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

normal I’ve ever discussed this with has been absolutely certain I was nuts to wish I could trade—and I’ve always felt that anything everybody agrees on has just naturally got to be wrong.   But now you’ve both got me wondering—”
    “It’s differences from ‘normal’ that make a person special,” Tanya said.   “Look at us: I’m a blind spade and David’s a queer Jew, and we’re two of the happiest people I know.   Everybody here is at least a little bit bent, one way and another, and the devil himself ain’t as happy as we are here most nights.”
    “Balance,” Acayib said thoughtfully, and took a long slow sip of beer.  
    “Salt in the cookies,” Dave said.
    “Beg pardon?”
    “You put salt in cookies to make them sweeter,” he explained.   “Gives the sugar something to work against.”
    “Huh.”
    “Are you scared all the time?” Noah asked.
    “Just when I’m in some environment I can’t control,” he said.   “At home in my easy chair, I’m a laid-back kind of guy.   I guess you could say that at all times, I know whether it’s safe to relax or not.”
    “It’s safe here, Mister,” Shorty Steinitz said earnestly.   “We’ll all keep an eye on you.   Won’t we?”
    There was a ragged but enthusiatic chorus of agreement.   “You got it, Acayib!”   “Take it off your mind, Nazz—it’s covered.”   “You’re off duty for the night, partner.”   “We look out for each other, here.”
    He blinked around at us owlishly, his mouth slack.
    “Believe us, son,” Doc Webster said.   “Pain has its uses—but it is not worth the grief that comes with it.”
    “But most of the time I’m like a ship in a war zone with no radar and one overworked lookout,” he said.
    “Better that than a thousand lookouts with shrill voices,” the Doc said.   “I’ve been a doctor, man and boy, for almost forty-five years now—and I believe to my boots that the human pain system was one of God’s very worst designs, even worse than the scrotum.   A child could do better.   What good is an alarm system with no off switch and no volume knob?   For two million years of evolution, the overwhelming majority of our most poignant pains were urgent warnings of situations we could do nothing about.   For all but the last century of that two million years, the agony attendant on an inflamed appendix served no useful purpose whatsoever, probably lowered the victim’s resistance even further.   It’s taken our minds two million years to adapt to our stupid bodies, and invent medicine.   Until we developed dentistry, what use was a toothache?   Were we supposed to bash ourselves in the mouth with a rock?   Why should passing a gallstone hurt so much—or at all?   Even now, with so many medical tools at my disposal, most of the pains my patients suffer are superfluous, redundant information, pointless misery.   Yet we still have no really satisfactory way to switch off the alarm, and all the ways we know to mute it have undesirable side effects.   I sometimes wonder if God felt He needed to flay us into developing intelligence.”   He coughed and looked embarrassed.   “Anyway, I suspect it might be better to have the alarm system permanently disconnected than to be unable to turn it off—or at least turn it down for periods of time without penalty.”
    “If God had agreed with you, maybe we’d never have become intelligent,” Acayib pointed out.   “If we have.”
    “Maybe not,” the Doc agreed, “and maybe we’d have become alert , instead—and who’s to say that wouldn’t be an improvement?   Have you ever spent much time in the company of someone with real deep, chronic intractable pain?”
    “No,” he admitted.   “My parents went together in a common disaster.”
    “Let me take you down to Smithtown General some night, and spend a little time in the Intractable Pain Clinic with me.   I think I can convince you that you’re a lucky