in his cheeks, the tremble in his jaw as his anger grew. And all the while, she was calm, quiet. A ghost out of time.
“Is that a question you really want the answer to, Captain?”
Nimrod raised his head and stared at the Director down his nose.
“Do you want to know the future?” she asked “Do you die in bed, peacefully? Does cancer claim you, eating you from the inside out? Do you choke on a fishbone at a restaurant in Maine? Do you take a vacation to New Zealand and die in a car wreck? Does someone shoot you in Times Square, accidentally, perhaps the police chasing a dangerous felon as you are caught in the crossfire? Or do you die here now, with me, in my Cloud Club?”
Nimrod raised an eyebrow. “It hardly seems to matter, does it? You already know. You already know the outcome of this very conversation. How awful it must be for you, reading lines from a script as you do.”
“I can tell you what happens. Don’t you want to know?”
Nimrod laughed. “If that is supposed to be a threat, then it fails completely. It does not matter if I know. What will be, will be, and it appears I have little choice in the matter. If I am to meet my end here, then there is nothing I can do about it, because it is already written in the stars.”
The Director smiled. Nimrod viewed her warily, rolling his fingers along the grip of his seven-shot revolver.
There was one bullet left.
“I need you, Captain Nimrod.”
“Is that so?”
Nimrod raised the gun to his temple and pulled back the hammer. Perhaps he could cheat fate, disturb the universal harmony. Perhaps everything the Ghost of Gotham was saying was a lie, another of her games to pass the torment of eternity. He could understand that.
Nimrod pulled the trigger, and he heard the gun go off even as the floor dropped away from him. Surrounded by blue light, when he blinked he was somewhere else.
The Director of Atoms for Peace was still floating in front of him, but they had left the Cloud Club. They were standing on a circular platform with a grilled metal deck. Below them stretched the great factory floor buried deep underneath Manhattan, where a thousand silver robots stood in their ranks, active but awaiting orders. The glow from the floor was a brilliant red and orange and the light moved as the fusors inside each robot torso churned. The platform on which he was standing was directly above the main fusor reactor, the great torus suspended in the center of the factory. Mounted above the reactor’s control panel, hanging underneath the platform above, was a large mechanical digital display, nothing but an empty black rectangle.
Nimrod was lifted into the air slowly, a foot at a time until he hung there, floating higher even than Evelyn. She pointed to him, gesturing with her hands, and he felt his arms being pulled outwards until he hung like a crucified man. The empty gun was still in his right hand.
“You cannot cheat fate,” she said. “You do not die in the Cloud Club.”
“I can see that, Madam,” said Nimrod. The tingle of the Director’s power surrounded him like a warm bath, but it was getting hotter, and more intense, quickly. He gritted his teeth against the burning pain.
“Now you know what it is like, being dragged through the universes against your will. Pain – infinite, eternal.”
Nimrod said nothing, focusing instead on dragging air through his clenched teeth.
The Director lowered herself to the platform, and began to walk around its edge, trailing ghostly fingers on the railing and leaving a trail of sparkling blue dust in their wake. She surveyed the robot army below her.
“Elektro?”
A robot walked out from the beneath the platform and turned to look up at the Director. The machine saluted, cigarette smoke curling from its mouth. “At your service, boss.”
“We are almost ready. Begin synchronization.”
“You got it,” said Elektro. The machine puffed on its cigarette and walked back underneath the platform. Nimrod dragged his head down as much as possible, and through the grilling saw Elektro operating the controls of the torus. The steady hum of the device increased in amplitude, the glow of the ring brighter until it was almost white.
The Director looked up at Nimrod, pinned like a butterfly to a board in midair. “My army of atomic robots. They are necessary, Nimrod. Do you understand? The atomic army is required. Now