by Darrell Pitt
PRAISE FOR DARRELL PITT AND THE JACK MASON ADVENTURES
‘A fun story, easy to read and full of action.’
Books+Publishing
‘Lots of mechanical mayhem and derring-do—breathless stuff.’
Michael Pryor
‘Non-stop action, non-stop adventure, non-stop fun!’
Richard Harland
‘Set in a fantastical London, filled with airships, steam cars and metrotowers stretching into space, this fast-paced adventure and homage to the world of Victorian literature and Conan Doyle offers an enjoyable roller-coaster read.’
Magpies
‘The writing is intelligent and Darrell Pitt has created characters that challenge and provoke readers.’
Diva Booknerd
THE JACK MASON ADVENTURES
Book I The Firebird Mystery
Book II The Secret Abyss
Book III The Broken Sun
Book IV The Monster Within
Book V The Lost Sword
DARRELL PITT began his lifelong appreciation of Victorian literature when he read the Sherlock Holmes stories as a child, quickly moving on to H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. This early reading led to a love of comics, science fiction and all things geeky. Darrell is now married with one daughter. He lives in Melbourne.
textpublishing.com.au
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Darrell Pitt 2016
The moral right of Darrell Pitt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in 2016 by The Text Publishing Company
Cover design by Imogen Stubbs
Page design by Text
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator: Pitt, Darrell, author.
Title: A toaster on Mars / by Darrell Pitt.
ISBN: 9781922182869 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925095760 (ebook)
Subjects: Detective and mystery stories.
Dewey Number: A823.4
To Aimée
As promised
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
I’m Zeeb Blatsnart.
Yes, that Zeeb Blatsnart. No doubt you know me from my appearances on the Interplanetary Nature Channel—Prodding Exotic Creatures, The Glecks of Totalis Four and The Rhinorats of Sirius. There are few corners of the galaxy to which I have not travelled, and little I have not seen with my five eyes. Some may consider me a know-it-all, but I prefer to think of myself as being better informed than anyone else in the universe.
I’ve been asked to edit this adventure about Blake Carter, a law-enforcement agent living on Earth. Oh, you haven’t heard of Earth? I’m not surprised. It’s a rather polluted blue dot suffering from global warming, overpopulation and not enough people using deodorant.
Some may see my editing of this book as a demotion, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is true: I was recently suspended from the Interplanetary Nature Channel for killing Tosho Twelve’s last rhinopig—but there were extenuating circumstances. I hadn’t eaten all day! And what would you rather have: a happy celebrity or a live rhinopig?
I will return to the Interplanetary Nature Channel. It’s just taking some time to renegotiate my contracts.
Meanwhile, I have chosen to earn a few trifling credits as an editor.
Ah, the trials of life…
First, I should make clear that at no point in this story does a toaster appear on the planet Mars. Nor on Jupiter, Venus, Mercury or any other planet local to Earth. There isn’t even a toaster in any nearby star system, although there is a waffle maker on Rygil Five and a rather nice casserole dish on Xypod Nine, but these culinary devices have nothing to do with our story.
I should also point out that reading this book prior to the 26th century is breaking the law. The penalty for such a crime is nine years in jail and 300 hours of listening to The Greatest Hits of Looloo Jones and his Singing Dachshund Quartet.
So don’t blame me if the Time Police come bursting through your door and drag you kicking and screaming into an inter-dimensional black hole.
Oh, and for a limited time only, the first ninety-seven seasons of my program, The Tarbils of Sataris, are available as a boxed set. Ring 555-334-455-663-322-441-0107 within sixty seconds to receive a complimentary slice of rhinopig.
Zeeb Blatsnart, Editor
1
‘Blake! It’s time to get up!’
Groaning, Blake Carter peered at the owl-shaped alarm clock. He hated everything about that clock—its leer, its bright mustard-yellow eyes—but most of all he hated its voice; it sounded too much like his mother.
‘You’ll be late for work,’ the clock said. ‘And you know how grumpy that makes you.’
‘Shut up,’ Blake muttered.
‘See what I mean.’
The night before, Blake had drunk not one but eight or nine too many Plutonium Supernovas at the Pink Hyperdrive, his local bar. Afterwards he had still been able to walk, but not in a straight line.
Blake’s eyes swept towards the window. His apartment, wedged between two buildings, looked over a narrow slice of Neo City. Last night he’d forgotten to turn on the blind and now he could see space elevators rising into orbit, lines of flying cars, and an advertising blimp flashing on and off.
New at the movies!
Star Trek 159: The Wrath of Khan’s Clone!
Starts Friday!
‘Just give me a minute,’ Blake said.
‘You said that five minutes ago,’ the alarm said. ‘If you don’t get up now, I’ll have to turn nasty.’
‘You don’t mean—’
The alarm clock gave a laugh that Blake didn’t like. ‘I’ll sing,’ it said. ‘And you know what my singing’s like.’
This got Blake out of bed. The alarm had once woken him with a version of ‘Dancing Queen’, sung in Icelandic and badly out of tune. Blake’s ears had rung all day.
‘In the old days,’ he muttered, ‘alarms used to buzz or chime.’
‘Well, now it’s the 26th century,’ the clock said, as if Blake were a dodo. ‘We live in a more enlightened age.’
‘Really?’ Blake snatched up a shoe and hurled it at the clock, knocking it off the bookshelf. ‘Enlighten that.’
The plastic owl smashed to the floor. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ it wailed. ‘You’ve broken my—’
Whatever Blake had broken would forever remain a mystery as the clock died with a gasp.
Blake lurched across the room and hit the switch for his coffee pot. He wasn’t a fan of technology. Once upon a time, people had hunted, gathered, and worn animal skins. It was a system that worked—apart from the small risk of being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers. Everything these days ran on fission power, resembled something it shouldn’t and was always looking for an argument.
His attack on the clock had knocked a few books off his shelf. Real books. Not plastic or electronic or those Immersion Books where you were part of the story. These were actually made of paper.
Blake’s home was four-metres square, with a sonar-shower in one corner and a kitchen nook in another. Blake liked his humble abode, although his ex-wife, Astrid, had once described the style as a cross between early ugly and eternal da
mnation.
Now that Blake was up, the bed had automatically folded back into the wall, revealing his wardrobe. His clothes were all identical: seven pairs of cobalt blue pants, seven amber-coloured shirts and seven long trench coats. Blake didn’t like variety.
A flat-screen television and family vids decorated the other walls. Most of the vids were of happier times with Astrid and their daughter, Lisa—a week at the Lunar Zoo, the holiday on Titan and their day at the Wet’n’Wild park at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
His heart gave a lurch when he thought of Lisa. She was the one thing Blake missed about his marriage. He still carried a souvenir with him wherever he went—a tube of water from their holiday on the ocean floor. Lisa had bought it for him. On the side was a slogan, How Deep is Your Love?
Sighing, Blake caught sight of himself in the mirror. He was ten pounds overweight, his hair was starting to thin and he had deep lines under his eyes. His knees weren’t in great shape and his back ached when it got cold.
Nobody lives forever, he thought. Except maybe Pleck Wilson.
Zeeb says:
I should point out that there’s some debate about whether Pleck Wilson is actually alive. The film and amusement-park mogul died in 2066 and had his head cryogenically frozen. Two hundred years later, advanced technology meant the head could be brought back to life. But after being taken on a day tour of Earth, Wilson asked to be put back into cold storage.
‘This sort of horror,’ Wilson said, after seeing 23rd-century Earth, ‘I don’t need.’
‘Good morning, Blake.’ The television had now flickered to life, having been activated by the percolating of the coffee machine. ‘It’s another beautiful day!’
‘If you say so.’
‘Would you like bad news, really bad news, or catastrophically bad news?’
‘I’ll go with catastrophic,’ Blake replied. ‘Things can only improve after that.’
The screen flashed to a pair of blue-skinned news anchors. ‘Two billion people dead as the Tyrus Five sun unexpectedly goes supernova! Rescue ships are being sent from Tyrus Four to search for survivors.’
They were trying to look horrified, but it was clear they were barely able to contain their glee at breaking such a huge story.
‘They’d better take suncream,’ the female anchor joked. ‘It’s going to be really toasty on the surface!’
‘Off,’ Blake told the television and it sputtered back to silence.
After thirty-eight seconds in the sonar shower, Blake emerged clean, and feeling almost human. A minute later he was dressed.
His wristcomm rang.
‘Yeah?’
‘Blake Carter?’ It was dispatch. ‘There’s a special briefing at 8am.’
As an agent with the Planetary Bureau of Investigation, Blake was used to receiving calls at all hours. With branches in every city on Earth, the PBI’s role was to investigate crimes too big for the local authorities.
Blake frowned. ‘But the daily briefing’s always at 9am.’
‘That’s why it’s called a special briefing.’
‘What’s it about?’
But dispatch had already disconnected.
Must be something big, Blake thought. There hasn’t been a briefing that early since the assassination of Kennedy’s clone.
On the top ledge of his bookshelf sat his hat—a scarlet fedora. Blake took it down and put it on. He and this hat had been through a lot.
‘Don’t forget your breakfast,’ his refrigerator reminded him. ‘It’s the most important meal of the day.’
Blake took out a bottle of pink pills. On the side it read Bacon and Eggs. He shook two into his hand.
‘Watch your weight,’ his fridge said.
Rolling his eyes, Blake ate them, grabbed a second bottle and stuffed them into his pocket.
The hallway outside his apartment was a cramped, gloomy corridor shared by a hundred other residents, most of them off-worlders. A family from Baxhill Six—a small marsupial race—shoved past without speaking to Blake. He’d been on their bad side since they first moved in, after chasing them with a chair, thinking they were mutant rats. No amount of apologising had mended the rift.
Some species just aren’t forgiving.
The day outside was humid and gloomy, the air thick with smog—but this passed for sunny in Neo City.
Zeeb says:
You know those communities where public transport is efficient, pollution is kept to a minimum and people work together for peace and harmony?
Well, Neo City isn’t one of them. It’s a multilayered metropolis with buildings a thousand storeys high, linked by a million walkways and roads. Sunlight permeates the upper levels, but it’s artificial light most of the way down, with complete darkness at the bottom. People and ‘things’ live down there, but mostly the things have the upper hand.
Don’t go to the bottom, not even on a dare.
Neo City was built on what used to be the east coast of an obsolete country called the United States. Buried under five centuries of construction is a mouldy green statue of a lady with a torch and a book. There’s also a pretty nice building that used to be called the White House—but now it’s mostly brown, held together with Wonder-Glue and occupied by a homeless guy named Ernie who lives there with his six-legged rat, Felix.
Blake sighed. He lived on the 701st level, on the east side of town. There were better places to live, but a PBI agent didn’t make enough money to live in them.
He joined the crowded footpath. A man passed by wearing a T-shirt with bright words flashing Don’t Buy Stuff! Following him came a woman walking a pair of Labrador-giraffes, and then a girl zoomed past on a tricycle-copter with a choir of dolls singing Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ in a basket.
Robots were everywhere. The League of Planets Charter forbade them resembling sentient life forms, including humans, but most were bipedal, with two arms, a torso and head. Many others had one leg, three legs, four legs—or more. Some even glided. They were every colour imaginable and made of plexy-plastic or hydro-metal, and all were equipped with AI brains, their intelligence ranging from that of a goldfish to an Einstein, Hawking or Slugmeyer.
Blake gazed about the street. Advertisements pulsated and gyrated on walls and windows, selling everything from diapers to holidays on the moon. This part of town had every building style imaginable: Art Deco, Greek Aluminium, Romanesque and Platinum Gothic, Rubber Classical, Tin Byzantium. Most of the apartments had small balconies with flowerboxes of balloon azaleas, which were all the rage this year.
Endless lines of flying cars, buses, taxi-gondolas and helium-cyclists moved around the city. Another advertising blimp floated past promoting Al’s Doughnut Burgers: Lo Cal Centres! Teenagers on skateboards jumped off walkways, dropped a dozen floors and activated rockets to land safely below.
Blake took a deep breath, inhaling something that tasted like a cross between burnt plastic and toffee apple.
Neo City, he thought. Home, sweet home.
2
‘Must you continue this madness?’
It was the first thing Sally—his red and white replica 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air—said to Blake as he approached.
She was parked in a narrow alley adjacent to the building. Blake had only owned the car for six weeks and she hadn’t done anything for his stress levels.
‘What madness?’ Blake asked as he slid behind the wheel.
Sally’s interior was also a replica of the original, except for some additional switches set into the dash. A nuclear fission propulsion system sat under the bonnet.
‘This driving madness.’
‘Everyone drives. That’s not crazy at all.’
‘No,’ Sally said. ‘The car does the driving. You should be watching television or cruising the Hypernet.’
‘I’m an old-fashioned guy. And what’s it to you, anyway?’
‘I’ve a right to be worried about my safety.’
‘I’m a good driver.’
‘Did you tell that to the other twelve cars, too?’
Blake didn’t reply. He had said that to his previous cars, but they had still all met unfortunate ends. Well, he reasoned. Thirteen’s a lucky number, isn’t it?
‘Being a PBI agent is a dangerous job,’ he said.
‘I worry about you, Blake.’
‘You can’t worry. You’re an AI—an artificial intelligence.’
Blake started the engine and, within seconds, had joined a line of cars. He flew towards PBI headquarters.
Everyone had replica cars these days, but most of them were in better shape than Blake’s Bel Air. While most people sat in the driver’s seat and read books or surfed the Hypernet, Blake focused on keeping Sally between the floating lane buoys. He liked driving. It made him feel like he was still in control, instead of surrendering to technology.
The early-morning traffic was worse than the Battle of the Bulge, and it took him half an hour to reach headquarters.
Despite having worked there for fifteen years, the view still took Blake’s breath away.
Zeeb says:
How do you define big?
Its meaning has long been debated. The universe has been called big, but then my Auntie Dukmaj is big, too—she eats too many doughnuts. So instead of calling Neo City’s PBI headquarters big, let’s say it’s larger than a breadbox and smaller than a Neptunian whale.
Covering twenty-two city blocks, PBI headquarters is the second-largest building in Neo City, dwarfed only by the McBurgers on 34th Street. Here, thousands of agents investigate robberies, kidnappings, murders and—most difficult of all—temporal crimes.
Temporal crimes are when people travel through time to change history. Anyone making an attempt is thrown into jail without a chance of parole.
To put PBI headquarters into context, it’s so large that the Missing Persons Bureau was missing for three months before it was found in the basement of the north wing.
Blake parked Sally in the underground car park and headed to the main concourse, which was an enormous dome-shaped chamber. Dozens of PBI agents sat on one side of the bookings desk, patiently trying to determine if crimes needed investigating, ridiculing or ignoring, while the public, queued on the other side of the desk, screamed and cried as they waved paperwork clenched in hands, tentacles or gluggy things. Everyone wanted justice, or their version of it.