"Not certain," Callahan amplified. "Most likely.'"

Eddie looked thoughtful-not an easy trick with that face-and shook his head. "I dunno. Most o' my life, de complicated explanation was de one to bet on. I don't buy din William o' Whatever-"

"Occam," I said.

"-an' de horse he rode in on," Eddie agreed. "He sure got it wrong dis time." He frowned slightly at our grins. "Well, what's our next move, boss?"

The grins went away.

"Mike!" I said as an urgent thought struck me. "It's New Year's Eve! The rest of the gang are going to start showing up any second-all of 'em, not just the regulars. Shouldn't we try to head 'em off? Go set up roadblocks? Something?'

He took one of those foul cigars of his from a shirt pocket and sniffed it meditatively. What more proof did I need that he wasn't a normal human being? "I don't think so, Jake. In the immortal words of Percy Mayfield-"

"'The Danger Zone is everywhere,' yeah, I understand that. They're no safer at home than they would be here. But do we want 'em all around underfoot; complicating the fight?" I felt my voice get hoa.r.s.er. "There's going to be a fight here, isn't there?"

He lit his cigar. "d.a.m.n straight there is," he rumbled. He dropped the dead match on the floor, trod it underfoot, and took Mary's hand. "d.a.m.n straight." Suddenly he grinned. "But who ever said a fight was complicated by reinforcements? Let 'em come, by Christ. Let 'em all come! if we have to, we can all go to h.e.l.l together-maybe there's a group rate."

"Callahan's right, Jake," Long-Drink said. "There ain't a one of the gang wouldn't rather be here on Judgment Day, and you know it."

Doc Webster nodded vigorous agreement, jowls flapping. "d.a.m.n well told, if the world is about to end, we can at least have a drink on it together before we go!" There was a general chorus of agreement.

"All right," Callahan boomed, "let's get to it. There's two phone lines in this joint, and the one for the computer is miked. I'll boot the directory disk and get a printout by last name-I'll take A through M; Doc, you take N through "Mike," Jim and Paul MacDonald said simultaneously.

He broke off and tried to look at both at once. "Yeah?"

"It's not necessary to use the phone," they chorused.

He looked startled-then broke into a big grin. 'Why, no, it ain't at that. What's your range these days?'

"With family? Callahan's People? We could find one of you on the Moon if we had to."

"Go to it then, sons."

Jim and Paul found a vacant table, sat down on opposite sides. They took each other's hands and smiled at one another. Then their eyes rolled up and their mouths went slack and they seemed to slump slightly.

Can you remember the very first time you used stereo headphones, and heard a voice speaking or singing inside your head? Or were you too young at the time to find that remarkable? This was a little like that: perceiving "sound" where sound had never been before.

(Further: You know that with stereo headphones an aural image can seem to move, from left to right or the other way around. In the Decca, Georg Solti recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Niebelungen there's a pa.s.sage in which Fafnir roars-and on headphones the sound seems to move up from your throat to the crown of your head. An illusion, of course, and I've always wondered how Decca's engineers managed it. Similarly-and just as impossibly-the combined "voice" of Jim and Paul MacDonald, which I heard now in my head, seemed to move from back to front, as though two tiny Paul Reveres entered the back of my skull, transited my brain at high speed, and left through my forehead.) The double-tracked voice was quiet, calm-but so emphatically urgent that I was certain it would have waked me out of the soundest sleep.

"Mike Callahan needs you," it said. "Hurry!"

The cold winter wind was choppy at this height, and the ledge was slippery; Walter clutched at the brick facade with slowly numbing fingers and at the pretty brunette's gaze with tearing eyes. She was nice to look at, leaning out the window, the last pretty girl he ever expected to see-but he knew all the things she was likely to say, and knew that none of them would work. "You're wasting your time," he told her and her husband, whose head was visible beside hers. "I know all the cliches, and I just don't want to talk about it."

"You've got to come in soon, Walter," she called from the window. "If you stay there much longer you'll get Window-Washer's VD."

"What?' To be surprised astonished him.

"It's a terrible thing," her husband said earnestly. "You get a watery blue discharge, with a funny smell."

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"Herpes windex," she said.

He laughed long and hard, to a point just short of hysteria. "You two really are good at what you do, you know that? I was in a lousy mood. This is a better mood to die in."

"That's something, at least," the husband called over the sound of the wind. "But-"

"I still don't want to talk about it," Walter yelled. "Why I'm doing this is none of your business."

"n.o.body asked you," the wife said. "What Les and I want to know is why you're doing it so badly."

He blinked at them.

"Merry's right. Some janitor has to mop up you and his breakfast; a bunch of cops and ambulance attendants get brought down; a whole street-full of pa.s.sersby have a great dark demoralizing omen literally drop into their lives-see that little girl across the street down there? Her mother is the one who's going to need to explain this, not us."

"And what about us?" Merry asked. "We're professionals, with a reputation to protect. You hired us to come over here and try to cheer you up. You say we succeeded, and now you want to skip out without paying. Are we supposed to-" She broke off short.

"You don't understand!" Walter shouted to the night sky. He closed his eyes, and sighed deeply. If he told them how it was, they would see that he really had no choice. "All right: I'll explain it to you. You deserve that much." He turned his face back to them, to see the empathy he knew he would find in Merry's eyes, and she and Les were both gone from the window. "Hey! Do you want to hear this or not?' There was no reply. "Hey!"

The Cheerful Charlies were gone.

Walter stood there on the ledge, confused, unready to jump, too stiff and cold to risk climbing back in the window una.s.sisted, his scenario thrown completely off the rails. Anger came to him, bringing warmth to his fingers and strength to his limbs. He made it safely inside, and reached the street in time to see the Charlies driving away; furious, he flagged a cab and followed them.

Patrolman Jimmy Wyzniak trailed the Sergeant through the empty corridors of Suffolk County Police Headquarters; the only sounds were their footsteps and the occasional ringing of phones that no one was going to answer. Jimmy was young, and just barely experienced enough at his job to have some appreciation of the magnitude of his ignorance, but he had no fear: his Sergeant was with him, and the Sarge was the best there was. It had been bravery and not bad judgment that lost him a leg.

"People are sure funny, you know?' Jimmy said plaintively. "I mean, Captain Whitfield is taking this like it was personal-like they put it here just for him. Never seen him so mad."

The Sarge spoke over his shoulder. "You notice he didn't try to do the d.a.m.ned thing himself first. He called for the experts." His limp was barely perceptible.

Jimmy shifted his trunk-shield like an umpire looking for a fresh plug of tobacco and grinned. "Well, that just proves he's smarter than we are."

His mentor snorted. "Son, everyone is smarter than we are. Here we go: Storage Closet 5. The phone tip said it was in here."

"Who claimed credit for this one?'

"Who cares?"

"b.o.o.bies on the door, you figure?"

"Never can tell-so we a.s.sume there are." Jimmy set down the heavy backpack of equipment, and they spent a few minutes a.s.suring themselves that the door was not b.o.o.bytrapped. "I hope they're professionals," the Sarge grunted. "Pros are tricky sometimes-but at least they use good equipment. An amateur job, who knows what the h.e.l.l it's gonna do?" Then, rank having its "privileges," the Sarge sent Jimmy thirty feet down the hall and around a corner. The young patrolman waited anxiously, heard the sound of the Sarge trying the k.n.o.b.

"Zoroaster in lingerie," he heard the Sarge say.

He ran back and looked through the door of Closet 5. "What the h.e.l.l is it?" he asked. "That doesn't look like anything we covered in training."

"I saw one once," the Sarge said very softly. "When I was in the Army. I'd guess it's not especially powerful- nothing like the one that did that slum clearance on downtown Nagasaki. By today's military standards it's not even a cherry bomb."

Jimmy regarded the object. "You're saying that's a nuke," he said in a calm, conversational tone, as though confirming the time-then, big: "It looks like a f.u.c.king miniature vacuum cleaner!"

"Sure does-probably doesn't weigh more than thirty pounds all told. Now, the military could make one that size with some real bang onto it-but looky there at the airline bag they carried it in. Amateur job."

It was not machismo that kept Jimmy's cool for him- this was beyond even the machismo of a demolitions man.

But if the Sarge wasn't worried, Jimmy wasn't worried. h.e.l.l, the Sarge could probably disarm an ICBM in flight if he had to! "So it won't do more than annihilate Riverhead if it goes off, huh?"

The Sarge shook his held. "Not even that bad, is my guess. This building, for sure. The block, possibly. This thing is just a pony nuke."

A guess for Sarge was Gospel for Jimmy. "So what's our first move?"

"Well, that time-fuse says it's got almost two hours left. That should be plenty of time. I suppose we-" The Sarge broke off, stood as though listening to something. Jimmy smiled: The Sarge had done this several times before, with conventional but difficult bombs-explaining afterward that he was "trying to outthink the guy that built it"-so everything really was okay after all. Any minute now, the Sarge would- start running like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, back the way they had come- "Sarge!" Jimmy cried, but his instincts were good: he was already in motion. His legs were good too, and he had two of them: he was neck and neck with the Sarge within ten strides. Suddenly the Sarge put on the brakes and doubled back; Jimmy did not. As he cleared the door to the outside Jimmy could hear the Sarge's uneven footsteps coming up fast behind him again. Captain Whitfield and the other cops waiting outside scattered in all directions when they saw both running men.

The Sarge made a beeline' for the Bomb Squad truck, leaped behind, the wheel. He was carrying an airline bag.

"Sarge! G.o.dd.a.m.n it-hey, Sarge!"

Sergeant Noah Gonzalez ignored him, started the truck and sped off.

Ralph spotted a likely-looking b.i.t.c.h, got close enough to smell her and growled deep in his throat. He had little difficulty in cutting her out of the pack she was with. He knew, as they did not, that in a matter of hours she would be panting for it. Confusing and mesmerizing her with his deep, softly accented voice, he led her away from her friends and into the darkness.

Sound Beach is a seasonally schizophrenic area of Long Island. For Ralph it was a walk on the wild side-literally. In the summer the vacation cottages are, filled with the nearly-wealthy. In winter the region is spa.r.s.ely populated by half-frozen college students from the nearby State University-and by packs of feral dogs. They are the watchdogs routinely abandoned by the nearly-wealthy at season's end. Dobermans, Shepherds. They pack-up, and raid garbage cans, and kill and eat the pets of the college students, and it is usually February or March before the county cops have shot the last of them. As a general rule, by the time they are hungry enough to attack a human, they are too weak to pull it off-though there are occasional exceptions.

Ralph Von Wau Wau neither smelled nor behaved domesticated, and he sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger in pitch, tone, accent, and confidence; he could move among his savage cousins in relative safety. He had only been forced to fight twice in the five years he had been wintering on Long Island, and had won both fights handily. The feral dogs were cunning, but Ralph was intelligent, and it made all the difference.

Though he was a mutant, Ralph had all the normal urges of any red-blooded son of a b.i.t.c.h, and house pets just didn't do it for him. Too tame, too boring. His true preference was for women, and he was currently on intimate terms with half a dozen-but three were vacationing to the south with their husbands, two were preparing final exams for their students, and one was preparing to run for reelection. Ralph had not gotten laid in several weeks, and his opinion was that the next best thing to an adventurous and sophisticated lady was a wild outlaw b.i.t.c.h. They were less inventive, but more instinctively satisfying-and cross-fertile besides.

He had certain moral rules of his own devising, which might seem exotic to a human. He always fed a b.i.t.c.h, before and after. If necessary, he protected her to the best of ability. If she got pregnant, he behaved as honorably as any other dog would-and scrutinized the offspring for indications that his mutation might have bred true-which far it had not. If a hyper-intelligent pup had resulted, would have bent every effort to get it the same larynx modification surgery he himself had once had, then taught it to talk. But by now he had almost given up hope.

He'd tried moving a few mates in with him, but it never worked out: they never really had enough in common relate to one another, and it always upset them when typed for hours at a time.

This particular b.i.t.c.h excited him a great deal, for reasons too subtle and subconscious for him to a.n.a.lyze. (Regrettably, the Freud of canine psychology has not yet emerged Something about the fur at the back of her neck, something about her walk, something about her smell ... there wasn't defining it. She was new to him, puzzled by the contradiction between what her eyes and nose told her, and what her ears told her, and he found her innocence charming. She was cooperative, but not slavishly obedient. Her eyes flashed. Her scent was ... piquant.

So they gave the rest of the pack the slip, and he to her to a warm and sheltered place he knew. There he open a can of deviled ham-a rather extravagant wooing-gift but one of the annoyingly few meats available in pop-u can format-and waited politely while she wolfed it down. Then they romped a bit, and nuzzled a bit, and present he taught her some things about foreplay that astonished her. (The Masters & Johnson of canine physiology have yet to emerge as well-but when they do, Ralph Von Wau Wau will be ma.s.sively represented in their footnotes.) Short after that, she taught him some things about hindplay.

As mentioned, Ralph was a love 'em and leave 'em sort fellow, but the summons from Jim and Paul MacDonald came at an extremely unfortunate, uh, juncture, and he was compelled to bring her halfway to Callahan's with him.

Joe and Susan Maser had sent their wife Susie on ahead to Callahan's because they wanted to put the finishing touches on the chili they intended to bring for the New Year's celebration; the summons came as Joe was stirring up the coals in the firebox of his woodstove. He dropped the poker and sprinted with Susan for the car, leaving the flue-door open on the stove. Pulling out of the driveway, he realized what would probably happen, but he didn't have time to do anything about it. Behind him, the draft whipped the fire to its hottest and sucked all the heat up the chimney ... which had not been cleaned recently enough. Since Joe and Susan had also left the front door of the house open, much the same thing eventually happened to the building; by dawn all the Masers would own was the clothes on their backs and the contents of their pockets.

Similarly, Shorty Steinitz left his lovingly restored '57 Thunderbird jacked up with one wheel off by the side of Route 25A and ran the last quarter-mile; he never saw it again. Lady Salty McGee was entertaining a very old and dear friend when the call came; he had never been intended to remain in that position for more than fifteen minutes, but the silken cords were strong, and he could not reach the slipknots. Pyotr left his bottle of breakfast sitting on his kitchen table, and few foods go bad faster or uglier than blood. And Bill Gerrity was caught in the middle of getting dressed: this would have been embarra.s.sing for anyone, but for Bill "half-dressed" for a party meant dark nylons, purple garter belt, black panties and an hour's worth of makeup (high heels, too, but he ditched them within the first half block); in the three and a half miles he had to jog to Callahan's, he was forced to hospitalize four young toughs who mistook him for a h.o.m.os.e.xual, two policemen who correctly identified him as an attractive nuisance, and a persistent politician who simply would not get out of the way.

It was not, in short, without cost that the men and women of Callahan's Place answered the Call, even though nearly all of them were getting ready to go there at the time. But it is a matter of proud record that every single one of them paid the cost, unhesitatingly. Within an hour, the Place was packed to capacity with all the regulars past and present, with all the people to whom this tavern had ever been home for a time, and n.o.body had any complaints to make. The MacDonald Brothers had followed up their initial Call with a synopsis of the situation; everyone arrived with a fair grasp of what was going on.

Josie Bauer was the first to arrive, of course, since it took her literally no time at all; she materialized before the bar, took the shot gla.s.s of Irish whiskey that Callahan was holding out for her and set it down on the bartop, plucked the cigar from his lips and kissed him firmly. "You sneaky b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she murmured. "I never guessed. I should have guessed. You must be from much further up the line than my outfit."

"Not as much as you might think, hon'," he told her.

She turned to Mary and kissed her, too. "Hang in there, sugar. He'll be okay."

The next arrival was Shorty, and he did just what Josie had done. I'd be willing to bet Shorty had never kissed another male in his life before, but he did so with no hesitation or sign of embarra.s.sment. That set the pattern. Every new arrival, and those already present, collected a shot and a kiss from Callahan and his daughter. No one drank; we waited for Mike to propose the toast. All of us were smiling, and all of us were crying, and all of us were touching, and none of us said a word, save for occasional briefly murmured greetings to old friends too seldom seen. No one had anything pertinent to say, and no one felt the need to mouth off without saying anything; it was enough to be together, to share whatever would come., I saw friends I hadn't seen in years-Ben, Stan, Don, Mary and Stephen, both Jims, Big Tom, Susan, Betsy, Mark, Chris, Robert and Ginny, Herb and Ricia, Diana, Joe and Gay, Jack, Viny, Railroad George, Ted, Gordy, Dee for Chrissakes, Tony and Susan, Wendy, Bob, Kirby, Eleanor, Charlie and Evelyn, and of course David- and it came to me as the crowd grew and the Place filled up that I could not have asked for a better time or place to die. There was no place on Earth or off it that I loved as much, nor any people I had ever loved better-no, not even the wife and daughter I'd killed a decade ago by doing my own brake-job with a self-help book-and New Year's Eve seemed an appropriately backa.s.sward date for Judgment Day.

After a, little more than a half hour of murmured greetings, multiple embraces and general warm happiness, Paul MacDonald spoke to Callahan. "Okay, Mike. Everybody who's going to arrive in time is here now."

The room became totally quiet, filled with a mood of exuberant desperation. The locker room before the big game.

Backstage waiting for the house lights to go down. The hold of the Huey as the LZ appears in the distance.

We were as ready as we were going to be.

Callahan nodded slowly. "It's about time," he rumbled. He trod his cigar underfoot and lit a new one. "It's all about time." He poured a shot of Bushmill's for himself, walked slowly around the bar. "Isn't it?" The sawdust squealed under his boots. Fast Eddie left the piano and tossed a couple of sticks of dry birch onto the fire; there was a crackle as the bark began to catch, and that fine sharp-sweet smell of burning birch joined the symphony of pleasant smells in the room. Callahan toed the chalk line, faced the rattling hearth. I didn't mind the tears; they fell too quickly to obscure my vision. He raised his gla.s.s, and we all raised ours. The bright lights shattered on all that gla.s.s and the room sparkled like a vast crystal.

"To the human race," Mike Callahan said clearly in that gravelly baritone. "G.o.d help us, every one." He drank off the Bushmill's in one long, slow draught, smacked his lips and whipped the gla.s.s underhand into the fireplace.

"To the human race," we chorused, and the largest barrage of gla.s.ses in the history of Callahan's Place began.

And when the great shout and cheer had subsided and the last shard of gla.s.s skittered to its final resting place, we began to build something.

I perceived it in musical terms, of course: to me what we built was something like a vast symphony orchestra, save that in addition to the usual ordnance of a full orchestra it incorporated saxophones, electric guitani, tin flutes, tablas, trap drums, Yamaha synthesizers, steel drums, vocoders, kazoos, baby rattles, Zal Yanovsky's Electric Gorgle and the Big Jukebox in Close Encounters, included every means the race has ever devised for making music and some that haven't been invented yet, the whole thing integrated into a vast tapestry of sonic and tonal textures that was indescribable and probably unimaginable-certainly I had never imagined anything like it before that night-and primevally satisfying to what a Buddhist might call my "third ear."

Imagine that you a.s.sembled such a superorchestra in a room. First there is cacophony, as each musician sounds his or her instrument and limbers it up, no individual or group predominating for more than a few seconds. Then one loud true voice takes up and holds a 440 cps A, and gradually everyone tunes to it; for several seconds everyone is playing the same note and it's like a giant "OM" chant. Then it diverges again, as each player goes into scales or warmup exercises. Imagine then that, seemingly by pure random chance, the vast a.s.semblage of instruments happens to stumble onto a single, stupendous chord, an accidental aural architecture of terrifying beauty, a chord so complex that the most knowledgable musician there cannot name it, yet so elemental that each feels he has always known it in his heart. It holds, swells, falters momentarily as percussive notes fade and lungs empty of breath and bows reach the limit of their traverse, then returns and steadies and fills the room to bursting, each musician thinking, keep playing- yes, try to notice and remember what note you're playing, but for G.o.d's sake keep playing, ~f we lose this thing we may never find it again and if that happens I believe I may need to die- The thing we built was like that. There was no sound to it, any more than there was substance to it, but it hung invisibly in the air around us, annihilating the s.p.a.ce between us, and to me that's music. The 440 A that we all tuned to was the voice, the essence, the nature of Mike Callahan, echoed and amplified by the MacDonalds. But neither he nor they led us to that "chord"-we found that ourselves.

Shortly it changed from something as static as the word "chord" implies to something dynamic, as though individual musicians, confident now that the chord would not be lost, began to jam around it, to dress it with trills and arpeggios and sc.r.a.ps of melody and rhythmic accents; it changed from a pretty sound to true music, although no human ear could have resolved music like that. It was timeless, like raga, and frantic, like bebop; it swung like Carl Perkins, and it purred like Betty Carter; it was simple like Bach and complex like Ray Charles; it was hot and cool and hip and square and lush and spare-I know no music can be all those things together, but this was. In the back of my mind I could hear Lord Buckley, rest his ticker, talkin' 'bout, "My lords and my ladies, I'm gon' hip you: you may have heard a lot of jam sessions blowin' off, you may o' heard o' New Orleans flips, you may have heard it Chicago style, you may have heard all kinds o' jazz jumpin' the wildest an' the most insane, you may have heard o' many musical insane flips, but you studs an' stallions an' cats an' kitties never dug any session-like these cats BLEW!. .

To others present it did not suggest music at all. Shorty Steinitz was a sculptor, to him it was as though all of us struck together simultaneously at a magnificent block of Carrera marble, reducing it in an instant to a perfect and complete statue, which began in that moment of its creation to walk and talk. Susie Maser was a Modern dance ch.o.r.eographer; she felt that we were inventing zero-gravity dance together. Indeed, Long-Drink McGonnigle, who had cherished a perverse interest in entomology ever since February 7, 1964, felt that whatever it was resembled pictures he'd seen of webs woven by spiders in free fall, in Skylab. Doc Webster saw us all as neurons learning to work together, to form " ... well, not a brain, not even a small one-but a ganglion, by G.o.d!" Toni Hauptmann, the former minister, perceived what we built as a perfect prayer, pleasing to G.o.d, who is a tough critic of prayers.

I do not know all this from having compared notes afterward. I knew it then, and everyone there knew and understood the a.n.a.logy-mode that worked for me just as well as I knew theirs. Just because I perceived it as music didn't make it music for Fast Eddie: the little piano man felt that we were setting up and executing a hundred-cushion billiard shot in ultraslow motion and cascading instant-replay. Of course, he appreciated my appreciation of it as music-but no more than did Tom Hauptmann, who is totally tone deaf (or rather, had been until then). Perhaps the most insightful a.n.a.logy we conceived was that of Joe and Susan and Susie Maser, who saw us all as building a group marriage akin to their own triad.

Or perhaps it came from Noah Gonzalez, who pictured us constructing, entirely by intuition, a cobalt bomb.

All this happened at the top of our minds, in the forefront of our combined consciousness. Along with that, we were simultaneously, but not separately, growing closer to one another, getting to know each other in even greater depth than we already did, sharing and cherishing. Tom, for instance, was discovering music for the first time in his life, and finding it both more and less than he had imagined it must be. Long-Drink and the Doc and I were discerning some interesting things at the root of our long-standing rivalry at punning. Tommy Janssen was understanding for the first time why heteros.e.xual Bill Gerrity enjoyed wearing drag. Tom Hauptmann was learning things about eroticism from Josie Bauer that would have shocked him c.o.c.keyed an hour before, and she was learning equally unsettling things about chast.i.ty from him. All of us were learning things from the Callahans' husband, wife and daughter, that I can't put down here. It's not that you don't have the words. You don't have the concepts to put words on.