Static in their displays, the airships looked wonderfully strange but not quite plausible. Jesse walked a circle around something called a jet engine, a full-scale model with sections cut away to display its internal works. Wires, ducts, tubules, rotors; steel, rubber, copper, aluminum. It looked as complex as a Swiss watch, heavy enough to crush a millstone, and about as likely to fly through the air as a blacksmith’s anvil.
“Might as well be a carnival show,” Jesse heard a guest whisper to his wife. Patience, friend, he thought.
The group approached the end of the Gallery of Science. One of the final dioramas depicted what looked like a sheet-metal hut on a desert landscape under a black sky, men in white diving suits posed next to it. Men on the moon, supposedly. Next to it was a panoramic photograph of the plains of the planet Mars. The skeptics in the crowd became increasingly vocal, and Jesse understood the sentiment. But he knew what was coming next. These tours were carefully timed.
“Step this way,” the guide said. The guide wore a City uniform; she was from the future, and judging by the sly smile on her face she enjoyed her work. She used her pass card to open the door at the end of the gallery. A flock of guests followed her onto the outdoor deck of the mezzanine level of Tower Two. Jesse joined them, trying to look as if he had some official business here. The deck—a sort of wide balcony, like the porch of a plantation house—overlooked what City people called the helipad.
Four stories below and some few hundred yards away, the City helicopter rested on a concrete platform, poised to take flight. The airship flew on a strict schedule, every morning at eleven forty-five, weather permitting. Jesse had seen it fly many times before, but never from this vantage point.
“Unlike the gallery displays,” the tour guide said, “this is the real thing. Ladies and gentlemen, the marvel of manned flight. Please don’t be frightened by the noise, and please don’t crowd the railing. You’ll be perfectly safe here.”
She wasn’t joking about the noise. It began almost at once. It was two noises in one, Jesse thought, a bass note that beat in the chest and a metallic whine that rose to a scream. The air around the machine quivered with the heat of its engines. Ponderously, slowly, the airship’s enormous rotary blades began to turn.
Jesse had learned a few things about the City helicopter from the descriptive plaques in the gallery and from the conversation of Tower One repairmen who occasionally bought meals at the commissary. The airship was called a Sikorsky S-92. The crystalline bubble at the front of it was called the cockpit, and that was where the pilot sat. Behind it was a passenger compartment, which seated twenty. The helicopter was painted blue and white, with the words CITY OF FUTURITY emblazoned in gaudy red letters on the hull. On the near side of the machine was a row of small windows from which the faces of anxious guests peered out.
Every guest who bought admission to the City was eager to see the famous flying machine, but only a minority ever volunteered to climb inside it.
“Surely,” a woman said, “it must be too heavy…”
If she said anything further it was lost in the roar. Heavy the machine undoubtedly was. More than ten tons, loaded. Fifty-six feet stem to stern. The top rotors spanned the same diameter. A team of horses couldn’t pull it. It was frankly absurd to imagine such a thing rising into the air.
But that was exactly what it did. The rotors grew invisible with the speed of their rotation, raising hurricanes of dust. Even at this distance the wind caused men to put their hands to their hats and women to flatten their skirts. The guests stepped back from the rails, momentarily terrified. Then, engines roaring at maximum pitch, the machine at last parted company with the earth—awkwardly at first; then decisively, ferociously, beating its way into the sky by brute force.
Jesse guessed this was what the tourists found so dismaying: the unexpected violence of it. The helicopter was a cousin to weapons of war, not birds or kites. It was no more delicate than an artillery emplacement. It leaped on legs of fire and iron. It was a factory for manufacturing elevation, and if its furnaces were banked for even a moment it would plummet from the sky like a monstrous aerolite.
Jesse felt a hand on his shoulder and turned. The hand belonged to Elizabeth DePaul, who must have come over from Tower One. She was wearing a security uniform with trousers. Her expression was solemn.
Now that the flying machine was airborne it moved with startling speed. It was already crossing the western properties of the City, and it would fly for forty-five minutes more, darting across the low hills like a steel damselfly before it returned to its base. “We need to talk,” Ms. DePaul said.
Her face was long and just missed being handsome, but her eyes were unnerving, brown as sand and just as implacable. “You could have paged me.”
“A little private conversation before we head over to the other tower, all right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you don’t need to call me ‘ma’am.’”
“I don’t know what else to call you.”
“It’s not the fucking army. Since we’re working together, Elizabeth is fine.”
A guest overheard the curse and turned to stare at her with slack-jawed astonishment.
“Maybe we ought to step inside,” Jesse said. “Where we won’t offend the paying customers.” He added, “You can call me Jesse.”
She nodded at the now-distant helicopter: “You must have seen it fly before.”
“Often. Never from this angle.”
“Think you’d like to ride it?”
“I’d be a whole lot happier not to. I suppose, Elizabeth, where you come from, you rode helicopters like they were horses.”
“I’ve ridden a few,” she said.
Jesse had first seen the City of Futurity when the towers were still under construction. At the time he had been less impressed by the buildings themselves—as impressive as they undoubtedly were—than by the tower cranes that roosted on their steel frames like skeletal birds, lofting buckets of Portland cement with their beaks. The scale of the work was dreamlike, a mechanical ballet across the vault of the sky, but the work itself, he soon learned, was brutally physical. The City men had trained him to help with the simpler tasks, and for months he had hauled lumber and boiled tar, his face burned brown by the Illinois sun, as the towers rose to completion.
But the most impressive miracle had been in place before he arrived. It was underground, located at the midpoint beneath both towers, and it was called the Mirror. The Mirror was the boundary between present and future. As a local hire he had never been allowed to see it, had never been close to it, had never expected he would see it; but he wondered, with his new pass card, if that had changed.
“Here’s the deal,” Elizabeth said. “We have to work together, and that’s fine. Booking says you’re a smart guy, and you did a good job with Grant. But once we cross into Tower One, you’re on my turf. So we need to lay down some rules.”
They rode a service elevator from the mezzanine to a floor below the dormitory level, another part of the City Jesse’s original pass card would never have allowed him to enter. The elevator opened onto a corridor, crude by comparison with the guest floors—pipes and ducts had been plumbed in plain sight along the ceiling—but wide enough for vehicular traffic. A cart adorned with a flashing red light passed by as Elizabeth spoke.