Wonder of the Worlds

by Sesh Heri

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  Tesla walked forward now, ahead of Cleveland and me.

  “Theoretically,” he said, “she could fly to the farthest reaches of the known universe—and still continue without end.” Tesla stopped and turned around to face us, and said, “So far, however, she has only made it across country from New Jersey and out over Lake Michigan on our secret test runs which Mr. Czito and I carry out each night.”

  Lillie and Ade had reached the roof of Tesla’s warehouse and had gone to the rooftop access door. Ade tried the door, but it was locked fast. He bent down and looked at the door’s lock. He tried Lillie’s pin, trying to probe the keyhole with it. This time the wards would not give. He removed the pin and bent it slightly on its end, then inserted it again. Still the wards refused to budge. “This may take some time,” Ade whispered to Lillie.

  Inside the warehouse, I stood at the bow of the airship and looked up at the pilothouse. I said to Tesla, “So this is what you’ve been doing with all your money.”

  Tesla said, “Yes, every penny I have has gone into this—and my laboratory in New York.” I said, “I bet J.P. Morgan doesn’t like that.” “He has nothing to say about it,” Tesla replied. “That’s what I mean.” “I’ve tried to interest the Navy in my airship, but, despite President Cleveland’s urgings, they have been strangely unresponsive.”

  I laughed, and said, “They’re waiting for Morgan to give them the go- ahead. And Morgan ain’t going ahead until he is the head.” “It was my head that created this ship. I will decide its use.” “Morgan doesn’t see things that way,” I said. “Does he, Mr. President?” “I’m afraid not,” Cleveland said. “But even Mr. Morgan’s view has its limits. For example, our friend J.P. Morgan doesn’t know we are here tonight.” “I thought Morgan knew all about everything and a little more on top,” I said. “Not this,” Cleveland said. “That so? Now you do have my interest.”

  “In fact,” Cleveland said, “there are precious few people in the world who know we are here tonight.” “So you’ve let me in on a big secret,” I said. “Why?”

  “In recent days,” Tesla said, “the President and I have discreetly approached a handful of the greatest minds on the planet—scientists, philosophers, theolo- gians—to seek out their council and advice on a very grave matter.” “Well,” I said, “it has always been my ambition to be a preacher, if I could get some religion in me. But so far…” I shrugged, and said, “I don’t under- stand. How can I help you?”

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  Cleveland said, “Drop the false modesty, Clemens. You’ve given a great deal of thought to the human condition, its origins and ultimate development.” “Yes, Your Excellency,” I said, “I’ve put on my thinking cap from time to time over the years. But you know, I’m really nothing but an old Mugwump.” “Mugwump my ass,” Cleveland said. “What do you think about the planet Mars?”

  I looked over to Tesla. He was studying me closely.

  “Your Excellency,” I said, “I can honestly say I don’t think anything about the planet Mars. I’ve never been there, nor have any of my relatives. What I think about is my rheumatism and my bank account—just like everybody else.” “You’ve never heard the secret legends?” Cleveland asked.

  I looked over to Tesla again, and he gave me an almost imperceptible nod. I knew he had told Cleveland what I had said about Percival Penrod. I went up to the airship and studied a riveted seam on its hull. “Well, now,” I said, “I’ve heard some things in my time… . Tall tales told late at night in the back room of the lodge.” “Tall tales?” Cleveland asked.

  “I’ve heard some things, yes.”

  “And you’ve heard about Mars. The cities up there.”

  “Hell, if you’re asking—you know I have. But now—I don’t like to discuss those things much.” “It’s all right, Clemens. It’s just you and me and Tesla here. I want to know: Do you think they are still there—the Martian people?” “I can only give you my opinion. I’d say—yes, they are. After all, we are still here.” “True enough,” Cleveland said. “For the last several years, our astronomers have seen through their telescopes what appears to be a vast network of canals stretching from the north pole of Mars to its equator.” “I’ve read about those,” I said. “Isn’t there some disagreement over whether or not they really exist?”

  “Yes,” Cleveland said. “There is a controversy. But it is only a small part of the picture. Starting in 1877, and continuing at intervals of two years thereafter, our astronomers have sighted artificial objects orbiting some fifty miles above the Earth. The authorities of Europe and America have been able to keep the existence of these objects a secret from the general public, and thus have avoided wide-scale panic. The appearance of these objects roughly coincides with the close approach of Mars to our world.” “I had no idea,” I said. “I’ve heard nothing of this.”

  “Neither you nor anyone else were supposed to hear a particle of it,” Cleve- land said. “In 1889, our astronomers sighted a spindle-shaped object a tenth of a mile in length hovering above the United States at a height of one hundred miles. At that time I approached Mr. Tesla here through George Westinghouse,

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  and asked him if he knew of any way to build a ship which could travel beyond the atmosphere of Earth. He informed me that he had been design- ing just such a thing. We decided it best for him to finance and build his own prototype airship with the understanding that the cost of the prototype would be reimbursed should our military find use for his ship. This plan gave us the greatest latitude of secrecy—and Mr. Tesla the greatest latitude for the cre- ative development of his ideas. Now, recently, one of our battleships out in the Atlantic sighted a foreign airship. It came up out of the ocean and f lew away into the sky until it was lost to sight. It is of utmost importance that we find the origin of this foreign airship. We think this airship has come from either the Moon or Mars.” “More likely Mars,” Tesla said.

  I said, “Moon—Mars—it has to be coming from some place off the planet, for I am certain that you are the only person in this world who could design and build a f lying machine.” “Come this way, gentlemen,” Tesla said, “I’ll show you something really interesting.”

  Tesla turned and walked back toward the front of the warehouse. Cleve- land and I looked at each other; then followed Tesla back down the hallway. Halfway down the hall, Tesla turned and went through a door and Cleveland and I went through it after him. We entered a room that was bare save for a couple of workbenches and a locked cabinet. Tesla went behind one of the workbenches and touched some- thing and a panel on one of the walls slid back to reveal a large combination- lock wall safe. Tesla went to the safe, spun its wheel back and forth and opened the safe door. The moment he cracked the door open, light f looded out from inside the safe. The light was prismatic, a rainbow of colors, and it brightened and dimmed rhythmically at regular intervals in a way which reminded me of the beating of a heart. “Gentlemen,” Tesla said, and he motioned us to step forward and look into the safe. Cleveland and I approached the open safe and looked in. Mounted on a ceramic pedestal was an oval-shaped crystal about two and a half inches in diameter by about six inches in length. The pulsing, prismatic light came from the interior of the crystal, seeming to originate from several twinkling points. As I watched, I could see other little sparkles of light circulating through the crystal’s interior, moving like flowing blood. The sparkles would move in sinuous arcs from the inside surface of the crystal to its center, and then back toward the surface again. The more I looked at the crystal, the less I thought of it as an inanimate object, and the more I thought of it as a living being. I would learn that Tesla himself thought of the crystal as just such a being—a living mineral.

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  “Jumpin’ Jehosophat!” I said. “What South African glory hole did that come out of?” “None,” Tesla said. “The crystal is entirely artificial, grown by a special electrical process over a three year period in my New York laboratory. It is a sp
ecial kind of quartz, its lattices layered with minute veins of a new kind of metallic element made from gold and other metals of the platinum group. It is the new element and its geometric distribution within the lattices which is the key to the crystal’s function.” “What does it do?” I asked.

  “In essence—it converts cosmic rays and electrical charges imbedded ran- domly in the ether into useable electricity. Those colorful f lashes of light are the visible companions of invisible electrical waves of energy.” “So this powers the airship?” I asked.

  “No,” Tesla replied, “the cosmic rays of the universe and the electricity embedded in the ether are the power. And that power is infinite in extent and of absolutely no cost. From this single crystal can f low all the electrical power needed by everyone in the world.” I began to understand that this crystal was not a fuel, but a living machine that converted one form of energy into another—a form of energy that had lain like a sleeping lion within the hidden recesses of space itself—a form of energy infinite in extent, cheaper than air, impossible to price, impossible to parcel, impossible to sell. It began to dawn on me that this crystal was not just another invention to do things a little faster and a little better, but was the obsolescence of scarcity itself. And without scarcity, how could there be any commercial value in the material realm? Here I perceived the dim outline of a “New World” that was much greater than the one sighted by Columbus. In this world, no coal need be dug, no oil need be pumped. In this world, people would go to and fro without cost or care. In this world, the poor would become as the rich, the weak as the strong. In this world, all labor would be rested, all sickness cured, all ignorance informed, all wrong righted, all sorrow ceased, earth raised to heaven, all hopes fulfilled, all barriers broken down, all bound- aries of time and space and life and death—obliterated. In this world, men would no longer exist—for they would have become gods. These thoughts did not come to me at the time as words, but as vague, uneasy feelings. I could hardly sort them at the time. After a moment, I struggled to orient my thoughts, to find some compass to point my way in a familiar direction. My thoughts sailed in circles, and then landed ashore on the mecha- nism of the crystal’s workings. I said, “If your airship was a steamboat… then this crystal would be the boiler… and the cosmic rays would be… the firewood?” “Very good, Mark,” Tesla said, “This crystal is a converter of energy, like your steamboat boiler. Only the energy being converted here is unimaginably

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  greater than any derived from the boiling of water. A small piece of this ‘Master Crystal,’ as I call it, can serve the conversion needs of the airship for some time before its molecular lattice collapses.” “Eh?”

  “Before it ‘burns out.’”

  “Oh. So you have a piece of this crystal in your airship already?” “That’s right.” “Can I see it?”

  “By all means.”

  Up on the roof of the warehouse, Ade was making no progress on the lock. Suddenly, the end of Lillie’s hairpin broke off inside the keyhole. Ade stood up, pushed back his hat, and said, “That lock is more than a mere lock. Whoever made it knew what they were doing.” Lillie looked around the rooftop, which was mostly f lat. But traversing the long axis of the building was a gabled skylight. In order to look through its windows, one had to climb up a slanting rooftop. “What about that?” Lillie said, nodding up to the skylight. “Maybe,” Ade said. Ade gingerly climbed up the slanting roof and grabbed hold of the edge of the skylight. Then he lay against the roof, and peered down over the edge of the windows. “Can you see anything?” Lillie asked from below in a loud whisper.

  Ade rubbed the dew off the window in front of him with his coat sleeve, and looked down through the clear glass. “It’s some kind of big machine,” Ade said, “a battleship maybe.”

  “Help me up there,” Lillie said, and she tossed off her shoes and began to climb up the roof in her stocking feet. Ade reached out, grabbed Lillie’s hand, and pulled her up next to him. Lillie looked down through the glass. “So it’s true,” she said. “What?” Ade asked.

  “Tesla’s airship. It really does exist.”

  Then Lillie and Ade caught sight of Tesla leading Cleveland and me back to the airship.

  Down below in the warehouse, Tesla went up the steps leading into the airship. I followed up the steps behind him. “Toot! Toot!” I piped. “All aboard! All aboard that’s coming aboard!”

  I entered the airship through her door and planted my foot on her lower deck. Cleveland came in behind me. We stopped, looking at a new curiosity. It was another strange vehicle, maybe a boat, maybe a f lying machine. It was

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  domed over with a bubble of glass.

  Tesla said, “This is a smaller version of the airship. It can carry up to six people in an emergency.” “A lifeboat,” I said.

  Then I looked over to the bulkhead and saw some kind of canvas garments hanging on hooks. Above each garment hung a helmet, a clear bubble of glass to somehow be fitted over the head, apparently. I pointed to the garments, and asked, “What are those?” “Air pressure suits,” Tesla said. “For movement through a vacuum.”

  Tesla ascended a vertical steel ladder leading to the upper deck. I followed him on up, and Cleveland came up behind me, barely squeezing his stomach through the hatchway. Tesla grabbed Cleveland’s hand and helped him pull himself up out of the hatchway and on to the upper deck. Then Tesla went to a large cabinet which extended from the f loor to the ceiling, a little over seven feet high. He slid back the door of the cabinet and revealed a maze of electrical machinery. There was a large spiral coil of wire mounted on a big spool and a number of metal boxes, each with a little glass tube attached at the top. There was a maze of other electrical equipment. Amidst all this was a little metal rod, and, mounted upon its tip, a tiny crystal f lashing with a rainbow of light.

  “There is the child of the Master Crystal,” Tesla said. “It is the drive crystal for the airship.” “What about those two fancy f lagpoles on the top of the ship?” I asked. “What are they?”

  “They are the aerial conductors,” Tesla said. “Lightning rods,” I offered.

  “Of a sort,” Tesla said. “One conductor absorbs electrical charges from the strikes of cosmic rays. The electricity is conducted down into the ship here. Originally, the electricity f lowed into a bank of special glass vacuum tubes. The tubes, when given a slight charge, would draw random electrical charges directly from the surrounding ether. Unfortunately, the tubes burned out rela- tively quickly, and were very expensive to manufacture. On an extended inter- stellar voyage, the ship would need to carry a large supply of the tubes. How- ever, last night I replaced the tubes with the drive crystal.” Tesla pointed into the electrical circuits. Cleveland and I stepped forward to get a better look.

  Tesla said, “The generated electricity passes into these banks of condensers and is then discharged in pulses through the circuit controller and into this magnifying coil. From the coil an intense pulse of electricity passes through space to the secondary coil.” Tesla went to a second cabinet and slid open its door, revealing a second coil.

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  Tesla went on, “The electricity from the secondary coil passes back up to the other aerial conductor where it is pulsed out over the surface of the ship as a skin wave. So there it is: a self-generating dielectric vehicle.” “Do you understand any of that, Your Excellency?” I asked. “The ship runs on electricity,” Cleveland said. “Yes,” I said, “that’s what I gathered.” “It is really simpler than it sounds,” Tesla said.

  “It usually is,” I replied, “but let’s pretend we understand you. The ship draws electricity from the surrounding space.” “Essentially—yes.”

  “And this electricity is everywhere in abundance.” “Yes. It is everywhere. And it can never be used up.” “Well, that’s… that’s remarkable in and of itself.” “Yes, it is.”

  “But I still don’t understand how that makes the ship move—much less f ly throug
h the air.” “It is really very, very simple. As I told you some time ago—this whole invention came to me suddenly in such beautiful simplicity. It was a sudden realization, just like my realization of the system of alternating current. This time, I was also in a park—this time, Central Park in New York. A group of children were picnicking under a tree. A boy had tied a rope swing to a branch of the tree and a girl got on the swing. The boy pushed her. Every time the girl would return on the swing, the boy would push her again. Each little push added to the last and in a short while the girl was swinging high into the air, almost achieving a 90 degree arc. This is the principle of resonance. I then wondered what would happen if some giant could come along and bend that branch upon which hung that rope swing. And I wondered what would hap- pen if the giant only bent the branch at the exact moment the boy made his push, and bent the branch in such a way as to make the girl’s path of motion bypass the spot on the ground where the boy stood. The answer to what would happen is obvious: The boy would not be able to reach the girl. He would not be able to push her anymore. The girl would slow down and stop! Amazing! So from that it is quite obvious how my airship operates.” “It is?” I asked. “I must’ve missed something. Did you miss something, Your Excellency?”

  “Girl on swing. Boy pushed her. Giant bends branch. No more pushing,” Cleveland said. “Yes,” I said, “I gathered all that. But how does that make the airship move?” This here illustrates Tesla’s genius. What was absolutely opaque to everyone else was clear and bright and obvious to Tesla. A million men in each

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  generation could see the same thing for a million years and not recognize one iota of what they were seeing. But a man like Tesla comes along and—at a glance—sees in a mote of dust the spinning truths of the cosmos.