The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  * * * *

  Take-off was delayed almost twenty-four hours until a major flare-storm had cleared the Earth’s orbit. Even so, the Van Allen belts were still so active that we had to make our exit through the North Polar Gap.

  It was a miserable flight. Apart from the usual trouble with weightlessness, we were all groggy with anti-radiation drugs. The ship was already over Farside before I took much interest in the proceedings, so I missed the sight of Earth dropping below the horizon. Nor was I really sorry. I wanted no reminders, and intended to think only of the future. Yet I could not shake off that feeling of guilt; I had deserted someone who loved and trusted me, and was no better than those who had abandoned Laika when she was a puppy, beside the dusty road to Palomar.

  The news that she was dead reached me a month later.

  There was no reason that anyone knew; the Andersons had done their best, and were very upset. She had just lost interest in living, it seemed. For a while, I think I did the same; but work is a wonderful anodyne, and my program was just getting under way.

  Though I never forgot Laika, in a little while the memory ceased to hurt.

  Then why had it come back to haunt me, five years later, on the far side of the Moon? I was searching my mind for the reason, when the metal building around me quivered as if under the impact of a heavy blow.

  I reacted without thinking. I was already closing the helmet of my emergency suit when the foundations slipped and the wall tore open with a short-lived scream of escaping air. Because I had automatically pressed the General Alarm button we lost only two men, despite the fact that the tremor—the worst ever recorded on Farside—cracked all three of the Observatory’s pressure-domes.

  It is hardly necessary for me to say that I do not believe in the supernatural. Everything that happened has a perfectly rational explanation, obvious to any man with the slightest knowledge of psychology. In the Second San Francisco earthquake, Laika was not the only dog to sense approaching disaster. Many such cases were reported. And on Farside, my own memories must have given me that heightened awareness, when my never-sleeping subconscious detected the first faint vibrations from within the Moon.

  The human mind has strange and labyrinthine ways of going about its business. It knew the signal that would most swiftly rouse me to the knowledge of danger. There is nothing more to it than that; though in a sense one could say that Laika woke me on both occasions, there is no mystery about it, no miraculous warning across the gulf that neither man nor dog can ever bridge.

  Of that I am sure, if I am sure of anything.

  Yet sometimes I wake now, in the silence of the Moon, and wish that the dream could have lasted a few seconds longer—so that I could have looked just once more into those luminous brown eyes, brimming with an unselfish, undemanding love I have found nowhere else on this world, or on any other.

  WHY I LEFT HARRY’S ALL-NIGHT HAMBURGERS, by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Harry’s was a nice place—probably still is. I haven’t been back lately. It’s a couple of miles off I-79, a few exits north of Charleston, near a place called Sutton. Used to do a pretty fair business until they finished building the Interstate out from Charleston and made it worthwhile for some fast-food joints to move in right next to the cloverleaf; nobody wanted to drive the extra miles to Harry’s after that. Folks used to wonder how old Harry stayed in business, as a matter of fact, but he did all right even without the Interstate trade. I found that out when I worked there.

  Why did I work there, instead of at one of the fast-food joints? Because my folks lived in a little house just around the corner from Harry’s, out in the middle of nowhere—not in Sutton itself, just out there on the road. Wasn’t anything around except our house and Harry’s place. He lived out back of his restaurant. That was about the only thing I could walk to in under an hour, and I didn’t have a car.

  This was when I was sixteen. I needed a job, because my dad was out of work again and if I was gonna do anything I needed my own money. Mom didn’t mind my using her car—so long as it came back with a full tank of gas and I didn’t keep it too long. That was the rule. So I needed some work, and Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers was the only thing within walking distance. Harry said he had all the help he needed—two cooks and two people working the counter, besides himself. The others worked days, two to a shift, and Harry did the late night stretch all by himself. I hung out there a little, since I didn’t have anywhere else, and it looked like pretty easy work—there was hardly any business, and those guys mostly sat around telling dirty jokes. So I figured it was perfect.

  Harry, though, said that he didn’t need any help.

  I figured that was probably true, but I wasn’t going to let logic keep me out of driving my mother’s car. I did some serious begging, and after I’d made his life miserable for a week or two Harry said he’d take a chance and give me a shot, working the graveyard shift, midnight to eight A.M., as his counterman, busboy, and janitor all in one.

  I talked him down to 7:30, so I could still get to school, and we had us a deal. I didn’t care about school so much myself, but my parents wanted me to go, and it was a good place to see my friends, y’know? Meet girls and so on.

  So I started working at Harry’s, nights. I showed up at midnight the first night, and Harry gave me an apron and a little hat, like something from a diner in an old movie, same as he wore himself. I was supposed to wait tables and clean up, not cook, so I don’t know why he wanted me to wear them, but he gave them to me, and I needed the bucks, so I put them on and pretended I didn’t notice that the apron was all stiff with grease and smelled like something nasty had died on it a few weeks back. And Harry—he’s a funny old guy, always looked fiftyish, as far back as I can remember. Never young, but never getting really old, either, y’know? Some people do that, they just seem to go on forever. Anyway, he showed me where everything was in the kitchen and back room, told me to keep busy cleaning up whatever looked like it wanted cleaning, and told me, over and over again, like he was really worried that I was going to cause trouble, “Don’t bother the customers. Just take their orders, bring them their food, and don’t bother them. You got that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I got it.”

  “Good,” he said. “We get some funny guys in here at night, but they’re good customers, most of them, so don’t you screw up with anyone. One customer complains, one customer stiffs you for the check, and you’re out of work, you got that?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I’ve gotta admit I was wondering what to do if some cheapskate skipped without paying. I tried to figure how much of a meal would be worth paying for in order to keep the job, but with taxes and all it got too tricky for me to work out, and I decided to wait until the time came, if it ever did.

  Then Harry went back in the kitchen, and I got a broom and swept up out front a little until a couple of truckers came in and ordered burgers and coffee.

  I was pretty awkward at first, but I got the hang of it after a little bit. Guys would come in, women, too, one or two at a time, and they’d order something, and Harry’d have it ready faster than you can say “cheese”, practically, and they’d eat it, and wipe their mouths, and go use the john, and drive off, and none of them said a damn thing to me except their orders, and I didn’t say anything back except “Yes, sir,” or “Yes, ma’am,” or “Thank you, come again.” I figured they were all just truckers who didn’t like the fast-food places.

  That was what it was like at first, anyway, from midnight to about one, one-thirty, but then things would slow down. Even the truckers were off the roads by then, I guess, or they didn’t want to get that far off the Interstate, or they’d all had lunch, or something. Anyway, by about two that first night I was thinking it was pretty clear why Harry didn’t think he needed help on this shift, when the door opened and the little bell rang.

  I jumped a bit; that bell startled me, and I turned around, but then I turned back to look at Harry, ’cause I’d seen him out of t
he corner of my eye, y’know, and he’d got this worried look on his face, and he was watching me; he wasn’t looking at the customer at all.

  About then I realized that the reason the bell had startled me was that I hadn’t heard anyone drive up, and who the hell was going to be out walking to Harry’s place at two in the morning in the West Virginia mountains? The way Harry was looking at me, I knew this must be one of those special customers he didn’t want me to scare away.

  So I turned around, and there was this short little guy in a really heavy coat, all zipped up, made of that shiny silver fabric you see race-car drivers wear in the cigarette ads, you know? And he had on padded ski pants of the same stuff, with pockets all over the place, and he was just putting down a hood, and he had on big thick goggles like he’d been out in a blizzard, but it was April and there hadn’t been any snow in weeks and it was about fifty, sixty degrees out.

  Well, I didn’t want to blow it, so I pretended I didn’t notice, I just said, “Hello, sir; may I take your order?”

  He looked at me funny and said, “I suppose so.”

  “Would you like to see a menu?” I said, trying to be on my best behavior—hell, I was probably overdoing it; I’d let the truckers find their own menus.

  “I suppose so,” he said again, and I handed him the menu.

  He looked it over, pointed to a picture of a cheeseburger that looked about as much like anything from Harry’s grill as Sly Stallone looks like me, and I wrote it down and passed the slip back to Harry, and he hissed at me, “Don’t bother the guy!”

  I took the hint, and went back to sweeping until the burger was up, and as I was handing the plate to the guy there was a sound out front like a shotgun going off, and this green light flashed in through the window, so I nearly dropped the thing, but I couldn’t go look because the customer was digging through his pockets for money, to pay for the burger.

  “You can pay after you’ve eaten, sir,” I said.

  “I will pay first,” he said, real formal. “I may need to depart quickly. My money may not be good here.”

  The guy hadn’t got any accent, but with that about the money I figured he was a foreigner, so I waited, and he hauled out a handful of weird coins, and I told him, “I’ll need to check with the manager.” He gave me the coins, and while I was taking them back to Harry and trying to see out the window, through the curtain, to see where that green light came from, the door opened and these three women come in, and where the first guy was all wrapped up like an Eskimo, these people weren’t wearing anything but jeans. Women, remember, and it was only April.

  Hey, I was just sixteen, so I tried real hard not to stare and I went running back to the kitchen and tried to tell Harry what was going on, but the money and the green light and the half-naked women all got tangled up and I didn’t make much sense.

  “I told you I get some strange customers, kid,” he said. “Let’s see the money.” So I gave him the coins, and he said, “Yeah, we’ll take these,” and made change—I don’t know how, because the writing on the coins looked like Russian to me, and I couldn’t figure out what any of them were. He gave me the change, and then looked me in the eye and says, “Can you handle those women, boy? It’s part of the job; I wasn’t expecting them tonight, but we get strange people in here, I told you that. You think you can handle it without losing me any customers, or do you want to call it a night and find another job?”

  I really wanted that paycheck; I gritted my teeth and said, “No problem!”

  When you were sixteen, did you ever try to wait tables with six bare boobs right there in front of you? Those three were laughing and joking in some foreign language I never heard before, and I think only one of them spoke English, because she did all the ordering. I managed somehow, and by the time they left Harry was almost smiling at me.

  Around four things slowed down again, and around four-thirty or five the breakfast crowd began to trickle in, but between two and four there were about half a dozen customers, I guess; I don’t remember who they all were any more, most of them weren’t that strange, but that first little guy and the three women, them I remember. Maybe some of the others were pretty strange, too, maybe stranger than the first guy, but he was the first, which makes a difference, and then those women—well, that’s gonna really make an impression on a sixteen-year-old, y’know? It’s not that they were particularly beautiful or anything, because they weren’t, they were just women, and I wasn’t used to seeing women with no shirts.

  When I got off at seven thirty, I was all mixed up; I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I was beginning to think maybe I imagined it all.

  I went home and changed clothes and caught the bus to school, and what with not really having adjusted to working nights, and being tired, and having to think about schoolwork, I was pretty much convinced that the whole thing had been some weird dream. So I came home, slept through until about eleven, then got up and went to work again.

  And damn, it was almost the same, except that there weren’t any half-naked women this time. The normal truckers and the rest came in first, then they faded out, and the weirdos started turning up.

  At sixteen, you know, you think you can cope with anything. At least, I did. So I didn’t let the customers bother me, not even the ones who didn’t look like they were exactly human beings to begin with. Harry got used to me being there, and I did make it a lot easier on him, so after the first couple of weeks it was pretty much settled that I could stay on for as long as I liked.

  And I liked it fine, really, once I got used to the weird hours. I didn’t have much of a social life during the week, but I never had, living where I did, and I could afford to do the weekends up in style with what Harry paid me and the tips I got. Some of those tips I had to take to the jewelers in Charleston, different ones so nobody would notice that one guy was bringing in all these weird coins and trinkets, but Harry gave me some pointers—he’d been doing the same thing for years, except that he’d gone through every jeweler in Charleston and Huntington and Wheeling and Washington, P.A., and was halfway through Pittsburgh.

  It was fun, really, seeing just what would turn up there and order a burger. I think my favorite was the guy who walked in, no car, no lights, no nothing, wearing this electric blue hunter’s vest with wires all over it, and these medieval tights with what Harry called a codpiece, with snow and some kind of sticky goop all over his vest and in his hair, shivering like it was the Arctic out there, when it was the middle of July. He had some kind of little animal crawling around under that vest, but he wouldn’t let me get a look at it; from the shape of the bulge it made it might have been a weasel or something. He had the strangest damn accent you ever heard, but he acted right at home and ordered without looking at the menu.

  Harry admitted, when I’d been there awhile, that he figured anyone else would mess things up for him somehow. I might have thought I was going nuts, or I might have called the cops, or I might have spread a lot of strange stories around, but I didn’t, and Harry appreciated that.

  Hey, that was easy. If these people didn’t bother Harry, I figured, why should they bother me? And it wasn’t anybody else’s business, either. When people asked, I used to tell them that sure, we got weirdos in the place late at night—but I never said just how weird.

  And I never got as cool about it as Harry was; I mean, a flying saucer in the parking lot wouldn’t make Harry blink. I blinked, when we got ’em—we did, but not very often, and I had to really work not to stare at them. Most of the customers had more sense; if they came in something strange they hid it in the woods or something. But there were always a few who couldn’t be bothered. If any state cops ever cruised past there and saw those things, I guess they didn’t dare report them. No one would’ve believed them anyway.

  I asked Harry once if all these guys came from the same place.

  “Damned if I know,” he said. He’d never asked, and he didn’t want me to, either.

  Except he was wro
ng about thinking that would scare them away. Sometimes you can tell when someone wants to talk, and some of these people did. So I talked to them.

  I think I was seventeen by the time someone told me what was really going on, though.

  Before you ask any stupid questions, no, they weren’t any of them Martians or monsters from outer space or anything like that. Some of them were from West Virginia, in fact. Just not our West Virginia. Lots of different West Virginias, instead. What the science fiction writers call “parallel worlds”. That’s one name, anyway. Other dimensions, alternate realities, they had lots of different names for it.

  It all makes sense, really. A couple of them explained it to me. See, everything that ever could possibly have happened, in the entire history of the universe right from the Big Bang up until now, did happen—somewhere. And every possible difference means a different universe. Not just if Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or won, or whatever he didn’t do here; what does Napoleon matter to the universe, anyway? Betelgeuse doesn’t giving a flying damn for all of Europe, past, present, or future. But every single atom or particle or whatever, whenever it had a chance to do something—break up or stay together, or move one direction instead of another, whatever—it did all of them, but all in different universes. They didn’t branch off, either—all the universes were always there, there just wasn’t any difference between them until this particular event came along. And that means that there are millions and millions of identical universes, too, where the differences haven’t happened yet. There’s an infinite number of universes—more than that, an infinity of infinities. I mean, you can’t really comprehend it; if you think you’re close, then multiply that a few zillion times. Everything is out there.

  And that means that in a lot of those universes, people figured out how to travel from one to another. Apparently it’s not that hard; there are lots of different ways to do it, too, which is why we got everything from guys in street clothes to people in spacesuits and flying saucers.