in fact. Just not our West Virginia. Lots of different West Virginias, instead. What the science fiction writers call “parallel worlds”. That’s one name, anyway. Other dimensions, alternate realities, they had lots of different names for it.
It all makes sense, really. A couple of them explained it to me. See, everything that ever could possibly have happened, in the entire history of the universe right from the Big Bang up until now, did happen—somewhere. And every possible difference means a different universe. Not just if Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or won, or whatever he didn’t do here; what does Napoleon matter to the universe, anyway? Betelgeuse doesn’t giving a flying damn for all of Europe, past, present, or future. But every single atom or particle or whatever, whenever it had a chance to do something—break up or stay together, or move one direction instead of another, whatever—it did all of them, but all in different universes. They didn’t branch off, either—all the universes were always there, there just wasn’t any difference between them until this particular event came along. And that means that there are millions and millions of identical universes, too, where the differences haven’t happened yet. There’s an infinite number of universes—more than that, an infinity of infinities. I mean, you can’t really comprehend it; if you think you’re close, then multiply that a few zillion times. Everything is out there.
And that means that in a lot of those universes, people figured out how to travel from one to another. Apparently it’s not that hard; there are lots of different ways to do it, too, which is why we got everything from guys in street clothes to people in spacesuits and flying saucers.
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