"Spider Robinson - The Immediate Family" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

he'll be in our collective memories, and maybe if we're lucky a little bit of Callahan magic will linger on.
"But a lot of it won't. Some of the specific 'magic,' if that's what you want to call it, that made
Callahan's Place work is simply not available to us any more."
Rooba rooba rooba. The Doc's fog-horn baritone rose over the rest. "What are you saying, Jake?"
"For one thing, I'm talking about whatever kind of magic it was that watched over that Place like a
door-checker. The Invisible Protective ShieldтАФa selectively permeable shield. You all know damn well
what I mean. Did anybody ever wander into Callahan's that didn't belong there? And did anybody who
needed to go there bad enough ever fail to find it?"
That stopped them. "I don't know about that last part," the Doc said. "There were suicides on Long
Island during those years. And I can remem-ber one or two jokers that came in who didn't belong there.
But as Suzy said a minute ago, I take your point. Those few jokers didn't stay. In all those years, '46 to
'86, we never seemed to get normal bar traffic. No bikers, or predators, or jerks looking to get stupid, or
goons looking for someone drunk enough to screw even themтАФ"
"Hell, no drunks," Long-Drink said, looking thunderstruck. "Not one."
"No grab-asses," Merry said.
"No brawlers," Tommy supplied. "No jackrollers."
Fast Eddie summed it up. "No pains in de ass."
"Was that magic?" the Doc asked. "Or some kind of advanced technol-ogy we don't savvy yet? Like
Mickey Finn's 'magic' raincoat?"
"What's the difference?" I told him. "We haven't got itтАФand so this is go-ing to be a different kind of
joint. It doesn't matter what it was. For all I know, it was just a sustained run of incredibly good lтАФ"
SCREECH!
I had been peripherally aware of rapidly growing automotive sounds from the world outside, but
before I could finish my sentence we all heard the nerve-jangling shriek of brake shoes doing their very
best (a sound I happen to find even more disturbing than most people do) much too close to the door.
We all froze, ex-pecting a vehicle to come crashing in and kill us all. Just as the noise reached its
crescendo and died away, there was a violent, expensive-sound-ing clang! crump!, and then a single
knock at the door.
Silence ...
There was a harsh emphatic crack! sound. Behind me, in the bar. And then a heavy, dull chop! from
the same place, followed by a gasp: and a faint, hard-to-identify sound that made me think of a gerbil,
curling.
Fast Eddie happened to be closest to the outside door. He opened it ex-perimentally, and it was a
good thing it opened inward. The front grille of a Studebaker filled the doorway, faint tendrils of steam
curling out of it. The rest of a Studebaker was attached in the usual manner. The only unusual thing about
it was the pair of rumpled frayed blue jeans on the hood.
"Hi, guys," Shorty Steinitz's voice came hollowly from the passenger compartment. "Sorry I'm late.
Did I kill him?"
One mystery solved. Shorty is the worst driver alive. But how had he managed to punch someone
through that door and through all of us and into the bar, without any of us notic-ing it happen?
I turned and pushed open the swinging door, just as tentatively as Eddie had opened the outside
door.
A stranger was sitting at my bar, in one of the tall armchairs I use instead of barstools. Kindling lay in
the sawdust at his feet, and there appeared to be either more sawdust or heavy dandruff on his hairy
head. He was just finishing a big gulp of beer. Tom Hauptman, my assistant bartender, was gaping at him.
This seemed un-derstandable, for the stranger had no pants on.
He caught my eye, looked me up and down briefly, and pursed his lips as if preparing to sneer.
"Evening, stringbean," he said.
He was short and hairy. His eyes and nose and lips, and the upper slopes of his cheeks, were the
only parts of his head that were not cov-ered with tight curls of brown hair. As far as I could see, they