Further Into The Future!

Chapter 9

If the Big Bahama Seafood Hall was the kind of nice restaurant Susan wanted to take me to, nice restaurants must be of lower quality in the future than they are today. We waited for minutes before a hostess finally greeted us and led us to a table.

The restaurant was cheaply decorated. There were dirty fishnets pinned along the wall, and a few pieces of antique naval equipment scattered about. Our table was wobbly and the red and white-checkered tablecloth was waxy and stained in a few places. There was a vase with a red rose in the center of the table. Bland Italian guitar music played in the background, even though it wasn't an Italian restaurant.

"Hello! Have you ever been here before?" a waitress asked as she laid silverware in front of us.

"Yes," the band clamored in unison.

"Great, then you know the drill. Here are your plates." She put a stack of four plates in the center of the table.

"I like your suit," she said to me. "Are you dressing up for something?"

I frowned. Dressing up? It was a specially tailored suit.

"Actually, I just traveled through time here from the year 1949," I said.

"Oh. Well tell me if you need anything," she said, and she walked back into the kitchen.

I followed Jack, Susan and Dan as they grabbed their plates and walked to a buffet on the other side of the large cafeteria.

The seafood bar was unlike anything I had ever seen. Trays of every kind of seafood you could imagine extended for about twenty yards. There were heaps of lobster and crab in especially large trays at the end in amounts that would be worth thousands of dollars in our time. My opinion of the restaurant soared with each chunk of lobster tail I heaped onto my plate.

When I reached the end of the buffet I pushed a bread roll down on the pile of seafood to make a nest it could rest in. Otherwise it would just roll down off the plate.

When I sat down the bread rolled onto the waxy tablecloth anyways and I put it aside to throw away later. I took a bite of the lobster and to my disappointment it didn't taste as good as I expected. It seemed to disintegrate the second I bit down on it, and it was too stringy. Suddenly the amount of seafood I got looked ridiculous, and I realized I wouldn't even come close to finishing it.

When Jack returned from the buffet and saw my plate he raised his eyebrows exaggeratedly.

"Whoa, Professor, slow down there," he said. "Did they have a lobster shortage in your time or something?"

Embarrassed, I didn't respond. I tried to eat more bites of the unappetizing lobster.

The waitress returned carrying our drinks on a tray. When she set them before us – an iced tea for me, and cokes for everyone else – I was amazed by their size. They seemed to be holding a gallon of liquid each.

"Well Professor, I guess we should tell you what's going on," Jack said as the waitress laid down four straws on the tablecloth. His mouth was full of crab cake, but that didn't stop him from talking. Dan arrived carefully balancing a plate with even more seafood on it than mine. The mountain of crab, calamari and shrimp on his plate came to a peak, while mine ended with a more stable plateau.

"Well, as usual Dan upstages everyone when it comes to food," Jack said. Dan sat down with his usual expression of equanimity.

"As I was saying before we were interrupted by Dan's gluttony," Jack said, "your coming here is a bit of a blessing to us. You see, our show sucks, we have no fans, and we have no ideas." He tapped his skull as if it were empty.