"Callahan 03 - Callahan's Secret 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

of a decade, it never struck me that the Place was always open when I arrived-until the night it wasn't.
Nearly nine o'clock of a warm wet summer evening, and the door was shut tight. Only dim light came thmugh the windows, nothing like the warm cheery glow the Place has when it's open, and the only thing in the parking lot besides my own carwas a big beat-up van I didn't recognize.
The rain complicated things. I don't mind rain a lot, and I like it when it's warm-as it was that night-but it had been coming down hard for the last fifteen minutes, and so the note posted on the door was only partly legible, I could translate "empor rily losed f r enovat tins," and "doo pens at," but the time at which the doo' would open was three blurs, all rounded at the top. Perhaps "900," perhaps "9:20" or "9:30." Or perhaps it read "8:30," and the job, whatever it was, was running overtime. Worst, there was a big long blur after the time. It might have said "9:00 sharp," but it could just as easily have been "3:00 Friday."
When that watch battery I mentioned earlier finally failed, I buried it in my backyard, respectful of its magnificent
achievement. But that was after reflection. My first reaction was acute annoyance. I thought my watch had failed me.
So it was now. I could think of several ways to go kill some time-but how much time? Meanwhile I was getting soaked. So I did what I don't think I would have done under other circumstances.
I opened the door and walked in.
I knew it wouldn't be locked, because there is no lock on that door. In the dozen years I've been coming to Callahan's, there've been four attempted afterhours burglaries that I know of. None of them used the front door; none bothered to try. (Callahan dealt with them situationally. One is now a regular customer, and never mind which one; another, a hard-guy type, got two broken elbows.)
But I should have knocked first, and waited for Mike to open the door or holler "Come in," and gone away if he didn't.
Which he wouldn't have-there was no sign of him when I had closed the door behind me. But I failed to notice; once I'd wiped my glasses dry, I was too busy being thunderstruck.
Do you remember that time I told you about once, when I walked into Callahan's to find a mirror behind the bar, where no mirror had ever been before? And it disoriented me so much that I mistook my reflection for an approaching demon, with "horns" that were really the brim of my Stetson hat? This was like that. Something as familiar as Callahan's Place is not supposed to change. The watch battery is supposed to last forever. I may have actually twitched and squeaked, I don't know.
The light was as bad as it had been that other time, with the mirror, and so once again my brain, trying to resolve
unexpected data into a pattern, made a first approximation that vaguely matched something in its files and served me up a trial hallucination. For a predator such as man, a wrong guess can be preferable to a slow one.
What I thought I saw, off to my left, a few yards away, was a giant ebony snake, maybe three feet in diameter, coiled around a tree, scales shimmering in the semidarkness. Tree and snake appeared to extend up through the ceiling without rupturing it.
I blinked and it wasn't a snake, it was an immense DNA double helix clinging to a bather pole, pulsing dully with life. So I blinked again.
(First the predator brain searches the file of Dangerous Things. If that doesn't work, it tries Nondangerous Living Things. Only then does it calm down and search all the other files. Two seconds, tops.)
It was a spiral staircase up to the roof.
"Cushla machree," I said soffly.
What had made it seem to be a double helix was the heavy railing which paralleled the stairs. The "scales" were the-spaces between the railing supports. The apparent shimmering and/or pulsing was because one of the very few lights in the room, a small flourescent behind the bar, was flickering rapidly.
I said (prophetically enough) that I would be dipped in shit, but I relaxed. I was beginning to understand.
Mike Callahan lets his customers take their drinks up on the roof if the weather's agreeable. There's a dumbwaiter to ferry cash down and drinks up. But until now the only access for humans and most other customers had been a vertical ladder and hatch. Some of the regulars had trouble getting up the ladder due to age or infirmity. Certain others could get up just fine-but found that the added ballast of four or five drinks seriously disrupted their balance on the way down. Something about the center of gravity shifting, Dcc Webster said. Just a few days before, Shorty Steinitz had broken an ankle-and here was Callahan's response.
"Hey, Mike," I called out, and got no answer. The curtain behind the bar was closed. I had gall enough to enter Callahan's bar uninvited, but not his living space. I called his name once more and wandered over to inspect the new staircase.
It was a cast iron joy to behold. I'm totally ignorant about such things,. but I could tell that it was old, and beautiful, and very well designed. You could not fall down that staircase,. You couldn't even bark your shin. It was so well installed that it looked like it'd been there for years - except for the odd bits of welding spatter in the sawdust on the floor-and indeed it fit right in with the atmosphere of Callahan's Place. Ornamented rather than starkly functional, subtly and ingeniously worked in ways I was not competent to appreciate even if the light had been adequate, it would not have looked out of place in a cellar jazz joint or a monastery, might have done time in both. It invited one to climb it.
So I did.
The footing was secure, the risers precisely the right height, the treads precisely the right depth. It had to be a modular assembly. A single giant staircase, even if it had happened to fit through the front door, would have required trucks, cranes, dollies, rollers, block and tackle and much time-whereas an assembly job this size could conceivably have been installed in a single day by two or three big skilled men. But it was so cunningly assembled that it was hard to be sure. This had to have cost Callahan a bundle.
I wound my way around and up until I stood in a sort of hut with a door opening onto the roof. I thought about rainwater spilling down into the bar below, but when I experimentally opened the door a crack, there was no flood. I pushed it open and the everpresent sound of rain went from bass rumble to treble hiss. It seemed to be easing up.
The rain did not spill indoors because the floor of the hut. was slightly higher than the roof. But you did not have to remember to step down; there was a short ramp. I know little more about carpentry than I do about iron work-but I know good design when I fail to trip over it. It figured that-Mike Callahan would hire the best man available to do surgery on his Place.
The door closed quickly; some unseen damping mechanism kept it from slamming; in the rain, it made no sound at all. I walked around the hut once, admiring it.. .then walked around it again, admiring the countryside.
I'm sure you know the strange, special magic of high places. Have you ever been on one at night? In the warm rain?
To be sure, Callahan's roof is a wonderful place 'from which to view the world in nearly any' weather. The land falls sharply away to-the north and east, amid incredibly for Long Island (even for Suffolk County) it is largely undeveloped, raw trees as far as you can make out. To the south and west, beyond the parking lot, runs Route 25A, sparsely lined with garishly lit sucker traps. (Fairly heavy traffic, but Callahan doesn't get a lot of transient trade. The parking lot is hid by tall hedges, the driveway is inconspicuous; the only sign is the one over the front door.) Beyond the highway you can -just make out one of the more expensive subdivisions, well zoned, landscaped and cared for; on Christmas Eve, with a couple of Irish coffees warming your belly and all the lights blazing in the distance, it locks. . . well, Christmasy.
Tonight the roof was a warm flat rock on which many large somethings were peeing, from a great height. The highway looked glorious-people who wear glasses are lucky, we have stars on rainy nights-but my clothes were getting- wet. Wetter. I considered ducking back inside... but as 1 said, I like warm rain. I particularly like to be naked in warm rain, and don't get a lot of opportunities. Mike wouldn't mind, and anyone else I would see drive up.
So I stripped and looked about for the driest place to stash my clothes.
The dumbwaiter seemed like the best bet; I could wedge its door open with something to keep it up here at roof level. I padded barefoot toward its tall housing-and discovered that it was already ~so wedged, with a chisel. Inside was a pile of clothing. Big man's clothes, faded jeans, denim-shut, boots, sized to fit only one man I knew. That solved the mystery of Callahan's whereabouts. He must be a secret naked-in-the-rain nut, too. He was going to jump a foot in the air when I came around the dumbwaiter. This would be good for laughs-and it might cost him a couple of drinks to keep the story to myself...
It was just possible that my fellow nudist was not Callahan-in which case I was properly dressed to meet him. Onward.
I should have lifted up the jeans. The underwear might have warned me. I piled my clothes on top of the others. walked around the dumbwaiter, and became one myself. Waiting, dumb, one foot in the air. She was very beautiful, and in the instant I saw her I wanted urgently to do this right, to not make any mistakes. It was not going to be easy.

I am sorry to say that you would probably not have thought she was beautiful-unless you, too, are a pervert. I mean, going naked in the rain is one, thing, but I'm talking major league perversion here. (From my point of view, I am the only sane man in a perverted culture. Perverts always feel that way.)
I will state the perversion: I like women who look like women. That is, my ideal of feminine beauty adheres closely to that which has been the generally accepted consensus from the dawn of time until quite recently and quite locally.
What you would probably have said if you'd seen her, naked or clothed, is, "Handsome woman; she could be beautiful if she lost the weight." You would probably have gallantly tried to avoid looking at, let alone commenting on her body-you almost certainly would not have drunk the sight of it the way I did.
She did not, in other words, look the way North America thinks women should look. She did not look like a thirteenyear-old boy with plums in his shirt pockets. Those were her clothes in the dumbwaiter. Amid I do not even mean that she was a Jayne Mansfield/Loni Anderson type, with one of those big bodies that seem packed tight, compressed snugly by invisible plastic, firm as a weightlifter's shOulder. She had big glorious saggy tits, and what are sometimes affectionately called "love handles," (that is, the people who use the term sometimes mean it affectionately) and a round belly and thighs-that would jiggle when she walked.
She looked, in short, much like half the mature women in this sorry culture, and she would have opened the nose of most of the heterosexual males who ever lived. Praxiteles, Titian, Rubens, Rodin, any of the great ones would have reached for their tools, if not their work utensils, at the sight of her.
You know: a whale. A hippo. I'm telling ya, Morty, this broad was a hunnert' eighty, hun'ninety pounds if she was a friggin' ounce, no shit. One of America's millions of rejects, forever barred from The Good Life, too sunk in sloth or genetic degeneracy to torture herself into the semblance of an undernourished adolescent male. A pig. No character, no willpower, no self-discipline, no self-respect, certainly no sex appeal. A lifelong figure of fun, doomed to be jolly, member of the only minority group that "comedians" like Joan Rivers can still get away with viciously assaulting.
I could tell I was beginning to get an erection.

So I used the second I bad left to study her face. A socially difficult moment was imminent, and I wanted it to go well, so I needed to know as much about her as possible, immediately.
Big lush women and small slight men in our society go through life wrapped around a softball-sized chunk of pain; it breaks some of them and makes others magnificent. She was magnificent. Clearly visible on her face, written plain for any fool to see, were the character, will power, selfdiscipline, self-respeCt and warm sexiness which common wisdom said she could not possibly have without automatically becoming skinny. She had lots of laugher's wrinkles and a 'couple of thinker's wrinkles and no other kinds. She wore her hair in a big bush of curls that made no futile attempt to downplay her size; rain-sparkle made it a halo. The split-second glance I got of her eyes, glistening in the light from the all-night deli across the road, focused on the far distance, made them seem serene, self-confident.
I went on computer time. And a very good computer it must have been, too, because I was able to run several very complex subprograms in the second or so allotted to me, One routine sorted through the several hundred thousand Opening Lines in storage for something suitable to Unexpected Encounter With Nude Stranger, but since it expected to come up empty, a more ambitious program attempted to create something new, something witty and engaging and reassuring, out of the materials of the situation. In hopes that one or the other would succeed, a simple and well-used program began selecting the tone and pitch of voice and the manner of delivery-soft enough not to startle, but not so soft as to seem wimpy; humorous but not clownish; urbane but not smug; admiring but not lecherous-prepared, in short, to begin lying through its/my teeth. Meanwhile, an almost unconscious algorithm had me keep my hands firmly at my sides and stand up a little straighter. And all of this together took up, at most, 20 pereent of the available bytes-the rest was fully occupied in an urgent priority task.
Memorizing her...
Plenty of time! Computational capacity to spare! I knew that she was beginning to become aware of me several hundred nanoseconds before she did, integrated all the subprograms, picked a neutral Opening Line and pinned my hopes on delivery, ran a hundred full dress rehearsals to derive best-and worst-case results, made the go decision, and bad time to admire her lower left- eyelash and myself before I heard my very own voice say, with all the warmth and tone and clarity I could reasonably have hoped for, "It certainly is a very nice tits."
My central processing unit melted down into slag.