Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) by Spider Robinson Read Free Book Online

  I got no problem wit dat.   Maybe dat’s ezzackly how we lasted dis long.”
    Eddie doesn’t say much, but when he does, the result is often a short thoughtful silence on the part of those within earshot.
    “All right, enough of this,” I said finally.   “Flipping old Nyjmnckra the Trudeau Salute may indeed have pissed her off.   But she was plenty pissed off at us to begin with.   There’s no reason to believe the very last thing we did to annoy her had any sort of threshold effect.   In any case, the question is irrelevant.   The point is, what are we going to do about this?”
    “Get me evaluated, somehow,” Erin said.  
    Alf spoke up.   “In some way that suits…look, let’s all just start calling her Ludnyola, okay?   My throat hurts when I try and say her name.”   Agreement was nodded or grunted generally.   “…in some way that suits Ludnyola.”
    “She was suited when she got here,” Doc Webster said.   People blinked at him.   “Alf said we had to suit her,” he explained.   “Well, she was suited to start with.   That silly ‘power suit.’”   He snorted.   “Like all other kinds of suits were hand-cranked.”
    I was starting to wonder about the Doc.   Over the years I’d heard him make some very lame puns, sometimes so abstruse it was days before I realized they’d been puns.   But I had never heard him explain one before.  
    Willard Hooker cut to the chase.   “Well, we can’t figure out what sort of evaluation we need to fake until we consult some experts tomorrow during business hours.   I say the only sensible thing to do now is make supper and then get drunk.”
    This suggestion met with general approval.   I realized I was starving, myself.   “Who’s cooking tonight?” I asked.
    It happens that among the staff and regular clientele of The Place we have, these days, seven people generally deemed competent to cook for the group, each with their own unique culinary style.   There’s no system to the rotation or anything; dinner just tends to get made by whomever consensus agrees should do so that night.   Anybody who eats some tosses some cash into the cigar box at the end of the bar before they leave, in whatever amount they deem appropriate.   Maybe it wouldn’t work with another group.   Okay, probably.
    Zoey says we’re the first commune in history that don’t live together.   Not the only one, mind you: there are several of them on the Internet right now, and at least one of them has a membership numbered in the high six figures.   But our group first achieved telepathic communion back in the 1970s—well before ARPANET evolved into even USENET, much less the WorldWide Web—so I’m pretty sure we hold the record.  
    “Well,” Marty Pignatelli spoke up, “I was planning to make an Italian rabbit stew for everybody, but you managed to find a way to screw that up, Jake.”
    “Oh, Fifty-Fifty,” I said, shaking my head theatrically.   We had all started calling Marty Pignatelli Fifty-Fifty that year to break his chops, the logic being that he was a retired policeman —”Five-Oh” in street parlance—and had just turned fifty.   I smelled a pun coming, now, chiefly because Marty was not one of the seven competent cooks, and I decided to help him out by supplying the shortest distance between two puns: a straight line.   “What could I possibly have done to spoil your cooking plans?”
    He didn’t let me down.   “Not buy the hare of my guinea din-din.”
    It was decided, by instant consensus, that Marty really ought to be chatting with Lex rather than with us, and he was delivered there airmail by an ad hoc committee.   He made an impressive splash, exciting general merriment.
    Most important to me, my daughter’s dark mood of self-recrimination vanished in a silver cascade of giggles.
    That sort of set the tone.   The crisis was over now, the emergency past for the moment, problems remained to be solved but for the moment