Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) by Spider Robinson

go broke, they’d have done it long ago.   If a couple of million of them starve, the Politburo just shrug and keep pursuing the socialist ideal.   They won’t go broke until they run out of cannon fodder…which means, when they run out of people.   Besides, no grand jury in the world would indict anyone for punching Geraldo Rivera.”
    “He will be a neoNazi.”
    I like to think I keep an open mind.   But the notion that I would one day find myself admiring anything at all about a neoNazi was—
    …well, okay.   It seemed ridiculous.
    “Jake,” Nikky said, “you are a cynic at heart.   You believe all bad things will always tend to be as they have been.   Because the Politburo has starved millions in the past, it will always do so.   No Nazi will ever share ordinary human impulses.   How, then, do you resolve the question of Viet Nam?”
    Ouch.   “Ouch.”
    “And the Wall will really come down?” Zoey asked.   Her late father and mother had gotten out of eastern Germany just in time, back in the late Thirties, and had never been able to return; the place was a little more than just an abstraction to Zoey.
    “Women will dance naked by firelight atop its stones as the last sections are pulled down,” Solace stated.   “Nikky?”
    He nodded.   “True.   I saw it.   Will have seen it.   Have seen it about to be.”   He sighed.   “She was lovely, by firelight…”
    “And Mr. Mandela will truly walk free?” asked Tanya Latimer.   Blind ladies tend to have very good ears, and hers had grown points at the mention of South Africa; she had been shamelessly eavesdropping ever since.   “He will lead his nation?   Without bloodshed? ”
    “Yes,” Nikky and Solace said together.
    “Dear Jesus,” she said, and began to cry.   Her husband Isham folded her in his great arms, and they began to rock together, he laughing, she crying, totally telepathic; theirs is one of the great marriages.
    I found that my own eyes were wet.   “Look,” I said, “I think this is just about enough of this.   Okay?   I’m starting to itch.   I’ve got—let me see, at least eight irresistibly good stories to tell, now—and nobody outside this room would believe a single one of them.   I’m glad we’ve established that Solace has a reasonably efficient way of predicting the immediate future, and now I propose that we drop it. ”
    “Hey, take it easy, Jake,” Long-Drink said.   “This is interestin’.”
    I shook my head.   “Nikky, you were right: to know the future is to lose something of the now .   This is wrong, Drink.   Didn’t you ever spy out your Christmas presents in advance…and then wish you hadn’t?   One morning the whole world will wake up and find out the Evil Empire just packed it in, and they’ll all look at each other in awe and wonder…and to me it’ll be old news.   No amount of money I could make on selling the ruble short could compensate me for that.”
    “I am sorry, Jake,” Solace said.   “I should have realized—”
    “No reason you should have.   I think it’s a human thing.   But you two are like unprofessional book reviewers, you’re giving away the plot twists, and I’d like you to stop, now. ”
    “Wise words,” Tesla said.   “I apologize to you, Jake.   I suppose I assumed that as an old friend of Mike and Lady Sally, you had dealt with this sort of thing before.”
    It did seem odd.   “It just never came up,” I told him.   “We didn’t even know Mike was a time traveler until right there at the end, just before the bomb went off.   He never told us a word about specifics of the future.   We never asked.   I can’t speak for anybody else, but I was afraid if I asked, he might answer.   It’s tempting to peek ahead to the ending—but it always spoils it if you do.   You gotta pay your money to enjoy the ride.   Anyhow, we never asked.   Now, this is my house, and I hereby declare the subject changed.   Who has a new