Before Tomorrowland (21 page)

S
TATIC ELECTRICITY
crackled as she smoothed down her drifting strands of hair. That happened every time Earhart entered the
wire transfer pavilion, and it always set her on edge. She was alone, and the room was quiet except for its signature low electrical hum. The dome was fifty feet in diameter with a round stage in
the center, and at the center of the stage, a copper sphere prickly with gold rods like quills on a porcupine. They corresponded to scores of rods lining the interior of the dome. They reminded her
of spikes in an iron maiden—another uncomfortable thought. She proceeded to the control panel next to the stage. Everything looked fine, but no matter how many times Tesla defended the safety
of his landline teleportation system, Earhart was never comfortable with what it did.

She checked her watch and wondered what was taking so long on the other end, or rather, other
ends.
Plus Ultra had wire transfer relay stations hidden all over the planet, a project five
years in the making and only recently completed. The technology, powered by batteries produced on the other world, was still glitchy, and they’d never used it to transmute and transport so
many people at once. She took a deep breath and tried to shake off her worry. The men she waited for were probably dawdling, as usual. Scientists were never on time, but they could have made a
special effort, given the circumstances.

She paced the floor, walking around the stage, listening to the low electrical hum. Henry’s words came back to her.

I saw you die.

She hadn’t been prepared to see him like that, dehumanized and demented. His accusations may not have been true, but they still stung. They stung bad. Her confusion made her feel angry and
weak.

“Ms. Earhart?”

Earhart turned and saw Clara Brackett emerge from one of several corridors that funneled into the pavilion. The woman removed her Plus Ultra glasses and stared up into the dome. Her hair started
to rise, and she reached up to pat it down with a laugh.

“That happens to me every time in here,” said Earhart. “Can I help you with something?”

“Oh, no, I just…I was coming back from the bathroom and my glasses started talking again, like this was part of the tour. Then I must have taken a wrong turn.”

Earhart smiled. “Wrong turn, huh?” It would be quite a feat to take a wrong turn all the way across the base and into a compound crammed with strange technology that was nothing like
their sleeping quarters.

“Yes,” said Clara, smoothing down her hair again with nervous hands. “My memory isn’t what it used to be…since this illness.” She said it sort of
halfheartedly, like she didn’t want to be using that as an excuse.

There was an awkward pause while Earhart thought of something to say. The story about getting turned around might not be exactly true, but what did it matter? Plus Ultra chose Clara because she
was a fascinated dreamer. You couldn’t blame her for wanting to know more.

“I’m sorry,” said Earhart. “That must be tough. Your illness must be tough, I mean.”

Clara shrugged it off. “I’ll live,” she said, and she did a little drumroll in the air with her hands. “Ba-dum-CH!”

Earhart couldn’t think of anything to say to that, either.

“I know,” Clara said. “My son hates it when I try to be funny. I guess that’s most kids, right? I try to keep positive, but what’s positive to a teenage boy,
anyway?” She hardly let that land before she turned her head to the ceiling. “What is this place?”

Earhart shook her head and chuckled. How might she explain something that transmuted your body into electrical energy and sent it across the globe through cables? “This is the, uh, this is
the wire transfer room. This was to have been the second-to-last stop on your comic book scavenger hunt. Perhaps you’d be using it right now to travel to the grand finale, if it wasn’t
for the fact that we’re suspending the reveal.”

“They’re suspending it?”

“Well, probably. Plus Ultra leadership’s talking it over tonight.”

Clara looked around at the machinery; the rods, the stage, the podium. “I think there was a display back at the hotel about this, but I didn’t check it out. How does it work? I mean,
what does it do?”

“It’s a teleport. It takes you places instantly.”

“No,” Clara said, with an incredulous smile. “Really?”

Earhart nodded. “It gives me the willies, but it works. C’mere, I’ll show you.” Earhart ushered her to the podium and punched in a code. A series of numbers came up on
the display. “See there? That’s latitude, longitude, plus elevation. It’s got a fail-safe so you don’t end up in a mountain or something. There’s a bunch of these
programmed in for different places in our network, or, if you’re feeling lucky, you can just type one in.”

Clara kept her eyes on the display. “Where was it going to take me?” she asked.

Earhart wasn’t sure about telling her much more. On the other hand, if the leadership council intended to suspend the dress rehearsal indefinitely, they’d probably have to keep Clara
and her boy quarantined for the duration, in which case Plus Ultra’s secrets would be nigh impossible to keep from them. Either way, their lives were set to be very different. The amount of
power Plus Ultra gave itself to impact all of mankind staggered and even alarmed Earhart. To serve Plus Ultra in their giant endeavors, you had to force yourself not to think about how giant they
really were.

“It was going to take you to a hangar on Long Island,” she said. “The last part of the reveal was supposed to be a flight to the other world. You would climb into a plane and
the plane would autopilot you there and back. Pretty wild, huh?”

She noticed the woman had become quiet. Clara put her hand out to steady herself. Earhart jumped to support her as she stumbled. “Mrs. Brackett? Here, sit here,” she said, and she
led Clara over to the stage steps. After she helped her sit, she kept a hand on her arm. “We have a doctor on base, I’ll go get him—”

“No, no, I’m okay,” Clara said. “I’ll just sit here a moment and I’ll be fine. I can’t believe…I can’t believe I’m here talking to
you like this, what a crazy thing.”

“You’re sure you don’t want the doctor?” asked Earhart.

Clara waved her hand at Earhart. “This is par for the course,” she said, shifting. “I hate doctors.”

“All right.” Earhart sat down next to her.

Clara took long, slow breaths. “When I was in the hotel, I saw this display, you know, on the ‘medicine of the future.’ So many of these amazing technologies, you’ve
already invented them…” Earhart braced herself for the question she knew Clara was about to ask. The woman spoke casually, like she could have been talking about anything. “Do
they have a cure for cancer already, too?”

Earhart shook her head. Clara nodded and shrugged, letting her off the hook.

“Are they going to give you a new one?”

Mrs. Brackett was pointing at Amelia’s beat-up flight jacket. It had been in rough shape before her tangle with Henry, and now it had a couple of pretty bad tears. She held one of her arms
out and twisted it, looking the sleeve over.

“Well…scientists don’t care much about clothes. That’s okay, though. This jacket’s saved my life at least twice since I got it. It’d be bad luck to replace
it.”

“Can I ask one more thing?” said Clara.

Earhart thumbed one of the rips and turned back to Clara. She knew the rest of this question, too, but it was a lot easier to answer. “You want to know what happened to me?”

Clara nodded.

“Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t know myself what happened until today?”

That definitely confused Clara. “What do you mean?”

“I didn’t know the truth.” Earhart stared across the pavilion. “I was on a jump. That’s what we call a dimensional crossing. My round-the-world flight with Fred
Noonan was a smokescreen for the real work, testing new ways to do these jumps. It’s actually extremely difficult to get to the other world. The first generation of Plus Ultra used bombs to
blow temporary portals in the sky until the second generation realized they were poisoning the earth with radioactive fallout. There was a whole drama around this, but long story short, the third
generation of Plus Ultra committed to a plan of developing better, safer ways to get to the other world. We were testing an idea that Tesla actually came up with around the turn of the century,
very hypothetical—”

“The particle beam,” said Clara, referring to the explanation in the comic book.

“No,” said Earhart. “I didn’t think it was wise to share
all
of our secrets at once, so I made the guys fudge some details. I mean, what if something went horribly
wrong and our greatest treasures fell into the wrong hands?” They both laughed hard, and it felt good. “The technique we were testing was called ‘the running start.’ Freddy
was with me. We had a Faustus on board, too. We attempted a jump in South America, then another in India, then another in Asia. Nothing was working. We got to our final jump theater, the Central
Pacific. The fabric between dimensions is quite thin in spots there, so it provided our best opportunity to make a jump. Just as we reached the right speed, we were hit. Everyone assumed we died in
a crash. What really happened was that we punched into the other world. I ejected. The robot survived the crash. Freddy…”

Earhart lapsed into silence. She smiled nervously and blushed, embarrassed by her lack of composure. “We waited to be rescued. I tried to keep busy. Charted the land with Faustus. Checked
on the old labs from back in the heyday of the atomic era of Plus Ultra. Plus Ultra finally got through again, using this new bit of business which I barely understand called the Grid. By then, it
had been a year, and the world had their story about what happened, and we stuck to it.”

Clara shook her head in amazement. “Your husband must have been shattered.”

“He was always popular,” she said. “He probably had a few options even before I disappeared. I don’t begrudge him that. He never begrudged me. I think he might be more
shattered if we follow through with all of this and everyone learns that I’m actually alive and well.”

“You’re going to tell everyone the truth? About you?”

“That’s the plan,” she said, unable to hide her mixed feelings on the matter. “We imagine much of what we want to share with the public will be hard to accept, despite so
many years of trying to stretch their imagination for it. They need living proof. And Howard Hughes needs someone the public can trust to sell them in the new tourism business he’s bound and
determined to launch. Say hello to the public face of TransDimensional Airways, offering flights daily to The New Frontier!”

She hoped Clara might laugh. She didn’t. “Seems like a lonely life, being part of all this with so many secrets. I don’t know if I could do it.”

Earhart gently elbowed her in the ribs. “A little too late, isn’t it?”

Bare feet smacking against concrete approached. Clara’s son, Lee, ran out of the hallway and his cheeks were flushed. “There you are!” he shouted at his mother. Tesla walked
behind him. The boy hurried over and apologized to Earhart: “
She always does this.
Are you trying to give me a heart attack, Mom?” His speech was full of drama, but Earhart could
see his heart wasn’t in it. There was a sense of wonder in his eyes, and she thought his mom must have noticed that, too.

“I know, I’m hopeless,” said Clara. “What have you got there?”

Lee showed her the pamphlet in his hand. He turned to Tesla, who stood a few paces behind, letting them have their family moment. “Well, I was looking for you, and then Mr. Tesla showed me
their spaceship display area. You know these people have actually been to
the moon
?”

Clara looked at Earhart. “Is that a fudge, too?”

Earhart winked.

Lee was a few dozen excited words into a description of a spaceship called the
Capricorn
when a blast of air from the stage assaulted them with an ear-rattling
whoosh
! Earhart
turned to calm the Bracketts as tendrils of electricity branched out from the the dome’s metal rods and met the spikes protruding from the pod. Earhart raced to the control panel to track the
energy levels and make sure the DNA packages of each traveler was kept separate from each other. She saw silhouettes of three men beginning to form inside the chamber. They solidified into
three-dimensional forms, then stepped through the light and into the room. The sound and fury subsided, leaving Einstein, Szilard, and H.G. Wells standing above them.

“Gentlemen,” said Tesla. “Welcome to the fairgrounds.”

Einstein, a handkerchief to his mouth, skipped the pleasantries. “Henry Stevens?!”

“I do love it when you read the memos,” said Earhart.

“Once again, we see it is appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity,” said Einstein, directing the comment at Szilard.

“Don’t start with me, Albert. Would someone explain to me how that boy can possibly be alive?!”

“When I find Rotwang,” said Earhart. “I’ll make sure to tell you, right after I beat the truth out of him.”