“It is neat,” Satan admitted. “Our perpetual heat-without-rain does fade the colors, though. The only moisture we get down here is when the angels weep over some new triumph of mine. Hell knows I try to make them open the ducts more often. If ever I learn to weep myself, I’ll likely irrigate a lot of suffering.”
“And why do you wish to weep?”
“People seem to enjoy it so. As for the squatness of the bungalows, what can you expect in the most tropical of climates? Assume a little imagination if you have it not. You should have seen the place before I took hold of it. At first, after my sudden fall into utter desolation from the Paradisian comforts of home, I couldn’t see any possibilities in Gehenna. But I never was one to let bad enough alone.”
“Oh, I didn’t say I thought it bad,” Dolores hastened to insert.
“No, you didn’t, but you’d better! Of course, it’s not what it might be, even now, but it was a perfect chaos when I began, a sort of peaceful haze, with not so much as a suffering gnat for me to vent my disposition on.”
“It’s so different from anything that——” Dolores puzzled.
“Did you expect to find Pluto wallowing in a lake of fire, á la Milton?”
“Gehenna is a place of torture, isn’t it? I wasn’t taught what they call religion in my childhood, but I typed the sermons of a minister for a while and I know what——”
She hesitated, regretting her persistence. Satan’s facial expression, always mobile, had altered for the worse.
“A minister, eh?” he asked fiercely. “I suppose he ranted the regular hell-fire stuff? Let me tell you that keeping the realities of my place from the preach-praters of Earth is the hardest thing I do. If they conceived a fraction of my achievements in the torture line, even in this vestibule to the real hell farther on, I’d never have a chance to hang out the S. O. S. sign—never. Earthlings would be good and The Great Intention foiled.”