Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers

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

“Yes!”

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.

So that was what got me started traveling.

What brings you to Benares?