Spider Robinson - Callahans Key

This e-text was scanned from paperback, proofread, and double checked carefully by Gorgon776 in early June, 2001. It was released 21 June 2001 for your reading pleasure in lit, rtf, html and plain vanilla text format. Cover scans also by Gorgon 776. If you find any errors in this e-text, please correct them, update the version number by .1 and post it to alt.binaries.e-books, with Attn: Gorgon776 in the header. If you enjoy this book, buy it in dead-tree edition to support the author. Better yet, go to Baen Books website and buy the electronic version of Spider Robinsons books, or those of any other author with the balls to release their works in e-book format. If you cant manage that, hunt down his address and send him whatever you think the book is worth.

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

CALLAHANS KEY

A Bantam Spectra Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam Spectra hardcover edition published July 2000

Bantam Spectra paperback edition/May 2001

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed- s are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Spider Robinson

Cover illustration copyright (c) 2001 by Don Maitz Cover design by Jamie S. Warren Youll

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-051311

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address: Bantam Books.

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property.

It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

ISBN 0-553-58060-4

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

OPM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This one is for Guy Immesa

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD not have been possible without certain key speculations by cosmologists Alan Guth, Sidney Coleman, and Sir Martin Rees, which I encountered in John Brockmans splendid book THE

THIRD CULTURE; my thanks to them for their unwitting assistance.

Possible or not, this book would have been much less plausible without the witting

assistance of the following friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and kindly strangers: Guy Immega (roboticist), Douglas Beder (physicist), David Sloan (physicist), Jaymie Matthews (astrophysicist), Jef Raskin (interface expert; chief designer for the Macintosh), Douglas Scott (cosmologist), Michael Spencer (blacksmith; philosopher), Bill McCutcheon (astrophysicist), David Measday (astrophysicist), Joseph Green (writer; NASA alumnus), the uncredited creators of the NASA website, Dean Ing (writer; auto designer/builder; military aviation expert) Laurence M. Jamfer (writer; polymath), Ben Bova (writer; space travel expert), Douglas Girling (systems analyst; aerospace expert), Ed Thelen (Internet Nike expert), and Ted Powell (programmer; cyberhistorian; skeptic).

And those are just the people who helped with the science component of this story! (Any errors arising from my misunderstanding of what they told me are, of course, all their fault, for not explaining it better.)

Other invaluable assistance, advice, inspiration, or permission to quote was provided by Spider John Koemer (musician), Don Ross (musician), the Beatles (the Beatles), David Gerrold (writer; cat servant), Stephen Gaskin (hippie; writer; Head Judge for the first and second annual International Cannabis Cup competitions in Amsterdam), Virginia Heinlein (retired naval officer; biochemist; widow of Robert A. Heinlein), Lord Buckley (saint), Will Soto (tightrope-walking juggler), the Key West Cultural Preservation Society and just about every Key West local Ive ever met. Special thanks must go to the superb Key West writer Laurence Shames, whose contribution to this story (like those of Rees, Guth, and Coleman, above) was crucial, although quite unwitting.

And my ongoing gratitude goes to the alt.callahans Usenet newsgroup, for keeping me grounded.

All their efforts-and any efforts of my own-would have come to naught without the massive ongoing love and support of my cherished wife Jeanne or the acumen of my agent Eleanor Wood .

.. or the sagacity and kindness of my editor Patrick LoBrutto, who found several structural defects and showed me how to fix them. And my friend Ted Powell deserves a second mention here, for his work as volunteer creator and keeper of my website (which can be found at http://psg.com/~ted/spider/).

Another second mention, and credit where its due: the new name that Doc Webster suggests for gamma-ray bursters, herein, is my own invention but the exquisite topper Mei-Ling comes up with was coined not by me but by Dr. Jaymie Matthews (who also came up with the title for my triweekly Technology column in The Globe and Mail, Past Imperfect, Future Tenser).

Finally, my thanks to the late great madman Henry Morrison Flagler, without whom the whole enterprise would not have been necessary-and to you, without whom it would have been pointless.

-Howe Sound, British Columbia 9 June, 1999

Reality is what doesnt go away when you stop believing in it

-PHILIP K. DICK

If it aint one thing, its two things.

-GRANDFATHER STONEBENDER

CHAPTER ONE

Cold Reboot

The future will be better tomorrow.

-J. Danforth Quayle

ITS ALWAYS COLDEST before the warm.

Oh, it could have been colder that day, I guess-I hear there are places up north where fifty below is considered a balmy day. But it could be a lot hotter than where I am now, if it comes to that. This is just about as warm as I care to be-and the day the whole thing started, I was as cold as I ever hope to get again in my life.

It was only twenty below, that day but for Long Island, thats unusually frosty, even in the dead of winter. Which that winter surely was: dead as folk music. Dead as Marys Place.

Dead as Callahans Place. Dead as my life, or my hopes for the future. Youve read Steinbecks THE

WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT? Well, 1989 was the winter of our despair

Its the little things you remember. You know how snow gets into your boots and makes you miserable? I had been forced to stagger through a drift of snow so deep it had gotten into my pants. A set of long underwear makes a wonderful wick. The damp patches from above and below had met at my knees almost at once.

Not that snow of yesterdays blizzard had fallen to a depth of waist height. Long Island isnt Nova Scotia or anything. My long soggies were simply the result of my tax dollars at work.

Just as Id been in sight of my home-driving with extreme caution, and cursing the damned Town of Smithtown that should have plowed this stretch of Route 25A yesterday, for Chrissake-I had seen the town snowplow, coming toward me from the east. Id experienced a microsecond of elation before the situation became clear to me, and then I had moaned and banged my forehead against the steering wheel.

Sure enough, the plow sailed by my home at a stately twenty miles an hour, trailing a long line of cars and trucks nearly berserk with rage and utterly buried my driveway with snow, to the aforementioned waist height.

I knew perfectly well that there was nowhere else I could possibly park my car along that stretch of two-lane highway anywhere within even unreasonable walking distance of home in either direction-except the one driveway that I knew perfectly well the sonofabitching plow was about to stop and plow out, which it did. The one right next door to mine. The driveway of the Antichrist, where I would not have parked at gunpoint.