Before Tomorrowland (6 page)

Plus Ultra
. He’d seen the words before, somewhere. He looked up at the man behind the table and saw a familiar pair of unblinking eyes staring back at him. No, not back at him. Into
him. It was the funny-looking man in the silver suit from the train station, and his skin was even more bronzed than Lee remembered.

“Hello,” he said. He spoke in a polite, lilting way that reminded Lee of the jazz singers on his mom’s records. The tone was comforting in contrast to his unnerving eyes.

“You get around, don’t you?” said Lee.

The man shrugged a single shoulder and smiled.

“So what are you hawking here?”

The bronze man swept his hand over the table. There were stereoscopes, paper and pencils, and a collection box with a sign that proclaimed:
LOOK! THINK! WIN! NAME THIS PLACE
,
WIN PRIZES!
There was also a stack of comic books.

“What do you think of ‘Betterburgh’ as a name for utopia?” asked Lee.

“It’s not my place to judge,” said the peddler. “But my guess is that it won’t win you any prizes.”

Lee chuckled and picked up one of the comics. A pair of thin sunglasses, maybe made from bamboo, hung inside the front cover. The production quality was better than Lee expected; the paper was
glossy-smooth. Some of the drawings were almost as good as his mom’s. “What’s Plus Ultra?”

“If you read the comic, you’ll find out,” said the vendor. He wasn’t as insistent as the last peddler, that’s for sure. “Do you enjoy science
fiction?”

“I’m just here with my mom. She loves all this stuff. She’d probably love this, too. It looks pretty good.”

“You don’t care for it.”

Lee squirmed. He didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings. “Maybe I don’t have much of an imagination. I just don’t go in for fantasy, you know?”

“I do,” said the man. “There are many good stories, but the best stories are true. You would agree?”

“I don’t know. I guess.” Lee checked to see if there was anyone else listening, then he spoke in a low voice: “It’s just, why put all this thought and energy into
something so useless? No offense.” Lee surprised himself. The guy was just so darn inviting, so easy talk to.

“No offense taken. I bet you’re the
sporting
type.”

“I like sports, yeah.”

“Baseball?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so. I’m a fan myself. Never played. I do plan to see Lou Gehrig at his last game.”

“Me too!” Lee said. “My mom got us tickets.”

“Such a sad circumstance,” said the man, although his face wasn’t any sadder than before. “I hope that science catches up to his troubles before it’s too
late.”

Lee nodded.

“Do you think it’s possible?” asked the man. “Do you believe we can gain the intelligence, knowledge, and resources to overcome diseases like the one that threatens his
existence, possibly in our lifetime?”

Lee tried to reply, but he couldn’t. He stared back at the strange man whose big eyes didn’t demand anything. They just waited.

“I don’t know,” said Lee. “I doubt it.”

“No? What about cancer?”

Now Lee felt an urge to leave. “I have to go. Good luck with your work here.” He held the comic out for him to take, but the man in the silver suit refused to claim it.

“It’s for you. Read it.”

“I don’t have any money. Sorry.”

“It’s not for sale. It’s a gift.”

“Ummm…why are you giving me a gift?”

“I’ve designated it to you alone,” said the curious man, ignoring his question. “Listen, for this is important: now that it’s yours, please don’t let anyone
else touch it or try to take it, at least until you’ve had a chance to read it cover to cover.”

Lee sighed and stuffed the comic in his back pocket, just to be done with this.

“My name’s Faustus,” said the man, extending his hand. Lee shook it, even as he was backing away. He jumped, surprised at the icy coldness of the other man’s hand.

“Thanks, Faustus.”

“It was a pleasure, Lee. Do read it.”

He knows my name?! How—

Then he remembered he was wearing a name badge. Lee, ashamed for creeping himself out, hurried away, peeking over his shoulder several times, wondering if Faustus was following him or watching
him to make sure he read the stupid comic book.

This is a bad idea.

Just as the words came to him, Lee remembered Clara. He snapped to alertness and picked up the pace, scanning the convention floor for his once-again disappeared mom. All the time, as he marched
up and down the rows, searching the crowd, he couldn’t lose the feeling of that dead, cold handshake.

I
T WAS
moments like these that Earhart wished she could fall off the face of the world. Again. Fritz Duquesne was one of
those effortlessly charismatic men who knew it, who made a mission of commanding the room, or in this case, the cab of her ’34 Packard Twelve. She had only worked with the agent for a few
weeks, but she had seen enough to know he could turn down the charm when needed. He could go perfectly unnoticed, even with that ridiculous mustache of his. She just wished he was doing it now. Her
irritation started the second he got to her car and asked if he could drive by making a joke about crashing. How original. It only got worse from there. The man just would not shut up.

“Happy anniversary, by the way,” he said. “How does it feel to be two years dead?”

Would. Not. Shut. Up!

He held out a pack of gum. She shook her head.

“I thought Beech-Nut was your favorite?”

“It used to be,” she said. She said it in such a way that she hoped he would take the hint to be quiet.

Earhart drove fast all the time, but she drove faster today, and not just because she wanted to scare Duquesne. She saw trails of white smoke spiraling up from the charred scrapyard beyond the
concrete flats. She sped past the line of fire trucks and police cars to get to the gate.

“New York’s finest. God bless ’em,” said Duquesne, pulling at a corner of his black waxed mustache. “Hopefully they’re not tromping all over the
evidence.”

Normally, the burning of an old scrapyard, even one with the remnants of Plus Ultra technology, wouldn’t have concerned her. But today wasn’t a normal day in the world of Plus Ultra.
It was, in fact, arguably the most important day in the storied group’s extraordinary history. The kind of day where it was imperative that nothing go wrong. Yet the night before, Plus Ultra
lost contact with a research vessel in the North Atlantic. Not unusual, given the nature of some of their experiments, but she had a search and rescue team en route, all the same. Now, this. She
hoped it was coincidence. But after a year on the job as Plus Ultra’s security chief, she had learned that hope wasn’t always the best attitude for an intelligence officer.

She braked to a hard stop, bucking Duquense from his draped position in the seat. “Whoa!” he said, straightening his vest. “Well, thanks for driving.”

“My pleasure,” she said, grabbing her weathered bomber jacket and stepping out of the convertible. She looked to the sky and saw her plane circling, waiting on her if needed. She
took a couple of steps toward the fence and waited for a policeman to come over and say his piece. “I’ll handle the cops,” she told Duquesne. “You wait for the others and
set up a CSI protocol.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

The policeman closed in, his round face already red. “What do you people think you’re doing? Get back in that car!”

Earhart whipped open her badge. “As you were, Sergeant. We gave your branch notice already. You’re excused.”

“I’m what?”

“Prepare any details you gathered for my partner and clear out your people.” Now the confused officer squinted at her ID. He recognized the FBI symbol, but he still couldn’t
fathom the woman behind it.

“I know. What’s the world coming to?” She let that sting him for a beat, then added: “My partner will ask for a debrief. Give him your full cooperation.”

She marched ahead, through the yard’s blown-out fence and out of their view. She clicked a button on her multifunction device (or “MFD,” as the Plus Ultra members
affectionately called them) and the false FBI symbol flattened out, faded, then reconfigured into a recording interface. Plus Ultra did make some useful toys.

Duquesne caught up. “They find anything?” she asked.

He jotted a quick note and tucked his own MFD in his front suit pocket. “Nah. Probably for the best, right?” Then he dropped his voice to a whisper: “He did ask if you were
related to, and I’m quoting, ‘that Lady Lindy gal.’”

“Funny,” she said.

The agent hiked his thumb at the fence, indicating the curious cop. “Isn’t that something we should take care of?”

“I don’t believe in angels, do you?”

That caught Duquesne off guard. “I guess not,” he said.

“I probably wouldn’t believe my eyes if one walked past us right now, with the wings and the halo, and the whole holy works. Seeing isn’t believing. People need to touch
it.”

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?”

She didn’t want to have this conversation, so she didn’t respond. “This is Earhart, reporting from forty point five seven seven north, seventy-four west,” she said,
speaking into her MFD. “It’s nine twenty-two
A
.
M
. The Plus Ultra scrapyard on Coney Island’s burned down, pretty much to the
ground. Will give it a look, then cover surrounding area. Stop.”

They were walking together through the smoking remains when Duquesne started in again. “You said you spent a whole year in…what are we calling this place again?”

“I didn’t say, you asked.”

Duquesne smiled and the laugh lines around his eyes crinkled tight. He aggravated her, but it was a handsome smile. “It’s just pretty impressive. How’d you know what was safe
to eat?”

“I just ate animals.”

“Huh!” He seemed impressed. “And what’s the strangest thing you ate?”

“My copilot.” She let Duquesne process that for a second. “I’m kidding. Now focus.”

They reached the scorched shell of The World of the Future exhibit. It was the epicenter of the blast. The ground was littered with fragments of metal, porcelain, and melted glass. Most
everything was unrecognizable.

Earhart was about to call it a bust when Duquesne kicked something out of the rubble. He held up the charred head of a robot. “Alas, poor Yorick.”

“Give me that,” snapped Earhart. She grabbed the head from Duquesne and examined the face. Both eyes were blown and wires dangled from the sockets and mouth. The metal skin was
blackened like an ashtray bottom but it retained its shape. Earhart tucked the head under her arm and pulled a pocketknife from her jacket.

“What is it?” he asked.

She spun it around and showed him a service hatch on the base of the skull. “These model B’s have memory chips here. Until they go offline, anything they see gets stored as video
footage.”

Duquesne smirked. “See there, ma’am, I’m useful when I don’t even know it.”

Earhart popped the hatch with her knife blade. She removed he chip from the mess of circuits, slid it into her MFD, and waited. The data came up as readable, with a date stamp:
JUL.02.1939.
She scrubbed the video track to its end, then back a few minutes, until she found movement. The picture was jittery and obscured by static, but just before the yard went bright
with explosion, she saw the outline of a man. The video skipped, then caught his whole silhouette from the waist up. She could just make out a few details: dark hair, bulky but athletic build,
precise movements.

Earhart’s stomach sank.

There was too much distortion to make an ID, but somehow Earhart knew she’d seen that figure before, and she knew exactly where.

When her plane got hit over the Pacific, there were only two pieces of evidence captured before she crashed through the jump point. The first was a blue light that engulfed their plane when the
right wing blew off, but no one had any theories about that. The other was a grainy black and white photo captured by her plane’s hull-mounted camera: the silhouette of a muscular man
standing on Howland Island’s beach, arms empty, facing up. A man whose outline was dreadfully similar to the one on her screen.