Before Tomorrowland
Copyright © 2015 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Disney Press, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
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ISBN 978-1-4847-1160-6
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For Ben, Lauren, and Nathan:
Build your future, kids. Make her proud.
—J.J.
To Lauren, Ben, and Nathan, and their parents. All my best.
—J.C.
H
E WAS
going to fly.
He closed his eyes and felt the wind on his face as he leaned out over the passenger door. The leather seat of the Arab Super Sports car stuck to his knees in the June heat. He hung on tighter
when the gears shifted and his father slowed for a turn.
“Get your head back in the car, Henry!”
Henry Stevens, age ten, sat down and opened his eyes. His dad, Max, was shaking his head and smirking. He wasn’t mad—Max Stevens never got mad—but you sure wanted to listen
when he gave an order.
“Your mother’s never going to let us have any fun if I bring you back in little pieces.”
Max leaned over and tousled Henry’s rust-colored hair. Henry caught a glimpse of himself reflected in his dad’s big aviator glasses, and his freckled face was all smile. He prized
these weekend outings with his dad more than just about anything. More than building carts made of orange crates and baby buggy wheels and racing them with his best friend, Nick. More than
blackberry cobbler. And he loved his mom’s blackberry cobbler.
Henry didn’t see his dad much. Max worked long shifts, and he lived an hour away, but when they got together on the weekends, their adventures were incredible; or sometimes just silly.
Once, they attempted to spend a day traveling only by pogo stick. The experiment lasted just an hour and ended with a sprained ankle for Max and a bloody nose for Henry. His dad used to tell Henry
that he worked hard, and he played hard. His mother said there was such a thing as “playing too hard.” Henry couldn’t understand that idea. His dad did just about everything
right. He wouldn’t have been the top mechanic at his Army Air Service base otherwise—a fact Henry shared at any opportunity.
It had been hard, learning to live such a fractured life after the divorce. But Henry was starting to roll with it.
Max cranked the steering wheel and maneuvered the car into a parking stall near the Santa Monica Pier. His leather flight jacket crinkled as he turned to his son and took off his glasses. There
was a glint in his eyes Henry had never seen before. “Ready for a real thrill?”
Henry bolted from his own seat, almost tripping onto the pavement on the way out.
He shielded his eyes and looked to the pier and its thrill rides. He heard the off-key carnival music and smelled the popcorn and cotton candy. It was glorious anticipation. Ever since
he’d been big enough—and big enough by his dad’s standards was pretty small—Henry had loved thrill rides. The faster the better. Anything that came close to the fantasy of
the screaming planes his father pieced together was fair game to Henry Stevens. Speed and more speed.
“Let’s do that roller coaster first! Then the Zipper, then the bumper cars. Then let’s do the coaster again—”
“We’re not going on any rides today, fella. We’re going to a special exhibit. It’s brand-new.”
Exhibit?
That didn’t sound good. “What kind of exhibit?”
“A science exhibit.
The World of the Future
.” He sounded like a carnival barker. “You’ll love it.”
Henry was sure he wouldn’t. His heart sank. Why would his dad tell him they were going to the pier when all he wanted to do was shuffle around some yawn-inducing thing that felt like
school? It sounded more like the sort of thing his mother liked. Museums and libraries and picnic lunches at the arboretum with her snooty boyfriend, Laurence. Boring.
Working up his courage, he said, “I don’t want to go to an exhibit.”
His dad didn’t slow down. He just gave him the line he always gave when Henry annoyed him—
“Well, them’s the breaks, kid.”
Henry followed his dad, feet dragging, onto the pier and past a couple of little kid rides. He thought about suggesting they just do some of those instead.
Bumper boats! He would settle for
bumper boats!
But he didn’t want to risk annoying his dad again.
Then they turned a corner around a fun house, and Henry saw it.
Looming over them on a wide expanse of boardwalk was a silver structure that shimmered so brightly in the noon sun that Henry had to squint. It was wide and circular, like a massive pie plate,
or one of those squatty spaceships on the covers of the science pulps. It rotated slowly on a big platform. Its sides were inlaid with angled patterns that reminded him of a book Laurence had on
his coffee table. He remembered because he had asked Laurence if it was a book on Egypt, and Laurence made some annoying sound and said, “Hardly. It’s art deco.” He said
“hardly” a lot, and it usually meant Henry was wrong about something.
“What do you think? Should we check it out?” Max asked.
Henry nodded.
They walked to a ticket window where his dad bought a fistful of tokens from a woman with dark skin so flawless, and brown eyes so wide and pure, her visage seemed unreal. An ivory badge on her
ebony dress gave her a name:
ANNIE N
.
CANNY
.
“Welcome to the world of tomorrow,” she said. “Please rise to meet it.”
They stepped onto some kind of ascending conveyor belt that extended to the building. Henry grabbed for his dad’s sleeve as the big moving sidewalk cranked to life under them and glided
them toward the attraction’s dark and gaping entrance.
“Scared?” asked Max.
“No!” Henry lied.
“Imagine a world of infinite possibilities, powered by endless energy that would come at no cost, to ourselves or our environment, rich with invention that would not only improve life as
we know it, but redefine it. For the better.” A narrator’s deep voice boomed louder and louder. The music shrieked to crescendo. Henry’s teeth rattled. And then the lights came
on. He blinked; the brilliance stung, but his eyes adjusted, and he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
“This world is coming.
And we are making it for you.
Welcome to the future.”
The lights came on. He blinked; the brilliance stung, but his eyes adjusted and he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
They were inside a dome with walls so white and clean Henry couldn’t even judge its size. Large model zeppelins and sleek model airplanes circled high above them. Metal walkways
crisscrossed above the floor in front of them. Just ahead, kiosks crowded the room, demonstrating technologies Henry didn’t recognize, or didn’t quite understand, or in some cases,
didn’t think possible. Below them, large model submarines propelled through an expanse of crystal clear water, accompanied by a school of exotic fish sporting colors so vibrant they
didn’t seem real.
“This way,” Max said.
Henry’s father led him past a table with a sheet of refined, clear quartz connected to a keyboard by a wire. He saw a menu of options printed on a cream-colored card:
TO WATCH
STEAMBOAT WILLIE
,
PRESS F1
.
TO LEARN BASIC COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
,
PRESS F2
. They paused briefly at a kiosk demonstrating a tabletop box that could cook a slab of beef in seconds,
and even more briefly to examine a model for a colossal power plant (
LARGER THAN THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA!
boasted a placard) that could generate enough energy to power half
the continent. They lingered to watch a film projected on a massive screen, showing a group of men in turn-of-the-century top hats and finery. The men stood a ways off from a skyscraper-sized
turret that jutted from the side of a desert butte. The cannon fired a bullet-shaped capsule into the evening sky toward the moon. Henry wanted to watch more of it, but Max kept mushing him
forward. He began to get the sense that his dad had been there before, and was eager to get somewhere specific.
Then Henry saw the robots, and he insisted that they come to a full stop. On a dining room set arranged on a raised stage, a copper-plated mechanical man sporting a butler’s tux served
food from a platter to a family of four, represented by lifelike mannequins, each identified by nametags as
NICHOLAS
,
MARIE
,
BUCKY
, and
ATHENA
—
THE NUCLEAR FAMILY
. A second automaton leaned over the mother and asked with a tinny voice, “More gel-a-tin, madam?” Henry
laughed when the robot’s mouth lit up as he talked.
He couldn’t believe it. He looked up at his dad to see if it was a trick, but he knew it couldn’t be. They were
real
robots, moving and talking all by themselves. There
couldn’t have been anything more incredible to Henry.
At least, that’s what he thought.
“Look at this,” said Max.
He turned Henry by the shoulder and pointed toward a line of visitors at the end of the platform circling a perfectly smooth black sphere the size of a small house. A hatch opened. One customer
exited, dazed but smiling; another customer entered, hesitant and giggly. The door closed and sealed behind him. An engine revved, causing the entire walkway to tremble, and the giant pod started
to spin.
Max placed a token in Henry’s palm.
They stepped toward the attraction, passing stalls demonstrating “teleportation” and “genetic engineering.” Then his dad pushed him toward the end of the queue with a
gentle shove. After a half dozen customers emerged from the sphere, delighted and bewildered, Henry reached the front of the line and gave his dad a thumbs-up. The hatch opened for him. It was his
turn.