Before Tomorrowland (13 page)

He sat in bed under a sheet with his caregiver’s journal propped against one knee. He hadn’t pulled the shade last night and his bed was closer to the window so she had a couple
fewer steps to the bathroom down the hall. The sun woke him. It wasn’t even over the short buildings yet, but he could tell it would be another hot day. Not good for her. He looked out the
open window at the post office across the street. The mailmen were loading delivery bins onto their trucks.

Will change tickets at Penn Station after breakfast.

He wouldn’t get to see Lou Gehrig at the game. So? His mom wasn’t much of a baseball fan, even if she did say his battle was “inspiring.” That was fine for her; Lee
didn’t want to think about it. He had to focus on what was right, on what would serve his mom, and that meant cutting her adventure short. He hated to do it, but he couldn’t go on with
the fun and games while wondering if she was going to collapse again. It was too much.

This is a bad idea.
He heard his father’s words with a different tone this morning, coming to him softly in the quiet:
I told you so.

Lee threw off the blanket and swung his legs over the side of the squeaking bed, then stopped himself with a wince, trying to quiet the springs. He’d forgotten the springs. His mom gave a
little groan and hunkered into her mattress, but she didn’t wake. Lee relaxed, and bent forward little by little until he was free of his terrible bed.

What needed to happen?
Breakfast.
He pulled on a fresh change of clothes and stepped into the hallway. As he eased the door back to its frame, he saw her again, still sleeping, facing him
now.

Most days he could focus on the little tasks instead of the fact that his mom was dying, but the collapse yesterday brought it all back to the front. In the first days, before they knew what was
going on, she had headaches, then headaches and seizures. She finally went to the doctor after she threw up at his cousin’s recital. When his parents came home from the doctor, it was the
first time he had heard his father say “mother” and “cancer” in that way he did. Lee hadn’t felt anything. Then she stepped through the door and gave him a damned hug,
and he broke down.

His father hit the road partway through her first round of treatment. The bills weren’t small, after all. Lee took her to therapy, then they taught him how to administer the medicine, and
for a while, things were pretty good. Fewer seizures, not as much throwing up, better energy. Then two months ago the stuff with her side started, the acute weakness, and they gave her medicine
again. She wouldn’t take the high doses anymore, though. She claimed the weakness was from something else and she wouldn’t go in for any more scans. “Too expensive,” she
said. “Waste of money.” So here they were.

There was a little cafeteria on the first floor with coffee and bagels. The only other person there was a tall man with his face buried in a paper. He had to have been one of the most muscular
men Lee had ever seen. He had arms and legs like tree trunks, and his hands held the paper perfectly still, like a statue. He was probably one of the military guys who stayed at Sloane House on
leave. Lee thought about asking if he was, but the man never put his reading material down. He never even rustled the paper.

Lee balanced two bagels and two coffees on a paper plate and added cream for hers and lots of sugar for his.
Good thing I don’t have acute weakness in my side,
he thought.
I
might drop this on their almost-clean floor. Now that’s thinking positive!

On the way back to the stairs, he passed the clerk.

“Excuse me, you can’t take that to your room,” said the clerk.

“What?”

“You can’t take that to your room. We don’t want to attract roaches.”

You already have them,
thought Lee. “I understand, but my mother’s not feeling well, and I don’t think she can make it downstairs without something to eat.”

“Your mother?” asked the clerk.

Lee paused, remembering. “Did I say my mother? That’s embarrassing...I mean, my
wife
.”

The clerk gave Lee a strange look, but he didn’t say anything else except, “No crumbs, or you pay an extra cleaning fee.”

“Thank you,” Lee said, and he hustled up the stairs, doing his best not to slosh the coffee.

He was halfway down the hall when his mother screamed.

He dropped the plate. The coffee splashed on the carpet runner and up his right pant leg. He ran to the door and yanked on the knob, but he’d locked the door on his way out. He fumbled for
the room keys, jammed the brass one into the lock, and threw open the door.

She stood in her nightgown at the window. She was holding the comic book she took from the creepy man at WorldCon and wearing the wooden glasses that came with it. She turned to Lee and laughed
like a little girl. “I put them on to read the comic, but it didn’t look any different, so I went to throw them away and—here! Look at this!”

He stood in the doorway a moment, exasperated. She was fine, and his heart felt like it was going to beat out of his throat. His fear turned into fury, and it flared higher when he looked behind
himself to the mess of breakfast scattered across the hallway. She yelled at him again, and he snapped his eyes back on her. She waved her arms at him like a crazy person, still smiling.
“Lee, get over here!”

“What?!” he yelled back at her. Grinning, she tried to put the glasses on his face, but he held up a hand to shove them away. “No, just stop, Mom!”

“Come on!” she said, pressing the glasses toward him again.

“I said stop!” This time she did, but her expression didn’t darken at all. She was waiting for him to come around again, like a dog wanting to play catch. No regard for why he
might be upset. He could have broken the damn glasses. He took a deep breath and stared at her. “You know how terrifying it is to hear you wailing and—”

She took the opportunity of him standing there saying his piece to shove the glasses on his face. He was too stunned by her insensitivity to react. She went around his back and pushed him in
front of the window and he felt the floorboards give under her excited hopping up and down. Then she stopped, waiting for his response.

“Isn’t it amazing?!”

Lee just saw the post office and the empty street. “No,” he said, low and fed up. He took another breath and tried,
tried
to just let her explain whatever she was so excited
about. “What? Is it darker?”

“No!” she said, confused.

“What am I supposed to be seeing?!”

A guest in the next room pounded on their wall, shouting something about “animals,” but Clara didn’t stop.

“The tower! The post office is a tower, don’t you see it? You see the tubes carrying people up, and the train running through it, and there’s a, there’s a big, tropical
jungle on the second floor?”

“A
jungle
?”

“Yes, with glass over it? You don’t see it?”

“I see the post office, Mom.”

She ran across the room and grabbed a frock from the closet. “Well, I don’t know why you can’t see it, but I’m going outside. There has to be more! It’s
incredible!”

Lee’s anger became worry. What was happening to her?

As she dressed and rambled about “the future,” Lee felt a heavy feeling in his chest. It was the same one from when she had walked through the door and given him a hug two years ago.
He couldn’t let himself think. If she was hallucinating now, that was something new, and it was a lot more than sad. It was terrifying.

E
ARHART TUMBLED
out of the copper pod gagging, both desperate for something cold and sweet to drink and desperate to throw
up everything in her stomach at the same time. Such was the effect on the human body of traveling by wire transfer, Plus Ultra’s highly unreliable and temperamental private teleportation
system. The experience of being transmuted into pure energy and transported over telephone landlines was so profoundly unpleasant, most members of Plus Ultra didn’t use it unless emergency
demanded. Earhart abhorred the technology. In her tempered point of view, she considered it a violation of nature, an affront to God, and just plain not fun.

But it was an emergency.

Plus Ultra’s unfolding security crisis had progressed from suspicious to alarming to bizarre in the fifteen hours since the scrapyard explosion. A Faustus unit and an agent, both at the
science fiction convention, had gone silent. If that was a coincidence, she’d eat her plane. The Faustus robots’ hive mind functionality meant that if one malfunctioned as the
agent’s text had indicated, it was pretty certain the rest of the robots would already be troubleshooting the issue. It smacked of foul play, just like the incident on the
Watt
.
Yesterday she’d taken a report from the ship’s captain, a young man named Cousteau, while visiting him aboard the civilian vessel that rescued him and his crew. He’d been on the
Watt
’s command deck at nine in the evening, guiding his dive crew on a survey of the Hudson Canyon trench, when they’d started taking on water. By the time they traced the leak
to the locked communications room, it was too late. When Cousteau threw open the door, he only saw water pouring through a perfectly sheared breach, and no sign of the cause.

Were they really hunting just one lone nut? If not, who was he working for? A foreign power? A terrorist organization? What did they want? Why hadn’t they acted in the two years since?
Why shoot her down at all? Why her? Why?!

She cursed, then settled herself. She had to prepare for the conversation ahead. Regardless of their enemy’s identity and motives, her mission was to protect Plus Ultra’s greatest
assets, including the man in the beach house over her head. As she sat on the sandy floor of his unfinished basement, recovering from her sickening trip and waiting for her equipment to materialize
in the pod, she resolved to be firm with him. If he were your typical Plus Ultra egomaniac, it would have been easier; it was always a joy, however rare, to puncture those arrogant windbags.

Albert Einstein was different.

She could hear him now, arguing in German with another man upstairs. The second voice belonged to Leo Szilard, another member of Plus Ultra, and an old friend of Einstein’s. He was staying
the summer there at the little Long Island beach house with one purpose: to convince the professor to make the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

“Peace cannot be kept by force,” she heard Einstein plead. “It can only be—”

“‘—achieved by understanding,’ yes, yes, so you’ve said many times,” said Szilard. “But there is nothing more to understand here, Albert. They are evil,
and they have fission, and they are a breakthrough away from having the bomb.”

“And we still have many breakthroughs to go ourselves. We can’t keep punching holes in our world, Leo, or there will be no world to save.”

“Which is why we need to act now! We can’t afford to be a day late to those clever devils, because they will use it the second they have it!”

Thirty-one years earlier, Plus Ultra had developed the atom bomb as a means to open dimensional rifts. It was one of many extraordinary innovations that the group had denied the world for fear
that mankind simply wasn’t ready for them. With the atomic bomb, the concern was twofold. First, Plus Ultra’s charter prohibited the development of weapons or the weaponization of
technologies. Second, Plus Ultra hadn’t yet found a way to create a tamer formulation of the bomb. It was one thing to create a big messy bang to open a hole in the fabric of space-time for a
few seconds. It was another thing to create a smaller one that could obliterate a city and kill thousands of people. Even if they were Nazis.

The wire transfer pod began to talk.

“Recalibration complete. Activating battery pack. Please stand away from the chamber, as contents may explode upon arrival. Thank you.”

Earhart shook her head.
We are a crazy and silly people
.

The pod began to rattle and hum. When it settled, she opened the door and removed the heavy duffel bag waiting for her. She grabbed it and trudged upstairs to the door. She tried the handle.
Locked.
Wow. He actually read the security memo.
Einstein rarely read memos, and even more rarely followed them. She knocked. The argument on the other side of the door didn’t stop,
and no one answered. She knocked louder. There was silence, some nervous whispering, and then the sound of footsteps stomping to the door. It flew open.

The first thing she saw was his shock of white hair. The second thing she saw was the baseball bat in Einstein’s hand, raised above his head.

“Professor,” she said, trying not to laugh. “We need to talk.”

Einstein exhaled with relief. “
Ach du liebe
, Amelia! You couldn’t have called first?”

“You’re so old-fashioned, Albert,” she said.

Einstein stepped aside and Earhart entered. The first things she saw were the open windows, allowing a cool, salty breeze into the beach house. Earhart frowned.
So much for following the
security memo.
Szilard sat at a small dining room table drinking coffee and nodded his doughy head at her in awkward greeting.