Time Travelers Strictly Cash (23 page)

Another gasp of shock ran round the room.

“Tiger Breath”, Callahan cried. “Why, the only use for that stuff is poison ivy of the stomach. Tiger Breath’ll kill a cactus.”

“Nonetheless,” Trevor insisted, “it’s Tiger Breath I’m bargaining for. Have you got any?”

Callahan frowned. “Hell yeah, I got a couple gallons in the back-I use it to unplug the cesspool. But that stuff’s worse’n King…worse’n King Kong’s supposed to be.

“Whip it out,” the stranger said.

Shaking his head, Callahan lumbered out from behind the bar and fetched a half-keg from the back. Its only markings were four Xs (a nice classical touch, I thought) and a skull and crossbones. People made way for him, and he set it on the bar.

“You’re welcome to all of it,” the barkeep declared. Trevor unstopped the hung. A clear ten feet away, a fly intersected an imaginary circle drawn round the bunghole. The fly went down like a shot up Stuka, raising a small cloud of sawdust from the floor when it hit. The nondescript stranger tilted the barrel, and the slosh sounded like a dangerous animal trying to get out. He poured a sip’s worth into an empty glass; the drops that spilled ate smoking holes in the mahogany bartop. Tiger Breath is industrial-strength whiskey, and it tastes like rotten celery smells. It is perceptibly worse thanKing Kong.

He sniffed the bouquet with obvious relish, and puckered up. As the first load went past his tonsils his face lit from within with a holy light, a warm soft glow like a gaslight jack-o’-lantern. His pupils opened to their widest aperture and I saw his pulse quicken in his throat. His smile was a beatitude.

“Done,” he said.

He and Callahan shook hands on it, and the rest of us marched as one man to the bar and held out our glasses. Callahan returned to his post and began measuring out shots of Trevor’s mystery mash, and not a word was spoken nor a muscle moved until two flasks were empty and the last glass full. Then Callahan’s voice rang out.

“To Bob Trevor.”

“To Bob Trevor!”

And we drank.

At once, my eyes (which are rated 20/20) clicked-into true focus for the first time inmy life, my I.Q. rose twenty points, and my cheeks buzzed. A thin sheen of sweat broke out over every inch of my body. My powers clarified and my perceptions sharpened; my pulse rate rose high and stabilized; the universe took on a crisp, brilliant presence; and none of these things was anything more than incidental to the TASTE, oh god the taste…

There are no words. “Rich” is pitifully inadequate. “Smoky” is hopelessly ambiguous. “Full” is self descriptive, semantically meaningless, and “smooth” is actually misleading. It felt, to the tongue and to the taste buds, like I imagine a velvet pillow must feel to the cheek-and it kicked like a Rockette. It enobled the mouth.

It was the Wonderbooze.

I gazed at my fellows-and knew them at once in a new and subtle and infinitely compassionate way, and knew that they now knew me too. We began to speak, within an empathy so profound as to be nearly telepathy, leaping a million parsecs and a hundred years of intellectual evolution with every fragmented sentence, happily explaining the alleged mysteries of life to each other and sorrowing cosmic sorrows. Men wept and laughed and embraced each other, and never a hail of more scrupulously empty glasses hit the fireplace. I found a new reason to admire Callahan’s custom; it would have been sacrilegious to use those glasseS again for a lesser fluid.

As the conversations gained depth and profundity, Long-Drink and I stepped up to Trevor and smiled from our earlobes. “Brother,” said the Drink, “let us assist you.”

“Why, thank you,” he said, smiling back.

Drink and I picked up the half-keg between us and poured his glass full of Tiger Breath. Trevor drank deep, and since we already had the keg in the air it seemed foolish not to top off his glass, and then it seemed reasonable to line up some glasses for him and fill those so we wouldn’t have to keep shouldering the keg, and in the end we poured six glasses full to be on the safe siide, and sure enough he drank them all. So to be polite Drink and I had Callahan pour us some more of his King-Kong, aithough it was the sort of booze that left no need for a second snort, and we sipped while Trevor gulped, and it got pretty drunk out. I remember walking over tO where the fly lay dead on the sawdust, dipping my finger into my glass and letting a drop of Wonderbooze fall onto the fly. At once he rose from the floor in a series of angry spirals, spraying sawdust, and I swear he shouldered me aside on his way out the door. The conversation got a little hard to follow, then. I sort-of remember the Drink insisting that a close analysis of Stephane Grappelli’s later music clearly proved that infinity is translucent; I vaguely recollect Callahan challenging us to name one single person we had ever met or heard of that wasn’t a jackass; I believe I recall Fast Eddie’s reasoned argument for the existence of leprechauns. But the next stretch of dialogue I retain in its entirety.

Trevor: “Who’s that stepping on my fingers?”

Me: “That’s you.”

“Oh. That’s all right then. Beer for ev’body, on me. Gotta celebrate.”

Callahan nodded and began setting ‘em up.

“Fren’ly place,” Trevor went on. “Helpful fellas. Hardly seem backwards at all.”

“Naw-,” I agreed. “Strange, yes. Backwards, no.”

“Strange?”

Callahan began passing beers around, and I snagged one.

“Sure. Li’l green men.. Time travelers. Anything can happen in Callahan’s joint. But not backwards. This guy here, now,” I pointed at Long-Drink, “this long drink o’ beer here, did you know sometimes at midnight he turns into a driveway?”

The punchline, of course, was that the Drink works as a night watchman two nights a week, and turns into the driveway of K.D.C. Chemicals at midnight on the dot. But I never

delivered.

“Mmmm,” mused Trevor. “Like to see that. Wha’ timesit?”

And Drink and I, not thinking a thing of it, gestured with our beers at the Counterclock.

The Clock has always seemed to suit Callahan’s Place perfectly. I don’t know where Mike got it, and I’ve only seen one other like it, at the New York apartment of a lovely lady named Michi Stasko, and I don’t know where she got hers either. What it is, it runs in reverse. I mean, the numbers are reversed-1,2,3,4, etc.-and run counterclockwise from 12, and the works are geared to run in reverse accordingly. It’s a rather-eraborate jape, but like I say it suits the Place, and if you hang out long enough at Callahan’s you often have to stop and transpose in your head to make sense of a normal clock. Doc Webster has gone to the extent of having a mirror installed in the inside cover of his pocket-watch so he can tell the time at a glance. Apparently Trevor just hadn’t notice the Counterclock over the door until now, and I always enjoy observing people’s first-time reactions to it. But I’d never witnessed so spectacular an effect before.

Trevor saw the clock; his eyes widened to the size of egg yolks and the blood drained out of his face. He let out a hell of a yell, backed off two paces, raced up to the bar and vaulted it, plunging headfirst into the mirror.

I mean into the mirror.

He had disappeared into it up to the hips and was still in headlong flight when Callahan’s meaty hand trapped a flying ankle and yanked backwards, hard. Trevor came sailing back out of the mirror and into the real world like a dog jerked from a pond by its leash, and he dangled upside down from a fist the size of a catcher’s mitt, swearing feebly. The big barkeep was expressionless, which is his scariest expression.

“You owe me ten bucks for them beers,” he said quietly.

I don’t care how drunk you are; if a chair bites you on the leg, you sober up at once. Your mind is perfectly capable of fighting off your own bloodstream if it must. It’s an emergency system, beyond volitional control, and it doesn’t care if it makes your head hurt. I found myself sober, at once.

But it probably didn’t help Trevor any to be upside down. Clearly, his first action showed confused thought. He reached into his right hand pocket with his right hand, and pulled out and gave to Callahan a bill.

Callahan glanced at it and frowned. “Mister,” he said, walking around from behind the bar, still holding Trevor by the ankle at arm’s length, “up until a minute ago I liked you okay. But a man who’ll try and stiff me twice running might try it a third time, an I can’t be bothered.” With no change in the tone or rhythm of his speech, he began during the last sentence to swing Trevor around by the ankle, in a wide circle paralleling the floor. Fast Eddie, divining the boss’s intent with the supersonic uptake which has earned him his name, sprang forward and opened the front door.

Centrifugal force prevented Trevor from getting enough air into his lungs to shout, but I noticed something fluttering from his left hand, and read it the way you read the label on a spinning record.

“Hold it, Mike,” I called out. “He’s got the sawbuck he owes you.”

- “If it’s like, the last one, he’ll only bounce the once,” Callahan promised, but he slowed his swing~, grabbed Trevor’s collar with his other fist and set the hapless stranger down on the floor feet first. Trevor spun three times and collapsed into a chair.

“I don’t understand at all,” he said dizzily. “Which side am I on?”

“The flip side, apparently,” I said, “if you really tried to cheat Callahan.”

“But the mirror…that clock … I was halfway through the mirror, it must be a Bridge… “He shut up and looked confused.

I looked at Callahan. “The mirror must be a bridge. Because of the clock.”

He nodded. “Mechanical orangutan.”

Then I saw the first bill Trevor had offered Callahan, lying forgotten on the floor. It said it was a O1$ bill.

It actually began to make a twisted kind of sense. I turned back to Trevor and pointed a finger at him. “I only thought you said ‘Trevor’,” I said wonderingly. “It was ‘Trebor’ wasn’t it? Robert Trebor?”

Trebor nodded.

“There’s a mirror dimension,” I went on, “one identical to our own, but mirror reversed. And you invented a dimensional bridge…”

He looked at it from all sides and gave up in confusion.

“Yes,” he admitted. “It can only be initiated in my continuum, because the molecules of the activating substance, thiotimoline, have different properties when they’re reversed. But if the first bill I gave you looks backwards to you, then I must be in the other dimension, where a Bridge can’t be activated. But I did get halfway thrqugh that mirror instead of breaking it, and there’s that clock-I just don’t understand this at all.”

“The clock?” Long-Drink spoke up. “Why that’s just…ouch.”

“…just one of the many mysteries we have to considOr, ” I finished smoothly, smiling at the Drink and rocking back off of his toes again. “So perhaps you’d better just tell us the whole things”

He looked around at us suspiciously. “You’d blow the whistle,” he accused.

Callahan drew himself up to his full height (a considerable altitude). “If I understand this,” he rumbled, “yOu ain’t tried to cheat me after all, so I owe you an apology. But I’d as soon you didn’t insult my friends.”

It’s a traditional moment at Callahan’s, familiar to all of us by now. The Newcomer Examines Us and Decides Whether, To Trust Us Or Not. Some take their time; some make a snap decision to open up. Nobody ever pressures them, one way or the other. Most of ‘čm cop. I had to admire Trebor at that moment. His mind must have been racing at a million miles an hour, just like mine, but he brought it under control for long enough to give his full attention to evaluating each of us one by one. Finally, as most do, he nodded. “I guess I’ve got to tell somebody. And even if you wanted to cross me up, there isn’t a sober witness in the lot of you. Okay.”

We all settled into listening attitudes, and Callahan passed around fresh beers to them as needed ‘em.

“Yes, I am an inventor,” he began, “and I did invent a dimensional Bridge-which my counterpart in this dimensional continuum could not do, since as I said thiotimoline doesn’t work right here.”

“Then this ain’t a perfect mirror of your world,” Long-Drink interrupted.

“No, Trebor agreed. “Not a perfect mirror. These are. subtle, generally unimportant differences. In my continuum; for instance, all the rock groups are different and Shakespeare wrote Bacon. Disparities like that, that make no tangible difference to the world at large. But they’re essentially similar-like ‘identical’ twins, It’s only because of their vast congruencies that the two continua lie close enough together for a Bridge to be feasible at all.”

“Then you’re like a time-traveler into the past,”! pointed out, “At least in a sense. If you change this world in any significant way, you’ll never be able to return to your own.”

“Precisely what I’m afraid of,” Trebor agreed. “Which is why this Bridge-mirror of yours disturbs me so much,. Because I didn’t build it, which means someone else did, which means the chances of some accident making the two continua diverge have just effectively doubled. At least. I ought to get home at once… but I can’t.”

Because his Bridge couldn’t be activated from this side? Surely he must have planned for such a contingency. I always buy a round-trip ticket.

Unless I’m rushed…

“What about your counterpart?” I asked, breaking his train of thought. “The Robert Trebor of this world,! mean?”

“Oh, I swapped places with him,” Trebor said absently.

“Where’s he now?”

“In jail, I should exp… uh, I don’t know.”

“I don’t get this,” Callahan growled, “but I don’t think I like it.”

I was still enough under the influence of the Wonderbooze to be capable of positively Sherlockean flights of deduction. “I think I get it, Mike. Trebor here invents a dimension Bridge to our world, right? What doeS he do? Collect samples of our ‘reversed’ artifacts as proof of where he’s been. Then when he gets home, he gets cagey and decides to keep his mouth shut, That make sense: if too many people hear about the Bridge, it becomes useless. “But he makes a fatal error. Through some mix-up, just like the one he pulled here tonight, he spends some of our money over there. This puts the feds onto him, and he finds it necessary to change neighborhoods in a hurry. So he steps through the Bridge to our world agaip, somehow suckers his mirror-twin into trading places with him, and burns his Bridge behind him. He probably has a second Bridge hidden somewhere, set to activate itself whenever the heat has died down-all he has to do is wait. His twin takes a fall on a bad-paper rap, and he walks away clean. Pretty slick.”