Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) by Spider Robinson

when it glistens with perspiration…well, it glistens, that’s all.
    But the left -hand path led to coffee.
    I might be standing there now, my nose still pulling me in two different directions, if I hadn’t noticed the small bucket of coffee my darling had placed on the flagstone beside her recliner.
    “Can I have some of your coffee, spice?”
    She raised her sunglasses.   “If it’s worth your life to you.”
    “Thanks.”   Cuban Peaberry, it was, somewhere between a medium and a dark roast.   To forestall my assassination, I took a seat down at the end of the recliner and began rubbing her feet.   Young men, forget Dr. Ruth and heed the advice of a middle-aged fart: rub her tootsies.   This is the only Jungle Love Technique you will ever need; done properly it will melt a Valkyrie.
    “Have some more coffee,” Zoey murmured shortly.   And a little later, “Alright, you win, I will tell you of our troop movements.”   Then nothing but purring for awhile.
    After I judged enough time had gone by, I said, “Has Erin filled you in?”
    “Yes.   It ought to be manageable.   She’s working on it now.”
    As if we’d invoked her, Erin came out of the house just then.   From a distance, in shorts and halter and bare feet, she looked pretty enough to make a bishop dance the dirty boogie.   Closer up, though, the frown spoiled the effect a little.   Nobody can frown like a new teenager.
    When she reached us she dropped like a sack of laundry into the chaise longue next to Zoey’s and said, “I think we’re screwed.”
    “I’m just rubbing her feet,” I said.
    “Good morning to you, too,” her mother said, ignoring me.
    “Good morning,” Erin conceded.
    “That’s better.   How screwed?”
    “The law says just what I thought it did: we can get me evaluated by quote any Florida-certified teacher unquote.”
    “But…?”
    “Well, to put it in technical terms, Ludnyola has the whammy on us.   She didn’t just pull some strings, she winched some cables.   The deck is not just cold, she’s dipped it in liquid nitrogen.   I won’t tell you the details of how she rigged it because I’d get too mad.   But the ultimate carriage-return is, there’s now one and only one person in the state of Florida authorized to evaluate me.”
    Zoey and I groaned together.   How odd, that our groans of genuine dismay sounded precisely like the moans of pleasure Zoey had been making as I rubbed her feet.
    “You guessed it,” Erin confirmed.   “Accent on the ‘rjkh’—as in, ‘What a dorjkh!’”
    Zoey and I exchanged a glance.   “Screwed,” I said, and she nodded.
    “Well…” Erin said, and trailed off.
    After a while, her mother said, “You won’t be well for long, if you don’t finish the sentence.”
    “Well, we may have one thing going for us.   I’m afraid to trust it, though.”
    Why does evolution require humans approaching puberty to become exasperating?   My theory is, so their parents will go away and let them get some experimenting done.   The only defense is to refuse to be exasperated.   (Or, of course, to go away.)   After another while, Zoey said gently, “I might better advise you if I had some sense of what it is.”
    “What what is?”
    “The one thing we may have going for us that you’re afraid to trust.”
    “Oh yeah, sorry.   It sounds paradoxical, but the only edge we may have is that Ludnyola is a real bureaucrat.”
    Zoey and I were beginning to be tired of exchanging glances, so we stopped.   “This is good?”
    “In a twisted way.   It could have been much worse: she could have been like half the other people in civil service.”
    “…who are…?”
    “Who are chair-warming buck-passing trough-slurping fakes, pretending to be bureaucrats because that’s an acceptable excuse for not being a human being.   As far as I can tell from study of her record and interrogation of her computer, Ludnyola is the genuine article: a machine with a