“Now, look,” Lamont said darkly, his back straightening and his cigarette dangling loosely from his lips, “I know what you lads want, and we both know it has nothing to do with my wife.”
“Is that so?” Asked one of the men, who was lanky and had a surprisingly nasal voice.
“I left for Mars eight months ago. That’s the last time I saw her.”
“True,” agreed the man with the high cheekbones. “In fact, that’s just about the last time anybody saw her.”
“That’s a fabrication,” Lamont said flatly. “I haven’t seen her, but I’ve spoken to her. I mean, I’ve heard from her. Several weeks ago. Harry Rowan, editor of the Atlantic Free Press. He can tell you where to find her.”
“He told us where to find you, mate.” Smiled the man with the nasal voice.
The attendant’s gaze darted uncomfortably. Around the store, eyes were beginning to emerge from behind racks and displays to peer curiously at the scene. He hooked a finger into the infinitesimal space between his prominent Adam’s apple and his pink-tinted collar. “Excuse me,” he interjected, “But would you mind taking this outside?”
“That’s a fine idea,” said the man with the high cheekbones. “Mr. Townsend, if you would kindly come with us.”
The two other men moved to form a loose circle around Lamont, who found himself turning to appeal to the attendant. “What? Just because they flash a tin badge, you’re going to let them do whatever they want? This is obviously a setup.”
“And this,” said the attendant, demurely waving Lamont’s cigarette smoke away, “Is a respectable establishment.”
“Come on, then,” said the high-cheekboned man, “We just want to ask you some questions. All you’ve got to do is not resist.”
Lamont glanced about. He was surrounded, with a fifteen-foot drop to one side and a man standing a pace away on every other.
“All right,” he said, straightening his coat. He took the drop.
Gripping the banister, he vaulted his legs over the side and fell ten feet before landing atop a well-dressed mannequin family. For a few seconds, there was a confusion of limbs. The men on the landing above shouted exclamations. A woman standing not far from Lamont screamed as a little girl’s head rolled past, tumbling on its molded pigtails.
Having regained his orientation, Lamont bolted for the door. In his peripheral vision, he could see that two of the supposed officers were already halfway down the escalator, taking quick but careful steps in the direction of the moving track. A third had unthinkingly opted for the opposite escalator; he was comically working against the mechanism, but would be downstairs soon enough. Lamont had bought himself precious little time.
Or perhaps he had guaranteed that he’d be doing a great deal of time, a small and adversarial part of his journalistic mind told him. As he burst through the door of the department store, he shed the thought—along with a slender arm with a faux pearl bracelet to which he had unconsciously been clinging. It fell into a perambulator that was being pushed by a young woman making her way up the sidewalk. The occupant of the carriage squealed in delight even as the woman went visibly pale.
Lamont had something like a forty-pace head start. He veered right around the block, glancing backward to see the men already emerging through the store entrance. In front of him, a few storefronts quickly gave way to the white picket fences of the surrounding suburb. What was his plan? He was in a self-contained settlement that was utterly unfamiliar to him. He decided that his best chance was to evade the men long enough to find a bus. All he needed was a few minutes and a phone.
He turned left and crossed the street, thinking that perhaps one of the men had gone around the other side of the store to catch him on the back of the block. That cost him precious time, though, and he could hear the shouting voices of the men as they reached the corner, just after he had disappeared behind a furniture store.
There were very few private cars on the road, which was typical for Mars, and not a bus to be seen anywhere, which was less common. Lamont zig-zagged around two more blocks and through an alley before he began to feel really desperate. He could hear that at least two of the men were less than a block away, and he was now at the edge of the housing development.
He took a gamble. A hundred yards from him was a patch of trees outside a park with a playground. They looked dense enough that, if he could make it there in time, he might emerge on the other side with sufficient time to form a plan. He bolted across a broad crosswalk, breathing heavily as he made a dead run for the treeline. Three more seconds. Two more seconds.
Lamont’s vision went red with sudden, jarring pain. At full clip, he had run headlong into a solid wall. He was crumpled at the foot of it, and in the scene that swam before him, he could make out a patch of blood dripping surreally down a patch between two trees. The forest was an illusion.
Lamont cursed bitterly, struggling to his feet as he saw one of the men emerge around the side of the candy store across the way and heard him whistle triumphantly to the others. This was it, Lamont told himself grimly. If he were to attempt another run for it, he would only be delaying the inevitable. Then he noticed: As the men flocked toward him, they were pulling objects out of their pockets and pointing them in his direction. They looked like firearms! Weapons of any kind were strictly forbidden in Mars, impossible to smuggle in and rarely seen even in the hands of law officers. What was this?
Just then, a lean black shape interposed itself between Lamont and the gun-wielding men. Not black, actually, more of a deep iridescent purple. A private car, silent and streamlined. A window rolled down two paces away from his bloody nose to reveal the long, sober features of Francis Carter.
“You look like you could use a ride,” The astronaut observed.
Next: Out of the Frying Pan…
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