Before Tomorrowland (26 page)

“No, I was a
child
. You took me before I died and you put me in
this…
” he hit his own chest, “…for your
progress.
I was a
child.
I was
Plus Ultra’s biggest fan and you destroyed me and let me go on,
destroyed.
”

Lee must have missed something, because when he searched his mom’s face, he saw that some kind of understanding had dawned in her eyes.

Faustus stood only a couple of inches from Henry, staring at him through those big, ridiculous lenses. “I’m sorry,” said the robot.

“You’re
sorry
,” replied Henry, mocking him. “Of course. Is that all?”

“You have been wronged, sir, but you operate under a falsehood. Dr. Werner Rotwang is the one who conducted a neural transfer of Henry Stevens, unsanctioned by Plus Ultra, into your
current form—”

“Who paid for it?”
hissed Henry. “Where did these metals and circuits come from? Who produced the technology to build it?”

Faustus’s face softened. Lee remembered what it felt like to talk to the silver one back at the convention about those difficult things. Henry kept still while the golden robot spoke:
“It should not have happened, Henry. I am sorry.” When the robot said those words, Lee thought Henry’s face softened too, just a bit.

“It’s likely small comfort,” Faustus continued, “but I want you to know this: After Rotwang fled his lab and left your human body behind, we put all our energy into
scouring the earth for him. We searched for six months—”

“To capture me,” Henry interrupted.

“To bring Rotwang to justice,” said Faustus. “Ms. Earhart led the search team. She never knew you survived. None of us did. We would not have captured you, we would have
offered you a home. With us.”

Clara squeezed Lee’s arm as they watched. The Faustus robot stood with his arms open at his sides.

“May I offer that to you now?” asked Faustus.

Offer him a place?
Had Faustus blown a circuit? Lee was baffled. So was Henry.

“There’s no place for me,” he said, and his voice got louder. “What’s my place? With
you?!
”

“If you’d like,” said Faustus. “With your unique talents, you might assist me and my fellow—”

“I am not a robot!”

Henry punched Faustus in the face, twisting his head around at a grotesque angle. The golden robot sputtered a string of garbled code and hit the floor. The glow of his golden suit flickered,
strobe-lighting the entire hall. Henry stomped and smashed and cursed Faustus into the floor. Black, oily fluid wept from the corners of Henry’s eyes and the droplets bounced down over
Faustus’ flailing, flickering limbs.

Lee grabbed his mom and wheeled her back toward the subway, but the diamond-shaped passage had sealed shut. “Put on your glasses!” Lee shouted, and Clara did. He turned her back
around and they ran toward the silver doors. When they were only a few feet away, the doors slid open on their own, and Lee and his mom bolted through them…

Into a dead end. Lee and Clara were trapped in a small, concrete square of a room with a rim of light around its top. Lee looked back and saw Henry sprinting toward them. The doors closed just
as the robot man reached the threshold, and when he slammed into them, it sounded like a car wreck. The scream of wrenching metal arrested him: Henry had his fingers mashed between the big doors,
and he was prying them open.

“Lee,” said his mom, taking his face in her hands and kissing his cheek. They sank to the floor together, watching Henry push the doors wider and wider, revealing his trembling,
oil-streaked face. The skin on his fingers was peeled away, showing the metal claws beneath, and his eyes glowed blue.

Lee held tight to his mom and shut his eyes as she rocked him in her arms. She whispered her song from when he was a little boy:
“Bye-o-baby, bye-o-baby, bye-o-baby, go to
sleep…”
but she couldn’t get the rest out. He kept his eyes clenched shut, but that was no escape: he kept picturing that terrible beam of blue light. Henry’s furious
gallop shook the ground, and then it didn’t. His mother squeezed his arm twice. He opened his eyes. Henry sat near them on the ground, face turned away, his hands clenched and dug into the
smooth concrete under his legs like a child’s hands would dig into sand on a beach. He stared off into the wall. Because Henry didn’t breathe, he seemed dead to Lee.

“I don’t want to kill you,” he said. His voice was different. The power had gone out of it. “I just want all this to be gone. Every part of it, gone.”

Lee was about to pull his mom up again and run back outside the chamber when the sound of machinery activating echoed through the concrete and the ceiling began to press down toward them. He
panicked: were they going to be crushed? But then the ceiling slid away, and Lee realized he had it all wrong. They were inside an elevator, going up. Twenty yards shy of a rocky, uneven roof, the
lift rose out of the chamber and stopped, flush with a wide, flat expanse of concrete. They had emerged in the middle of a megastructure that was part airplane hangar, part cavern. Lee imagined
that the space, roughly the size of a football stadium, was located within a mountain. Hundreds of sleek aircraft surrounded them, all lined up to face a half mile of runway that stretched to the
giant, concave opening. Beyond was the ocean, shining in the moonlight. Lee could smell the sea salt. A breeze tossed his hair.

“They can’t cure her, you know,” Henry said, his voice as soft as it had ever been. “I’m sorry. They can do many things, but they can’t do that.”

Henry’s words chilled him.
He knows? About the cancer?
But instead of asking “how,” Lee found himself saying, “They will. Someday, they will.”

“Nothing good has come from their striving. I’m proof of that.”

Clara pulled herself away from Lee, who reached after her, confused. What she did next shocked him. She walked over beside Henry, kneeled down, and sat back on her heels. Then she spoke to the
robot man like he was a lost kid. “Henry,” she said, “you could destroy every machine in the world. People will always build them again, whether they’re a Nikola Tesla or a
man like your father. You can’t keep going like this.”

Henry never met her eyes, but for a long time he didn’t say anything more, until he made up his mind for good.

“Thank you, Clara, but you are wrong about me, and wrong about them,” he said. “It’s time to end this.”

H
ENRY COUNTED
the planes. There were two hundred forty-eight jet propulsion aircraft, all pointed out toward the ocean.
Half a kilometer of runway lay between the nose of the lead planes and the hangar bay, which extended the length of the space, twenty meters above the water.

He began running tactical analysis to calculate the most efficient way to destroy them all. Doing the math had the added benefit of distracting him from his irrational thoughts. He told himself
to focus. He told himself that his mission still meant something. The doubt he felt was a glitch that needed to be ignored.
Focus.

Henry stood up and switched to X-ray vision. He scanned the facility’s foundation. It took no time to spot the cables running under the hangar and into the ocean, connecting to a massive
structure anchored to the ocean floor, waiting to be released. It was the Grid. Forty-eight crisscrossing electrical lines capable of carrying more power than he could estimate ran across the ocean
floor toward the horizon, so far that he couldn’t see their end. His analysis suggested it was the work of several years, and an extraordinary fortune. The creative engineering of the
mechanism and the extraordinary physics suggested by it staggered him…

Focus.

If any Plus Ultra leaders had survived his bomb, they’d be following soon. Earhart didn’t take well to dying, after all. Henry needed to act if he was going to do this. He ran
through a quick series of plans and settled on one; take a plane, follow the lines to their termination point, bail out, dive, and tear the thing in half. He wondered if the Grid’s energy
would release upon its destruction. Since his transference, Henry had never encountered anything with enough power to destroy him. Maybe now was his chance.

You can’t keep going like this.

Clara’s words slowed him. So did the reminder of his father. Max Stevens had given his life to Plus Ultra. He had believed in their mission and he wanted to make a better world for his
son. His work for Plus Ultra had paved the way for the fleet of aircraft before him…

Henry’s defense systems activated. His sensors detected movement behind a plane three hundred yards away, near the mouth of a hangar. Something larger than a man, built to walk on two
legs, moved toward them from the far side of the hangar.

Henry looked back at the Bracketts. “Run. Protect yourselves.”

“Don’t, Henry,” pleaded Clara. “Don’t destroy this!”

Henry shouted at Lee, “You do not understand. There are others here, and they are not Plus Ultra. Take her now!”

When Henry turned to confront the wicked thing clanking his way, there was not one, but seven of them. He tried to assume a combat stance, but he couldn’t move his legs. He couldn’t
move any part of himself. He tried to quick-drain his battery and siphon energy from the death squad bearing down on him, but that trick was no longer working, because they were using it on him. He
had never felt more trapped inside the prison of his mechanical body than now, when it was completely failing him. The faces behind thick glass visors sported sneering smirks; they knew they had
him. One of them, cackling, was enjoying the victory more than the others. Dr. Werner Rotwang raised a fist, and the company halted.

And now there was another set of sounds, too, coming from over the ocean. Most of his analytical systems were now offline, but he didn’t need them. He had known the sound since his
earliest days: they were prop engines.

Henry read Rotwang’s lips as he gave a command over the jumper’s radio:
“The HS1 has been neutralized. You may land when ready.”

In his peripheral vision, Henry could just see the flecks of moonlight shining on a dozen aircraft as they approached the hangar. He recognized their profiles as Dornier Do 325s; experimental
German Luftwaffe. The whine of their engines intensified as they leveled off over the ocean, roared straight through the hangar’s illusory wall, and came to a stop in near-perfect
formation.

The men in the metal suits saluted the planes, and they all marched out to meet their comrades save one. Rotwang approached Henry. Every hissing hydraulic step left spiderweb cracks in the
concrete. The jumper began to decompress, releasing blasts of pressurized air. All the hatches retracted, and Rotwang stepped out of his metal shell. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and
gently wiped the oil off the face he had made for Henry so many years ago.

“My dear boy,” he said, letting the words linger for a long beat. “Remember how I always told you how I wanted nothing more than to put your mind at ease? I am here to finally
fulfill the promise.”

Rotwang opened an access hatch in his AJ2 and withdrew a device that made the helplessly petrified Henry want to thrash from fear. It was a yard-long iron shaft with three sharp spines jutting
from its business end. “I wouldn’t have thought the jumper’s wireless system could jam you, but it seems quite effective. EMP guns, robots, exoskeletons, you. All basically the
same, aren’t they?”

Rotwang walked toward Henry. He studied the instrument, testing its function with a handle on the other end, opening and closing its three dagger points.

One of the Luftwaffe officers walked up behind Rotwang. He was tall, blond, and pale, and he pulled off his cap and gloves with precise and efficient movements. “Heil, Dr. Rotwang,”
said the officer, “and greetings from Newfoundland.” Rotwang lifted the clamp away from Henry’s face and saluted the Nazi.

“Heil, Herr Lieberman. I trust your flight was pleasant.”

Lieberman nodded, sizing up Henry. “All but the landing. It does wonders for circulation.” The officer wiped his brow. “So this is your famous creature. How much does he
weigh?”

Rotwang swung the clamp back into Henry’s view. “Three hundred fifty-five kilograms.”

The officer whistled and shook his head. “We will never get off the ground with him.”

“Your men will stay to secure the hangar, yes? Leave your copilot and burn off the robot’s organics. That should account for eighty kilos, at least.”

The officer considered it for a moment, looking up as he juggled numbers in his head. “All right,” he agreed. “Go ahead, then.”

With surgical precision, Rotwang inserted his trident into the corresponding indentations in the center of Henry’s chest, until the prongs latched into housings. He twisted the rod, and
the casing containing Henry’s heart, the uranium core, spun and loosened. As Rotwang worked, sweat beaded around his excited eyes, and he ranted under his breath. “I granted you new
life, Henry. Gave you what every boy wants. To be a superman. To be transcendent. This was always a loan, of course, but you should have cherished it. But no. You resented it. Squandered it. I
won’t be making that same mistake…” When he had twisted until he could twist no more, Rotwang met Henry’s increasingly absent gaze. “Good-bye, Henry. Do go gentle
into that terrible night.”