and to keep visitors cool and comfortable without wasting a lot of energy on climate control. It stayed cool under there, and the protection from UV radiation had been an additional preservation measure for the air and spacecraft.
The old photo showed happy patrons approaching the entrance, while others read informative signs at outdoor displays. There had been demonstration gardens with plants from all over the world, an old Thor-Delta rocket standing off to one side, and a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt plane mounted on a stand a few dozen yards away.
Gordon circled, setting down right at the coordinates. He slowed, bumping along the rough ground and coming to a stop. She gazed out. All that had endured were the rusted remains of the stand the plane had been mounted on, now lying on its side in the dirt. She could see the vague outline of the foundation of the building’s aboveground portion.
A person could walk right over this area and not even know it was there.
They’d brought explosives in case they had to blast their way in, and from the looks of it, that was exactly what they’d have to do.
Raven consulted his PRD, gathering his bearings. “Looks like they probably loaded craft in through some big docking doors to the south. The public entrance was on the north side of the complex. For now, it’d be a smaller job just to blast our way through the smaller main entrance.”
They piled out of the plane, loading a maglev with packs of explosives. H124 checked her toolbag. It had been growing heavier by the week. In addition to her rain gear, water bottle, multitool, and pocket pyro, she now carried the flight suit she’d used to infiltrate Delta City with Astoria. It folded up neatly in a brick-sized pack, so it was worth keeping with her.
Raven moved to the north side of the complex, and studied a location in the dirt. “The main entrance should be under here.”
Gordon and Dirk set up the explosives, and they all withdrew to a safe distance. Sweat poured down her back in the sweltering heat. Gordon’s white hair stood out in unruly tufts on his beige scalp, and he dabbed at the sweat with the red rag that always hung out of his back pocket. She watched Gordon work, his body spry for his eighty-plus years, his overalls hanging loosely on his bony frame. She always found his energy and enthusiasm inspiring. “Fire in the hole!” Gordon called out as a deafening explosion tore through the afternoon, sending up a massive cloud of dirt. When it settled, the resulting crater exposed two rusted doors.
Raven cut through them with a pyro, and they fell away, exposing a cavernous underground space. Stale air rasped out, cobwebs fluttering in the darkness. H124 donned her headlamp and switched it on. The beam fell on displays and dusty equipment.
She entered the quiet cool of the museum, instantly grateful for the relief from the relentless heat. They’d been smart to build it underground. Much of the museum was still intact. A wide staircase led down to a lower level. On the ceiling hung a jet of some kind—she’d looked through numerous books on aircraft, but didn’t know this exact model, though she recognized it as a combat plane.
They split up, exploring different rooms. In the first hall on the right she discovered a collection of old planes. She explored the hall, reading their placards. A silver one with a painted name was called The Spirit of St. Louis. Hanging from the ceiling was a yellow Beechcraft C17L Staggerwing from 1936 and a black Curtiss R3C-2 seaplane from 1925. Nearby, taking up a section of floor space, stood a delicately winged 1903 Wright Flyer.
In the next room, she stopped before a display that read, “How Do You Contribute?” Originally it had been a powered display. A cord snaked off into the wall. She pulled out the wire and hooked it up to her PRD’s power cell. Light flickered from a contraption in the floor and filled the old display. H124 stepped back in wonder. Three-dimensional people suddenly stood before her, all made of light. Green grass stretched into the distance, and huge living trees shaded the area, their leaves rustling in the wind.
“What are you doing to help the planet?” the voice of an off-screen interviewer asked. A smiling man faced the camera. He wore brown shorts and a collared white-striped shirt, his hair cut short, his face red with sunburn.
“I teach my kids to respect the earth.”
“And what have they done so far?”
In the background H124 could see the man’s kids kicking around a black-and-white ball. One of them kicked it past the other and let out a whoop.
The man continued to beam. “Oh, well, nothing yet. But they’ll teach their kids, too.”
The scene shifted to show an older woman smiling into the camera. “And what do you do to help?” the interviewer asked.
She grinned. “If I can make just one person smile, I’ve made a difference.”
The display shifted to a woman with long blonde dreadlocks, a white knitted tank top, and a flowing rainbow skirt. “And what do you do to help?” asked the off-camera interviewer.
“I figure if I can convince two people to be more green-minded, then those two people will convince four more people, and those four will convince eight, and on and on until everyone on the planet has a greener mindset.”
“And why do you think that hasn’t already happened?”
Her smile faltered. “What do you mean?”
“Well, conservation has been a part of the global dialogue since the days of writers and thinkers like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Rachel Carson. Why didn’t their thinking convince two people, who went on to convince four, who went on to convince eight? If that worked, wouldn’t we already be a predominantly green-minded society?”
The woman stared into the camera, her smile now gone.
The green display turned brown and black, and in the ensuing darkness, the off-camera voice said, “And what are you doing to help?”
The display went dark, and H124 stood for a few minutes, processing what she’d just seen, thinking of the ruined landscape above her. The last person interviewed…the idea wasn’t a bad one. So why hadn’t it worked, this passage of ideas from one person to the next?
But H124 already knew the answer. The PPC was the last holdout from this culture that valued greed and power over the preservation of the planet. The woman’s theory didn’t work because for every one of her, there were millions of other people passing on the idea that personal gain was more important than a communal, earth-friendly attitude. Make money. Take what you can get. Think in the short term. That signal had been a thousand times more powerful than conservation, and in the end, even when things had become so dire with rising sea levels, megastorms causing massive damage, and CO2 levels changing the very composition of the earth-ocean system, greed still won out.
She thought of the PPC destroying the experimental forest Raven’s parents had worked so hard to maintain, all so the media execs could furnish their offices with wood. The mentality was still present, and powerfully so.
“You okay?” came Dirk’s voice from across the room. She turned to him, unplugging her PRD from the display.
She turned to him. “Yeah. This place is just…”
“Haunting?”
She blinked. “Yeah. It’s hitting you that way, too?”
He gazed over his shoulder. “All these amazing inventions, this dedication to learning and exploration. I feel like we’re on some alien world, or that we discovered a long-lost civilization. Can’t believe these were our ancestors.”
He hooked his thumb to the left. “Looks like there’s a whole room about airships over there.” He moved past her, on to a different section of the museum.
The next room did indeed hold photographs and artifacts from a variety of early airships. And finally she knew why the PPC ships were called “airships.” Early ones had been filled with helium or hydrogen, the latter being highly flammable and dangerous. She stopped at a photograph depicting a huge airship on fire, anchored to a metal scaffolding of some