The Callahan Touch (Callahan's Place series Book 6) by Spider Robinson

Author:Spider Robinson [Robinson, Spider]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Multiply my dilemma by—

—no, raise it to the power of—

—the number of people present with me in the room.

* * *

Now do you want to be telepathic, Jake old buddy?

* * *

“Whaddya say we blow de tree wi—de tree tings quick on sometin harmless,” Fast Eddie whispered a thousand years later, “before we get ourselves inta trouble, here?” His forehead was so wrinkled you could have played washboard on it.

Long-Drink gently put a hand over Eddie’s mouth. “What,” he asked, “is absolutely guaranteed harmless?”

Eddie’s brow wrinkled up even tighter…and the rest of him slumped.

“Well,” Doc Webster murmured, a timeless, silent time later, “it could be worse.”

“How?” I asked mournfully, and several others groaned approval of the question.

“We could be down to one,” the Doc explained. “This way we have a little room to breath. If we screw up too bad the first time, we can always get ourselves out of trouble—or at least back where we started—and still have a backup wi…option. It seems like our first priority is—”

“No backup option, Doc,” Jordin Kare corrected. “The third one is the most important one of all. Say you’re right: we goof the first one, we undo it with the second…and there we are with a cluricaune in the house. The third is our last hope of ever getting rid of him.”

“Sure,” the Doc said, “ideally we hold Losing The Cluricaune in reserve for our third w—our third expressed desire, naturally. But if we…choose that one first, there’s nobody to grant the other two.”

The cluricaune was smiling in his sleep.

“And you think there’s any way in hell that you can get this many people—even these people—to agree on one choice?” I asked. “Without a fight? Are you ready for that fight, Doc?”

“Jake, it seems to me we have a responsibility—”

I reached an instant, unilateral and irrevocable decision. If even Doc Webster, always one of the most sensible and wise and level-headed of us, was thinking along these sorts of lines—and so rattled that he had to keep making an obvious effort to avoid tripping over his own tongue—we were in big trouble. I knew he was wrong. He was being as reasonable and logical as any chump protagonist in a fantasy story; a hundred thousand stories said he was thinking like a victim. We had to break the mold somehow, move laterally. But I was not sure I had the emotional weight to sway the gang from his way of thinking—and that uncertainty made me a little frantic. Any one of them could doom us all, any second, with the best of intentions and a single sentence. Damn it, this was my bar, for now at least! It was up to me to decide who had what responsibilities to whom in here. If any of us was going to bear the weight of this, it had to be me. So I made a choice that hadn’t even gotten onto my preliminary ballot. To assert my authority—I yelped for higher authority.

“God,” I said loudly, cutting the Doc off, “I wish Mike Callahan was here right now.

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