It Could Be Anything

A young man leaves his rural hometown for the first time, burning with questions about what's beyond the next hill: the ocean, the city, the vast world he's only ever heard about. He boards a local train, closes his eyes, and wakes to silence. The three passenger cars are abandoned. The engine has vanished. And the tracks simply end in the middle of a golden grain field, stretching toward nothing. No station. No explanation. No way forward or back. Keith Laumer was a master of conceptual science fiction, and this short story asks something far more unsettling than how to get home: what if everything you 'know' is just what others have told you? What if the world is stranger, more arbitrary, more infinite than you ever dared imagine? It's a fable about the fragility of certainty, about the terror and liberation of standing in a place that shouldn't exist, and confronting the possibility that reality might be far more personal than you thought. Those who love mind-bending speculative fiction will find much to dwell on here.