Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers

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 licked the navigation problem all those other people had talked about.

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.”