The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
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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