The Age Atomic

THIRTY-SIX

Carson led the way from the Nimrod, unbuckling himself as soon as the craft had touched down in the dark tunnel. He had hardly spoken except to bark the order to follow as he hobbled off the flight deck, wooden leg and wooden stick banging on the floor. Rad was right behind, grateful that his old friend was still alive but wondering what the hell had happened to him out beyond the fog. Along with the wooden leg and Santa Claus beard, Captain Carson was older by a decade.

Despite Carson’s disability, Rad and the others had to jog to keep up with the old man. They walked out of the tunnel into a huge chamber, a concourse of elegant marble, the blue ceiling immensely high and studded with lights like the night sky.

“What is this place?” asked Rad as they crossed from one side of the chamber to the other.

Finally Carson broke his silence. “It is called Grand Central. It has been here always, although never used. It is a train station.”

Carson led them up an inclined passageway and then down a set of wide, shallow stairs. Rad jogged alongside him. “There are no trains in the Empire State.”

Rad saw Carson grin under his beard. “Precisely,” he said. “The City Commissioners were never interested in this place. A veritable fortress, right in the heart of the city! I always thought it would be useful one day, so I had one of the tunnels converted to an airship dock. Splendid, isn’t it?”

“That’s one word for it, sure,” said Rad.

“Oh, Mr Bradley, you haven’t changed, haven’t changed a bit.” Carson clapped, his face lit in a grin Rad remembered well. “And, Kane, my dear fellow,” he said, turning to the younger man, “it is a sheer delight to discover you did not perish as we all thought. The Fissure is a strange and wonderful thing.”

“It’s good to see you again, Captain,” said Kane.

“Aha!” Carson came to a halt. In front of them was another large room, as impressive as Rad’s fleeting glimpse of the concourse above, but in a different way. Here the ceiling was lower and curved into great vaulted arcs, illuminated by up-lights that cast triangular shadows against the walls. The vaulted ceiling came together to form the inside of a flattened dome in the center of the room, creating a series of separated spaces like the segments of an orange. There were tables of varying sizes scattered around, and plenty of chairs, like the place was some kind of restaurant.

Carson hobbled forward and pulled out one of the chairs.

“Now, then,” he said, gesturing for the others to sit. “It is time we had a good, old-fashioned chat.”

Jennifer filled Carson in on recent events.

Rad watched as the Captain studied her golden mask, his one good eye moving over the features constantly. Something bothered Rad, and Jennifer had left out a couple of details from her account — like her search for her brother and her own investigations.

Rad rolled his fingers on the tabletop. Finally, he turned to Jennifer. “We’ve got a robot army coming for us, but the thing that bothers me is that your old boss here doesn’t seem to know who you are. You wanna tell us about that?”

“I-”

“And about what your brother has to do with the King of 125th Street?”

Jennifer sighed behind her mask and looked at the three men seated at the table. She pulled off her gloves, and played her fingers along the edge of the wood. Rad felt a jolt of surprise when he realized that her naked hands were now the only part of her, apart from her hair, that was visible. He knew his turn would come to explain to the others what he’d found in the theater freezer, and he wondered what her reaction would be when he told her about the glass head.

“I wasn’t an agent,” she said. “And I didn’t work for Carson, I worked for the City Commissioner — the other one, during Wartime. I was just an ordinary desk clerk, like a hundred others.

“I was attached to the group liaison between the robot yards and the Empire State. It was fine, we were fighting a war, but… I found things out about the ratings used on the Ironclads.”

Rad nodded. “That they’re people?”

“Yes. I mean, why did nobody know? People — men — marched down to the Battery and into the factory, and they never came back, never. Then every Fleet Day the robots would march down Fifth Avenue until the ticker tape was a foot deep on the sidewalks, and they filed onto their Ironclads, and off they’d sail with fireworks and brass bands and… that was it. How could nobody figure that they were men? How could people be forgotten? Friends? Family members… everyone who volunteered or was conscripted?”

“The same way nobody remembered that the last Fleet had never returned from beyond the fog,” said Kane.

Jennifer turned her golden mask to his black one.

Carson brushed his mustache with the back of his index finger. “The Enemy,” he said, “is a living thing, an entity that is also a city. Nobody knew that either, except me, and the City Commissioners. But one thing we didn’t understand, didn’t even consider, was that if the Enemy was a thing alive, then so was the Empire State. The city fights against those in it. It makes you forget, Ms Jones — it has to. Otherwise our entire world, the whole of the Empire State, the whole of the pocket universe itself, becomes a logical fallacy, an impossibility.”

Jennifer shook her head slowly, clearly failing to follow the Captain’s explanation. Rad waved his hand. “Doesn’t matter, and I don’t understand it myself. But that’s not everything you found, right?”

“No,” said Jennifer. “It was my brother. He’d volunteered to join the navy. I knew that but… but I forgot. When I discovered the robots were men, I looked up the enlistment records, just to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding something. I found his name there, and then I remembered. My brother, I lost my brother.”

The others around the table were quiet. Rad glanced at the Captain, and saw his eye narrow, his brow knitted tightly in concentration. He wished that Kane and Jennifer didn’t have to wear the masks; it felt like they were robots as well.

He turned back to Jennifer. “That’s why you were on the trail of the robot gangs, right? You were looking for your brother.”

“He was in the last enlistment, and then the Chairman vanished and Wartime ended. I wasn’t in the Empire State Building when the robot, the one from the Ironclad, tore it up. But afterwards everything was in chaos. I got through to some people I knew in the robot yards. They were just shutting down, closing everything up. And they just… they just let them out, all of them.”

“The robots?” asked Kane.

Jennifer nodded. “They had several Ironclad complements ready to go, as well as four other batches that were partway through conversion. But I couldn’t get any information, things were… well, they were crazy. I tried to match up the records, but nothing tallied. It looked like they also had a whole lot of volunteers and conscripts who they hadn’t started processing yet.”

Rad nodded. “Your brother among them?”

“I didn’t know, but that’s what I hoped. There was no way to check who had already been turned into one of those monsters, or who had escaped. But the navy just… stopped. The doors opened, and they were left to fend for themselves. Where could they go? They were built and programmed for war, but now they had no function. They couldn’t go back to their old lives, because they didn’t remember them, and neither did their own families.”

“They’re in Harlem,” said Kane. “The ones that hadn’t been finished, they ended up there.”

Rad steepled his fingers and tapped his top lip. “The refugees. The King of 125th Street said he’d worked in the robot yards. So he gathered the leftovers up and began work.”

“Except he was a robot himself,” said Kane.

Rad nodded. “That was a just a diversion. The real king was a man, working while his mechanical assistant collected more refugees and kept them doped on that green stuff, making them dependent on it so they’d have to stick close.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer. Then she fell silent. Rad wished he could see her face, what she was feeling, thinking, but her golden mask was frozen. But he had a feeling about what was coming next.

“I found him,” she said.

Rad nodded. “The Corsair.”

Jennifer shook her head. “James. His name is James. He was a doctor, a surgeon. When he volunteered, they said they could make use of his skills. I thought that if he had survived — if he hadn’t entered the processing — I thought maybe he would have done something. He would have tried to help.”

Carson stirred. “And help he did. Although perhaps not quite in the way you expected.”

“No,” said Jennifer. “They… they must have started the processing, the mental conditioning, anyway. He… they changed him.”

Rad nodded. “And then after finding Kane and discovering his vision, instead of turning robots back into people, he was continuing the work, turning people into robots.”

“To defend the Empire State,” said Kane.

“To prepare for war,” said Rad.

“He thinks — thought — he was doing the right thing,” said Jennifer. She raised both hands and fanned them out on the tabletop. “Maybe he was.”

The table fell silent. Then Carson hrmmed loudly.

“I see,” he said. “I come back to find the place full of robots, while the city itself crumbles away as entropy increases. It seems I have returned just in time.”

“Where did you go?” asked Rad. “And what happened to you? You’ve only been gone three months.”

“Well,” said Carson, stroking his beard. “By my reckoning, I have been away ten years, at least, although beyond the bounds of the city measuring time is a difficult task.

“But, yes, I abandoned the Empire State. And for that I am deeply sorry. But in the chaos that followed the… well, the you-know-what… while I was trying to pull the city back together, get everything running, removing Prohibition and the restrictions of Wartime and so on and so forth…” Carson rolled his hand in the air. Then he paused and let it drop to the table. “Well, it was Byron. Byron was gone; he had sacrificed himself to save us all. But I wondered, always, at the back of my mind, what had happened to him. Did he survive, perhaps? Did he fly out into the fog and into another world? Did he manage to detach from the Enemy airship and escape? Or did he land? Did he crash? So many possibilities, so many uncertainties. I just had to know. Every time I looked out into the wretched bank of fog I thought of him, and I remembered the two ships, stuck together, vanishing as they left the borders of the Empire State.”

Carson wrung his hands and sighed. “I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? The city was a mess and needed my attention, but always, always I thought of him, of Byron. And then…”

There Carson paused. Jennifer and Kane exchanged a look, and Rad leaned forward a little.

“And then…”

Carson looked at Rad and smiled sadly. “And then there was a signal. It was very faint, picked up by the Empire State Building but largely ignored. So I searched for it myself, and there it was. Faint, but unmistakable. It was a mayday call, automated certainly and the signal alone may not have indicated anything at all but… it was my signal, the mayday from the Nimrod. Which meant he was out there, somewhere. And that was… well, that was that. I had to go.”

Rad shook his head. Byron had survived? Or at least the Nimrod had, and was out there somewhere. Rad couldn’t blame Carson, but still.

“You had to go?” he asked. “You would abandon your post like that?”

Carson sighed again and smiled again, and reached out and patted Rad’s hand on the top of the table.

“Oh, my friend, what would you do? The signal was the final straw, the culmination of everything. Suddenly I had clarity. I had purpose. Byron was alive, and I had to find him.”

Kane whistled. “So you walked out over the ice, just like that?”

“Ah!” Carson laughed. “Reports of my departure were largely exaggerated, as they say. Yes, I walked, and yes, I was on my own, but I was not unprepared. You may recall, the both of you, that I — or at least my counterpart in the Origin — was a polar explorer of some fame. I knew what to do, because I had always known what to do, even though the skills and memories of the past were not mine and not complete. So I was prepared. All the equipment I needed for a solo hike across the ice and into the unknown was at the house. I prepared myself and left.”

Carson looked around the table with a smile, but Rad could see something in his eye. There was a tightness there, and it wasn’t just the miraculous increase in years the man had suffered on his journey.

“And?”

Carson rolled his lips, the action moving his entire beard.

“It was hard, but I succeeded. I came first to the land of the Enemy, a dark, dangerous place. The cold was reaching there too, and they looked to be in even worse shape than our own city. It was a ruin, and I stood on the banks of the… well, the shoreline opposite, and as I watched I saw buildings fall, collapsing like sand into the water. There was other movement too, the people, if you can call them that, all moving at once, back and forth, like ants. I could feel it too. The Enemy was there, and it was fighting with something, or against something — against the dissolution of its world, I suppose. It saw me as well. I knew it, and I… well, I ran. My very presence there seemed to help the thing coalesce, perhaps even hasten the destruction of the city.”

Carson looked across the table, but his eyes were unfocussed. He held one hand out, like he was reaching for something, but he was lost in his memories.

“That was… many years ago. I ran. There was ice and fog, and darkness. Eventually the Enemy turned away, or perhaps I simply got used to it. But one day I felt I was alone, and I could get back to tracing the signal. I had a device, a radio of sorts, but I had run for so long from the darkness that I wasn’t sure where I was, or how far I had gone, or whether I would even be able to find it again. Time passed — how long I have no idea — but then I heard it, the signal. It was far away, so off I went.

“I found other places. A great city they call New Amsterdam was my home for months as I recovered from my flight. But I had to follow the signal, so as soon as my strength was back I continued.

“I saw war and horror. I saw cities burning, cities destroyed, cities empty. And then I found him.”

Rad blinked. “What? You found Byron?”

Carson smiled and seemed to snap out of his reverie. He turned slowly to Rad, and Rad saw a tear roll down his cheek.

“Yes, I did. He’s upstairs, in the ship.”

Carson led them back to the ship, via the main concourse. This time, as they approached along the incomplete platform, Rad had the opportunity to view the ship clearly, although much of it was obscured by the curve of the tunnel.

It was the Nimrod, although it was different. Larger, longer — the lines were harsh, the armor plating pierced and pitted. The Captain’s original airship had been in a poor state of repair when Byron had piloted it away. This machine was the same, but a nightmare version. It felt wrong somehow.

Rad felt a hand on the small of his back. Carson leaned in to him.

“It’s a different ship, yes. Well, it is the Nimrod, but a Nimrod from another world. I had to fight for it,” he said, tapping his eye patch. “But I found him inside.”

Kane walked back from the ship’s door, leaving Jennifer to gaze up at its dented walls.

“How many other worlds are there?”

Carson’s eye narrowed again. Rad decided he didn’t like it when the Captain got that look.

“I thought there was only us and New York,” said Rad. “And the Enemy, of course.”

Carson nodded. “So did I, or at least that was as far as Byron and I had been able to penetrate. But I had always surmised there were more realms, further out. Perhaps even an infinite number of other universes and worlds.”

Kane folded his arms. “And you were right,” he said.

“Indeed,” said the Captain, and he smiled the smug smile that made Rad laugh and think of tea and sawdust shortbread in the Captain’s palatial residence. Then he realized that those days were a very long time ago for the Captain.

“If Byron was in this ship, how did you know it was really him?”

“Oh, that was easy. He had the taken the signal device from the Nimrod — the other Nimrod — and kept it with him. He knew I would be listening.”

“So why didn’t we meet him when we came back here? You’re saying he’s still inside the ship?”

Kane said, “It was empty when you picked us up.”

Jennifer ducked into the Nimrod’s side door. “Ah, everyone?” she called out from inside. “There’s someone here all right.”

Rad looked at Carson, and pulled himself into the doorway. Ahead of him, a black shadow seemed to sweep past Jennifer. She stopped and looked around her in surprise.

Rad turned back to the Captain, his eyes wide. Carson laughed loudly.

“Byron can’t leave the ship, detective. He’s a ghost. He’s haunting it!”