"Spider Robinson - C2 - Timetravellers Strictly Cash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

The first four are from people who found Callahan's Place. All four had needed to believe
so badly that they ignored my disclaimer: they simply kept searching for the Place until they
found it. 1 should have known it would happen. The Place is like that. But those letters caused me
to reconsider the ethics of concealing the truth. How many people needed Callahan's, but gave up
because I told them the quest was hopeless?
Look: there is no restaurant so good that it can survive Being Discovered. If you know a
real nice place to hang out, the best thing you can do-for yourself and for the place-is to keep
your mouth shut about it, at least publicly. Close friends can sometimes be tipped off-but even
here care is required, as every friend has other close friends. It sounds selfish, but it's just
pragmatic. If five hundred people try to share an apple, nobody benefits. Especially not the
apple. So my inclination has been to play Callahan's Place close to the vest.
But there's that fifth letter I mentioned.
It is from Mike Callahan; Handwritten, of course; his pinkies are a typewriter-key-and-a-
half in width. The penmanship is superb; some long-ago nun's stern discipline has triumphed over
broken fingers and popped knuckles and a natural disposition to be easygoing in all things. The
ink is green. The paper is wrinkled and beer-stained, and smells faintly of cigar smoke-very cheap
cigar smoke.

Mike writes, in part:
I appreciate your trying to keep the tourists and voyeurs out of our hair-if this Place
gets too crowded, I can't let people smash their glasses in the fireplace. By all means keep our
location under your hat, and keep your hat in a safe-deposit box. But I think you've gone just a
bit too far in that direction. If folks think your stones are fiction, they're liable to get the
idea that this Place is only imaginary, that a Place like this couldn't 'really' exist. They'll
miss the point that any bar can be Callahan's Place, as soon as responsible people start hanging
out there together. You'd be surprised how many sad sons of bitches believe people only care about
each other in books.
I don't think you've given too many clues to our location. 'Somewhere off Route 25A in
Suffolk County, N.Y.' covers a lot of territory-anybody who can track us from that is either
hurting bad enough to belong here, or resourceful enough to buy a round for the house.
So let's go public.


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P.S.: When are you coming down for a visit? The Doc has a new stinker for you, and Jake
and Eddie want to jam.

Which last brings me to a second confession:
This is NOT "just" a collection of Callahan's Place stories, and so it is not, strictly
speaking, a sequel to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.
It was supposed to be; that's how the contract reads. Yet Callahan stories occupy a little
less than half the total wordage, just over 60% of the fiction content. Why? Well, now that I've
revealed the truth-that Callahan's Place really exists-I can explain, it's absurdly simple,
really.
I don't live in Suffolk County any more.
I had so much success transcribing lake's yarns about Callahan's Place (somehow that way-
out stuff never seems to happen while I'm there) that I was encouraged to try writing real science
fiction on my own. It worked out rather well, and soon I decided I wanted to write for a living.