Before Tomorrowland by Jeff Jensen

THE REFLECTING pool shimmered with lamplight and the reflections of the monuments that loomed at its far end. Henry, who had infiltrated the fairgrounds through its drainage pipes, peered out from a crouched position in the shadows of a tree line running the pool's perimeter. The cloaked Plus Ultra zeppelin, still visible in his alternate spectrums, hovered over the fair's theme center, a pair of structures known as the Trylon and Perisphere. The former, a 180-foot-tall spike-shaped tower, doubled as the docking station for the invisible airship. The latter, a 180-foot-wide globe with a bumpy stucco exterior, was emblazoned with the words Le Monde de Demain. The World of Tomorrow. The interior held an elaborate diorama for a model city of the future, rings of idyllic suburbs surrounding an urban center of glittering factories, humanity wrapped around a mechanical heart. He was appalled by the notion.

It was the hidden complex beneath the Perisphere that concerned Henry the most. The tracking device placed the woman inside the structure eighty feet underground, as large as the whole fairground above. But how to access it? Analyzing Clara's comic book again, Henry concluded that the next step for the participants in Plus Ultra's absurd alternate reality game was to journey to the World's Fair and find one of several secret entrances into the facility by looking for symbols or words carved into doorknobs, plaques, or lamp posts, all of them so subtle that normal passers-by would miss them. It was just a matter of finding the nearest one to his beacon. That meant slipping by the ten roaming security guards and Plus Ultra's electronic surveillance.