Before Tomorrowland (7 page)
“Duquesne, get that seaplane in the water now.”
She was off like a shot, bounding toward the estuary where her crimson Lockheed Vega idled, door open. Duquesne followed close on her heels, tapping on his MFD. “Hang on a minute,”
he said. “What do I tell Tesla?”
“Let me worry about Tesla,” said Earhart, who was already worrying about quite a bit. The smart play would be to pull every Faustus unit off the street and suspend the risky
operation they were undertaking, a dress rehearsal for the larger undertaking Plus Ultra was planning for the Fourth of July. Tesla had invested his entire life into the work, and she had come to
care much for him and his dream. She didn’t relish breaking his heart.
“What do you want me to do?”
She threw Duquesne her keys. “Take care of my car. Feel free to give it a wash, too.”
Earhart took a head-mount radio from the pilot and pulled herself onboard by a wing strut. She slammed the door shut and took to the sky. What should have been the happiest moment of her day was
darkened by dread. Flying low and fast, she kept her eyes on the horizon, but all she could see was the grainy black and white photo from that day her plane went down.
Maybe it was just the shadows and distortion in the robot’s footage that triggered her memory. She only knew for certain that Plus Ultra was under attack. Whether by a man, or a whole
organization, the short time between attacks suggested one thing: there would be more, and soon.
H
UGO LOHMAN
shrieked at the top of his withering lungs: “Hit him harder!”
Rotwang doubled over Hagen’s fist. Although he’d lost count of the blows, each hurt as bad as the first. He felt a hand grab his thinning hair and pull his face up. He couldn’t
see much besides a pale blur in front of him that issued creaking speech. “I have no grace left,” said Lohman. “You promised me infinite life. I gave you money, time, resources.
You repay me with death and disgrace!”
Rotwang struggled to stand between the two men holding him between their shoulders. His mouth was salty with blood as he sputtered, “I did not kill those men.”
“Again!” Lohman shouted, and this time Rotwang’s vision blacked out altogether. The submarine’s diesel fumes choked him as reality faded, but Lohman’s sickly sweet
breath cut through sharpest when he leaned in close and hissed, “No grace.”
When Rotwang woke, his vision was clearer, only obscured by a crust of blood and sweat. He recognized the walls of his cabin and the soot-covered reading light above his berth. He thought he
smelled Lohman’s breath, but when he turned his head, he only saw the empty leather reading chair from his apartment. One week ago, when the HS1 fled, the Nazis had burned Rotwang’s
other creature comforts, but Lohman made them spare that old leather chair. “This is the last thing that is yours,” he’d said. “There is no room on a U-boat for a chair like
this. We are taking it to remind you of what comfort you enjoyed through our hospitality and what you stand to lose. It is a handsome chair. I shall enjoy sitting in it, I think, when I visit
you.” The old man was full of that flourish.
Rotwang swung his legs over the berth and propped himself up. He ached, but it was all dull and the world felt slower. Morphine, perhaps. What a poor solution to terrible pain. One day, he
thought, he would feel no pain at all. His mind, which was the only thing he cared for about himself, would be in a perfect, unfeeling body, powered by a uranium core with a half-life of five
hundred years.
The beatings were all the more galling to Rotwang because their current predicament was Lohman’s own damn fault. Rotwang had long exhorted him to keep the HS1 deactivated while he’d
toiled on the consciousness transfer mechanism. But Lohman wouldn’t have it. He’d loved to watch the HS1 walk and talk, work and exercise, even sleep. He’d made the HS1 drill with
his soldiers. He made Rotwang augment the HS1’s defense mechanisms and had the HS1 practice with them daily. Lohman had needed the spectacle to nurture his desperate hope for more life. But
keeping the HS1 active also nourished the risk that the increasingly frustrated spirit trapped inside the machine might snap. “That’s your problem, not mine,” Lohman would hiss.
“Keep your guinea pig in check.”
Rotwang had tried. And for years, he’d succeeded. He’d convinced the boy that the leaders of Plus Ultra were careless futurists obsessed with the speed, ease, power, and efficiency
of technology, indifferent to the cost. He’d convinced the boy that they’d forced him to conduct the consciousness transfer experiment, “just to see what would happen.”
He’d convinced the boy that they were merely using the Nazis, not aligning with them, and that once Rotwang had gotten what he needed, they would launch a more heroic mission: saving the
world from all oppression, be it Plus Ultra’s mad science or Hitler’s bid for world domination. Through it all, Rotwang had helped the boy feel more human by completing his education
and promising to “cure” him one day. Rotwang was father, doctor, teacher, friend to the boy, and the boy had bought it.
It was an Oscar-worthy performance.
Of course, what Rotwang had really wanted was to put his own mind in the HS1, then to use all those infernal devices Lohman had made him install to kill him, then to fight his way out of
Germany. He’d been so close. All that had remained was finding time away from Lohman’s gaze to purge the boy’s consciousness and download his own into the core. How could he have
let the HS1 outwit him? Rotwang knew the boy had been growing restless, but he’d never thought he’d grown desperate enough to distrust him. He broke into Rotwang’s safe. He saw
the correspondence with the mole. He came to a conclusion, possibly even the correct one, and he ran. He feared death just like Rotwang. Of course he ran.
Rotwang set his feet down, forced himself to stand, and stumbled to his water basin.
He splashed water on his face, but before he could brave a look in the mirror, the cabin door unlatched. Kurt, the cadet stationed to guard his room, stepped inside. He was golden blond, pale as
moonlight, and couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The boy did a quick turn, planted his heels and addressed him squarely: “Herr Rotwang, I will help make you presentable. You will
join Herr Lohman in his quarters at once. I am to make you chamber-ready.”
Chamber-ready.
There was a time when Rotwang shuddered at those words. What did it say about him that he no longer did?
“A personal dresser. How fancy. Can I get some room service, too?”
Kurt kept his bloodless lips pressed shut.
Rotwang sighed. “Do what you will.”
Kurt stripped him, scrubbed him with soap, sterilized him with powder, and dressed him in a cream cotton gown still warm from its special drying place on the engine block. He then pulled
Rotwang’s voluminous gray-streaked hair back and gathered it into a net.
“Do you need a wheelchair, Doctor, or can you walk?”
“I’ll walk,” said Rotwang. “I think you’ve pushed me around enough for today.”
Rotwang shuffled out of the room and into the corridor. He used the handholds mounted in the iron walls as he made his way toward the bow of the U-boat. His legs felt heavy, as if wrapped in
cement. His right eyeball throbbed. He was reminded anew of how much he despised his aging body and how he yearned to be liberated from it. That was the only thing he had in common with the
decrepit monster to whom he was enslaved. Or so Rotwang liked to tell himself.
Lohman’s quarters were located at the head of the submarine’s command deck. It was no ordinary cabin, but rather a bedroom-sized hyperbaric chamber rich with oxygen, designed to
preserve the mysteriously long-lived warrior’s frail body. Kurt rolled back the vinyl hatch and allowed Rotwang to enter ahead of him. The roomy space made of clear plastic and ribbed with
tubes and decorated with helmets from various cultures, Roman, Japanese, and Medieval, all choice selections from Lohman’s vast collection of antique armor in Peenemunde. Most prominent was a
complete set of Gothic body armor, a steel-plated suit detailed with fluting to resemble the fine Victorian dress and flecked with crusted blood. There were those who said Lohman was old enough to
have worn the armor himself. But people said a lot of things about Lohman. The legend that always most interested Rotwang was the one that claimed that Lohman had once volunteered for an experiment
conducted by a notorious quack geneticist named Friedrich Bofinger to create human super-soldiers. Whatever Bofinger had done to Lohman, he had not made him strong enough to be impervious to the
chemical weapons of the Great War. Still, he was enough of an übermensch to cling to life despite two decades of deterioration, albeit painfully. No one in the world wanted to be rid of his
body more than Lohman. Except, of course, for the scientist he had hired to turn him from a superman into an iron man.
Lohman cut an appalling figure at all times, but he appeared particularly hideous right now, wearing only a white cotton robe. He sat slouched behind a metal folding table covered with maps and
papers, sipping from a long black straw leading into a metal cup. His limbs were skinny as sticks. His hairless, pewter-tinged skin was either shriveled or speckled with tan liver spots. He would
have been a sublimely horrid specimen except for his most ironic feature, a beautiful pair of round doe eyes, soft and sad. Lohman at ninety-nine years old had come to resemble one of the grotesque
hybrid experiments that forged his legend: He was what might have happened if you spliced a plucked vulture with an adorable baby deer.
“
Guten tag
, Werner,” wheezed Lohman. “Would you care for a peppermint schnapps?”
“No, but you could interest me in an empty bucket. I think I might have to vomit.”
Lohman’s large eyes grew wider at the thought of his sterile refuge being polluted with a spill of rank germs. Then he smirked. “You’re pulling my leg.”
Rotwang thought about what might happen if he literally pulled Lohman’s leg. It made him smile. “Don’t worry, Doctor. I’ll keep it together.”
Lohman snorted and pointed a crooked finger at the stool next to his desk. “Sit,” he said as he turned his attention back to examining a collection of blueprints, some ripped and
taped together, and redacted documents, some torn. Rotwang recognized them: it was the intelligence provided by an ally within Plus Ultra. In fact, the mole, a professed Nazi sympathizer, had
helped him finally complete the work of replicating the transfer mechanism by slipping him key data from his original research. He had provided other secrets to prove his value to the Third Reich,
too. Schematics for science vessel called the
Watt
. Research on radioactive fallout from an experiment dubbed “The Tunguska Incident.” Designs for an airplane hangar wired to
service automated planes. Most of it defied Lohman’s understanding, and some of it described things that Rotwang wasn’t too keen to explain, including the one Plus Ultra secret he was
desperate to possess for himself.
The door to the chamber opened and Commander Hagen entered. He, too, was dressed in a cream-colored gown. He took position behind Lohman and crossed his arms. Rotwang noticed that his knuckles
were scabbed.
“So glad you could join us,” said Lohman. “Shoulders, please. Use the gloves.”
Hagen almost jumped to remove a pair of surgical rubbers from a box on the table. He pulled them over his hands and began to massage Lohman’s slight, bony shoulders. The old man murmured
with contentment.
“I’ve been going through these Plus Ultra papers to see if there is anything that may prove useful in reacquiring the prize your promised me,” said Lohman. “What is
this?” He held a flyer for a science fiction convention. The mole had written a note across the bottom:
MAJOR EVENT
.
MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT PLANNED
.
LEADERSHIP TO BE PRESENT
,
SUPPOSED TO BE A BIG STEP FOR PLUS ULTRA
.
“I honestly have no idea,” said Rotwang. “I know Plus Ultra was interested in sponsoring events that encouraged futuristic thinking, but I know nothing about this one in
particular or what they might announce.” He had been a gifted actor since childhood. He made sure to keep eye contact with Lohman as he spoke. It helped that most of what he said happened to
be the truth.