Bill 4 - on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure by Harry Harrison

the perfidious chemo-behavioral wiring jury-rigged in his nervous system by the Empire, as well as to dampen the notion that this Quest might actually be fraught with horrendous dangers beyond his feeble imagination. Nor did he wonder if the game was worth the candle; he did not consider that Irma's beauty might fade with years. All of his attention, what little was left, was focused on the eternal now. The future would only be more of the same. Most certainly, he never considered that his already overtaxed liver might not be able to handle all the promised alcohol. But most especially, he hadn't the faintest idea that by this late stage of the game, his position in the Starship Troopers was as firmly wedded to his identity as the leather thong was to his neck, and his old Farmboy days were just as dead as the dove.
    No, all these considerations were far beyond Trooper Bill's ken. His heart's desire was for Irma. Doctor Delazny had chosen well, for he had become, by this foggy stage, the archetypical Fool for Love.
    So it was that when Dr. Delazny called this odd troop of travelers to attention, Bill obeyed without question.
    “Right this way, folks,” said the good Doctor, gesturing them to follow him. “The Aperture into the Paradigm lies in a room down the hall. We will toss your weapons in after you have stepped through the Portal. We don't want any accidents here, now do we?”
    Bgr the Chinger, in his satyr outfit, herded them all toward the indicated room, chuckling enthusiastically and telling them how he intended to spend the peaceful years of his life, following the Armistice that would surely result after this excellent adventure. He would return to his studies, what intellectual joy. He described some of the repulsive alien races he had studied and thought of the slimy joys still untouched, and Bill cringed. Luckily, the lecture on exobiology ceased as they entered a large chamber, chock-a-block with computers and other extravagantly curved and angled machinery. Above it all, a gigantic Van der Graaf generator crackled fat zaps of electricity across its gap, frying the odd mosquito, moth or fly that escaped from the portal that yawned below it.
    “Gulp!” susurrated Bill.
    The others gulped as well. As well they might.
    It was a round doorway, its edges rimmed with blinking red, green and cerulean lights. An occasional claw of energy would paw across the inlaid coppery metal work, or reach out and grab the air of the land beyond.
    It was like peering through a window at a distant portion of landscape. It looked like a proscenium stage of a rococo production of a bad historical tragedy. Crumbling castles tilted in the distance, craggy mountains stuck out willy-nilly beyond. A blasted heath oozed ground fog, ridged with twisted, skeletal branches of trees, with gorse bushes and heather arrayed about simmering bogs like barbed wire about trenches. A chill wind sieved through the hole with faint hints of rotting vegetation and broad elbow-nudges of decomposing corpses.
    Dr. Delazny grinned. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, fellas! Now go find that Fountain of Hormones!”
    From the Drunkards and Flagons came a collective gulp.
    More gulps ensued as they knocked back large quantities of drink to embolden their flagging spirits.
    One by one, they stepped through the portal. Bill's hair frizzed up, standing on end with the energy humming along the portal's periphery. Or was that the pure and simple terror that suddenly gripped his spine with ice-cold hands? His feet squelched into ankle deep muck. The smell grew truly horrendous; it was as though they had just stepped into some dragon's sulfurous lower bowels. When they were all through, Bgr and Dr. Delazny tossed their promised weapons after them.
    Broadswords, daggers. Bows and arrows. Dirks and knives. Slingshots and Boy Scout knives.
    “What the hell is this bowb?” cried out Rick the Supernal Hero, trying in vain to lift a broadsword out of the muck. “I