Before Tomorrowland, page 13
“Okay. You see the three switches in that access panel?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hit the top one for me and take another reading.”
Henry saw the switches. They were all painted green. When he hit the top one, it sparked, and he let out a yelp, but he couldn’t hear himself. Something else was louder; louder than the fireworks or anything he’d heard before. In the sheer silence of the roar, he saw Amelia spin around toward him, panic on her long face. Henry ran out from under the rocket and looked up at the mechanics. They yelled and flailed their arms different ways at him, but he couldn’t hear anything. Frank scrambled down the scaffolding and Amelia ran toward the access panel, right before his dad’s hands shoved him to the side and the rocket’s thruster came alive.
It shouldn’t have happened. That’s all he could think when the pain took him. It shouldn’t have happened.
It went dark.
When he came to, the noise was gone, but there was something else in its place. The sounds of his body, things he never noticed, like his breath passing out of his mouth and nostrils, or the sound of a swallow going down past his ears and through his neck: they weren’t there. He couldn’t swallow. Was he suffocating? He yanked his hands up to his throat and saw hands that weren’t his own. Metal hands, and beyond them, the shape of something awful.
“Henry,” said a man’s voice.
Then he realized exactly how short five feet really was.
Across the room on a table, he saw his own tiny body, burned from the chest to the kneecaps. He saw his own face, his own chest rising as it breathed slow, shallow breaths. There were lights, wires, and beyond his little body, stairs. The stairs led up to a door. There were rustling sounds in the dark. A man stood over the body. His face was covered by a welder’s mask. He was holding something terrifying. Something like a three-headed spear. The spearhead was embedded in Henry’s chest. Rotwang pulled a lever on the device’s opposite end, and the three sharp metal fingers released from Henry’s heart.
“Henry?” asked the masked man, voice muffled. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” said Henry, but it wasn’t his own voice. It was a strange, deep voice. A man’s voice.
Henry whipped around and saw a large glass vat of churning liquid and more tubes. In the glass, where his face’s reflection should have been, there was a metal machine. The machine trembled. Its perforated surface shined in the overhead lights. He reached up to feel that shiny metal face, but he couldn’t feel anything. He just heard the cold sound of metal on metal. Feeling came on slow, with a creeping sensation that rose up his spine. A white substance extruded from the thousands of holes in the machine’s surface and built up, layer on layer, in seconds. The layers became a skull, then sinew and flesh crept over the skull, then a stranger’s face screamed at him.
/ HISTORY / PERSONAL / TRAUMA / AIRFIELD /
The memory finished its cycle. The fear faded some as he opened his eyes and saw the light of another subway train creep over the water in front of him. He saw the stranger’s face again, whole and healthy and quiet.
He stood up, running a scan through his internal map to pinpoint his location and Earhart’s. He tossed the last tatters of his ruined clothes into the water and felt droplets spatter over his naked shins. The headings came through on his map, but he waited a few seconds and took another reading on Earhart to get a trajectory. When the second reading came through, he knew there was only one place they could be going.
He should have known.
THE ZEPPELIN’S dining room was covered from top to bottom in the most intricately detailed metal and woodwork Lee had ever seen. From his seat at the long cherrywood table, New York’s skyscrapers appeared as toys through the room’s five round portholes, each as tall as a man, with their brass rings set two feet above the floor. Ms. Earhart sat in one, watching the city drift by while she applied a cold compress to her bare back. Lee tried not to watch out of respect for her privacy, but he couldn’t miss the red rash running from her right shoulder blade up to her neck. Behind him, bookcases covered in art deco filigreed glass spanned the inner wall, divided every few feet by thin wall spaces where tall oil portraits of Plus Ultra luminaries hung beneath elegant light fixtures. Above the table, a giant globe light hung stock-still on a thin chain. Lee couldn’t figure out what kept it from swinging as the ship banked and swayed through the air, but that was only one of a thousand inexplicable details that had assaulted him since their arrival on board the Pulsar.
One of those bizarre things was the man sitting at the head of the table. Lee and his mom sat on either side of him with a huge amount of fine food between them: swordfish fillets, steamed vegetables (several he didn’t recognize), mussels, steaks, baguettes, a fruit salad, and a large bowl of green peas.
“I don’t worry about the Nazis,” said Mr. Howard Hughes, sorting through the little green balls on his silver plate. “You know what the Nazis want to do? All they want to do? They want to take my boop-oop-a-doop away.”
What did a person say to that? Lee hoped to take a cue from his mom, but she just stared at Lee, probably wishing he’d do her the same service. Mr. Hughes smiled at both of them and popped a pea in his mouth off the tip of his special fork, which he used only to eat peas. A crazy day had only gotten crazier.
After they’d boarded the airship, some Plus Ultra agents wrapped them in blankets and tested them for shock. Right after, word came over the loudspeaker that Mr. Hughes wanted to meet them. “Mr. Hughes?” asked Clara. “As in Howard Hughes?” And it was. Lee was beginning to wonder if anything would surprise him anymore.
The billionaire picked up his glass of milk using a tissue paper. He was still talking about Betty Boop. “Remember that song? I love Betty. She has a body built for sin and a head like a praying mantis. What a combination.” He ran his lower teeth over his upper lip, itching it. “Ever go to the pictures?”
Lee realized Mr. Hughes was talking to him now.
“Uh, yes, sir. We go a couple times a year.”
“I’ve seen King Kong over three hundred times. Maybe three hundred and forty-some. What sort of pictures do you see?”
Lee glanced at his own plate of hardly touched food, then back up to Mr. Hughes. “I like crime movies.”
“Me, too! We’ll have to watch one while you’re here. I made a good one called The Racket in nineteen twenty-eight. You see The Racket?”
Lee shook his head. He couldn’t think about movies. Nazis, the destroyed hotel, Amelia Earhart, an invisible zeppelin, and the robot man who tried to kill them? Now, yes, those were things that he could think about, as they were crowding out everything else in his mind. A lot had happened in the last twenty minutes before this tea party, and it deserved urgent explanation. Instead, there they were, listening to a lecture on contemporary cinema.
“No, Mr. Hughes, I think I missed that one,” said Lee, his frustration leaking through.
Mr. Hughes swallowed a large drink of milk, then nodded and waved his hand at Lee as if he needed to be calmed down over the tragedy of not seeing his film. “We’ll watch The Racket.”
When Mr. Hughes set down his glass, one of his three personal robot butlers topped it off. Lee and his mom couldn’t keep their eyes off the robots whenever they did the slightest thing. “Tesla’s pretty excited about you, Clara. I can’t blame him.”
Lee saw Ms. Earhart roll her eyes at that. His mom shifted in her seat, embarrassed. “Well, thank you, Mr. Hughes, but I sure don’t know why.” She gave Lee a nervous smile. “We’re just country mice.”
Mr. Hughes patted his mouth with another tissue and threw it in a trash bin at his feet, full to the brim with them. “They tell me you’re quite an artist. We’d love to help you get your career off the ground. My organization has great contacts within the magazine publishing industry, you know.”
“I do now,” said Clara.
“I’m also staffing a department to design packaging for a whole line of Plus Ultra products we’ll soon be releasing.” He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a thin black case the size of a compact mirror. Hughes flipped it open and showed Lee and Clara the keypad and a small screen. “We call it a Multifunctional Data Device around here, though we should probably come up with a better name for consumers. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. We’ve been using them around these parts for years, but we felt it was high time the paying public had a crack at them, too. I think they’re going to love them. What do you say? Think you can put those pens to work for me?”
Lee’s mom stumbled over her words, trying to keep up with their host. “Well, that, ah, it sounds—”
He brushed her response aside. “It’s nothing. I’ll set it up. After what you and your boy went through, it’s the least I can do.” Lee couldn’t believe how long it had taken Mr. Hughes to even reference their near-death experience. Now, all of a sudden, it visibly weighed on him. “You know, tragedies happen every day in this world and you can’t head them all off. Sometimes all you can do is take care of anyone that gets hurt.” He snapped his fingers, and one of the robot butlers scuttled to his side and handed him a white envelope. He slid it across the table to Clara. “This is our welcoming packet, plus thirty thousand dollars’ compensation for any damages to your personal property or mental affairs.”
Lee couldn’t help but gasp. Sure, that amount of money might have been nothing to someone like their host, but it was probably more than his father had made in his entire career. They could do almost anything Lee could think of with those funds. His dad could stay put, they could afford better care for his mom, maybe even get a new radio. Heck, five new radios.
Clara touched the corner of the envelope, but she didn’t pick it up. Mr. Hughes dug through his peas and continued: “Go ahead and open it. The first page is pure formality, non-disclosure agreements and such. Just needs a signature and we can get on with the fun parts.” The butler held out a pen to Clara, and Mr. Hughes popped another pea in his mouth and scrutinized her as he chewed with small, mincing movements.
Lee grinned at his mom as she held up the envelope, turning it in her hands, but instead of opening it, she set it down and slid it back across the table to Mr. Hughes.
“Mr. Hughes, that is such a generous offer,” she said, “but—”
“But what?” said Mr. Hughes, clamping his teeth down on the little green pea skin. He sat forward, tall in his chair, with his fist clenched on the tabletop. Lee was about to chastise his mom when he saw her whole countenance change, and in an instant, she wasn’t acting like a scared country mouse. When she answered Mr. Hughes, she brought out her low, commanding register, and it took the air right out of the room. Even Ms. Earhart sat up straight in the window.
“Mr. Hughes? Let’s talk about my future career and all the money you want to give me some other time, please. Sometime when I’m not still processing a building being split in half by a robot man with laser eyes. Because if that’s the secret you want me to keep for you, I’m not sure I’m up for it.”
Mr. Hughes didn’t move a muscle.
Ms. Earhart snorted, loud. They all turned to her, and she stood, wiping the grin off her face as she pulled her flight jacket back on. “Why don’t I move the Bracketts along, Mr. Hughes?” she said. “Tesla’s expecting them.” Clara had already pushed her chair away from the table and stood before Ms. Earhart finished. Mr. Hughes was glowering at them as they walked away, and the stare unnerved Lee more than any of the wild technology around him.
Ms. Earhart led them down a long air lock decorated with pictures. Lee recognized a lot of the imagery from the Plus Ultra comic book, but here, the pictures weren’t drawings. They were photographs. Lee struggled to take it all in. Plants and animals he’d never seen before. Otherworldly landscapes, the same landscapes with the vibrant colors they had seen in the stereoscope Faustus had given his mother at Penn Station. A series of portraits of Plus Ultra members, past and present, formed a Plus Ultra pictorial history: Verne, Eiffel, Edison, Tesla, Bell, Lumiere, Curie, Gillette, Einstein, Godard, and more. One picture stood out to him, in particular, of an enormous explosion high above a desolated forest. Lee caught one word on the picture’s plaque as they walked by: SIBERIA.
“It’s all true,” he said to Ms. Earhart, then wished he hadn’t. She seemed to want to help them, but she still terrified Lee. “The comic book, I mean.”
“Oh, who knows,” said Earhart. “Plus Ultra’s founders didn’t keep the best records, and the old timers either don’t like talking about the early days, or want to remember them, however it works best for their personal interests. Even second- and third-generation members like myself don’t know the whole story.”
When they came to a large steel hatch, Earhart stopped and put her hand on a glass plate embedded in the wall. A pulsing light strobed her palm. “Truth,” she said, “is a pretty relative thing around here. I’ll tell you what works best for me: trust your gut. Or your mom. Seems like she’s got it pretty well figured out, judging by how she dealt with Mr. Hughes.”
She swung the hatch open and they stepped into a dim room with tinted windows as long as the belly of the zeppelin. Flickering screens and consoles ran along either side of a central path, all operated by dozens of men in silver suits, each wearing enormous glasses. It took a second for Lee to register the fact they were all the same man: Faustus. He didn’t know whether to be amazed or terrified, but it seemed his mom sure did.
“Fantastic!” his mom murmured. “They’re all robots or clones or something.”
“It’s something all right,” Lee replied.
In the heart of the room stood a tall, elderly man on an elevated platform. He had a thin gray-flecked moustache and sallow cheeks. A natty charcoal suit hung a bit saggy on his thin frame. Earhart bounded to him and touched his one of his spindly arms. His worried complexion lit up with warmth and it flattered him; his eighty-something visage suddenly lost thirty years. She whispered a lengthy report in his ear, and when she finished, Nikola Tesla raised his eyes to them. As he moved carefully down the steps the platform, gripping a handrail, Earhart kept a hand near his back, as if ready to catch him if he should fall.
“Stop crowding me,” he muttered.
“I’m not crowding you, I’m helping you,” she muttered back.
Lee recognized this dance. He played Earhart’s part every day, every waking hour with his mom.
Tesla opened his long arms to them. “Welcome, my friends! I cannot begin to express my regret for the dangers in which we placed you.” The words weren’t that dissimilar to the consolation offered by Mr. Hughes, but Lee thought Mr. Tesla sounded wholly sincere. The old man gave him a polite half bow, then took Clara’s hand in both of his. “Mrs. Brackett. It is an honor and a pleasure.”
Maybe his mom was getting used to that sort of attention from famous people, because she only nodded her head and said a polite, “Mr. Tesla.”
“Please, come take a look.”
Lee watched Tesla take his mom by the hand and walk her to the largest screens. It was divided into panels like a comic book page. One of them showed a picture of his mom snapped at Penn Station. Another played like a movie reel depicting her tour of midtown Manhattan from the perspective of her glasses. For the first time, Lee saw what she’d been talking about, the enhanced buildings, the skyway, and the portals to other places. There wasn’t much of Lee himself on the screen. He was about to feel jealous and even a little ashamed when he saw the other windows, all of them crammed with personal information about his entire family, from his birth certificate to his father’s bank records to his mom’s medical records. How had they acquired all of that data? And so quickly? And without their permission!
“Mr. Tesla,” he asked, “what exactly is all of this?”
“Have you heard of the term ‘market research,’ young man?”
Lee shook his head.
“I wasn’t familiar with the practice myself until Mr. Hughes introduced me to it, although I suspect his approach to ‘market research’ is outside the norm for even his own industry,” said Mr. Tesla. “This gross invasion of privacy, which I do hope you will forgive, is our attempt to understand how you are responding to the experience of your day, and more, why you might be responding to it the way you are.”
Tesla leaned back against one of the consoles, regarding them like a proud father. “Mrs. Brackett, you and your son were chosen to be among the first civilians to be privy to a staggering secret, one, which, to be honest, should have been shared with the world a long time ago. Regardless, the time is upon us. We want to tell the world the full story, but in a unique, visceral, interactive fashion. We didn’t think people would be believe us if we simply took out an ad in a newspaper. So we decided we would have to show it to them, and more, bring them to it. The comic book, the augmented reality tour, the showroom at the New Yorker—these were all steps of an elaborate reveal we planned to stage in every major city around the world. This weekend was a sort of a soft launch, if you will. We wanted to start with a small sample, gauge its effectiveness, use the data to adjust the program as we took it wider. There were to have been hundreds of you. Dreamers who could appreciate our vision. Seekers who perhaps could benefit from seeing it. Even skeptics and cynics who might resist it. I must say, all things considered, the results you’ve produced have been most encouraging.”
“By ‘all things considered,’” said Lee, “you mean, except for the part where we were almost killed by Nazis and a killer robot disguised like a tour guide, right?”
“He’s not a robot,” said Earhart sharply. She heard her tone and blushed. “Sorry. It’s not your fault for not knowing that. But he’s not, technically speaking, a robot.”
“If he’s not a robot, than what is he?”
“He’s a boy, actually. Not much older than you. Warped into something gross by an experiment that never should have happened.”
