Free The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell by Harry Harrison Page B

force of my personality—or because
she was still tired. I climbed to my feet creakily and wearily and strolled forward into Hometown.
    Found out everything I needed to know in a very short time and went back to join her sitting and chewing.
    â€œStrangest thing I have ever seen,” I said.
    â€œJim—don’t torture me!”
    â€œSorry. Didn’t mean to—just trying to come to grips with this particular reality. Firstly, the town is empty. No people, dogs, cars, kids. Anything. One of the reasons that it is empty is that everything seems to be in one lump. As though it was made that way. The doorhandles don’t turn and the doors themselves appear to be part of the wall. The same with the windows. And you can’t look in. Or rather it looks like you’re looking in but what is inside is really in the glass of the window. And nothing really seems right or complete. It is more like an idea of Hometown instead of being Hometown itself.”
    She shook her head. “I have no idea of what you are talking about.”
    â€œDon’t worry! I’m not so sure myself. I’m just trying to pick my way through a number of very strange occurrences. We arrived here in a sort of a cave. With volcanoes and lava streams and no grass or anything else.” I glanced up at the bloated red sun and pointed. “At least the sun is the same. So we went for a walk and found green grass and porcuswine, the porcuswine of my youth.”
    â€œAnd the Hometown of mine. It has to mean something …”
    â€œIt does!” I jumped to my feet and paced back and forth in a brain-cudgeling pace. “Slakey knew where he was sending us and it wasn’t to Heaven he said. So he must have been here before. Not quite Heaven, that’s what he said. Maybe he thought he was sending us to Hell. And the spot where we arrived was very Hellish what with the red creature, the volcanoes and lava and everything. Could it have been Hellish because he expected it to be? Because this Hell is his idea of Hell?”
    â€œYou lead, Jim—but I just can’t follow you.”

    â€œI don’t blame you, because the idea is too preposterous. We know that someplace named Heaven exists someplace, somewhere. If there is one place there could be others. This is one of the others. With certain unusual properties.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œLike you see what you expect to see. Let us say this planet or whatever it is was a place that was just a possibility of a place—until Slakey arrived. Then it became the place he was expecting to find. Maybe the red sun got him thinking about Hell. And the more he thought the more Hellish it became. Makes good sense.”
    â€œIt certainly does not! That’s about the most flakey theory I have ever heard.”
    â€œYou bet it is—and more than that. Absolutely impossible. But we are here, aren’t we?”
    â€œLiving in another man’s Hell?”
    â€œYes. We did that when we first came here. But we didn’t like it and wanted to leave it. I remember thinking that the barren, volcanic world was just about the opposite of the one where I grew up … .”
    It was my turn to wonder if this whole thing wasn’t just institutionalized madness. But Sybil was more practical.
    â€œAll right then—let us say that was what happened. We arrived in this Hellish place because Slakey had come here first and everything—what can we say—lived up to his devilish expectations. We didn’t like it and you wished very strongly we weren’t there but in a place with a better climate. You got very angry about that, which may have helped shaped what we wanted to see. Then we walked on and came to it. We drank, but we were still hungry. Rather I was, so much so I must have thought of my earliest gustatory delights. Which just happened to be in Hometown. Given that all this is true—what do we do