There was an expression of surprise on Madison Burk’s face when she opened her door after Lamont’s insistent buzzing. It changed quickly to concern not unmixed with fear at his haggard appearance.
“What is it?” Madison asked. She was dressed in floral-patterned pajamas and slippers, with a utility belt clipped around her waist.
Lamont thrust a battered piece of paper at her. “Read this,” he ordered.
“All right,” his neighbor agreed with forced calm. She hesitated briefly before sliding the heavy wrench she had been gripping into a pouch of her belt. She took the paper in hand and began to scan its contents with her eyes.
“No! No!” Lamont exclaimed, running a hand rapidly through tousled auburn hair. “Read it out loud! Please.”
Madison pressed her lips together, attempting to regain composure after jumping visibly at the outburst. She cleared her throat and began to read haltingly.
“I knew that she would need cheering up when I broke the news, so I stopped by the box office of the Crystal Palace on the way home and purchased two tickets to the 1989 Free World’s Fair. My plan was to surprise her with a day at the Palace later in the week and then drop news of the assignment to her as casually as possible while we were in the midst of some activity. Instead, I opened the apartment door to see her wrapped in a bathrobe, tightly clutching the old Tibetan phrasebook that I had kept hidden for some time in my toiletries drawer. The look on her face…”
“You can stop,” Lamont interrupted. Exhaling slowly, he leaned against the wall of the hallway as if deflating.
Madison’s expression had begun to change into something like pity. “Why did you ask me to do that?”
“I thought perhaps I was going mad,” Lamont admitted tonelessly, clenching a fist to his mouth in concentration. “Seeing things that weren’t there.” He looked up to meet Madison’s concerned gaze furtively. “I’m not. The page is real. Unless I’m imagining you too.”
“I don’t feel imagined,” Madison offered helpfully.
Lamont nodded as if relieved.
“Come in and have a seat, Mr. Townsend,” Madison invited, pushing the door open further with her back. “I’ll get you some tea.”
“I spent some time in a prison camp while I was in the East,” Lamont was explaining a short time later. Madison’s apartment, the same size as his, was sparsely and haphazardly furnished but immaculately clean. It had never occurred to Lamont that the chrome details of the kitchenette could be polished. In an interesting decorating choice, the lighting was provided by tiny string bulbs of the kind used on Christmas trees, roped this way and that along the ceiling among small hanging baubles that had been cut from paper and foil. The blinds were tightly closed. The small utility closet tucked between the living area and the bedroom was ajar, and a tangle of tubes, wires and mechanical viscera were visible in the comparatively bright light that shone through the crack. While the tea was brewing, Madison had stepped into the bedroom to replace her tool belt with a robe.
“Yes,” She acknowledged several minutes later, setting a gleaming silver teapot down on the small table between them. “I read about that in your book.”
“Well, the first thing they did—no, the first thing they did was interrogate me. I wrote about that. The second thing they did is make me write.”
Madison winced. A section of Behind the Curtain was devoted to an account of Lamont’s systematic torture and inquiry, describing a lengthy procession of physical and mental torments. “Write what?” Madison asked. It was something that the book hadn’t mentioned.
“This,” Lamont said, slapping the half-crumpled sheet on the table. “They made me write everything. Everything I knew, everything I believed, everything I remembered. Every day for 10, 12 hours, for weeks. I typed until my fingers bled.”
“Why?” Madison whispered, astonished.
“At first I thought that they were looking for secrets—details that hadn’t come out during the interrogation. But it was more than that. They wanted me to take everything—everything!—that was in here…” He tapped the side of his head with two fingers before moving them downward to tap the page. “...And put it out here. The smallest, most petty resentment. The deepest, most ridiculous belief. Every irrational fear and unconscious affection.”
Madison shook her head uncomprehendingly.
Lamont furrowed his brow, struggling to articulate his point. He lifted his hands to cup spread fingers together in the rough shape of a ball. “In our heads, things are fuzzy,” He explained. “Every fact we know is based on a hundred assumptions. Every truth we hold dear is supported by a dozen idioms that we swallowed without questioning. Every affection is suspended like oil on a hidden sea of resentments. In our heads, it’s all bright and alive because our brains fill in all the gaps with chemical carrots and social sticks. But on paper, it becomes flat and dull. It can be picked apart, dissected, exposed in all its flimsy preposterousness.”
Madison’s eyes widened with comprehension. She tipped her empty teacup, revealing the tiny puddle of swirling tea leaves in the bottom. “They wanted to empty you out so they could put something new in,” she suggested.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Yes, that’s it.” Lamont agreed.
“Why didn’t you include this in your book? It seems like an important detail.” Madison asked.
Lamont gulped down the dregs of his tea. “Harry—my editor—thought that it would confuse the readers.”
“So you found this in your things and it triggered a reaction,” Madison concluded, nodding toward the paper. “That makes sense, especially if you’re exhausted.”
“That’s just the thing,” Lamont insisted. “It makes no bloody sense at all! When I came back from the Orient, I didn’t have anything with me except the clothes on my back! Those papers were long gone—who knows whatever happened to them. But one thing is certain: This page didn’t come here with me. Somebody put it here, in my room.”
Madison set her teacup down and sat back in her low-set globe chair, scrutinizing her guest thoughtfully. After a long silence, she said: “I spent the second half of my trip back from Neptune alone. I had to learn to do the jobs of two people. I was scared, exhausted, not taking care of myself. Sometimes I would come to my senses in the middle of a conversation with my partner, who had been gone for weeks. More than once I made him a meal without realizing it until I set the trays down.”
“You’re suggesting that I wrote the page myself, in the apartment.” Lamont observed.
“Don’t you think it’s possible?”
Lamont picked the paper up from the table and looked it over carefully, scraping his right hand over his cheek. “No,” he concluded firmly. “In prison, I wrote volumes like this using the same typewriter—an old Royal manual. I’d know it like my own handwriting. In my apartment, I have a microtape stenograph and a portable electric typewriter. This page was typed on the machine I used in prison, or one very much like it.”
Madison leaned forward, looking intently at Lamont. “Who else knows about what happened to you in prison? It isn’t in your book.”
“Nobody,” Lamont said tightly, the muscles in his jaw working as if he had just swallowed something dreadful. “I never told anybody about it.”
“For goodness sake, why not?” Madison asked incredulously.
“I don’t know,” Lamont shrugged. “It’s almost as if I’d forgotten about it until today.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Madison admitted.
Lamont shook his head, standing stiffly to his feet and replying angrily: “I’m not trying to make you believe anything. Why would it matter what you believe? I just needed to know that I’m not hallucinating.”
Madison raised her hands, her tone softening as if she was sorry to upset him. “If you can be sure that you’re not, what’s the alternative, Lamont?”
The newspaperman ran a hand through his hair reflexively. “It’s not the only thing. I was there when the bomb dropped on Lhasa.”
“I read about that,” Madison acknowledged, uncertain about the change in topic.
“Afterward, before I was captured by the Scientific Society, it started to snow. But it wasn’t snow, it was ash. Fine, white powder that turned black on your skin.” He turned to look at his neighbor earnestly. “Somebody put ash just like that in my lampshade. Where they knew I would find it when I checked the bulb.”
“Who would do that?” Madison asked? “And why?”
Lamont clenched his fists, partially crumpling the paper in his left hand. His eyes turned toward the closed door to her apartment. “It’s the Society. It’s got to be. They know where I am, and they want me to know that they know.”
Lamont jerked away at the sensation of a hand falling on his shoulder. It was small and weathered.
“You’re shaking,” Madison observed. “You should sit down.”
With a gentle nudge, she led him to a stool at the bar of her kitchenette. She crossed around to the other side and, bending down momentarily, produced a green-tinted bottle and a shot glass. She filled it and pushed it in front of Lamont with two fingers, waiting patiently until Lamont lifted it and tossed the drink down his throat.
“Thanks,” he croaked, his shoulders slumping.
Crouching again, Madison retrieved a second glass. She filled it, then refilled the one that still rested between Lamont’s ink-stained fingers. She drank hers effortlessly, her eyes never leaving Lamont’s face.
“You could be one of them,” Lamont said, meeting her gaze steadily.
His neighbor tightened her lips, forming fine wrinkles around them, lifting her palms in a helpless gesture. “A communist spy? I could be.”
Lamont downed the second shot and set the glass down, inhaling deeply. It no longer trembled in his fingers. “That’s very good,” He admitted. “You didn’t get it in District 7.”
Madison smiled slightly. “No, I bought it outside the spaceport in Medusa Dome. First thing after my cargo was converted to gold bars at the trade market. I was saving it for the flight home.”
“Sorry,” Lamont said self-consciously.
Madison waved her hand. “I can get more. Besides, that was months ago. I never expected to be renting an apartment here.”
“What was the cargo?” Lamont asked.
“Mostly helium,” Madison answered eagerly, her eyes lighting up at the familiar subject. “Pressure-cubed for transport. Enough to buy a farm when I get back to Earth. I hear people are doing that now…”
***
The blinds glowed a sullen red with the approach of artificial sunset in the daylights outside. Madison’s apartment had taken on a warm coziness, the small points of light scattered across the ceiling appearing to drift like fireflies in Lamont’s peripheral vision. Madison had long since come to occupy the second stool at the bar, and the bottle between them was half-empty, sharing space with two stainless steel mugs that had been filled with strong coffee to balance things out.
“It’s a strange thing,” Madison was saying, her speech affecting more of what Lamont now recognized as a Louisiana drawl than it had when they had first met. “Tracking the new fusion models zipping back and forth between Mars and Jupiter, Mars and the Belt. I saw a few of them make a round trip while I was still just moseyin’ along. I’ll tell you, though, those first radio transmissions might’ve just saved my life. I must have sounded like a lunatic.”
“It can’t be that unusual to meet a prospector out there,” Lamont suggested. He had kept her talking for hours, describing the minute details of a decade spent in the outer Solar System, which he carefully absorbed, weighed, compared.
Madison shook her head. “The Asteroid Belt is still crawling with ‘em, of course. I picked up some radio traffic from Saturn, and now they’ve practically got cities orbiting Jupiter. That’s new. But it’s still rare to venture out to the ice giants. The first half of our—of my—trip back was just about silent.” She looked haunted at the thought.
“So the whole time you spent in orbit around Neptune was just you and your partner? You never saw anyone else?”
“There was one encounter,” Madison admitted, quickly draining the cold dregs at the bottom of her coffee mug. “It was a weird one. After our departure, we happened to notice that a station of some kind was being constructed in orbit around Triton. There was a big supply ship for it in orbit; we could see the United Space markings on the side. But they never responded to our radio calls.”
“That is strange,” Lamont agreed thoughtfully.
“It gets stranger,” Madison teased, leaning toward him conspiratorially. “I took some photos of the station. It was a big radio array. But it was pointed outward—away from the sun, into interstellar space. Now, you’ve got to ask yourself: What’s the point of that?”
