“Seems to me that’s all you’ve been taking lately,” Chet replied, not looking up from his menu. “We’ve been waiting over an hour now.”
Joanne dropped her mouth open in histrionic surprise (wooo, groans the audience) as she placed her hands on her hips. “We-l-l-l-l-l! I didn’t know you were in such a goshdarn hurry! What’s the matter, Chet, you waiting for a social security check?” (More laughter.)
Chet continued to study the menu. “Joanne,” he said quietly, “I’ve been coming here to eat before you were born. I bounced your little fanny on my knee when you were a child, and told Ray Senior that he should give you a job when you got out of school…”
“And if it wasn’t for you, I could have been working for NASA by now!” (Whistles, foot-stomping applause.).
Chet ignored her. “Every time I’ve come here, I’ve put a dollar in your tip glass, even when you’ve done no more than pour me a cup of coffee. So after all these years, I think I deserve a little common courtesy, don’t you think?”
Joanne’s face turned scarlet beneath the make-up. This wasn’t part of the script. “Well, I don’t… I don’t think I have to… I don’t have to…”
“Joanne,” Bill said softly, “just take our orders, please. We’re hungry, and we want to eat.”
“And turn off that silly thing,” Chet added. “I’d like a little privacy, if it’s not too much to ask.”
Reminded that the camera was on her (the audience coughs, moves restlessly) Joanne sought to recover her poise. “We-l-l-l-l-l, if it’s privacy you… I mean, if you don’t… I mean… if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon…”
“Sorry,” Chet said, then he reached up and grabbed the flycam.
The drone resisted as his fingers wrapped around its mike boom, its lenses snapping back and forth. Its motor whined as the rotors went to a higher speed, and for a moment it almost seemed alive as it fought against Chet’s grasp, then he yanked it down to the table.
Tom’s coffee went into his lap and Garrett nearly overturned his chair as they yelled and lurched out of the way. “No! Hey!” Joanne reached for the flycam as Chet turned it over. “Stop! What are you…?”
Chet pushed her aside with one hand, then twisted the drone over on its back. The rotor blades cleaved through a plastic salt shaker and swept the pepper cellar halfway across the room before they snagged against the napkin dispenser.
Bill instinctively pulled his coffee mug out of the way. “Chet, what the hell…!”
Then Chet pulled out from beneath his jacket the tire iron he had fetched from his car trunk and brought it down on the flycam. The first blow shattered the camera lens and broke the mike boom, and the second shattered its plastic carapace and ruined a compact mass of microchips, solenoids, and actuators. The third and forth blows were unnecessary; the flycam was already an irreparable mess.
Then he dropped the tire iron on the table and sat down. There was a long silence as everyone in the diner stared at him. Then…
Long, spontaneous applause from the live studio audience.
As Joanne stared at the wreckage on the table, Chet picked up his menu and opened it again. “Okay,” he said, letting out his breath, “I’ll take two scrambled eggs, bacon, home fries, wheat toast, and tomato juice. Please.”
Tears glimmered in the corners of Joanne’s eyes. “I don’t… I don’t believe you just… that was my…”
“Show’s canceled, Joanne.” Ray Junior, standing at the lunch counter behind them, spoke quietly. “Will you just take the man’s order?”
Joanne’s hands shook a little as she raised her pad and dutifully wrote down Chet’s order. Then she went around the table and copied down everyone else’s. Tom asked for blueberry pancakes, link sausage, rye toast; Garrett requested a western omelette, no fries or toast, and a large glass of milk.
Bill had lost his appetite; he only asked for a refill of his coffee.
Joanne snuffled a bit as she thanked no one in particular, then she turned away and marched on stiff legs back into the kitchen. No one said anything when Ray Junior came out a moment later with a brush and a plastic garbage sack. He avoided everyone’s gaze as he silently whisked away the debris, then he vanished through the swinging doors.
“Well…” Tom began.
“Well,” echoed Garrett.
Chet said nothing, slipped the tire iron beneath his chair, and picked up his coffee.
“Joanne’s a good kid,” Garrett added.
“That she is. That she is.”
“Leave her a good tip, guys. She deserves it.”
“Yeah, she certainly earns her money.”
“Hard-working lady.”
“Damn straight. That she is.”
More silence. Across the room, someone put a quarter in a jukebox. An old Johnny Cash song entered the diner. The door opened, allowing inside a cool autumn breeze; a heavyset driver sat down at the counter, took off his cap, and picked up the lunch menu. A sixteen-wheeler blew its air horn as it rumbled out of the lot, heading for parts unknown.
“So… Braves blew it again, didn’t they?”
“Yep. That they did.” Bill cleared his throat. “Now it’s football season.”
THE ICHNEUMON AND THE DORMEUSE by Terry Dowling
One of the best-known and most celebrated of Australian writers in any genre, the winner of eleven Ditmar Awards and three Aurealis Awards, Terry Dowling made his first sale in 1982, and has since made an international reputation for himself as a writer of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. Primarily a short-story writer, he is the author of the linked collections Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, and Wormwood, as well as other collections such as Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and Blackwater Days. He has also written the novels Beckoning Nightframe, His Own, the Star Alphecca, and The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse. As editor, he also produced The Essential Ellison, and, with Van Ikin, the anthology Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF. Born in Sydney, he now lives in Hunter’s Hill, New South Wales, Australia.
In the tense story that follows, he shows us that there are some games you can never stop playing, whether you want to or not.
THIS time was different. This time on his way past the tombs, Beni turned left, ignored the guard Stones of the nearer mounds and headed down the path through the trees to the wide low tumulus where her tomb was.
He granted that the Stones had him, though nothing showed it. The tumulus was quiet under the hot afternoon sun; the trees, the grass barely stirred; the fields stretched away to meet the sky. The only movement was the heat shimmer on the other tomb mounds and the endless pull of the sentry Stones.
The Nothing Stones were neither stones nor quite filled with nothing, though that was the sense they gave, all sixteen of them, low basaltic pillars two metres high, as wide as his shoulders, as deep as his thigh, standing in the usual henge circle around the foot of the tumulus itself.
Their onyx-black, outward-facing sides were filled with stars, converging points of light, and while Beni would not look into those glossy midnight fields, he knew that if he remained, if they didn’t have him already, the darkling, star-ridden massebots would solve his mysteries, totes and sly conditionings and come to snatch him away, pulling, pulling, grabbing at sight and mind, close obsidian in the hot afternoon.
Always assume the Stones have you, Ramirez had said, told him now in memory, the greatest tomb-robber of them all, and Beni did so, leaving it to his autonomic tote systems to sort out. If they had him in a trance loop, he’d probably soon know. He continued through the perimeter henge, leaving the deadly megaliths at his back, and headed down the access ramp to the black gulf of the doorway.