by Mark Jeffrey
“Getting crazier by the second,” Bantam replied, wonder drenching his voice. “We don’t have helux where I come from, but if I ever find my way back, I’m inventing it. It’ll be a huge hit with the skateboard set.”
“Would you like to try air-waltzing?”
“Oh, no. I can’t even dance on the ground.”
As if to emphasize his point, a woman suddenly screamed, realizing how high up she was. Her gentleman quickly propelled to her to a nearby balcony far above.
A hostess floating just above them, evidently expert at graceful motions in the air, led them to their table near the orchestra.
“I can’t wait to see what’s on the menu.” When the waiter arrived, bringing giant, oversized tomes hand-written with calligraphy, Bantam was surprised to notice that it was all birds. Ostrich, goose, chicken, turkey—even dodo. “This place has a feather fetish. Does everything have to be about flying?”
Rachelle laughed like tinkling crystal. “That is the theme of the hotel, my sweet.”
Bantam grinned and reached out for her hand. She pulled back demurely and raised a fan to her face, hiding behind it. “Oh, no. Not here in the Age of Aether. Not in public, anyway.”
Bantam raised an eyebrow. “The age of what?”
“Age of aether. That’s what many philosophers call the modern times. All of our inventions, the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist if you will.”
“I like it,” Bantam said. “Good branding. Better than the Industrial Age, anyway.”
“Miss Romani told me that another age was coming soon. The Age of Iron. The world will be a prison. Oh, heavens. Do you think she could have meant the Nazis?”
“If they win the war . . .” Bantam said.
“But they can’t!” Rachelle protested. “They just can’t. There are things we are working on, you know. Weapons.” She lowered her voice. “I never told Dr. Hardin about this, but the main project I was working on was biological. A sort of weapon. We’re not defenseless against the Nazis.”
Adrenalin zinged through Bantam’s chest. Biological? Could it possibly be?
“Rachelle. This is important. Is this biological weapon based on smallpox?”
“Why, yes. How did you know that? It’s a complete secret!”
“I was sent back to find the cure invented in 1944 for a disease called the Shadow. It works by causing black boils to appear and—”
“—by attacking the blood,” Rachelle finished. “It turns black; the red blood cells are turned. Yes, I know. We crossbred it with the bubonic plague and several other strains of influenza. Released into population, it will kill everyone within days.”
“Rachelle. Do you have the cure? Do you know what the cure is for the Shadow?”
“Yes,” Rachelle said. “Of course. I developed it. That was my work.”
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh. My. God.
The room yawned around Bantam, and the dancers suddenly seemed like demons circling in the sky. His eyes rose as he struggled to process this.
Bantam rose from the table.
“What is it?” Rachelle asked.
“I’ll take you up on that dance now,” Bantam replied, eyes full of intensity. He grabbed her hand and rushed to the booth where they rented helux harnesses.
“Two, please. You’ll be paid double if you move fast.”
“Yes, sir!” the man said, beaming. Inside of a minute, Bantam had his harness strapped around his tuxedo. The man had given him a lead weight to hold as he buttoned him up.
“Thank you,” Bantam replied as he spun and threw the weight at an incoming waltzer who was just landing. The man caught it with an “Oof!” and sank to the floor.
“Soldiers! From the base!” Bantam explained to Rachelle. “I recognize them!” Then he turned, weightless from helux, and kicked an incoming soldier squarely in the stomach.
This propelled Bantam upward, out of control, somersaulting helplessly. To his surprise, he popped up precisely in between a dancing couple, sending the older lothario sailing, and finding himself air-waltzing with the pretty young blonde who had been the object of his affection.
“Oh. Hello,” Bantam said with a smile.
The tips of Rachelle’s ears turned pink with anger. She turned to the rental gentleman. “Mine! On! Now!” The man hurriedly obeyed.
But Bantam’s pursuers had recovered and had launched themselves upward at him at a fast clip.
“Tut! Tut!” yelled a man seated in something like a lifeguard chair about midway up. He pointed at a sign that read:
Graceful Velocities Only!
Gentlemen especially: remember, the Waltz is a gallant dance of grace.
The Air Waltz is the most gallant dance of all!
But the soldiers paid him no heed. One was almost upon Bantam when he extricated himself from the embrace of the blonde. She was frightened and held on to one of his hands. The soldier missed Bantam but grabbed on to her other hand.
The trio spun in midair, the girl screaming between them.
Meanwhile, her date reappeared. Missing the girl, he grabbed onto Bantam’s other hand, making it a spinning foursome. He cursed and snarled at Bantam, trying to climb up his arm.
The other waltzers began to notice the ruckus, though the orchestra was oblivious. Screams erupted, and couples began landing on various balconies.
Bantam yanked the two ends of the spinning human chain toward each other, causing them all to crash into one another and let go. Bantam flew upward.
Rachelle had made her way to the second soldier and was yelling something at him furiously as the both floated in a chaste embrace.
Still, Bantam grumbled inwardly at the sight.
He was preparing to launch himself downward when something out of the skylight caught his eye. His eyes wide, he thrust himself downward directly at Rachelle and the soldier.
When he reached them, he grabbed Rachelle and pushed off the wall again. “Move! You too!” he yelled to the soldier. “The floor! Get down quickly!”
Puzzled, the soldier followed them both.
When they landed, Bantam grabbed a steak knife from the nearest table. “Turn around!” he ordered Rachelle. She did so and Bantam cut the whimsical straps that held the Helux bubbles to her arms. They both flew up and away. Bantam did the same to the soldier and himself.
“What is it?” Rachelle yelled at him. “What’s wrong?”
Blam!
The skylight exploded. Glass broke into a thousand pieces, but didn’t fall; instead, it was sucked out into the sky above.
Several dancers were sucked out as well. Soundlessly, their screams were torn from their mouths by a sudden vacuum. The other soldier was one of these unfortunates.
“Hold onto something!” Bantam yelled to the soldier, latching one arm around a nearby statue and the other arm around Rachelle.
Wind howled. The ballroom had become a hurricane. People everywhere desperately clung to whatever was nearby. Every once in a while, the terrifying howl of someone being sucked up and out of the Phlogistonian . Most survived but some did not.
Over the cacophony Bantam yelled, “We’re under attack! A giant Nazi dirigible is parked right off our bow and it’s taking pot-shots at us!”
Another loud explosion burst. The Phlogistonian creaked and tilted. Tables, chairs, food, and people tumbled along the floor, sliding toward the front reception area.
Bantam, Rachelle, and the soldier tumbled as well.
All three still wore helux bubbles attached to their legs so they were semi-weightless. When they finally stood, they floated slightly off the ground before thumping back down. It was like running in a dream. The air was made of molasses.
They found an alcove. It was a back-office entrance, but it kept them from falling toward the tilt.
“What now?” Bantam asked Rachelle and the soldier. “I’m out of ideas. Sorry. This isn’t my world.”
“The growlers. Air taxies. There will be quite some number moored up front. We need
to find one.”
Another bomb hit the far side of the hotel as if to emphasize this point.
The aerotel tilted further. It was actively falling from the sky.
Clumsily, the threesome was dislodged. Bouncing along the floor, they found themselves at last in a growler.
Bantam cut the last of the helux bubbles from them as Rachelle piloted the growler away from the Phlogistonian, which was aimed and falling like a great golden knife into the heart of New York City.
The Great Clanker Battle
The Great Clanker Battle, as it came to be known, began with a sneak attack in the early morning.
The Nazi Iron Scallops, a fleet of large submarine transports, had run silent, creeping up the continental shelf to New York Harbor. Although Hitler had only recently seized power in this world, he had not been idle in the intervening years. Using money acquired through several sympathetic banking dynasties, including the Veerspike family, he had secretly built the largest fighting force the world had ever seen. Machines, airships, and submarines had been forged in factories deep in the wildernesses of the world. There, they had accumulated and waited for over a decade.
It was this fighting force that Hitler brought forth.
Under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the Iron Scallops had landed. Pulling up the shore docks, the great submersibles suddenly opened their scaly metal tops.
Out poured clanker after clanker after clanker.
The Nazi swastika of this world was rounded and fit inside of a red circle like a gyre. But the horror it represented was every bit as recognizable to Ben Bantam. This modified swastika was emblazoned upon every clanker.
The clankers were essentially tanks walking on two iron legs, enabling them to navigate any terrain. Each had several guns capable of shooting projectiles for several miles.
The Nazis didn’t hold back. The second they landed in New York, they began firing upon buildings, dirigibles, and the Manhattan Air Way cars. The tubes of the PneumaNet were smashed to bits. The Nazi clankers burned everything in their path. Millions died within the first hours of their arrival, and the Manhattan skyline was a horror of orange-and-black billowing smoke.
It was into this mess that Rachelle and Bantam’s growler descended from the Phlogistonian.
They were on the ground in no time, immediately wondering whether the aerotel might have actually somehow been safer. The Nazi clankers traveled everywhere, stomping horses and people into the sort of mess you never want to see.
But then the American clankers arrived!
Pouring out at once from a single canyon of buildings, clankers emblazoned with stars and stripes blasted away gloriously at their dark Nazi foes, destroying many in the first wave of the counter attack.
One American clanker nearby was hit and tipped over. When it did not rise, Bantam and Rachelle ran to it. Inside, the pilot was dead, hit by shrapnel. But his clanker itself was still operational. Respectfully removing the soldier, Bantam and Rachelle worked together to operate it.
“My ex-fiancé once showed me how this works,” Rachelle explained. “Sorry to bring him up. Those levers operate these legs. This here fires the cannon.”
“I’m on legs, you’re on cannon.”
She winked and smiled. “Let’s go!”
Their clanker rose from the ground. Bantam worked the legs such that it ran right into the middle of the battle.
As the fighting raged on from morning to afternoon, Bantam and Rachelle destroyed at least twenty Nazi clankers. Rachelle was a crack shot on the cannon, and Bantam brilliantly maneuvered the clanker to avoid being hit, as well as position Rachelle for the kill.
Bantam rallied the American clankers on several occasions when all seemed lost, boldly racing his out into the middle of the battlefield while Rachelle fired at the Nazi lines, destroying their leading units.
At one point, the Nazis launched a dirigible from the Iron Scallops, raining plasma lightning on the Americans. But the battle turned when Rachelle and Bantam bull’s-eyed the balloon, setting it on fire and dropping the battle growler to the earth far below.
At this point, the Nazis lost heart. Their clankers began retreating, and the Americans pounded them as they ran. Enemy clankers went down in a hailstorm of fire from the American lines. Cheers rang out.
The Nazi clankers jumped back into their nautical conveyances, which quickly turned and headed back out to sea.
Later they learned that astronaut Cliff Cleveland had died in the battle manning a clanker. He had refused to back down, even in the face of the overwhelming initial onslaught of Nazi war machines.
AT FORT MACLAREN, Benjamin Bantam and Dr. Rachelle Archenstone were greeted as heroes.
“It was your warning that made sure the men stood at the ready,” said acting General Fitzhenry to Rachelle. “We were not caught flat-footed. That’s what enabled us to repel the sneak attack. Next time we’ll be ready for those villains!”
“It was Benjamin who discovered the Nazi communiqué,” she replied, her eyes shining with admiration.
“It was nothing,” Bantam said. Rachelle hit him playfully. “Okay, it was kind of hard.” She grabbed him by the neck and kissed him long and hard.
“Ho, ho!” Fitzhenry said. “We should leave the two heroes of The Great Clanker Battle alone.”
“Oh, wait,” Bantam said. Rachelle punched him with a pout. “Can I get access to my capsule?”
Fitzhenry smiled. “Of course. In fact, Hoermann Volzstrang has been anxiously waiting for your return.”
IT TURNED OUT that Hoermann Volzstrang had not let go of the idea that an alternate version of himself had invented time travel in a world where electricity was real. Night and day, he had been trying to make the time capsule function again. And that’s when he happened upon a revelation: if he isolated the capsule from the earth’s damaged magnetic field, would the mythical and magical electricity work again?
A hydrologic chamber was just the thing, Volzstrang figured: a rotating vat of fluidics, controlled in the right way, could act as a shielding mechanism
When Bantam entered the time capsule, encased in Volzstrang’s chamber, and flipped the switch, he couldn’t believe his eyes as everything lit up.
“It works!” he screamed. “It all works!”
He tried the iPhone and the iPad next. They both turned on as they should.
“Rachelle! Rachelle get in here! You have to see this!”
Bantam spent the next two hours showing her Angry Birds, Instagram, the Kindle app and other wonders. She was astonished beyond reason. Volzstrang loitered and pouted outside the whole time, so Bantam laughed as he invited him into the capsule next. He ran through all of it again. Even simple objects like tiny bulbs alight with electric energy made Volzstrang visibly ecstatic.
“You must understand,” he explained with tears of wonder. “I am seeing the fairytales of my youth come alive. I am seeing magic happen before my eyes, and it is real, undeniably real.”
Bantam kissed Volzstrang’s forehead. “You bet it’s real. And your equations are what got me back here to show you. You should thank your other self, not me.”
“This is sorcery,” Volzstrang said, voice dripping with awe.
“No, it’s not,” Bantam slapped him on the shoulder. “It’s science. Your science!”
THE WEEKS that followed held unparalleled bliss for both Rachelle and Bantam.
Long mornings drifted into afternoons and then evenings, and it seemed silly to even leave the bed.
Others on the base, including Fitzhenry, couldn’t help but smile whenever the happy couple passed by holding hands. The other soldiers on the base took to saluting them wherever they appeared. The rumor that Bantam was US Army from the future had made the rounds. Now that he was a war hero in the present day, the salute seemed somehow required or at least appropriate.
“Oy, they’ll be hammered for life,” some of them said of Rachelle and Bantam, ribbing each other. Rachelle refused to explain what th
is meant. Eventually Volzstrang told him it meant to be married.
Volzstrang, Rachelle, and Bantam also spent a lot of time together. During these sessions Volzstrang revealed to Bantam that he believed the timewave could be stopped from rolling back through time to 1881: theoretically, he could prevent the Day of the Red Sun from ever occurring.
“But that would kill billions of people,” Bantam said. “People of this world would cease to exist.”
“Yet you’ve already done that,” Volzstrang said. “Yes, there is a version of me in both timelines. But for most people, there aren’t. By traveling back in time, and accidentally causing the Day of the Red Sun, you’ve made billions of unpeople already.”
That word, unpeople, haunted Bantam intensely.
It reminded him of the gypsy’s words.
“Were I to travel back to the future, it would be a different future, right? It wouldn’t be the world I’d left at all.”
“That is so,” Volzstrang confirmed. “It would be the future of this world, not your world at all.”
Traveling back to the future was the last thing on Bantam’s mind.
He had no intention of ever leaving Rachelle’s side again.
ONE DAY, Fitzhenry summoned Bantam to his office.
“This is a time for truth. The war is going badly,” he confided with a wobble in his voice that caught Bantam off guard. “Our victory in New York was short-lived. The Nazis quickly regrouped and nobbled us in the southern states. Much of America is under their rule. This is not widely known: we don’t want our military or our people to lose heart. But we will soon be beaten.
“I should also tell you that Europe has completely fallen, as has Russia. Japan is not far behind. As Germany conquers, she annexes the men and the war machines of those nations. In this way, her own war machine is multiplied with each defeat. Her final victory is inevitable due to sheer numbers.”
Final victory.
