To the Vanishing Point

by Alan Dean Foster

  Smoke rose lazily from a brick chimney at the rear of the building. As they crossed the intersection they saw that the sign over the entrance changed characters as fast as individual frames on a videotape. One frame read CAFE before vanishing in favor of blurred alien hieroglyphs.

  "Probably says the same thing in hundreds of different languages," Flucca suggested. "But it’s a restaurant. You can smell it."

  "Wonder if they can smell us." A check of the gas gauge revealed less than half a tank left. He wondered if he could top off their tanks here. If they sold lightning bolts, maybe he could buy premium unleaded, too.

  There was plenty of room to park alongside the giant treadless wheel. He pulled up carefully, set the brake. Fifty yards to the right, sunlight and solid ground gave way to void. It was with considerable relief he gingerly stepped out onto unyielding earth.

  Flucca hopped down and hurried past him. "Wonder what kind of place this is and what it’s doing here?"

  "If this is a reality line it is surely a short one," was all Burnfingers could say.

  "A bit of reality apart from any other." Mouse turned slowly, studying their surroundings. "A drifting fragment, held in place only by this intersection. Astonishing."

  "Interesting chunk of real estate, all right." Flucca was leading the way toward the entrance. "Wonder what the food’s like?"

  Thoughts of real food set off a small bomb in Frank’s belly. None of them had enjoyed a real meal since leaving behind the Cedar City that was too full of truth to be their reality. He indicated the brass bubble and its neighbor.

  "Looks like they have a few customers already."

  "Never saw a place yet fond of turning business away." Flucca reached for the handle of the front door.

  The cafe’s interior was nothing like what any of them expected because it looked exactly like what they were familiar with. It was no different from any of a hundred similar establishments you would encounter traveling along a rural state highway.

  They took a table near a front window with a view of the parking lot and fuel islands. The Formica tabletop was lined on the side with fluted metal strips. Legs solid as railroad iron supported it. There were salt and pepper shakers and a big glass sugar dispenser with a stick of vanilla inside to maintain freshness, paper napkins and cheap metal silverware. A cluster of laminated menus shared a plastic stand with the napkins. Everything looked and felt familiar. Gazing out the window, Frank half expected to see cars whizzing past, mountains and cacti in the distance. But there was only the parking lot, pumps, sourceless sunshine and, off in the distance, the blackness of the abyss.

  That’s when the voice startled him out of his reverie. "Now, then, whut kin I git for you folks?"

  14

  The heavyset woman regarding them patiently was in her midforties. Her bleached blond hair was piled in swirls atop her head, a sweeping abstract sculpture. She wore a plain white waitress’s uniform. Two pens peeped from the lip of a blouse pocket. One hand held a third, the other a yellow note pad. Gum snapped as she chewed. Her cheeks were pale rose.

  "What is this place?" Wendy spoke first. "No — where is this place?"

  Chiclet popped, punctuating each sentence. "This place? Why, this here’s the Conjunction. Me and Max, we run the whole joint." She nodded proudly toward the kitchen, from which strange and wondrous odors emanated, not to mention the thick aroma of hot grease. "We’ve been here for some time. I take it this is the first time out this way for you folks?" She scanned them approvingly. "Always nice to see new faces. We got enough regulars as it is." She hefted pad and pencil, 160 pounds of kitchen computer instantly on-line. "I expect you’d like something to eat."

  Frank didn’t reply. His attention was drawn to a booth on the other side of the restaurant. Its occupants could only be the drivers of the two extraordinary machines parked outside.

  A giant green caterpillar wearing wraparound blue sunshades sat across the table from a tall, thin creature built of petrified Silly Putty. Taking up an enormous chair out in the aisle was a walrus-sized quadruped with engraved tusks and hands like a pianist’s. He wore dark gray dungarees and waved his hands animatedly as he spoke. Most of his sentences were directed to the caterpillar. The Silly Putty person sat and sipped silently from a glass two feet tall and an inch in diameter.

  "Sorry?" Frank blinked, leaned back in his chair.

  "Asked what I could git ya." The waitress started to slide her pencil behind one ear. "I can see you folks are tired. I’ll come back in a few minutes."

  "No, no, that’s all right," Alicia said quickly. "Could I — do you have coffee?"

  "Don’t see why not. What else we sellin' today?"

  "I wanna chocolate shake," Steven told her, "with whipped cream on top!"

  His mother bent close to him. "Steven, we don’t know if a place like this carries anything like — "

  "One chocolate shake." The waitress made a terse notation on her pad, looked up. "You folks gonna have anything to eat, or you just thirsty?"

  A numbed Frank picked up one of the menus, opened the laminated sheets. It was as thick as a small book and full of writing that leaped off the page. He couldn’t read a word of it. Unlike the sign above the entrance, the words did not change as he studied them.

  The waitress leaned over his shoulder. She smelled of cheap perfume. He wondered if it was produced by adding liquid to her skin, or if it was her actual body odor, or if it changed like the sign outside to meet the olfactory requirements of an extraordinarily diverse clientele.

  "I forgot: you folks are new here." She straightened. "Max is pretty versatile. You just tell me what you’d like and I’ll bet a dime against a dollar he can whip it up."

  "Anything?" Frank swallowed, the saliva running inside his mouth like a spring flood.

  "Sure. He likes a change now and then. Gets tired of feeding the same specials to the same regulars."

  "Okay." One more swallow. "I’d like — a New York strip sirloin, medium well, with grilled onions, baked potato, sour cream and butter on the side, no chives, and whatever the vegetable of the day is." When he finished he was nearly in tears. "Can he — can he do that?"

  She grinned down at him, suddenly no longer an inexplicable vision. "What size steak?"

  "Twelve — no, ten ounces. I don’t want to overdo it."

  Everyone ordered. Fried chicken for Steven, shrimp salad for Wendy and her mother. Mouse requested unfamiliar food in an unrecognizable language while Flucca called for chicken mole with frijoles and rice. Burnfingers Begay waited until everyone else had put in their order before calmly requesting tenderloin of venison filled with trout pate beneath a sour cream-champagne sauce, potatoes au gratin on the side, and haricots verts accompanied by a 1948 Bavarian Liebfraumilch. Not to mention rambutan sorbet for dessert.

  "Right." Their waitress scanned the long list before walking back to the kitchen. They could hear her rattling off the orders to an unseen figure behind the grill.

  Wendy was shaking her head. "Can you believe this place?"

  "It’s no more impossible than everything else that’s happened to us." Her mother was arranging a napkin on her lap. "I don’t see why we shouldn’t believe in it as well."

  "Got a good location," Burnfingers observed.

  In a few minutes the waitress returned with their drinks: coffee, iced tea, wine, and one towering chocolate milkshake. While they drank, the walrus and his companions rose to leave. Everyone watched them go.

  Frank heard their machines start up, peered out the window to observe the departure. The wheeled globe belonged to the Silly Putty creature. Instead of rolling down the road, it rose six feet off the gravel and banked sharply to its left. The wheel was rotating so rapidly around the globe it was less than a blur. The caterpillar and the walrus left in the other vehicle, exploding up the roadway opposite the cafe.

  The Sonderbergs were alone in the cafe with their friends.

  Twenty minutes later their
food emerged from the kitchen. Wendy’s and Alicia’s salads were ice chilled, the shrimp the size of small lobsters, and everything expertly washed and shelled. Frank’s sirloin arrived on a sizzling steel platter. The first bite was purely sensuous. He chewed and swallowed two more before he could find his voice.

  "Anybody — anybody else use the road we came in on?"

  Their waitress frowned as she stacked serving plates. "Now that you mention it, not for quite a while. Guess that section of road’s under repair. Usually seems to be." Her gum popped, sounding like a small-caliber pistol.

  "Does this place have a name?" Flucca’s lips were dark with mole sauce.

  "Just the Conjunction." She hesitated, gazing toward the kitchen. "Say, it’s kinda between mealtimes right now. Would you folks mind chatting with Max while you eat? Talking to the customers is one of his biggest pleasures."

  Frank’s defenses went up instinctively, relaxed when he saw Steven smiling back at him. "I guess so. Come to think of it, I’d like to meet somebody who can conjure up a meal like this in twenty minutes."

  "Great!" She turned and bellowed toward the kitchen. "It’s okay, Maxie! C’mon out and shoot the bull if you want to!"

  "Minute!" came the reply from the vicinity of the kitchen. "Just scrapin' the grill!"

  They were three-quarters finished with their food and beginning to slow down when the chef finally emerged to join them. His waitress wife was in back of the counter setting places and arranging alien desserts inside a tall glass cylinder.

  Max was almost as tall as Burnfingers Begay, and much beefier. He had a permanent five-o’clock shadow and thinning black hair. His wide apron somehow stayed in position without the aid of shoulder straps. As he approached the table he was wiping both huge hands with a dirty towel. On his bare right shoulder Frank identified a tattoo of a naked woman entwined with a snake, beneath which rode a banner and two hearts. Beneath it, in florid script, was the word MOTHER. The other shoulder displayed a tattoo, which traveled from elbow to neck. It resembled nothing on Earth.

  "Everything okay, folks?" Each word ended in a grunt, giving Max the sound of an educated hog. He smiled as he listened to a barrage of compliments. "Thanks. Eileen says you folks haven’t been through this way before."

  "We’re trying to fix something that’s broke," Steven blurted before anyone could stop him.

  Max just nodded. "Trouble with the threads of reality?"

  "How did you know?" Mouse was instantly on guard.

  "We feed a lot of truckers in here. They know just about everything that’s goin' on anywhere. You look like the fix-it type. Wish you all luck. Hope you put reality to right. Chaos is bad for business."

  "As an independent businessman myself," said Frank as he gestured with a forkful of steak, "I can go along with that."

  "What sorta business you in, buddy?"

  "Sporting goods."

  "No foolin'?" The cook was delighted. "That’s great! Used to be big on sports myself until I found out I had this other talent. I was premed in school. Gonna be a designer molecular engineer until I discovered I liked slingin' hash better." He jerked a thumb toward the counter. "Eileen didn’t want to go world-hopping anyway, so when we found this place up for sale it was a natural for us. We’ll never get rich here, but you can’t beat it for gettin' to meet interesting people."

  "I can imagine." Alicia sipped her perfect blend of Colombian and Kona coffees.

  "We need to top off our tanks, too," Frank told him. "I don’t suppose you carry premium unleaded out here?"

  Max scratched beard stubble. "Oh, I reckon we got just about anything you need. Not much good tryin' to run a business if you don’t stock what the customer wants."

  "That’s exactly how I feel about it." A sudden thought made Frank frown. "I don’t know how we’re going to pay you. Do you take credit cards?"

  "Hell, we take anything." A big hand dug into a pocket beneath the stained apron, emerged holding fragments of metal, plastic, and crystal. Some of the crystals burned with bright internal fires. Max displayed the handful before shoving it back in his pocket.

  "You run a place out in the boonies, you better get used to acceptin' some funny money."

  "If you’d prefer, I think we can cover the bill with cash."

  "Hey, since when did anybody turn down cash? That steak done right?"

  "Absolute perfection. Tastes of mesquite. Where do you find mesquite?"

  Max shrugged modestly. "I got my suppliers. Truckers, they get everywhere." He nodded toward the window. "There goes a regular right now."

  Everyone turned as a blast of passing air rattled the windows and something the size of the Queen Mary with wheels thundered through the intersection beyond the gravel parking lot.

  "Wow!" said Steven softly. There was a faint smell of burned caramel in the air. It faded rapidly. "What was that?"

  "Don’t know for sure," Max told him. "Can’t tell where everybody’s going or where they’re coming from. But a lot of em stop here." He was quiet for a long moment. "There is somethin you could offer that’d be better than money, though I’ll take that, too. Call it a tip."

  "Like what?" Alicia asked hesitantly.

  He looked down at her. "Personal contact. Oh, not what you’d call intimate. I simply want to touch you." Seeing the expressions on their faces he explained further. "Call it a hobby if you will, but one of the pleasures of running this place is knowing the folks you serve."

  "This won’t hurt, will it?" Wendy asked him.

  "No, little lady," he replied, laughing softly. "It won’t hurt at all."

  Frank shrugged. "God knows you’ve earned a bigger tip than anything we could leave. If that’s what you want …." He stuck out his hand. "Pleased to meet you. I’m Frank Sonderberg."

  "Just call me Max." The chef extended his own paw.

  It was an ordinary handshake they exchanged, except for the faint lingering tingle Frank felt as he drew his fingers back. Without a second thought, Alicia extended her own hand.

  "I’m Alicia."

  "Charmed." Max turned her hand over and kissed the back.

  Frank wondered if his wife felt more or less of the subsidiary tingling as a result.

  Everyone shook his hand: the children, Flucca, then Begay. The chef’s eyes widened perceptibly as he gripped Burnfingers’s equally large hand. "Well, well: a Traveler."

  "I get around. Hitchhike, mostly."

  Max was just staring. "I’d like to talk with you at length."

  "Be glad to, but I’m with these folks and they’re in kind of a hurry. Sorry."

  "I understand." Max let the Indian’s fingers drop. For a split second, less than the blink of an eye, Frank thought he saw half a dozen steely green digits attached to the chef’s wrist. Or maybe they’d been silvery tentacles. Two localized hallucinations in less than a second. Before he had time to digest his eyes' deceptive information, Max’s hand was a normal hand once again.

  "That’s the trouble with folks. They stop here for a fill-up and a quick bite to eat, and then they’re off again, sometimes for the last time." He turned to Mouse, extending his hand a final time.

  She lifted her own tiny hand to meet his. Frank wasn’t sure exactly what happened next, but the first contact produced a bright blue flash and a crackling in the air. He nearly fell out of his chair. Wendy squealed and covered her face.

  When he’d recovered from the shock, a cloud of blue smoke was already beginning to dissipate above the table. Their host was lying against the counter, legs spread, shaking his head like a man who’d just taken a solid uppercut. Mouse was standing by her chair, her eyes even wider than usual.

  "I didn’t mean to do anything," she was saying over and over.

  "It’s okay. It’s all right," Max told her. Eileen was leaning over the counter, staring at him and still chewing her gum.

  The chef used one of the counter stools for support as he rose. Then he turned his gaze not on Mouse, but back on Frank. "You go
t any idea who you’re travelin' with, buddy?"

  Frank stared at Mouse, who wore her usual enigmatic expression. "A musician?"

  "Musician, yeah." Max wiped at his pants, straightened his apron, and chuckled. "Right: a musician." He inspected his hand, shaking it loosely from the wrist while supporting his elbow with his other hand. "Quite a handshake you got there, miss."

  "Just call me Mouse."

  "Miss Mouse, I haven’t had contact like that since" — he glanced back at his wife, who was looking on from behind the counter — "well, let’s just say it don’t happen often."

  "You okay?" Even as he asked, Frank wondered what Mouse had done to the much bigger man. There’d been a spark, a ripping noise, and he’d been thrown across the floor as though he’d been shot from a cannon.

  "Sure, I’m okay."

  "I didn’t mean to do anything." Mouse was openly apologetic. "I’m usually very careful."

  "You were careful," Max told her. "I should’ve mentioned that I’m an open receptor. Usually I just get a sip of everybody who comes through here. I wasn’t prepared for a deluge. Most folks don’t put out more than a trickle." He took a deep breath. "That’ll be a memory to savor. Thanks." He looked around the table. "You can thank the lady here for your meals. On the house."

  "You sure?" Frank fumbled for his wallet. "You should let us pay you something. I still have to fill up."

  "Go ahead."

  "Then you have to take some money." He extracted several bills without bothering to check the denominations. "Here. Take this and give me whatever the change is."

  Max frowned at the paper. "What’s that?"

  "Money." Frank started to put it back in his wallet. "If it’s no good…"

  "No, no. Currency? Let me see." Frank passed him the bills. "I’ll be damned. Eileen, have a look at this! You won’t believe it. Paper money. Intentionally transitory currency." He turned back to Frank. "You don’t often meet someone who comes from a society that makes a virtue of insubstantiality."

  "Not all of it’s insubstantial," Frank protested. "We use coins, too. Metal."