The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  But there’s one thing about it—with an infinite number of universes, I mean really infinite, how can you find just one? Particularly the first time out? Fact is, you can’t. It’s just not possible. So the explorers go out, but they don’t come back. Maybe if some did come back, they could look at what they did and where it took them and figure out how to measure and aim and all that, but so far as any of the ones I’ve talked to know, nobody has ever done it. When you go out, that’s it, you’re out there. You can go on hopping from one world to the next, or you can settle down in one forever, but like the books say, you really can’t go home again. You can get close, maybe—one way I found out a lot of this was in exchange for telling this poor old geezer a lot about the world outside Harry’s. He was pretty happy about it when I was talking about what I’d seen on TV, and naming all the presidents I could think of, but then he asked me something about some religion I’d never heard of that he said he belonged to, and when I said I’d never heard of it he almost broke down. I guess he was looking for a world like his own, and ours was, you know, close, but not close enough. He said something about what he called a “random walk principle”—if you go wandering around at random you keep coming back close to where you started, but you’ll never have your feet in exactly the original place, they’ll always be a little bit off to one side or the other.

  So there are millions of these people out there drifting from world to world, looking for whatever they’re looking for, sometimes millions of them identical to each other, too, and they run into each other. They know what to look for, see. So they trade information, and some of them tell me they’re working on figuring out how to really navigate whatever it is they do, and they’ve figured out some of it already, so they can steer a little.

  I wondered out loud once why so many of them turn up at Harry’s, and this woman with blue-grey skin—from some kind of medication, she told me—tried to explain it. West Virginia is one of the best places to travel between worlds, particularly up in the mountains around Sutton, because it’s a pretty central location for eastern North America, but there isn’t anything there. I mean, there aren’t any big cities, or big military bases, or anything, so that if there’s an atomic war or something—and apparently there have been a lot of atomic wars, or wars with even worse weapons, in different worlds—nobody’s very likely to heave any missiles at Sutton, West Virginia. Even in the realities where the Europeans never found America and it’s the Chinese or somebody building the cities, there just isn’t any reason to build anything near Sutton. And there’s something that makes it an easy place to travel between worlds, too; I didn’t follow the explanation. She said something about the Earth’s magnetic field, but I didn’t catch whether that was part of the explanation or just a comparison of some kind.

  The mountains and forests make it easy to hide, too, which is why it’s better than out in the desert someplace.

  Anyway, right around Sutton it’s pretty safe and easy to travel between worlds, so lots of people do.

  The strange thing, though, is that for some reason that nobody really seemed very clear on, Harry’s, or something like it, is in just about the same place in millions of different realities. More than millions; infinities, really. It’s not always exactly Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers; one customer kept calling Harry Sal, for instance. It’s there, though, or something like it, and one thing that doesn’t seem to change much is that travelers can eat there without causing trouble. Word gets around that Harry’s is a nice, quiet place, with decent burgers, where nobody’s going to hassle them about anything, and they can pay in gold or silver if they haven’t got the local money, or in trade goods or whatever they’ve got that Harry can use. It’s easy to find, because it’s in a lot of universes, relatively—as I said, this little area isn’t one that varies a whole lot from universe to universe, unless you start moving long distances. Or maybe not easy to find, but it can be found. One guy told me that Harry’s seems to be in more universes than Washington, D.C. He’d even seen one of my doubles before, last time he stopped in, and he thought he might have actually gotten back to the same place until I swore I’d never seen him before. He had these really funny eyes, so I was sure I’d have remembered him.

  We never actually got repeat business from other worlds, y’know, not once, not ever; nobody could ever find the way back to exactly our world. What we got were people who had heard about Harry’s from other people, in some other reality. Oh, maybe it wasn’t exactly the same Harry’s they’d heard about, but they’d heard that there was usually a good place to eat and swap stories in about that spot.

  That’s a weird thought, you know, that every time I served someone a burger a zillion of me were serving burgers to a zillion others—not all of them the same, either.

  So they come to Harry’s to eat, and they trade information with each other there, or in the parking lot, and they take a break from whatever they’re doing.

  They came there, and they talked to me about all those other universes, and I was seventeen years old, man. It was like those Navy recruiting ads on TV, see the world—except it was see the worlds, all of them, not just one. I listened to everything those guys said. I heard them talk about the worlds where zeppelins strafed Cincinnati in a Third World War, about places the dinosaurs never died out and mammals never evolved any higher than rats, about cities built of colored glass or dug miles underground, about worlds where all the men were dead, or all the women, or both, from biological warfare. Any story you ever heard, anything you ever read, those guys could top it. Worlds where speaking aloud could get you the death penalty—not what you said, just saying anything out loud. Worlds with spaceships fighting a war against Arcturus. Beautiful women, strange places, everything you could ever want, out there somewhere, but it might take forever to find it.

  I listened to those stories for months. I graduated from high school, but there wasn’t any way I could go to college, so I just stayed on with Harry—it paid enough to live on, anyway. I talked to those people from other worlds, even got inside some of their ships, or time machines, or whatever you want to call them, and I thought about how great it would be to just go roaming from world to world. Any time you don’t like the way things are going, just pop! And the whole world is different! I could be a white god to the Indians in a world where the Europeans and Asians never reached America, I figured, or find a world where machines do all the work and people just relax and party.

  When my eighteenth birthday came and went without any sign I’d ever get out of West Virginia, I began to really think about it, you know? I started asking customers about it. A lot of them told me not to be stupid; a lot just wouldn’t talk about it. Some, though, some of them thought it was a great idea.

  There was one guy, this one night—well, first, it was September, but it was still hot as the middle of summer, even in the middle of the night. Most of my friends were gone—they’d gone off to college, or gotten jobs somewhere, or gotten married, or maybe two out of the three. My dad was drinking a lot. The other kids were back in school. I’d started sleeping days, from eight in the morning until about four P.M., instead of evenings. Harry’s air conditioner was busted, and I really wanted to just leave it all behind and go find myself a better world. So when I heard these two guys talking at one table about whether one of them had extra room in his machine, I sort of listened, when I could, when I wasn’t fetching burgers and Cokes.

  Now, one of these two I’d seen before—he’d been coming in every so often ever since I started working at Harry’s. He looked like an ordinary guy, but he came in about three in the morning and talked to the weirdos like they were all old buddies, so I figured he had to be from some other world originally himself, even if he stayed put in ours now. He’d come in about every night for a week or two, then disappear for months, then start turning up again, and I had sort of wondered whether he might have licked the navigation problem all those other people had talked about. But then I figured, probably
not, either he’d stopped jumping from one world to the next, or else it was just a bunch of parallel people coming in, and it probably wasn’t ever the same guy at all, really. Usually, when that happened, we’d get two or three at a time, looking like identical twins or something, but there was only just one of this guy, every time, so I figured, like I said, either he hadn’t been changing worlds at all, or he’d figured out how to navigate better than anyone else, or something.

  The guy he was talking to was new; I’d never seen him before. He was big, maybe six-four and heavy. He’d come in shaking snow and soot off a plastic coverall of some kind, given me a big grin, and ordered two of Harry’s biggest burgers, with everything. Five minutes later the regular customer sat down across the table from him, and now he was telling the regular that he had plenty of room in his ship for anything anyone might want him to haul crosstime.

  I figured this was my chance, so when I brought the burgers I said something real polite, like, “Excuse me, sir, but I couldn’t help overhearing. D’you think you’d have room for a passenger?”

  The big guy laughed and said, “Sure, kid! I was just telling Joe here that I could haul him and all his freight, and there’d be room for you, too, if you can make it worth my trouble!”

  I said, “I’ve got money; I’ve been saving up. What’ll it take?”

  The big guy gave me a big grin again, but before he could say anything Joe interrupted.

  “Sid,” he said, “Could you excuse me for a minute? I want to talk to this young fellow for a minute, before he makes a big mistake.”

  The big guy, Sid, said, “Sure, sure, I don’t mind.” So Joe got up, and he yelled to Harry, “Okay if I borrow your counterman for a few minutes?”

  Harry yelled back that it was okay. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I went along, and the two of us went out to this guy’s car to talk.

  And it really was a car, too—an old Ford van. It was customized, with velvet and bubble windows and stuff, and there was a lot of stuff piled in the back, camping gear and clothes and things, but no sign of machinery or anything. I still wasn’t sure, you know, because some of these guys did a really good job of disguising their ships, or time machines, or whatever, but it sure looked like an ordinary van, and that’s what Joe said it was. He got into the driver’s seat, and I got into the passenger seat, and we swiveled around to face each other.

  “So,” he said. “Do you know who all these people are? I mean people like Sid?”

  “Sure,” I said. “They’re from other dimensions, parallel worlds and like that.”

  He leaned back and looked at me hard, and said, “You know that, huh? Did you know that none of them can ever get home?”

  “Yes, I knew that,” I told him, acting pretty cocky.

  “And you still want to go with Sid to other universes? Even when you know you’ll never come home to this universe again?”

  “That’s right, Mister,” I told him. “I’m sick of this one. I don’t have anything here but a nothing job in a diner; I want to see some of the stuff these people talk about, instead of just hearing about it.”

  “You want to see wonders and marvels, huh?”

  “Yes!”

  “You want to see buildings a hundred stories high? Cities of strange temples? Oceans thousands of miles wide? Mountains miles high? Prairies, and cities, and strange animals and stranger people?”

  Well, that was just exactly what I wanted, better than I could have said it myself. “Yes,” I said. “You got it, Mister.”

  “You lived here all your life?”

  “You mean this world? Of course I have.”

  “No, I meant here in Sutton. You lived here all your life?”

  “Well, yeah,” I admitted. “Just about.”

  He sat forward and put his hands together, and his voice got intense, like he wanted to impress me with how serious he was. “Kid,” he said, “I don’t blame you a bit for wanting something different; I sure as hell wouldn’t want to spend my entire life in these hills. But you’re going about it the wrong way. You don’t want to hitch with Sid.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Why not? Am I supposed to build my own machine? Hell, I can’t even fix my mother’s carburetor.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. But kid, you can see those buildings a thousand feet high in New York, or in Chicago. You’ve got oceans here in your own world as good as anything you’ll find anywhere. You’ve got the mountains, and the seas, and the prairies, and all the rest of it. I’ve been in your world for eight years now, checking back here at Harry’s every so often to see if anyone’s figured out how to steer in no-space and get me home, and it’s one hell of a big, interesting place.”

  “But,” I said, ”what about the spaceships, and…”

  He interrupted me, and said, “You want to see spaceships? You go to Florida and watch a shuttle launch. Man, that’s a spaceship. It may not go to other worlds, but that is a spaceship. You want strange animals? You go to Australia or Brazil. You want strange people? Go to New York or Los Angeles, or almost anywhere. You want a city carved out of a mountain top? It’s called Machu Picchu, in Peru, I think. You want ancient, mysterious ruins? They’re all over Greece and Italy and North Africa. Strange temples? Visit India; there are supposed to be over a thousand temples in Benares alone. See Angkor Wat, or the pyramids—not just the Egyptian ones, but the Mayan ones, too. And the great thing about all of these places, kid, is that afterwards, if you want to, you can come home. You don’t have to, but you can. Who knows? You might get homesick some day. Most people do. I did. I wish to hell I’d seen more of my own world before I volunteered to try any others.”

  I kind of stared at him for awhile. “I don’t know,” I said. I mean, it seemed so easy to just hop in Sid’s machine and be gone forever, I thought, but New York was five hundred miles away—and then I realized how stupid that was.

  “Hey,” he said, “don’t forget, if you decide I was wrong, you can always come back to Harry’s and bum a ride with someone. It won’t be Sid, he’ll be gone forever, but you’ll find someone. Most world-hoppers are lonely, kid; they’ve left behind everyone they ever knew. You won’t have any trouble getting a lift.”

  Well, that decided it, because y’know, he was obviously right about that, as soon as I thought about it. I told him so.

  “Well, good!” he said. “Now, you go pack your stuff and apologize to Harry and all that, and I’ll give you a lift to Pittsburgh. You’ve got money to travel with from there, right? These idiots still haven’t figured out how to steer, so I’m going back home—not my real home, but where I live in your world—and I wouldn’t mind a passenger.” And he smiled at me, and I smiled back, and we had to wait until the bank opened the next morning, but he didn’t really mind. All the way to Pittsburgh he was singing these hymns and war-songs from his home world, where there was a second civil war in the nineteen-twenties because of some fundamentalist preacher trying to overthrow the Constitution and set up a church government; he hadn’t had anyone he could sing them to in years, he said.

  That was six years ago, and I haven’t gone back to Harry’s since.

  So that was what got me started traveling. What brings you to Benares?

  GALACTIC CHEST, by Clifford D. Simak

  I had just finished writing the daily community chest story, and each day I wrote that story I was sore about it; there were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of copy. Even the copy boys could have written it and no one would have known the difference; no one ever read it—except maybe some of the drive chairmen, and I’m not even sure about them reading it.

  I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the community chest for another year. I had protested loud. I had said: “Now, you know, Barnacle, I been writing that thing for three or four years. I write it with my eyes shut. You ought to get some new blood into it. Give one of the cubs a chance; they can breathe some life into it. Me, I’m all written o
ut on it.”

  But it didn’t do a bit of good. The Barnacle had me down on the assignment book for the community chest, and he never changed a thing once he put it in the book.

  I wish I knew the real reason for that name of his. I’ve heard a lot of stories about how it was hung on him, but I don’t think there’s any truth in them. I think he got it simply from the way he can hang onto a bar.

  I had just finished writing the community chest story and was sitting there, killing time and hating myself, when along came Jo Ann. Jo Ann was the sob sister on the paper; she got some lousy yarns to write, and that’s a somber fact. I guess it was because I am of a sympathetic nature, and took pity on her, and let her cry upon my shoulder that we got to know each other so well. By now, of course, we figure we’re in love; off and on we talk about getting married, as soon as I snag that foreign correspondent job I’ve been angling for.

  “Hi, kid,” I said.

  And she says, “Do you know, Mark, what the Barnacle has me down for today?”

  “He’d finally ferreted out a one-armed paperhanger,” I guessed, “and he wants you to do a feature.”

  “It’s worse than that,” she moans. “It’s an old lady who is celebrating her one hundredth birthday.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “she will give you a piece of her birthday cake.”

  “I don’t see how even you can joke about a thing like this,” Jo Ann told me. “It’s positively ghastly.”

  Just then the Barnacle let out a bellow for me. So I picked up the community chest story and went over to the city desk.

  * * * *

  Barnacle Bill is up to his elbows in copy; the phone is ringing and he’s ignoring it, and for this early in the morning he has worked himself into more than a customary lather. “You remember old Mrs. Clayborne?”

  “Sure, she’s dead. I wrote the obit on her ten days or so ago.”