Toby winced. “I think I’m having a heart attack, miss.”
“Sorry, Toby.” She hit him with the ray gun on a different setting. “How about now?”
“Much better, mam.”
“Hurry, Toby. We have to make it to The Crystal Palace in time for the World Expo.”
“We’re about a hundred and sixty-some years too late, mam.”
“Unless I miss my guess, we’re just in time. Step on it, Toby.”
Toby depressed the accelerator, lurching the convertible limo out of the garage.
Once they were on the road, Toby broke the news to her. “Mam, you do realize The Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in the 1870s?” When she pulled the ray rifle out of her guitar case (or what Toby took to be a guitar case, judging by his expression), and readied it for action, he said, “I suppose the finer points of history are a minor consideration.”
Toby’s eyes kept going back and forth to the ray rifle as the car jockeyed down the road. “You don’t mind me asking where you got that thing?”
“Rumfeld is quite the toolsmith.”
“The lunatic who keeps fixing useless kitchen appliances?” Toby’s voice had risen an octave to capture how flabbergasted he was.
“That’s just his cover story. He’s my gateway to the steampunk era.”
“It’ll take more than a ray gun, mam.”
Raya Stark fired up the ray rifle. Toby’s face grew noticeably pale. “Maybe not.”
“What you’re seeing,” Raya explained, “is the alternate reality the ray gun is keyed to. Once you’re proximate to me and the field effect of any of these weapons, you’ll see what I see.”
Toby gulped. “God help me.”
***
Raya and Toby, arriving at The Crystal Palace in an earlier steampunk era, made quite the splash with their vintage vehicle. Most of the attendees had arrived on horseback or by horse-drawn carriage. Aristocrats mounted on their steeds hoofed it towards the vehicle swooning, abuzz with chatter, taken enough by the sight to climb off their horses and investigate further. “I’ll leave you to explain the ins and outs of the car to them, Toby, while I attend to matters.”
The sea of fascinated faces parted for her, nearly as enthralled by her get up and ray guns as they were by the car. But in the end, the parting of the Red Sea did not last, and the group coalesced around the car.
Raya waltzed straight into The Crystal Palace. She froze, momentarily disoriented by the sights and sounds and sheer wonder of things that would never be. They should call this The Temple of The Men in Black, she thought. A shrine to their many successes in forestalling the future. Poor-bastard inventors will not see one of their inventions make it into the light of day.
Raya ran her eyes over the interiors to get a better sense of the layout, and to curtail her dizziness and sensation of being overwhelmed. The Crystal Palace enclosed full grown trees. Giant elaborate fountains were located liberally throughout the enclosure moving more water than anyone would have deemed possible. An upper balcony ran along both sides of the palace. And above that was yet a third terrace of exposed metal-work which supported the arching glass ceiling overhead. Giant statues protected the entrances to the many booths at each level; they gazed brazenly into the open courtyard overlooked by the balcony walkways and booths.
She caught sight of her assassin-cum-saboteur, and pushed her way through the maddening throng to get to him.
Quickly walled in by bodies, she found herself instead being herded toward one of the exhibits. Hobbs was demonstrating the inadequacy of locks of the day; he tripped them by waving a magnet across them, or effortlessly picked them with whatever was at hand in his audience’s pockets. Against the state of the art in locks, he demonstrated his elaborate human rat-traps that the would-be thief sprung the instant he crossed the threshold, and elicited much by way of gallows laughter.
After snaking her way through the throng, she was once again forced by the ebb and flow of bodies to stop before Bakewell’s booth. He demonstrated an image-telegraph machine that used rolling cylinders. Raya recognized it as a precursor to the modern day fax machine.
She took advantage of the advancing cloud cover overhead, throwing the natural-light-filled Crystal Palace into shadow. Suddenly, the fired-up ray gun in her hands lit up the scene, and allowed her to cut through the resistance like butter; the wide-eyed voyeurs took a step back to appreciate the show.
She sprinted, aiming her gun at the assassin, who ran the railing of the upstairs balcony and used magnetized shoes to secure his foothold.
He set one charge at a support beam, a timer attached to dynamite, then ran to the next beam. She took pot shots with her ray gun, and missed him twice; the electrical ray lit up The Crystal Palace like sideways running lightning. The crowd, thinking it part of the show, clapped and caterwauled.
By the third shot, Raya Stark hit her man. The ray connected with the metal railing he was on, and electrocuted him. He gyrated wildly on the banister.
Finally, the saboteur’s charred remains plummeted to the ground. On closer examination, he appeared mummified. Doctors and surgeons, here in abundance, crowded the corpse, eager to study what lightning did to a body.
Raya ran upstairs to grab the dynamite the saboteur had strapped to the building and check the timers, but they had been fried, too, by the electrical beam. She breathed a sigh of relief, and looked up just in time to spy another mysterious face in the throng. He eyed her with disdain, and quickly disappeared into the sea of faces.
And she was off again to find out what he was about.
She was quickly upstaged by the flying, steam-powered cars soaring off the upstairs balconies like bees from a disturbed nest. The various sections of railing dropped down on command. The air-cars were held aloft by helicopter blades of sundry designs, some large and singular, some small, several of them taking the place of one. Yet other car designers had elected to direct their thrust downwards, pushing up on columns of air from underneath their vehicles. They gave the voyeurs on the ground floor a few chuckles as the blasts of air blew off ladies’ wigs and men’s toupees alike.
***
Toby didn’t know what to make of it when the crowd around his prize car thinned. As soon as the last of the voyeurs had forgotten about him, he triggered the dashboard’s MI6 upgrades, and scanned what was going on inside The Crystal Palace. The pop-up satellite umbrellas gave him the view of the flying cars inside the World Expo. “Whoa! I’ll be damned if I don’t get to ride in one of those!” He hit record on the two camera angles the satellite umbrellas were giving him on the dual TV screens. “How am I getting these EM wavelengths in this steampunk reality?” He checked the interior of the car and noticed Raya had dropped one of her pistols in the back seat. It was lit up, possibly discharging its batteries. “The bubble she was talking about.”
He put the car in gear and rushed toward The Crystal palace. While riding the service ramp up to the top level, one of the wheels must have tripped a release lever. A section of the glass wall folded down to clear a path for him.
Toby located the one driver having trouble getting his car airborne. He jumped from car to car, and threw himself into rewiring the man’s dash for him.
“Try it now,” he said.
The driver cranked the starter, pleased to find his flying car firing up on the first try. He gave his new assistant the thumbs-up.
***
As the various vehicles came in for a landing, everyone clamored for a ride in one of the flying cars. Their inventors were anxious to seduce the big money investors away from the other prototypes by highlighting what was so special about their designs.
With the crowd occupied, and organized in groups around the car designs they fancied, Raya found it easier to track her man. He busied himself with planting explosives along the floor, though she couldn’t fathom why.
The mystery quickly unspooled about her.
From the floor rose a cannon, a giant relative to any ca
nnon then known. The barrel alone required that the glass panes in the roof retract. As they did so, the cannon fired a beam into the clouds overhead. The electrical discharge made the society women’s hair stand on end, levitated their jewelry away from their bodies until it was tugging at their necks, arms, and ears. A crack of thunder hurriedly followed, and the sky opened, pouring rain.
“A weather changer!” someone screamed. “A rain maker!” shouted another man. The cannon’s job accomplished, it began folding in on itself to thunderous applause.
Raya didn’t have time to go after the saboteur. Instead, she targeted his explosives, and took them out with her ray gun, set low enough to fry the wires of the timers without triggering the dynamite.
The vexed saboteur, intent on his revenge, took to lighting the fuses by hand, not caring if he was lost in the explosions along with everyone else. Before she could lock her weapon on him, one of the drivers of the airborne cars directed his helicopter blade at the saboteur and reduced him to chunk meat.
The deed accomplished, the pilot stood up and waved to Raya. She recognized Toby shouting at her from the driver’s seat. When she asked herself how he’d gotten ahold of a flying car, she looked down to find the original driver hugging the barrel of the cannon for dear life, shouting, “It’s all right, you can keep the car!”
Toby bellowed, “I really must have one of these, mam!”
She smiled. “If we can keep this structure from raining glass down on our heads!” she hollered back.
Toby, ever quick on the draw, caught her meaning. He returned his attention to the lit fuses on the dynamite.
He leapt from his car to the flying fire truck, signaled the driver to attend to the driving, while he attended to the fire hose.
He extinguished the flames streaking toward the dynamite at the last second.
Raya’s saboteur was still on the loose.
Seeing him run for the exit, she chased after him.
She arrived outside The Crystal Palace in time to see the saboteur sail across Hyde Park’s sea of grass. Turning her attention to the whirring sounds overhead, she noticed the flying cars coming out of the roof of the exhibition hall, still drawn back, courtesy of the rain maker.
The cars buzzed the fleeing saboteur. The men riding shotgun took potshots at him until he was too wounded to flee any further. With the man cuffed and in custody, Raya let the matter go.
Toby caught up with Raya, and landed his flying car. She hopped in the vehicle, and he flew her back to the 1930s convertible limousine.
When they arrived at their departure point, Raya clambered out, noticed Toby’s reticence to do the same. “I’m afraid we can’t take it with us, Toby. Outside the field effects of the weapons Rumfeld calibrated for me, this reality collapses altogether—and everything that goes with it.”
“A crying shame.” Toby slid his hands over the steering wheel.
“There are many more such worlds, Toby, merely a setting on the ray gun away.”
“You promise?” He didn’t sound quite ready to believe her.
“Assuming my alter ego can ever get out of the way long enough for me to become Raya.”
Toby jumped from the open carriage of his air-car into the cabin of the limousine parallel parked against it. “Maybe if Lady Harding could just get over her stage-fright.”
“Stage fright, huh?” She thought about it as Toby fired up the engine on the limo. “I suppose that might explain her love of characters. Maybe she’s been looking for a part worthy of her all this time. One that can make her forget herself.”
“Yes, that’s my take on it too, mam,” Toby said as they drove off.
Toby drove them back outside, exchanging the big picture view from the balcony of The Crystal Palace for the big picture view afforded by the sprawling lawns of Hyde Park just outside it.
“Well, that’s one more timeline protected from the men in black, at least for today,” Raya said with an air of victory.
“I fancy from here on out the inventors will be a little more on guard, and will take a little less on faith,” Toby surmised.
“Yes, hopefully we did more than forestall the inevitable.”
FORTY
Ermies had gathered the throng of actors before him in his warehouse. Behind the actors were the inner circle of kids Ermies had elected to keep on on a probationary basis, and behind them were the ones he had farmed out to the Harding estate, as much to disburden himself of the cost of maintaining them, as to collect intel.
Rake was present only in spirit; he had stayed in touch all this time by carrier pigeon, adding to the spy network of kids with his own skulking about the castle.
“All right,” Ermies said, throwing his voice, “you actors are going to spearhead the operations for us. Soften the estate owners, guests, and staff up for the big sales. The first thing you’re going to do is give them a big show. The landed gentry will pay the price for true entertainment, no matter how high, because so little entertains them.” He held up one of the items from the sky-high pile of well-packaged junk behind him for effect. “The price today will be these useless items which they can boast to their friends are the worst inventions ever made. You’re free, of course, to try and convince them otherwise, at your peril.”
He ran his eyes over the actors to see if he could guess the answer himself before asking, “Who among you is the best magician?” All hands in the actors’ troupe pointed to Rupert. Ermies sighed. The old codger didn’t look like he could make it to the bathroom without getting lost or falling over. “Fine, fine. I have to admit that levitating gag was genuinely great. But you’ll need to mesmerize them for a good hour or more. Remember, they’ve seen and done it all. Still, somehow, you have to exceed their wildest expectations.”
The old man nodded with all the self-confidence of a sacrificial virgin strapped to a stone altar.
Ermies explained the battle plan: “The magic show will prime the pump for everything else which follows. As the show breaks up, and you wander about the house interacting with staff, you’ll present your items to them as yet another form of magic. ‘See this whiffer sweeper-upper, see how it makes the dirt disappear, like magic? See this power washer, see how it makes the mold in the siding and driveway disappear, like magic? See this hair brush, how it stimulates the scalp, encouraging hair to grow back, like magic?’ You get the idea.
“And, of course, you will have one more ace up your sleeve.” Ermies paused for dramatic effect. “You’ll have fine-tuned your sales to them in advance using Bespellion’s psych profiles and the intel we gathered over the last few weeks.”
Ermies stared at them, imparting confidence, which, strangely, he didn’t have to fake for once. “All in all, we’ve never been so well prepared to part these fools from their money. Remember, people, failure is not an option. You don’t sell, you don’t come back.”
In the wake of cheers and fist pumps, Ermies sailed off to his office and slammed the door. His confidence was unable to ski the wake behind his showboating, getting sucked down in the undertow instead.
Truth was, if they didn’t sell anything, Ermies was taking a full-gainer off the nearest bridge. Not even indentured servants and all-out slaves could keep him in business, anymore. Employing the out-of-work actors on commission was a stroke of genius, but he could only live on borrowed time for so long. The house of cards had for too long threatened to come crashing down. He needed a cash surplus and savings to pad him over for those import items that weren’t ever going to sell half as well as he thought they would. That cushion was long gone. Mistakes in judgment were unavoidable. Even the best of businessmen, of which he was one, miscalculated from time to time. There had to be room for error, and there just wasn’t, any longer. If the Harding affair went well, he might ride out the next few months fairly well.
Problem was: his market niche was all about building relationships for repeat business. For that, his customers had to trust him, they had to feel he was saving them time a
nd effort over what they could accomplish on their own. Playing the Hardings for suckers like this was death over the long-term. He couldn’t believe he was leveraging his future just to pay for his present. The worst possible, most inescapable situation. If these people put the word out on him, they could close ranks with the rest of the landed gentry and suddenly everybody who was anybody with money would be lost to him. Forget selling to the one percent, he’d be selling to the ninety-nine percent, who, like him, had little money to squander and could ill-afford to risk purchasing his items for a taste of the exotic in their lives.
He hadn’t told his people his real game plan. He couldn’t afford to reveal just how precarious his situation had become.
He was counting on Lady Harding’s penchant for broken people to save him. That’s why he put his biggest losers on the front lines. He would approach her later, in private, when she would show her gratitude for expanding her staff with the ones who had all “The Right Stuff” with a huge endowment. He couldn’t tell his people and risk them sabotaging everything, either unconsciously, to get back at Ermies for deeming them expendable, or out of sheer stage-fright. Who can be themselves when told, “Be yourself?” It just wasn’t possible. It was like telling someone to relax. The first thing they did was tense up. His secret was best kept, for their good as well as his.
Besides, he was just doing what every other business in the world was doing, cutting his losses, keeping only the best of the best. Everyone else could damn well sink or swim on their own. He knew he came across as a heartless bastard, but that was the game. Beneath it all, he had a heart of gold. And this was the best win-win scenario he could come up with for everyone.
God willing, the Hardings would pull off the one miracle only they knew how to pull off in a down economy. Grow money on money trees. They were like a bizarre monastery for the criminally insane. The state couldn’t afford to incarcerate the patients in prisons or psych wards. The business world couldn’t figure out how to make money off them. Someone had to pick up the slack to minimize on all the human suffering. But that took skill well beyond his own fantastic ability to manipulate people. A humbling enough thought.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 152
