Outside the phone booth, lights played across a deep canvas of mist in alternating flashes of lurid pink and sullen red. Together with the condensation that dripped down the grimy transparent side of the booth, it conspired to hide everything outside from view save a thick wire conduit, a brick wall, and the vague outlines of the advertisements that were the strongest source of light outside the booth. Was it really nighttime? Lamont Townsend wondered, as he often did. Mars, he knew, had a day/night cycle not so different from that of earth, and so it made sense that the artificial lights beneath its surface would be programmed to follow that. This was common knowledge. Nevertheless, Lamont would not have put it past United Space to set the cycle by some other standard that better suited the company’s purposes.
The repeating buzz to which he had been listening in one ear as these thoughts passed through the back of his mind stopped abruptly. It was replaced by the even, feminine voice of the operator, unaccompanied by any kind of visage on the small video screen.
“I’m sorry, sir, but no one picked up. Would you like to leave a message in the central system?”
Lamont hesitated briefly, reflecting that while he was not at his present home, he was also not far from it. His wife’s phone would of course be tapped, and a long distance call of this kind could be easily traced back to its source. Then again, who cared? I’m not paranoid, he silently insisted to a memory in the neon emptiness.
“Sir?” Repeated the operator.
“Yeah,” Lamont breathed into the mouthpiece. “Yes, I’ll leave a message.”
“Very well,” said the operator. “Please deposit three Munits and speak after the tone.”
Lamont fished three coins from his pocket and pushed them into the cash slot beside the card reader on the telephone. He took a deep breath.
“Elizabeth,” he said, “It’s me. I haven’t heard from you in some time. I don’t have a phone, but you can reach me through the editorial office. Just let me know if you’re well. I miss you, love.”
Setting his stubbled jaw, Lamont returned the headset to its hook and listened to the coins as they fell into the depths of the machine.
Stepping outside the booth, Lamont stopped for a cigarette. He counted the number of slender white cylinders in his cigarette case, made a mental note, and snapped it shut after placing one between his lips. His thumb moved automatically over the nicked and dented surface of the utilitarian metal box as he returned it to his jacket pocket, exchanging it for a lighter. As he ignited the cigarette, he shielded the flame with a cupped hand. A warm, steady wind from air circulating fans blew steadily through these streets, imbuing life and movement to a place that for eons had been cold and dead.
The fog was always thickest in the early hours of the morning. Pipes, filled with cold water drawn from icecaps and frozen reservoirs above, became covered in condensation as they met air warmed by thermal activity from below. The resulting mist, relatively undisturbed by traffic, settled down into the neon-tinted streets, snaking through alleys in a slow circuit. Countless blinking billboards and flickering street lamps populated the fog with ghosts and shadows, filling it with a steady mechanical hum.
If Lamont kept his eyes low, focused on the stoops and storefronts and the mist clinging to street vents, he could almost convince himself that he was still in London. The effect was short-lived, however. Back home, the combined glow of lights from the city filled the leaden expanse of sky above with a twilight radiance that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Here, the rooftops met an inky blackness, broken in places by the glitter of a distant light or the weird outline of alien architecture. On a foggy night in London, Lamont might venture down to Kingston on Thames and find among the ashen remnants ruins that could be dated back centuries, even tens of centuries, if he delved beneath the surface. But the colossal structures among which human dwellings were nestled here had been built—or perhaps grown, by the look of them—when London was populated mainly by trilobites. Or had it been even earlier? He exhaled a cloud of smoke and shook his head. Best not to think upon it.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Life on Mars had a stifling feeling that was, in a sense, paradoxical. When the pioneering astronaut Francis Carter first set foot on the planet in 1959, he soon discovered that it was a hollow world. Beneath the dead and wind-driven sand of the surface, its previous inhabitants had burrowed, tunneled, and built a civilization that had lasted millions of years. Carter had described it, Lamont remembered from an interview he had read, as an “Eerie providence” that mankind, desperately probing outward from his devastated home, should find his sister planet artificially primed for colonization. In its three-dimensional vastness, the technological anthill of chambers and corridors constituted an area greater than the surface of earth. For all that, it was impossible for the average colonist to roam freely. Life was restricted to the areas that had been made fit for human habitation and connected by transportation corridors. There were industrial zones, business districts, hydroponic farms, even suburbs.
Cerberus District 7, which Lamont had called home for some months now, was none of those. Originally planned as a micro-city for corporate men and their families, it had formed an alternative economy in the 1980s when the Company had turned its attention elsewhere. It was now a place for people who had fallen through the cracks. People like Chester K. Grimwald, whom Lamont had visited earlier that day. Formerly an employee of United Space like most of Mars’ Western colonists, Chester’s life had crumbled several years ago because of his gambling addiction. He now occupied a makeshift apartment in what had once been an upper story of a department store, from which he spent his days alternately avoiding debts and acquiring new ones. Lamont had befriended him shortly after arriving in town—not as a newspaperman for the Atlantic Free Press, since that would have gotten him nowhere, but as a fellow down-and-outer with a good ear and a supply of real Earth tobacco. Chester of course may have suspected that Lamont was a United Space sleuth or even a foreign agent, but he was apparently beyond caring about such things.
For Lamont, it was mainly a way to pass the time in the absence of a more direct lead, and to possibly glean some small detail about the Company’s past on Mars that could be useful to his investigation. The visit carried the additional advantage of not requiring him to use public transportation, by which he might always be tracked. To avoid this, he never got off a bus or shuttle within a mile radius of his apartment, and consequently did a great deal of walking. Lamont didn’t mind. He had always liked to walk.
A walk of twenty minutes took Lamont from the telephone booth to the stoop of his apartment building. The ground floor was a pawn shop. A flickering blue light kept on inside the shop outlined in silhouette inscrutable artifacts of human and Martian life, equally lost to time, in the smudged windows. The shop attracted more than its fair share of independent explorers, adventurers and retired rocketmen who would take their chances delving into unsettled sections of the planet in search of alien novelties. Technically, a special permit was needed for such things, and any artifact removed from its place was required to be processed, cataloged and approved. In reality, the regulations were impossible to fully enforce, and only served to prevent the organization of large-scale independent operations. Still, the fact that so many Martian artifacts were displayed out in the open here was saying something.
Lamont looked up by habit at the facade of the building. It was five stories high, made of Martian brick with geometric flourishes that had been popular during the first decade of mass colonization in the 70’s. It was nestled between two beams of native architecture that, high overhead, converged organically into a colossal fluted archway of vaguely Gothic aspect. A blinking neon billboard across the street turned the dull orange of the brick momentarily into a bruised purple every three seconds. The windows were widely spaced, one to each apartment, with pipes and conduits snaking between them. All the windows were dark.
Lamont set his jaw, tossing his cigarette into a gutter. The window of his apartment was on the right side of the fourth floor, and he always left a light on when he went out.
He glanced furtively at the surrounding street, at the deep shadows of the alley nearby, but saw nothing unusual. A newspaper delivery scooter passed in and out of view two blocks down, the only movement. Lamont glanced at his watch; it was just past three in the morning. It could be a fluke, he told himself. A power surge, a bad bulb. There was one way to find out.
Lamont fished his keys from his overcoat pocket. He unlocked the door to the stairwell before gripping them tightly in his palm, with the longest key firmly set between his middle and ring fingers.
