Before Tomorrowland (2 page)

The interior was dark and stark: a leather chair with a security harness, surrounded by a honeycomb of black glass. The hatch sealed.
HISSSSS.
And then Henry heard nothing. The space was
soundproof.

“Greetings, explorer!”

Henry jumped. The chirpy salutation came from another robot. This one was attached at the waist to a metal track that circled the room. “Please take a seat and buckle your security
harness.”

Henry sat and brought the shoulder straps over his head and snapped them into place. They felt loose for a second, but then they tightened, pulling him back until the fit was snug. He almost
yelped when the robot extended a pair of telescoping metal arms with clawlike hands to check the fit of the harness. After two tugs, the robot retracted and rotated out of view. “Please make
yourself comfortable, and enjoy the ride!” The seat tilted back until Henry looked straight up into the black honeycomb.

It was dead quiet.

The engine revved, then quieted to a hum, and then intensified all over again until the roar of a blast shook the room. He was thrust deep into his chair. Was he really launching into the sky?
Henry’s brain knew it was impossible, but his churning stomach wasn’t convinced.

A voice spoke to him, narrating his experience, but Henry was too disoriented to listen. The opaque glass illuminated with a swirl of color, then turned clear as the engine roar faded. The
sphere pushed through wisps of cloud toward a ring of fire in a turquoise sky. Henry remembered that film about the cannon shooting a capsule at the moon, and his clammy hands clenched tight at the
thought.

But the moon was not Henry’s destination. As soon as he sailed through the blazing hoop in the high atmosphere, the blue sky abruptly turned copper. The hum of the engine quieted and the
sphere seemed to lose speed. Just as the sky was about to turn into outer space, Henry’s pod turned upside down and began to descend. Breaking through the clouds, he beheld terrain unlike any
he had seen with his own eyes or had even seen illustrated in a magazine or textbook. Lush jungle extended across the land with foliage sporting vibrant, iridescent colors. Next he skimmed the
surface of a boiling lake and Henry felt the soles of his shoes get warm. He passed through a waterfall—the sphere rocked but stayed level—and gained speed again as the sphere shot
through a valley toward the horizon. A huge crimson moon crossed the sky and night passed in seconds to day on the other side of the world. The roaring engine was like music swelling to a
crescendo…and then it was over.

The glass went dark. Silence. The robot whirled around to unfasten the security harness as the hatch opened.
HISSSSSS
. He was back in California.

Henry’s legs shook as he stepped down from the chair. “Thank you for visiting!” the robot said. “We hope you’ll journey with us again!”

His father was waiting for him as he stepped out of the sphere. The grin on Max’s face might have been bigger than his own. “What’d you think, fella?”

Henry just shook his head. He didn’t have words. His dad laughed. “Pretty fantastic simulation, huh?”

“It wasn’t real?” asked Henry. His voice sounded small in his own ears.

“Well…it could be. I’m going to find out.”

“What do you mean?”

His dad threw his arm around Henry’s shoulders. “I just accepted a job with the people in charge of this place. The men who built it. They’re some of the best and brightest
from all over the world. You might have even heard of a couple of ’em. Howard Hughes? I’ll be working for him.”

“Doing what?” Henry asked.

Max nodded back to the big sphere and smiled. “Making that real.”

Henry stared at his dad. “Can I come to work with you?
Please?
”

“Son, I’m going to have to jump through hoops to even let you visit. They take security very seriously. Like working for the military, but with less war.” He smiled at his
joke. “I’m sure we can work something out. Let’s get some lunch and go ride that roller coaster.”

Henry shuffled his feet, glanced back at the sphere, then at his dad.

“You wanna do it again?”

Henry nodded profusely.

His dad handed him a half dozen tokens. “Don’t get sick on me.”

Henry ran back up the walkway, almost knocking over a young girl who stared at the Nuclear Family dinner display. He was too giddy to care.

My dad just got a job making the future!

When he climbed back into the simulation, this time he heard the narration over the engine roar.

“This is a journey into what may be humanity’s next days—into the worlds of tomorrow…”

He was going to fly.

Henry grinned as light flooded the darkened pod and he escaped the gravity of the ordinary world at thrilling speed.

It was the happiest he’d ever been.

It was the happiest he’d ever be.

The following story takes place between July 2 and July 4 of 1939 in the greater New York City area. Many of the characters and events described here are well known to
history. A few of them are not.

L
EE BRACKETT
took off his wool cap and wiped his forehead. It wasn’t the just the heat getting to him. He’d
told his mom, twice and clearly, to wait there for him, under the impossible-to-miss crystal clock suspended from the vaulted ceiling, while he got their luggage. Instead, she’d ditched him
and gone off to God knew where. He should have expected her to resist him and go her own way like a stubborn little kid. Where could she be? She wasn’t in the women’s lounge with its
peeling yellow wallpaper and screaming babies. She wasn’t at the newsstand, where a vendor with an ink-smudged smock pinned the week’s new comic books to a clothesline. Several dark
scenarios cycled through Lee’s mind, including what might happen if she didn’t take the pills she’d needed to take an hour earlier. Normally, playing caretaker to his mom made him
feel grown-up, but at that moment, Lee, age seventeen, felt as helpless as one of those infants in the ladies’ lounge.

He sat down on the largest suitcase and forced himself to take a deep breath. Unfortunately, every time he tried to clear his head and compose himself, he just heard his father’s voice
ring louder and louder:
This is a bad idea.
Deep, discouraging, disapproving. Lee hadn’t heard the sound of his father’s actual voice in weeks, maybe months, but it echoed in
every cursive scratch on the postcard from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Lee felt the flush of anger that usually followed thoughts of his father these days. “All his best” for the last year was a postcard every other day and an envelope of cash every
week. Lee did the rest. Coming up on the early train from Edison, it was giving her the seizure medication, applying the blanket, removing the blanket, adjusting the pillow for her left side where
she was weak, escorting her to the bathroom—three times. The doctor thought the treatments over the past year had at least slowed the growth of the cancer, but he also said he didn’t
know for sure. “Keep her spirits up, son,” the doc had told him. “Enjoyment and positivity can work wonders, as much as any medicine.”

Hence this lousy trip. When his mom first started talking about it, Lee’s instinct had been the same as his father’s. Then she’d pitched him on the Yankees game. “Take me
to New York City, and I’ll take you to a game,” she’d said. “Come on. It’ll be a chance for you to be a kid again for a change.” It was an appealing offer. It
became even more appealing when the Yankees announced a celebration for Lou Gehrig to be held the same weekend his mom wanted
(needed)
to be in Manhattan.

“If you can get us tickets to that game, I’ll take you to New York,” he said. They were broke, so he thought that would be the end of it, but three days later she handed him
the tickets. Just holding them, his reservations evaporated. A small-town teenager chaperoning a possibly terminally ill woman on a visit to the biggest, busiest, most stress-inducing metropolis in
America? Sure! No sweat! And wouldn’t she
love it.

That’s probably what she was off doing right then. Loving it, while he sat on an oversized steel suitcase, coming apart.

“Well, would you look at that!”

Lee spun around so fast at the sound of her voice that the suitcase he used for a seat wobbled, and both he and it collapsed to the tile floor. There she was, standing in the middle of the
concourse, gazing up at the cathedral windows with something like binoculars held up to her eyes. In her long black coat and with her drawing tube slung over one shoulder, she looked like a
soldier.

Lee sprang up. He gathered their things and pinned a thick folder—labeled
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW TO SURVIVE THIS TRIP
—under his chin. “Mom!” he
yelled. She didn’t hear him. He waddled forward as fast as he could, stopping to punt his duffel bag across the floor ahead of him. “Mom!” He was done being self-conscious about
the New Yorkers’ seven million stares. She still didn’t hear him.

He was right behind her. “Mom, what are you—”

“There you are!” she said with the brightest smile he’d ever seen on her.

“There
I am?
I said to wait by the crystal clock!”

“I had to get directions to the hotel.”

He dropped one of the bags he held to wave the survival folder in her face. “Mom! I
have
directions! I told you to wait—”

“Oh, bygones. Look what that funny-looking man over there gave me!”

Lee wanted to rip into her, to let her know that a woman in her condition couldn’t wander off, and a few other choice things. And yet, seeing her round face, with her flushed cheeks and
darting brown eyes, he couldn’t. Her renewed energy was just so beautiful to see. He felt calm, and with a near smile, he said, “Mom,
please
—don’t do that again.
Okay?”

She saluted him. “Yes, sir! Now look at this.” She put two fingers under his chin, tilted his head back, and placed her binocular contraption to his eyes. It was, in fact, a toy
stereoscope. The illuminated three dimensional image showed a field of wheat under a blazing sun. “See how vibrant the colors are!” she said. “The gold of the wheat, the glow
around the sky with that deep blue. Isn’t it almost supernatural? I wish I could paint colors like that.”

Clara pushed a lever. A new image rotated into view. It showed a massive electrical tower topped by a rib-cage dome sitting on a hill. She launched into an explanation, words gushing out of her
like water from a busted main: “I’d love to know how they fabricated this one, because the tower is clearly supposed to be Wardenclyffe Tower. I told you about Wardenclyffe Tower,
right? Nikola Tesla’s folly? Would have harvested clean energy out of the earth and distributed it wirelessly across the planet? It would have broadcast radio waves, too, with text and
pictures! Amazing! But Wardenclyffe Tower doesn’t sit on a hill, and that hill is unlike anything you’d find in nature, not to mention that Nikola Tesla never finished Wardenclyffe, so
the tower pictured here can’t possibly be real either—”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Breathe.”

Clara sighed. “Anyway, it must be a photo-illustration of some sort, but the funny-looking man insists it’s an honest-to-God photograph.” She pointed. Lee couldn’t
believe he hadn’t seen him before, even with the crowd. The man sat at a card table stacked high with boxes of stereoscopes and affixed with a sign:
THE PLUS ULTRA
VIEWMASTER! BRINGING YOU VISTAS FROM FURTHER BEYOND!
FOR FREE!
He had bronze skin, a tailored silver suit, a dark leather briefcase, and square-rimmed glasses that
magnified his eyes. He never seemed to blink.

“That is one funny-looking man,” Lee agreed.

“He asked me what I thought the place in the picture should be called,” his mom said. “I always liked ‘Graceland’ for utopia. How about you?”

“Mom, if there is one thing I haven’t given much thought to in my life so far, it’s names for a utopian state. How about ‘Betterburgh’?”