Lamont nearly toppled over the nearby card table as he leapt from his chair, instinctively raising his fists, street-boxing style, at the intruder that had a moment ago been touching his shoulder.
The stranger lifted both hands, palms out, taking a step back.
“Easy, easy there, fella,” She said, in precisely the same tone one might use to calm a horse. “I just came in to see if you needed help.”
It was, in fact, a she. Lamont had not been certain at first; her short-cropped silver hair and baggy overalls were not at all feminine. The voice—and now, Lamont could see—the delicate bone structure beneath the leathery skin of her face, were definitely female.
“How did you get in here?” He demanded, standing up straight.
“Door was open,” Answered the stranger.
Lamont felt his brow furrow. Had he forgotten to lock it behind him? An image of his hand, powdered in white, flashed unbidden to mind. “Why would I need help?”
The intruder glanced around, as if looking for the corroboration of a hidden witness. “You were screaming.”
Lamont took a deep breath, running his hand over the stubble of a warming cheek. “Was I? I was asleep.”
“Shell shock.” The stranger’s diagnosis was matter-of-fact, but not without a note of sympathy. “Reckon I know it when I see it.”
“Yeah?” Lamont asked. A newspaperman’s habit—when otherwise at a loss for words, he asked a question. “Why’s that?”
“Eleven years out to Neptune and back on an old fission job. You see things. Lose things.” The woman stuffed one hand in an oversized pocket and extended the other tentatively. Strong and wiry, it appeared comically small in relation to the sleeve. “Madison Burk. I live at the other end of the hall.”
“Townsend. Lamont Townsend.” He took the extended hand without shaking it as he would a man’s. The gesture appeared to surprise Madison. She withdrew the hand, looking flushed.
“I know. I read your book a couple months ago.”
“Did you?” It was phrased as a question, but came out sounding more like an accusation. An image came to Lamont’s mind of his portrait in the yellow dust sleeve of the hardback. Lamont wasn’t undercover on Mars, but several million miles between him and home had given him the assumption of anonymity. He now realized the foolishness of it.
Apparently sensing that he had become upset again, Madison turned awkwardly toward the open door. “I’ll be going,” She said.
“Miss Burk—” Lamont ventured contritely, “Thanks.”
Pausing in the doorway, she turned to look at him. “If you haven’t talked to someone, you should. No good keeping it to yourself.”
“I wrote a book,” Lamont offered glumly.
“Ain’t the same,” Madison said, and closed the door.
Lamont cursed under his breath and surveyed the scattered papers that had fallen to the floor when he had knocked into his card table. He glanced at his wristwatch and cursed again. He was overdue to call the office. The papers would have to wait. He grabbed his overcoat and hat from the stand beside the door and looked back into the apartment. He mentally verified that the lamp was on, despite the fact that the room was currently flooded in bands of white artificial daylight from the window. Satisfied, he stepped out into the hall, locking the door behind him.
As usual, Lamont walked. He had a mental map of locations throughout the district where payphones could be used in relative privacy. He was running late, so he selected one that was closer than usual to his apartment, 10 minute’s walk. Pulling his cap over his eyes, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and proceeded east down Underpass Avenue.
Traffic was heavier during the day. Broad boulevards were shared by a patchwork of pedestrians walking this way and that on various errands, with personal scooters weaving between them at alarmingly high speeds, not uncommonly eliciting brief exchanges of shouted unpleasantries. Occasionally a full-sized passenger car or cargo truck would pass through the center, parting the crowd like a shark breaking into a school of fish. The streets were rarely level, following the inscrutable contours of eons-old Martian architecture. Whether out of a certain awed self-consciousness or simple expedience, demolition and excavation was nearly unheard of within the human occupation of the planet’s interior. Man made structures were built around and on top of what was already there—what had probably been there long before man himself had existed as such. The particular street that Lamont followed, true to its name, sloped downward into what would have been some kind of giant trench or half-pipe, the span of which was about five city blocks. Buildings were placed on brick steps following the curve of the trench, with streets spaced crossways along its length. Overhead was a bridge-like structure, supported by massive brass-colored columns that split organically into a trellis at their tops, creating the effect of metal vines. Spaced evenly between these were constructs that looked something like giant inverted vacuum tubes, green-tinted, with jagged filaments inside them that would sometimes flicker in an obscurely orchestrated lightshow.
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Lamont descended into the center of the trench and turned right on 82nd Street to follow its length in the direction of the district’s south entrance. His destination was far short of this, though, in an area of the central trench that was home mainly to restaurants and nightclubs. During the day, it was relatively quiet, the only occupants being vagrants, through-passers and sometimes a tightly-squeezed delivery truck. Things had a way of settling at the bottom of the trench; a thin mist clung to the floor here when it had been dispelled by the daylights higher up, carrying with it an inextricable complexity of contrasting scents. Lamont’s destination was a phone booth nestled in the alley behind a jazz club called the Oblivion. The perpetual shadow was cut through at seemingly random intervals with the green glow from a filament fifty feet overhead. Glancing about the alley to ensure that he was alone, Lamont picked up the payphone’s receiver.
“Operator,” came the predictable response as the line was opened. “What destination, please?”
“Long distance collect to Earth,” Lamont answered. “London, Liberty five-five-three.”
There was a pause while the operator made the necessary calculation. “Turnaround time is currently fourteen minutes, ten seconds. Is that acceptable, sir?”
“Fine,” Lamont said. There wasn’t much anyone could do about the orbits. “Audio only,” he added.
“Very well,” replied the operator. “The connection has been prepared. Remember that it will only be delivered if the collect call is accepted by the recipient. Please dictate your introduction at the tone and press the Transmit button when ready.”
Lamont took a deep breath and organized his thoughts. After a moment, a tone sounded in the earpiece.
“Hello, Harry,” he said evenly. “On Thursday I obtained a second interview with Source Seventeen. Relevant details were transmitted via telegram later that day. I recommend The Collected Essays of L.A. Straub, first edition, page 45. No follow-up scheduled; he seemed uneasy. He made a reference that he wouldn’t repeat—it sounded to me like ‘Escherspace.’ I couldn’t make a connection here, but perhaps something will turn up in the paper’s library. I have that, and a list of names that I intend to research tomorrow in Hellas District 12.” He paused for a moment. “Look, have you seen Elizabeth lately? I haven’t heard anything for weeks. Please check in on her when you can.”
Inhaling deeply, he hovered his fingertip over the button labeled Transmit next to the phone’s small display screen. “Cheers, mate,” he muttered, and pressed it.
Lamont lit a cigarette and waited for a response from Earth. Water dripped here and there from leaky utility pipes far overhead, forming a few small puddles in the imperfections of the grimy, copper-colored floor. The smell that hung in the air of the trench was not unlike that of the scrapyards he would pass on his walks to outer London in years past—rust, tinged with rot. Except now he wasn’t carrying a gas mask for fear of encountering something worse than an unpleasant smell. The thought reminded him of why so many millions had migrated here in the first place.
In the span of fifteen minutes, Lamont saw no one on the street except for two fast-moving scooters and a police patrol cart, the occupants of which slowed to scrutinize him, but did not consider him worth stopping for. Lamont was checking his wristwatch for the dozenth time when the operator’s voice interrupted the cheery jazz piece that had been piping tinnily into his ear. “A reply has been received, sir. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Lamont acknowledged, dropping a third cigarette to the ground at his feet and cradling the earpiece on his shoulder as he pulled a small notepad from his pocket.
Harry’s familiar voice came through after a series of clicks. Smooth, confident, with the steady diction of a man who used words like a fish uses water. “Hello, Monty. Your telegram was received. I’ll see that Seventeen gets a token of gratitude for his help; perhaps it will persuade him to grant another interview. ‘Escher’ rings a bell. I recall meeting a consultant by that name who made a series of technical drawings for the Icarus project in ‘66 or ‘67. I’ll see what I can find. Meanwhile, your article on the Martian radio monopoly was published Sunday and made a stir. Good work, but I wouldn’t weep if you stuck to less provocative topics while you continue your investigation. Try some human interest, maybe. Oh, and I saw Liza two nights ago. Doing very well. The new exhibition is keeping her busy. She sends her best. Carry on, chap.”
Lamont scribbled on his pad, not bothering with shorthand:
—19 Dec. 1997—
Escher - Cons. Icarus 66/67
Too much attention. Human interest.
Sends her best.
SENDS HER BEST
The tip of his pencil broke. After another series of clicks, the voice of the operator returned. “Did you get that, sir?”
“I got it,” Lamont hissed through his teeth.
“Very good, sir. Will you be transmitting a response?”
Lamont bit his tongue while he considered. “No,” he finally said. “Not at this time.”
“Very well, sir. Goodbye, and thank you for using Intersol—”
Lamont returned the receiver to its hook with more force than was strictly necessary, causing the change inside the machine to jangle.
The walk back to his apartment was a blur. He had intended to get something to eat while he was out, but he passed by his usual food stands without stopping, absently turning his wedding ring on his finger. Before he knew it, he was unlocking the door to his apartment.
Everything was where he had left it. The lamp was still on, a half-cup of coffee sat next to his typing machine, and the papers he had toppled earlier were still scattered across the surface of the card table and the floor. Not bothering to take off his coat, Lamont paced to the table and began to put them back in order. They were the sorts of things that he tended to gather a lot of—photostats of internal communications, budget and expenditure records, copies of phone directory pages. He glanced over each sheet and placed it in a pile on the table for appropriate filing.
Kneeling down, he gathered the papers that had been scattered on the floor, leafing through them. Suddenly, he stopped, his eyes widening as they absorbed the contents of one sheet. His hands began to tremble. Frantically, he flipped through the other papers before returning to the one that had stopped him. Dropping the other sheets again, he rose to his feet so fast that his head hit the edge of the card table, scattering the papers he had sorted across the floor.
Lamont’s eyes darted around the apartment before returning with burning intensity to the sheet that was tightly gripped in his hand. He paced back and forth across the apartment before finally settling on the edge of his cot, from which he could see his own ashen features in the mirror of the adjacent bathroom. He looked, something inside him ironically reflected, like a man who had seen a ghost.
