Before Tomorrowland (20 page)

F
LAMES LICKED
up the side of the Electronic Baseball kiosk where Rotwang huddled with his knees pulled tight to his chest.
He felt the heat intensify, but he was too beside himself to be bothered by it. How had it happened? How could he have let the boy get the better of him? Rotwang had never felt so dumb, so
exploited, so hopelessly out of control since—

No.

He would not go there.

The past didn’t matter. Only the future.

Rotwang raised himself up and took stock of the salon. The HS1 was gone. Sometime during the melee, the machine had bolted out of the room as if to chase after something or someone. Or maybe
just to get away. Regardless, his creation had fled from him. Again.

Rotwang checked his person. He was dazed but uninjured, which was miraculous considering the state of Duquesne’s squad. Those who weren’t dead were crippled and ruined and howling in
agony. The doctor did them the courtesy of lifting their masks and dropping another gas grenade, then stumbled out of the room.

He shuffled to the elevator and hit the lobby button. He searched for another, but there was only a stairwell down the hall. He thought of the Empire State Building’s stairs. Going down
was harder on his back than going up, but it was his only escape route. He hurried down the hall, straining his ears as he approached the stairwell door. There were no sounds above or below the
landing, so he scrambled down the steps as fast as his old legs would go. Pain shot through his knees by the first landing, and Rotwang tried not to think about the thirty-one floors left to go. He
ripped the gas mask off and threw it aside on the steps.

He reached the fourth flight of stairs when a strained voice called to him. Duquesne looked smaller than usual with Commander Hagen’s big arm draped over his shoulders. The American, the
only one still wearing his gas mask, supported the taller man, who limped from a stray shot to his thigh. Duquesne’s clothes were a bloody mess and his waxed mustache was bent and flared out
on one side, but from his movements, he appeared uninjured. Hagen glared at Rotwang as he spat out the words: “You
gassed them
. You left us for dead!”

“I ended their suffering,” said Rotwang, breathing hard. “Now stop wasting your breath and move.”

Hagen shoved Duquesne away and grabbed a luger from his holster. He pointed it at Rotwang’s face. The handrail shook in the doctor’s grip. He was terrified, for certain, but
Rotwang’s hand wasn’t shaking the railing, the railing was shaking Rotwang’s hand.

A beam of blue light swept between them and across the stairwell from top to bottom. Half the room started to fall away—the half with Hagen. The commander screamed and fired one shot into
the air as daylight poured in and a whole corner of the building fell like a curtain to reveal the New York City skyline. Debris cascaded into the streets below, and Hagen went with it, falling
just as his men had fallen into the abyss at the bottom of the ocean, but without an apocalypse jumper to make the fall more pleasant. His face showed neither surprise, nor fear. Just
resignation.

Rotwang knew that face would haunt him forever.

The stairs sagged and crumbled. Duquesne grabbed Rotwang’s collar and snapped him back. Then they both ran, tearing down what remained of the stairwell and heaving themselves through a
door. Rotwang’s fingers dug into the carpet and he whimpered, clinging to the solid feeling of the floor and waiting for a complete collapse…

…which didn’t come.

Rotwang lifted his head off the carpet. Duquense was already up, pulling off his gas mask and throwing it aside. There was a laundry cart ahead of them and a maid behind it on the floor, crying
and praying. Her prayers were full of “Mercy, Lord” and “Not now, not now, Lord.” Duquesne bent down and grabbed her dress by the shoulder, shaking her hard until she saw
him.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey! Where are the other stairs? Get up. Take us to the other stairs.” Rotwang didn’t know that there were other stairs, but it was a worthy hope.
A tremor ran through the floor and the woman screamed.

“Shut up!” Duquesne shouted, dragging her to her feet. “Where are the other stairs?” Another tremor ran through the floor and the woman screamed. She pointed toward the
other end of the hall, spun out of Duquesne’s grasp and ran, sobbing and spouting gibberish. They followed her to a door at the opposite corner of the building. Duquesne opened it. The
stairwell was thick with hotel guests, pushing and shoving past each other like a tangle of rats heading for low ground. Duquesne and Rotwang merged with the flow until they exited the building.
The throng had stopped to gawk at the destruction. The rubble, the crushed cars, the dense dust cloud ringing the building like a halo. Duquesne pulled his handheld radio from his coat pocket.
“We’re moving to the southwest corner of the hotel. Pick us up there.”

After several more minutes of pushing through the screaming citizens and the debris, they found Duquesne’s black sedans idling in an alley across the street. The first driver’s face
was bloodless and he spoke with a boyish tremor: “Where are the others?”

Duquesne opened the suicide door and, ever the gentleman, allowed Rotwang to enter first before he slammed the door shut behind him. “Drive,” he said.

The driver gunned it in reverse down the alley and sped away from the destruction. Rotwang let his head fall back against the leather seat back. His body shook with exhaustion. When he wiped the
sweat off his forehead, his coat sleeve came away soiled with a blanket of gray soot. Filth seemed to follow him everywhere.

“For the record,” said Duquesne, “this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I signed up for the Nazi party.” Before Rotwang could say, “Me, too,” the
American had leaned his head against the window and passed out.

Rotwang still had his remote viewing receiver. It was caked in dust, just like him, but it was still working. The screen showed only static. The HS1 must have been recharging. He turned a dial
on the device and scrubbed the footage back to the moments before the confrontation in the salon. What was the HS1 even doing there? What was he looking for? What did he find? He had lingered at a
one kiosk in particular: a video featuring Orson Welles. Rotwang couldn’t hear it, but he could see the images, and he understood their significance. He watched the footage, then watched it
again, then again, and with each viewing, his mood lightened. A catastrophic day had not been in vain after all.

“Mr. Duquesne,” he said, but the American was sleeping. He shook the man’s knee. “Mr. Duquesne!”

Duquesne startled awake and regarded Rotwang as if he might have been a ghost. Maybe he was.

Duquesne expelled an anxious breath and relaxed back into his seat. “What’s up, doc?”

Rotwang gave the American his very best smile: “How much do you really love being a Nazi?”

T
HE REFLECTING
pool shimmered with lamplight and the reflections of the monuments that loomed at its far end. Henry, who
had infiltrated the fairgrounds through its drainage pipes, peered out from a crouched position in the shadows of a tree line running the pool’s perimeter. The cloaked Plus Ultra zeppelin,
still visible in his alternate spectrums, hovered over the fair’s theme center, a pair of structures known as the Trylon and Perisphere. The former, a 180-foot-tall spike-shaped tower,
doubled as the docking station for the invisible airship. The latter, a 180-foot-wide globe with a bumpy stucco exterior, was emblazoned with the words
Le Monde de Demain.
The World of
Tomorrow. The interior held an elaborate diorama for a model city of the future, rings of idyllic suburbs surrounding an urban center of glittering factories, humanity wrapped around a mechanical
heart. He was appalled by the notion.

It was the hidden complex beneath the Perisphere that concerned Henry the most. The tracking device placed the woman inside the structure eighty feet underground, as large as the whole
fairground above. But how to access it? Analyzing Clara’s comic book again, Henry concluded that the next step for the participants in Plus Ultra’s absurd alternate reality game was to
journey to the World’s Fair and find one of several secret entrances into the facility by looking for symbols or words carved into doorknobs, plaques, or lamp posts, all of them so subtle
that normal passers-by would miss them. It was just a matter of finding the nearest one to his beacon. That meant slipping by the ten roaming security guards and Plus Ultra’s electronic
surveillance.

Henry counted, watching and waiting for a break in the guards’ patrol pattern. He kept one hand on the satchel he’d acquired when he broke into a subway general store after his
recharge in the sewer. He’d needed a new set of clothes and a number of supplies to build his bomb. Rotwang had taught him that a few simple ingredients could be made into weapons of
tremendous power, requiring only a little knowledge and a little will. The one in his satchel was nothing compared to the sophisticated creations of Plus Ultra or the Nazi war machine, but it would
kill men. A few, important, men.

After nearly ten minutes, Henry saw an opportunity. He sprinted in the direction of the Perisphere, sticking to the shadows created by the trees. Before breaking into the open, he dumped a
quarter of his power, then activated his quick-charge capability. He estimated a seventy-four percent likelihood that any surveillance device in the area would be adversely affected by the sudden
power drain. At best, any anomalies Plus Ultra noticed would be seen as glitches. At worst, they would put them on alert. The twenty-six percent chance of failure made for an alarming margin of
error, but Henry didn’t have a choice. It was the only way. The world of tomorrow was counting on him. As long as he could get underground before they noticed him, he’d be fine.

All told, Henry slipped past two dozen digital snares between the Plaza of Light and the Transportation Zone. He ducked behind the colossal curved wall of another soulless techno-tomorrow
showcase, a corporate-sponsored attraction called Futurama.

He was now right on top of the beacon.

He spotted a Plus Ultra symbol on a doorbell next to a service entrance on the building’s east end. He scanned. No one was inside. The lock was child’s play. Inside, he found a
stockroom filled with props for Futurama’s many dioramas and displays, hundreds of miniature plastic cars, household appliances, and other machines. There was another door leading into the
public space. He again dropped a quarter of his charge, then entered. The one-thousand-square-foot exhibit, which imagined what America would be like in 1960, was a gentle theme park ride that took
visitors on a simulated aerial tour of a society redesigned and allegedly “reformed” by emerging technologies. Two cameras monitored the space at either end of the hall; one hidden in a
mirror, the other in an unlit light bulb. Both had gone dead. Good.

He scanned the interior and located another marker. The most direct path would require leaving the designated winding pathway and marching through a series of dioramas depicting skyscrapers,
flying machines, nuclear power plants, a fourteen-lane superhighway for automated cars, farms for genetically engineered crops, and elegant homes built with thoughtful integration into their
landscapes and futuristic features. Many hours and substantial care had gone into the attraction. He counted five hundred thousand tiny buildings, one million tiny trees, and ten thousand tiny
automobiles. Henry enjoyed a moment of unexpected pleasure by destroying it all. He took heavy, crushing steps over the foam core and plastic like a primordial god bringing judgment upon his
overreaching peoples. It was juvenile, but so satisfying he had to stop himself from crossing it a second time. The cameras would start rolling again, after all. For a moment he wondered why
pretend destruction felt so much more enjoyable than all the real havoc he’d created. What was the difference to a robot?

On the other side of the exhibit there was a janitorial closet with a
+U
embossed on the doorknob. Henry opened the door and found a typical cleaning closet stocked with
typical cleaning supplies. He pushed aside some boxes on a shelf to reveal a breaker box, which he opened. He scanned the labels.

He flipped the breaker labeled
LIFT
. The door automatically shut behind him. The closet light blinked out. Gears in the walls cranked. A bulb pulsed with amber light
once, twice, and then the floor started to sink.

The lift descended ten, twenty, fifty feet. Henry pressed himself into the side of the door, waiting for the ride to stop and for the door to open. He gripped the satchel and felt the weight of
its deadly contents pressed to his back. He was ready.

It was time to face the future.