The Falling Machine

by Andrew P. Mayer

  The Automaton grabbed onto the man's elbow with one hand and used the other to tear the rest of the frame completely off of his right arm. His hand no longer encumbered, the Bomb Lance dug down into his pocket and produced the key.

  “Thank you.” Tom reached out to grab it and then jerked back as three bullets from Doc Dynamite's gun tore the rest of his face away. The glass lens of the camera underneath shattered. “How d'ya like the taste of lead, you hunk a’ junk?”

  Tom staggered for a moment and then lunged at the Texan, leading with his fist. It wiped away the Texan's smile as it cracked into his jaw.

  Doc Dynamite tried to roll with the blow, but it was far too late. He tried to talk, and screamed, “Ooo oke my od am ace!” The Automaton tried to attack again, but failed to connect as a harpoon smashed into him. The impact was much weaker than the previous shots had been, but it was still enough to knock him down. The Bomb Lance's last shot had also been the final one for his frame, and the remaining tension wires escaped their bondage, hanging slack from his shoulders and arms.

  Doc Dynamite reached into his coat, but the Irishman grabbed him and yanked him down the road. “At eh ell?”

  “We need to go, you idiot! The Paragons are here!”

  Realization dawned on Doc Dynamite's broken face as he saw a figure coming toward them from the far side of the anchorage with a gun in his right hand. The two of them turned and ran as the bullets whizzed by.

  The man shooting at them was clearly someone who wanted to be seen. His royal-blue jacket and bright red vest were both cut entirely from thick leather. The heavily padded shoulders over his well-developed frame gave him an imposing silhouette. A blue leather mask covered his face down to the bridge of his nose in front, and the rest of his head and neck in back. Securely attached to the top of his head was a red, white, and blue top hat, a steady cloud of steam rising up from it like a chimney.

  In his left hand he held a large steel shield emblazoned with the symbol of a gear, and in his right was a gun that connected to both a bandolier of bullets that circled his forearm and a small brass pipe that ran to a pressure canister on his back. With each shot steam blasted out of the gun, propelling the bullet and loading another one into the chamber simultaneously.

  Reaching into his duster as he ran, the Texan pulled out a short stick of explosive that was colored blue instead of the usual red. He lit it and dropped it onto the road. A second later it exploded into a curtain of smoke that completely hid the two men from their pursuer.

  The masked man stopped running when he reached the Automaton, and fired a few more desperate shots into the smoke cloud. “Where's my daughter?” he yelled at the metal man.

  The Automaton attempted to reply, but something in his throat had been damaged from the abuse he had just received. “The t-t-t-top of the t-t-t-ower.”

  Sticking his gun into its holster, he knelt down and grabbed Tom by the shoulders. “Is she all right?”

  The Automaton nodded yes. “She is o-k-k-k-kay.”

  Standing up, the Industrialist saw a black balloon rising up out of the smoke. The large propellers on either side of the gondola pushed it up and away from the bridge, and it headed deeper into Brooklyn.

  His gloved hand hovered over his gun for a moment and then relaxed. The Automaton rose up behind him. His movements were jerky, and for an instant it seemed as if he would topple back to the ground. Finding his balance, he reached up to his head, and pressed a finger into his throat. “Those men killed…Sir Dennis.”

  “Damn it to hell!” The Industrialist lifted his gun and fired shot after shot at the balloon until it was nothing more than a dot in the sky.

  Sarah Stanton let out a loud and unladylike grunt as she tugged at the ornate brass handle. There were two of them, each connected to a massive slab of bronze ten feet wide and sixteen feet tall, and no matter how hard she tried, they were as immovable as the granite that surrounded them.

  “Definitely locked,” she said, and let go. Gasping in her corset she took a moment to compose herself, looking up while she caught her breath at the reliefs that had been cast onto the metal. The dim, dirty glow from the cloudy February day illuminated scenes from ancient mythology in the tarnished bronze: illustrations of powerful Greco-Roman deities locked in mortal combat against foul monsters. The swords, shields, and lightning bolts of the gods were arrayed against the fangs, claws, and serpent hair of evil creatures hell-bent on destroying the world.

  The expressions on the gods’ immortal faces were intense and grim. As Sarah stared into their metal world, the images seemed to mock her inability to simply open the door. The message of the battling was suddenly clear: mortals should not enter into the world that lay behind these doors unless they had the strength to defeat evil beyond imagining.

  Tired of the scorn of the gods, Sarah turned away and looked down onto the hustle and bustle of the street traffic rolling down Fifth Avenue on a chilly Friday afternoon.

  She smiled to herself and rolled her eyes at her foolishness. She may not have been a Paragon, but she knew at least one way to outsmart the gods….If the front doors had been locked it meant there would only be minimal staff on duty inside, and she knew another way in.

  After Alexander Stanton had been forced to reveal to the world he was actually the hero the world knew as the Industrialist, he had told Sarah the story of “the first Paragon.” His name was Prometheus, one of the Titans, and he had bravely stolen fire from Mount Olympus, bringing the precious gift down to man so that they could chase away the cold and the night.

  When he discovered what Prometheus had done, Zeus condemned the disobedient god to be punished for all eternity. Chained to a rock, the fire-bringer's liver would be eaten by a vulture every day, and then regrow each night, until the end of time.

  But even Zeus could not steal back the fire. Humanity would be able to keep its gift. Her father had told her that, if he could have, he would have used his powers to kill the bird and break the Titan free from his chains. But since he was just a man, he would follow in the footsteps of Prometheus, bringing the light of knowledge to mankind, no matter what the consequences or the cost.

  A few years later, when she had first seen the images for the front doors to the Hall of Paragons sketched out on parchment in her father's office, she had asked him if he found it ironic that Prometheus remained bound and tortured, while Zeus rode in his chariot high above, throwing mighty thunderbolts down to Earth.

  He had scowled at her and told her to leave, something he only did when either she or her mother were being what he considered “far too clever for your own good.”

  Shivering from the chill, Sarah stepped down the Italian marble staircase that swept down to the street from between the two massive granite columns that flanked the entrance. She made a sharp left when she reached the cement sidewalk and started walking up Fifth Avenue. The front of the Hall filled almost a third of the block between 49th and 50th Streets. Having been constructed as a modern-day version of the great buildings of Rome, it had for the last six years been the biggest structure on Fifth Avenue, adding a counterpoint to the soaring gothic towers of St. Patrick's Cathedral just down the avenue.

  The building was every bit the mysterious and impenetrable fortress that it had been designed to be. The imposing bronze doors were only the first of many formidable challenges faced by any enemy who might wish to enter and hurt the Paragons in their home.

  Although that hadn't stopped everyone—a good portion of the northwest corner of the building had been shattered when the Steam Hammer had attempted to undermine the Hall's foundations and found himself crushed under ten tons of stone.

  She could still see the cemented cracks, and the slightly whiter rock that had been brought in to replace what had been destroyed.

  But the building still stood, and the villain remained down below there somewhere, surrounded by walls that he would never be able to break.

  So far the only nonmembers who had ever actually
made it inside were invited guests, and most of them never got farther than the foyer.

  And for most of them it was enough. The grand entry hall was the great showpiece of the building, designed to inspire awe in those lucky enough to see it. Built around a 500-square-foot red-marble floor, it was capped off with a vaulted ceiling that floated three stories above on two rows of massive Roman columns.

  On the walls were enormous frescoes that stretched up the full height. And unlike the classic mythology used on the front doors, these color renderings depicted the actual likenesses of the individual members of the Paragons, portraying them as if they were the gods themselves, looking down into the room from the sky above.

  Sarah had never been shy about letting people know that she thought these images of her father and the other all-too-mortal Paragons shooting bolts of lightning, fire, and steam from their hands were comical, to say the least. Sir Dennis had even admitted to her that he felt a bit ashamed when he saw a perfectly idealized version of himself staring back down at him from so high above. And now that he was dead, the mythical man was the only one who remained.

  Reaching the corner of the building, Sarah turned left and slipped down the slim alley that traveled along the north side. The six-foot-wide corridor was clean, but gloomy, and few people even noticed its existence. It was simply there, one of many hundreds of odd little spaces in the ever-growing metropolis of New York that went ignored. But Sarah had always thought the unnoticed was far more interesting than the ostentatious.

  The side of the hall that faced the alley was a massive wall of featureless stone blocks. Wide metal doors were cut into the side of them at regular intervals, allowing supplies to be loaded into the buildings. If Sarah had ever been intent on breaking into the building by force, it seemed to her that this would be a far more logical place to make an attempt. But perhaps whatever megalomania it was that convinced a man to put on a costume and name himself after an animal or an object would also prohibit him from trying something as subtle as looking for a weaker door.

  To Sarah this simple alley was a romantic place, and she had often gotten “lost” there when her father had brought her to the construction site. No matter how much her father admonished them afterward, the workers were always lenient with her and Nathaniel, allowing the children free rein to explore the unfinished halls while her father was off doing his business of running his railroad or saving the world from another ridiculous villain with delusions of grandeur.

  The time she'd spent running through empty rooms and half-finished hallways had given her knowledge of the building that was beyond most of the Paragons.

  Sarah stepped down into a stairwell that ran parallel to the wall. Ten steps took her down five feet below the ground. The door that stood locked in place at the bottom was a flat sheet of bronze with no handle. The only break in its otherwise featureless surface was a small hole about the size of a nickel where a knob would be on a normal door.

  Sarah snapped open her reticule. The bag was small, and it only took her a moment to find what she was looking for and draw it out. The key was four inches long, and the entire piece was ornately designed so that it appeared to be a stylized letter “P” with a blank stem where the teeth would normally be. Like most things associated with the Hall, the gaudy exterior hid something far more complicated underneath.

  She slipped the key into the door slot and then simply held it there. The door hummed for a moment, followed by a heavy thunk as something hidden beneath the metal sank into place. The key disappeared, and a few moments later the door released, swinging inward just a few inches. Sarah pushed it open the rest of the way and stepped inside, escaping from the cold of the winter day into the relative warmth of the building's interior. She closed the door, cutting off the gray daylight and leaving only a dim gloom broken by the glow of the pilot lights from the gas lamps on the walls. Her key was poking out from the inside, the mechanism inside the door having flipped it over as it passed through. She pulled it out and slipped it back into her purse.

  Grabbing a small brass lever on the wall to the left of the door, she pushed it down until it came to rest with a small click. Hidden machinery clanked audibly behind the wall. There was a hiss, and then a pop as the gaslights flared to full brightness behind their reflectors. They lit a cramped stairwell.

  Sarah climbed to the top and reached a landing with two doors—one directly in front of her, and another to her left that she opened and stepped into. Inside was a cramped supply closet that was utterly free of the exotic weapons or colorful costumes that people often assumed must be stored everywhere. Instead there were simply rows of wooden shelves containing ink, pencils, pen nibs, cleaning supplies, and all the other mundane and sundry items needed for the care and maintenance of the Hall.

  Sarah pulled off her winter coat and gloves, folded them neatly, and placed them up on the highest shelf she could reach inside the closet. She slipped her hand behind one of the dusty boxes of paper and pulled out a large brown-paper envelope from the back. Inside it was a pair of beaded slippers. She sat down and pulled off her winter boots, replacing them with the footwear she had just found.

  Stepping out of the closet, she closed the door and put her ear up to the other door. “No one out here,” she whispered to herself, hoping it was true, and cracked it open.

  Sarah almost glided as she moved down the rust-colored marble floors of the main corridor in her slippers. She looked around constantly, still not sure that one of the building staff wouldn't run into her. In normal times that wouldn't have earned her more than a reprimand, but since the death of Sir Dennis she had been told by her father in no uncertain terms that she was to stay out of the building, and she had a destination that she could only reach if no one knew she was here.

  She made a right, heading down another long corridor. It was dimly lit, the gas lamps burning low. The yellow light reflecting off the red stone gave everything a dull orange glow, as if morning were just over the horizon.

  She heard what was clearly her father's voice echoing from in front of her. “Damn,” she whispered. Her path would take her past the main conference room, and it sounded like the Industrialist was inside of it, making one of his famously long-winded speeches, although she couldn't make out any of the words.

  In the almost four weeks since Sir Dennis Darby's death Sarah had seen her father only infrequently, and she had only really spoken with him once. Darby's funeral had been held in Central Park, exactly one week after “the bridge incident,” which was what everyone in polite society had taken to calling the murder. The papers had given the event much more lurid names, “Darby's Downfall” being the one she found most distasteful, for a number of reasons.

  The ceremony had been simple and short, the way that the old man had requested. Still, there were tens of thousands of fashionable New Yorkers who had made the trek northward to pay their final respects to the fallen genius. He was a beloved man, but Sarah was convinced that most of the mourners simply wanted a chance to take a closer look at the Paragons without having to expose themselves to the deadly dangers that normally came with being a bystander when the heroes went into action.

  Each of the other heroes had given a short eulogy, describing what it was that the Professor had meant to each of them. Nathaniel's had been the longest—an emotional ode to the man he called his “spiritual father.” She supposed it was supposed to be an epic poem, heroically describing how the Professor had struggled against death while only a few feet away from him the mighty Turbine bravely faced the Bomb Lance's harpoons until finally one of them had speared his leg and bound him to the “granite spire” of the still-unfinished Brooklyn Bridge.

  Like everything involving the Paragons, the official account had little relationship to the messy ambiguity of the events as they had actually occurred. They had also completely removed any mention of Nathaniel's unconscious form being lowered down from the tower in a basket like so much fish. Sarah had mentioned to her father tha
t she was concerned that Nathaniel's need to protect his reputation would diminish the chances of tracking down the man who had murdered Professor Darby. He had scoffed at the suggestion and told her that the only truth in history was what people could read between the lines. “The truth is that the average man doesn't have the capacity to understand the boring details, or the moral capacity to understand what they meant if he did.” Sarah replied that she thought that the world could use a strong dose of the truth every now and again.

  Her father had been the final speaker at the funeral, delivering a patented Stanton droner. It recounted, in detail, the mythic founding of the Society of Paragons, including his early days as the Industrialist, and how he was unable to capture a black-hearted villain called “the Lightning Rod” who was using bolts of electricity to “slay every man who ignored his genius.”

  He had tracked the maniacal master of electricity to the Darby mansion, where he was hoping to steal some of the Professor's amazing devices and use them for nefarious purposes.

  But the Industrialist found Darby first and took possession of an invention called the “grounding shroud.” Using it, he was able to siphon off the villain's electrical energy field and claim the day in the name of the Paragons.

  Seeing the potential in combining his skills with the clearly superior intellect of Sir Dennis, the Industrialist proposed that they work together, creating an organization dedicated to “protecting those who cannot protect themselves.”

  “And the rest,” he concluded, “is history.”

  The audience had cheered wildly at the end of his story, as they always did whenever they got a chance to see the Paragons in the flesh. Sarah knew that the truth was, once again, far more nuanced than the simplified fairy tale he told the adoring masses.

  It was her father, not the Lighting Rod, who had broken into Sir Dennis's mansion, hoping to find some technology to use to stop a villain who had given him nothing but trouble and bad press. In particular, Alexander Stanton was looking to grab an electrical dampening device that Darby had shown at the scientific exposition the year before, an event that the Stanton Railroad Company had funded.