The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
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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 wrong 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