Before Tomorrowland (30 page)

“It took us two years to build the Grid and over a decade to build the tower,” Mr. Szilard growled at Hughes. “Do you have a spare of either in your back pocket?!”

Mr. Hughes spit his words at the Hungarian: “Don’t condescend to me, you weakling! You know there are other ways—”

“And none of them are safe, and most of them do more damage than good,” said Mr. Tesla.

“This makes no sense. I thought we resolved that the New Frontier was good for the world, with or without Hitler,” said Hughes.

“But we were operating from a position of strength,” said Mr. Tesla. “Our infrastructure was in place, we had means to defend it. Starting over again, but now with Hitler
watching and waiting while we are most vulnerable? Too risky. For us, and for the world.”

Lee watched their drama through a little window framed by ugly curtains. Hughes stood up from the table where Mr. Tesla, Ms. Earhart, and Professor Einstein all sat. Mr. Szilard didn’t
smoke so much as chew a pipe stem where he sat in the corner. “If you ever want to make your dreams come true again, just try doing it without my money,” said Mr. Hughes. “See how
far you get.” He turned his back on the other leaders and stormed into the basement to take the next wire transfer out.

There was a scruffy black dog in the house sitting next to Professor Einstein. It was hot, but happy, lolling its tongue out of its long, grinning mouth. For a quiet minute, the professor just
scratched its head and rubbed its ears. Then he turned to Mr. Tesla.

“Nikola, you have changed my mind,” he said. “Our dreams will keep.”

“Albert,” Szilard began, “if you truly agree the Nazis are so much a threat…” When Einstein looked up, face full of anguish, Szilard didn’t finish his
thought.

Mr. Tesla stared at the floor, weary and beaten. Lee thought his voice sounded older as he spoke: “Then it’s decided. We will send notice to the membership. They are to cease all
Plus Ultra activities and deactivate all Plus Ultra technologies, effective immediately, until further notice.”

“What about us?” Ms. Earhart asked.

“What secrets of ours remain must be protected from the Nazis. Take whatever agents you need to do the work, but keep the operation small. We can’t afford another
Duquesne.”

Ms. Earhart seemed to take those last words personally, but she nodded. “Our old base would make a good HQ,” she said.

“Amelia, I do not expect you to continue living as you have for us,” said Tesla. “If you wished to stay the course and go public, I would understand.”

“Just when things are getting exciting? Not a chance,” said Earhart. “Besides, somebody has to take care of you, and it isn’t going to be your pigeons.”

“What kind of life is that, taking care of a wobbly old man?”

“A good one, Nikola.”

Tesla turned away, and Earhart looked up at Lee. He didn’t know what made him blush more: getting caught eavesdropping, or getting caught eavesdropping with tears in his eyes. But then she
winked at him, and he almost laughed.

“Szilard?” said Einstein. “Go ahead and bring me the letters, please.”

Mr. Szilard took a moment to register what the professor had said. Then he hopped out of his chair and opened a nearby desk drawer to pull out some sheets of paper with messy penmanship scrawled
across them. He handed those to Professor Einstein. The white-haired man gazed down at them over his bulb nose while Mr. Tesla, Mr. Szilard, and Ms. Earhart watched and waited.

Lee wasn’t sure what was happening, but it seemed to have all of them on edge. Einstein scanned the letters front to back, then took a fountain pen from the table and signed, twice. He
stretched his arm out to Szilard. “Get them to Sachs as soon as you can. He’ll want to set up a meeting with President Roosevelt to ensure we have communicated our message clearly and
thoroughly. God save us.” He rose and put a hand on the small of his back, stretching up. “Now if you all don’t mind, I’m going to bed.
Gute nacht
.”

Lee looked down at his mom’s face where it rested on his shoulder. She breathed softly, and the ocean breeze blew her hair around her open mouth. He’d hardly ever noticed how pretty
she was.

Suddenly, her eyes tensed, and she stirred, shifting. “Lee?” she said.

“Hey. I’m right here,” he said. She let out a breath and held him tight. “Let’s get you inside. This isn’t any place to rest.”

She squinted at him and yawned. “No, it’s better out here,” she said, rubbing an eye. “Have you slept, honey?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t believe you could the way they were yelling.” Inside the house, he saw Ms. Earhart collapsed on a leather couch. The others had gone
off.

“I guess Dad was right,” said Lee.

“About what?”

“We weren’t prepared for New York.”

She laughed and patted the knee on his bad leg. “Ow!” he said.

“Oh, sorry,” she said with a snort, which only made her laugh harder. “I don’t know. I think we’re doing pretty damn well.”

Lee wanted to tell her that he agreed with her, but he didn’t want to lose it. He didn’t know which emotion surged within him. It probably wasn’t just one, but he recognized
gratitude, and when he did, he suddenly understood what Earhart’s wink meant. “They brought our stuff from the hotel,” he said, handing her a glass of water and her pill box.
“You skipped your meds yesterday. Don’t do that again.”

“Sorry, Doctor, I was a little busy trying not to get killed by Nazis.” She popped the pill and raised the glass to him.
“L’chiam.”
She swallowed it,
wrinkling her nose and shaking her head like she always did. She set the glass back down on the deck and wiped her mouth. “Is the game still on?”

They were going to listen to a repeat of the Yankees game they’d missed via a little transistor radio, but it had become too hard to hear with all the racket from inside. Now it was quiet.
Lee reached over to the radio and turned up the volume.

Clara rested her head back against Lee’s shoulder and he put his arm around her. They stared out at the ocean together. Over the radio, Lou Gehrig gave a speech: his last words as a first
basemen for the New York Yankees. He spoke about his battle with disease, but it was mostly about the people around him. His gratitude for being able to play the game. He talked about his family,
his wife, his mother-in-law, different ballplayers and managers.

Lee took a deep breath and gave Clara’s shoulders a squeeze as Gehrig reached the end:

“Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth…I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.
Thank you.”

His mom took a deep breath of the salty air and smiled: “Amen.”

A
LINE OF
smoke drifted up into the broad blue sky from the broken aircraft burning in a clearing in the midst of dense
jungle. She leaned against a tree with wide, spiraling branches and saw the moon up above through its leaves. It was just as strange and big as she remembered. She’d missed it.

The young doctor held her arm in his right hand and the little hook and line in his left. The alien wonder around him wasn’t helping him finish the stitches. A weird bird flew out of the
jungle beside them, and the young man couldn’t help watching it flap its fluorescent wings back toward the wreck and land on top of the ship’s starboard hatch, cawing down at the
invaders below. A dozen crewmembers worked there, pulling supplies from the silver hull with its big block letters:
T E S L A
.

“You almost finished there, Doc?” Earhart asked. He smirked, the brat, and pulled another stitch through the side of her arm. He was lucky he hadn’t tried to cut her jacket off
like he’d wanted to. The wound obviously wasn’t that bad if he could take time to gawk at the local flora and fauna. Even now that he was past thirty, Earhart couldn’t see Lee
Brackett as anything but the kid she’d met in New York.

“Don’t say it,” she warned.

“What?”

“Don’t say it.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Lee replied, all innocence. “Of course, I understand if you’re touchy about it…”

“Don’t—”

“Since I’ve never seen you
land
a plane.” She yanked her arm away from him. “Your stitches!”

She rolled her sleeve back down and scooped up her pack. “Were you thinking we’d have a picnic, or did you want to cover some ground?”

He reached down and stuffed his medical kit into his own backpack. Inside the flap, she saw a number of Lee’s personal effects, including Clara’s sketchbook of futuristic drawings.
He took it everywhere, even though she always warned him to leave it at home; you never knew what you’d lose out in the field, let alone in the other world. He was stubborn, though, in that
way that doesn’t look stubborn. It got on her last nerve.

He stuffed his medical kit into his own backpack. “I have everything I need,” he said. “Switch it on.”

Earhart pulled out her new MFD and punched its touch screen, missing the simulated button twice and feeling old. Why hadn’t she just kept the radar data on her old one? It worked just
fine, mostly.

“You want help?” Lee asked. She pretended not to hear. The red beacon pulsed on screen, marking a distance of four point three miles from their current position. She took a big step
over the tree roots and started off. “Okay,” she heard him say. Then he turned back to their crew and yelled, “This way, folks!”

They cut through jungle for the first couple of miles, and everyone was dazzled by the wide variety of wildlife. Earhart couldn’t believe she’d eaten most of them back when she had
been stranded there with Faustus.

Good old Faustus.

When the war started, she’d wanted to keep the Faustus units active, but the vote didn’t go her way. The bots themselves agreed it was for the best, but Earhart shed honest-to-God
tears when they all marched into the incinerator. The Faustus who’d accompanied her during that year in the other world was one of the better companions she’d had. It took orders. It
kept quiet when there wasn’t anything that needed to be said. It could also make her laugh. She wondered how they’d managed to give Faustus a sense of humor. Plus Ultra had been full of
little mysteries like that; little bits of genius you took for granted.

They came out of the jungle and climbed a long, gradual slope toward the sound of crashing waves. They were now within half a mile of the signal. A year ago, when they’d finished the tower
in the Himalayas and began surveying the other world to see how it had changed during the long, dark decade, the last thing they’d expected to detect was a faint pulse of uranium.
They’d had the means to send a signal into the other world and shut it down.

When she saw him, Earhart was glad she’d never tried it.

He sat against a mossy rock atop a towering cliff, facing the ocean. His hollow sockets were dark, and his body was discolored, oxidized, and scratched to such a degree that Earhart
double-checked her signal to make sure they were in the right location.

Lee kneeled down at his side and spoke his name just above a whisper: “Henry?”

His eyes pulsed on with dim blue light and looked Lee up and down. “Lee Brackett,” he said, and his voice sounded warmer and more familiar to Earhart than she remembered. It
wasn’t his human voice, the voice of little Henry from the airfield, but it seemed closer to that than the cold, hollow speech she had heard in New York thirteen years ago. “I’m
glad I saved a little power for this occasion. I didn’t think it would be you.”

“No?” asked Lee.

“No,” he said. “I hoped it would be your mother. I wanted to feel some of her enthusiasm one more time.”

Lee smiled at the memory. “She was very special,” he said.

This seemed to catch Henry off guard. “Was,” he repeated. He bowed his head, and Earhart swallowed a lump in her throat. “I am sorry. I had hoped that maybe science might have
progressed to…” He didn’t finish.

“No,” said Lee, not shying away from Henry. “Not yet.”

Earhart couldn’t stand the subject any longer. “Henry…how did you survive?”

“I’m a strong son of a gun, that’s how,” said Henry. “I have very little power left. Since you’re here, Amelia, I want to apologize.”