Before Tomorrowland (18 page)

The trouble was robots were even more amazing than rockets, and there were plenty of evenings Henry would steal away from RJP to peek in Rotwang’s window, or better yet, slink through his
hangar if Rotwang wasn’t around. The Faustus robots were friendly and never told on Henry as far as he knew. They let him poke around and ask all kinds of questions, though they weren’t
always generous with answers. Henry tried to convince them it was okay, he’d been to ‘the other world’ with Amelia Earhart (which he hadn’t), so he could handle another
secret just fine, but they just laughed.

The field lit up hot pink and another
BOOM
followed. Then another flash, and a boom, and soon the fireworks were all on top of each other. Henry rolled back over and clapped his hands
over his head, cheering with the crew for the display’s grand finale. Mr. Hughes had spared no expense, as usual. The last rocket soared what must have been a half mile higher than the
others, and when it popped, the whole sky lit up so Henry could see the San Gabriel Mountains north of Glendale. The explosion fanned out in the shape of an airplane, and underneath that, huge
block letters:
HAPPY 4TH HUGHES AIR CO
.
1932.

Henry slid down the bomber’s wing with his dad and landed on the tarmac, a little unsteady. “You better hit the hay, fella,” said Max. “You’ll want to be plenty
rested for show and tell.” His dad meant their team’s scheduled demonstration tomorrow for Mr. Hughes and Mr. Tesla. The rocket’s propulsion system was almost done, and Henry knew
the rest of them would be up all night getting it tuned up.

“I’m not tired,” said Henry, yawning. His dad put him in a headlock and ground his knuckles across Henry’s skull, making Henry giggle. He tapped out for mercy and Max
released him.

“You think you’re gonna impress Mr. Tesla enough to fly that rocket yourself, huh? Maybe someday. Get some sleep, we don’t need a gopher tonight.”

“I’m not tired!”

“Max, let him stay, for crying out loud,” Amelia hollered. She came over and slugged Henry on the shoulder. “It’s a celebration.”

Max took a last swig of beer and threw his bottle across the airstrip. It shattered in the ditch. “Ohh-kay, but I need something to eat. Gopher, go for a bag of jerky and a box of candy
bars.” Max tossed Henry his keys. It wasn’t exactly allowed for Henry to dig into the mess hall with an officer’s keys, so his dad always added, “Leave it looking like you
found it.”

A few minutes later, Henry ran from the mess hall toward RJP with an armload of Hershey’s bars and Bridgford beef. The radio was on in the hangar, playing Betty Boop’s
“Don’t Take My Boop-Oop-a-Doop Away.” He turned the corner around the hangar doors and saw Otis on top of the rocket’s thruster, calling down for a three-quarter-inch
socket.

The rocket was a hundred and fifty-eight feet long with a diameter of twenty-six feet at its widest point. It wasn’t Plus Ultra’s biggest ever, but it sure would pack a wallop when
it came time to launch. Estimated top speed was twenty thousand seven hundred and seventy miles per hour: just enough to break out into orbit. Henry got the impression it wasn’t going to
space, but he couldn’t nail down his dad on what exactly it
was
supposed to do. Whatever it was for, Amelia always said she was going to fly it and send him a postcard.

Right now, she sat with her feet up on a workbench and flipped through one of Henry’s
Amazing Stories
magazines. The pilot held out her hand for a candy bar. “Gimme
here,” she said to Henry. “You know these mags of yours are all Plus Ultra sponsored? Look at this plane here. I flew that in Chile in twenty-nine. Piece of junk made such a racket they
couldn’t even hear me on the radio. Now it’s immortalized like some big thing, with a
man
flying it. Typical.”

His dad came out of the washroom and brushed his hands dry against his overalls. Henry set the snacks down on their table and Max ripped into one of the jerky packs as he said, “Amelia, if
you wouldn’t mind working—I mean, if it wouldn’t put you out
completely
, we could use you in the cockpit.”

Amelia threw down the pulp rag and sighed like it was putting her out completely. “There a medal in it?” she asked, and sauntered toward the rocket’s nose.

His dad reached out and tousled Henry’s hair again and went across the hangar to finish up an auxiliary piece of the thruster. The other mechanics were all on top of the primary unit with
Otis, either on scaffolding or the machine itself. “Anything yet?” asked Frank.

“No, try the left side,” said Otis. “Hey, Henry, grab my voltmeter and gimme a reading on this wire here, where it starts. It’s by the orange access
panel—”

“Yeah, I know!” Henry grabbed the voltmeter off Otis’s desk and ran to the access panel. He didn’t get many chances to help in a hands-on way. He tested the wire.
“Nothin’ down here!”

“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.

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.

T
HE 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.
”