Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

“Yeah, I may try to get a job here over the summer.”

The kids walked out, cracking jokes, giggling, chewing.

He fit in so well.

That night, humming softly, Burger Queen walked a weary Burger Creature to the freezer with her hand on his back. She tied his sneaker laces, folded his gangly legs into his box, and tucked him in with some brown wrapping paper. I left her there, watching over him under the dim buzz of the fluorescent light I think she was waiting for me to go.

The manager showed up bright and early the next afternoon and pulled a thermos of ready-mix martinis out of his briefcase. He was back in the pink, and Creature was back in cold storage, whining like a lonely TV dinner.

“I’m celebrating!” quipped the manager, his thumbs feeling for his belt under his paunch. “I’d ask you to join me, but you girls have to face the public.”

We smiled, teeth brushed, uniforms spotless. “Right, sir.” Burger Creature howled behind his door.

“Do you know why I’m celebrating?”

We shook our heads. “No sir.”

“Because next Friday at two o’clock, the regional manager is giving us a surprise inspection.”

I slipped Creature one of his special favorite burgers with extra pickles. I heard him writhe in ecstasy against the other side of the door.

“I want the golden arches hosed down. I want the trash can lids oiled.”

I slipped Creature some fries to wash down his burger.

“Maureen, look at me. I want the freezer cleaned up.”

I slammed the door.

“What the hell is that?”

Four ground beef fingers were sticking out the door, tying themselves into knots of pain. Burger Creature said his first word: “ Ahnggg.”

I looked to Burger Queen for some instant genius. She dug her plastic nails into her blouse and screamed.

The manager yanked open the door, froze, then went reeling back into the grill, slamming the door, his greasy eyes wider than I’d ever seen them.

“Aaauih!” he said.

“Sir?”

“It’s a... There’s a ... a goddam thing in there...a... filthy ugly whatthehhell I don’t know a pickle a meat a . . . with all greasy and...”

“Now, sir, it’s true we haven’t cleaned up in there for a while, but . . .”

“No! Nooo! Waving its arms! Dancing goddammit! It was dancing! Pouring ketchup over itself! I think it was drinking the goddam ketchup! Bun on its . . . lettuce in its hair! Thin . . . greasy . . . hamburger!”

I shrugged coyly.

The freezer banged open, and Queen jumped back, mouthing my baby, my baby in mute hysteria and bouncing everything she had. Pickle-eyes bulging, his french fries trembling, flushed like raw meat, Burger Creature filled the doorway, the front of him flattened by the slamming of the door. A burnt smell hit me. He roared the roar of an angry hamburger.

“It’s going to eat me,” the manager whispered. He sucked in his gut, lunged at the service door, and ran into the parking lot, throwing a straw dispenser behind him. He jumped in his convertible, backed over the curb into the side wall, shrapneling red and white tiles, and stripped gears out the entrance onto the highway. “Police!” he was yelling hoarsely. “Police! Garbage!”

In her distress, Burger Queen ripped the top button off her uniform.

“You better move on,” I said to Creature. “Try the drive-in ten miles west. Follow I-12. Get out!”

Creature was panicked. I could tell. He dove over the grill, scrambled through the customer window, slid around a glass door, and staggered off across the asphalt toward the open highway.

Burger Queen ran after him, and I saw her pull his arm. She talked to him feverishly, biting on her lower lip. He bowed his little head and shook it slowly. Limp french fries brushed her nose. He started down the road with a wet glisten in his pickle-eyes.

He jammed his fists between his legs in terror and nearly swallowed his mouth when he saw the red convertible bearing down on him. The manager had U-turned, chrome grill gleaming in the sun, teeth bared behind the heat waves and manic gasoline whine. Creature stood frozen. The manager revved into fourth gear.

Waving her arms like a crazed cheerleader, Burger Queen ran into the path of the Corvair.

Creature’s head shot out, his body snapping after. His sinewy legs coiled and sprang to new lengths. His head jammed down between his undershirt straps when it rammed Queen’s shoulder.

The manager downshifted out of sight around the bend, and I was ready to see only a ragged patty on the blacktop, but Creature and Queen were lying in the roadside gravel in a cheerfully struggling pile of jeans and arms and ripped uniform.

He helped her to her feet, straightened her bobby-pinned two-corner cap, and gazed into her eyes.

Then he braced his sneakers, bent her over backward, and pressed his face to hers in the longest, most nose-breaking kiss it has ever been my pleasure to see. He stood her up. She stepped after him dizzily, her bodice rippling loose in the breeze, her makeup smeared under a mess of greasy sweet ketchup.

He jogged up to a passing truck, grabbed the gate with one hand, and swung aboard. They waved to each other, slowly and wistfully, though Burger Creature’s arm was pulled slightly out of shape, until he disappeared in the smoggy distance.

A BIG BRIGHT ring of gold took shape in the air five feet above the curb on Turner Street. Tom Wegler came along and saw it hovering there, became curious and poked his head through it

A bare foot shot past his nose and he looked down. Sprawled on some impossible yellow grass was a skinny naked man who yelled in terror and tried to scoot away from a cluster of shiny objects that dipped and bobbed in space over him.

The shiny objects were silver dollars. Tom climbed over the rim of the ring, stepped onto alien ground, grabbed one of the dollars, started to close his hand around it, felt it fade away. Quickly he grabbed another. It dissolved. Then another. There were fourteen in all, and he stood watching in disbelief as the last one popped away in his palm. His head whipped up and around in time to see a mob of people appear over a low hill.

About to clamber back to Turner Street, he hesitated when he realized that not a single unclad soul in the mob was paying him any attention. They seemed interested only in the man on the ground.

The man was lifted and dusted off by solicitous hands, someone even lent him a bare shoulder to sob onto, so he was obviously somebody important.

Tom was still half in, half out of the ring when a hand touched his shoulder. A long-faced, shaggy-headed fat man stood grinning down at him.

“My name is Gute. Congratulations. You get a reward for saving our king from the Glof.”

“Reward?”

The stranger pointed toward the skinny man who still wept and clung to the handiest shoulder. “Flax, our king. You’re entitled to half his kingdom or his daughter.”

Something far back in Tom’s memory stirred. He said, “Why don’t I get half the kingdom and the daughter?”

“We don’t do it that way.”

Swinging his feet around and sitting on the ring, Tom looked across the grass at Flax. “Does he have any gold?”

“We don’t use it. But he has a twenty-story palace so full of zox he has to sleep in a hotel.”

“Zox?”

“It’s the equivalent of a compound in your world. I believe you call it clay.”

“Your king collects clay?”

The fat man looked apologetic. “He plays with it.”