Double Threat

by F. Paul Wilson

  Cadoc gathered up his notes, which was his signal that Rhys should think about leaving. He turned at the door.

  “Thanks for telling me all this, Cad. I appreciate it. I really do.”

  “Ungh.”

  Rhys closed the door and started down the hall.

  She thinks you’re cute …

  Well, how about that?

  THURSDAY—FEBRUARY 26

  1

  Since she didn’t know when she’d next get a chance to eat, Daley ordered eggs and sausage and toast at Arturo’s. She’d worn her cap to avoid any discussion of her hair, but had to put up with his ribbing about whether she’d seen any more giant lizards.

  Am I ever going to live this down?

  (“We saw what we saw, Daley.”)

  Yeah, but did we see what we think we saw?

  She took an extra coffee for the road and was standing in front of her shop when Rhys showed up in a Highlander.

  He started to get out but she opened the passenger door and called out, “I got it.”

  She appreciated a guy holding a door for her, but waiting for someone to run around the front of a car to open a door she could easily handle herself—awkward. Worse than awkward: total bullshit.

  They made small talk along the way with Rhys asking some rather pointed questions as to whether she had a partner in the shop.

  Finally she said, “Look, I’m probably going to go broke running the place by myself. A partner would only mean I’d go broke sooner. You should understand that, Mister Degree-in-Economics.”

  “Only if it’s a given that you’re going to go broke. I don’t accept that premise.”

  “Well, my predecessor didn’t last.”

  “Yeah, but she was competing with the spa’s gift shop. You’re offering something completely different. Apples and oranges.”

  “You have more faith than I do.”

  He winked at her. “I have faith in you.”

  (“Oh, he likes you,”) Pard said from the back seat. (“He really likes you.”)

  Time for another time-out?

  (“Absolutely not. I want to see his Tesla tower.”)

  Rhys turned south and drove them along a chain-link fence that rimmed the solar array. It ran about ten feet high and was festooned with NO TRESPASSING signs.

  “If you look uphill to your right,” he said, “you can’t miss the Tadhak compound.”

  Daley saw a high, long beige wall that looked like poured adobe. All angles and sharp edges had been smoothed over, like ice cream left out of the freezer too long. She could see nothing of whatever lay beyond it.

  “Actually I could miss it. Really blends into the scenery.”

  (“Could have been designed by Gaudí,”) Pard said and somehow Daley knew exactly what he meant. Would she ever get used to this?

  “People think we Pendrys keep to ourselves, but the Tadhaks take insular to a whole other level. Nobody outside their family has ever seen behind those walls.”

  They continued on about a mile south of town to a gate in the fence. The fellow in the guardhouse waved them through. The south-tilted panels of the array lay straight ahead. The car was approaching from the east, so they were lined up edge on. And looming above and behind them all: the Tesla tower.

  “The solar panels take up about four acres of the six we have fenced off. The lack of clouds out here in the desert makes our array super-efficient, exceeding a one-megawatt capacity.”

  Daley shook her head. “Is that a lot? I have no idea what that means.”

  “It would allow us to supply more than a thousand homes on a steady basis year after year.”

  Shocked, she said, “A thousand? Your clan owns a thousand homes? Where are they all?”

  He laughed. “No, not even close. We plan to use the excess for the tower. If you want to get out and walk around, we can, but otherwise I’ll just drive you around the perimeter.”

  “Seen one solar panel, seen them all, I guess.”

  “You’ve got that right. Of course I could take you inside one of the buildings and show you the inverters.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  (“Sarcasm, Daley.”)

  What’s sarcasm?

  (“Try to sound interested.”)

  Gotcha.

  “What do they invert?”

  “The PV cells produce DC power. We have to convert it to AC to make it usable.”

  “You really know how to show a girl a good time.”

  (“Daley!”)

  But Rhys laughed. “Let’s get you down to the tower. It’s a helluva lot more interesting.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “And we should get moving. The engineers are up at the Lodge for a briefing before they do the final wiring for the test run tonight.”

  “Testing for what?”

  “To see if we can send power through the air.”

  (“Never happen.”)

  “Is that possible?”

  He shrugged. “Tesla thought so. The Pendry Elders are true believers in Tesla’s theories about wireless broadcast energy.”

  (“I’m afraid I can’t count myself among them.”)

  Hush.

  “How’s that going to work?”

  “Good question. They’ve invested a small fortune in the tower, so let’s hope Tesla was right.”

  “And you’re testing it today?”

  “Tonight. And you’re invited.”

  “I don’t know … sounds dangerous.”

  “You’ll be safe. Interested?”

  (“Say yes! Yes-yes-yes! I want to see this in action.”)

  Sounds boring.

  (“Please do this for me.”)

  “Okay,” she said. “Sure.”

  (“Thank you.”)

  You owe me.

  As they passed the inverter building—is that what they called it?—she spotted Karma Kendrick having a smoke outside. He spotted her as well and treated her again to his strip-stare.

  But then the road curved around and suddenly the tower lay dead ahead, claiming her full attention.

  “God, it’s massive. You don’t sense its size from the road.”

  “We’ve built it exactly to the dimensions of Tesla’s original Wardenclyffe tower, which means it’s one hundred and eighty-seven feet high.”

  (“Very impressive. And you don’t have to ask about Wardenclyffe because, thanks to me, somewhere in your memory bank is the datum that it’s a now-defunct town far out on the north shore of Long Island.”)

  You’re so wonderful.

  (“More sarcasm?”)

  Rhys pulled to a stop outside another ten-foot chain-link fence festooned with No Trespassing signs. Concertina wire coiled along the top all the way around.

  “Wow,” Daley said. “You really don’t want company in there.”

  “A lot of copper up in the cupola, and copper’s valuable.”

  Scattered among the No Trespassing signs were warnings about dangerous high-voltage electric currents.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Yeah. Everything’s insulated and re-insulated.”

  She pointed to the padlocked gate. “How do we get in?”

  “Easy when you’ve got a key.”

  Karma came striding up as they got out of the car.

  “You can’t go in there.”

  “It’s okay, Kendrick,” Rhys said. “My father is—”

  “I know exactly who your father is and he’s the one who told me to keep everyone away from the tower except the engineers and the Elders. So I can’t let you in.”

  Rhys jangled a key ring. “It’s all right. I’ve got keys and I’ll take full responsibility.”

  Karma said nothing but he didn’t look happy.

  Rhys unlocked the gate and they stepped inside. Daley stopped and gazed up at the maze of crisscrossing struts and trusses tapering up to a circular platform that supported the gleaming, copper-studded, mushroom-cap cupola.

  A heavy steel pipe ran through the center from the top into an
opening in the base. The tower had eight sides and so did the concrete pad that supported it.

  “Looks like you’re almost finished.”

  “Pretty much.” He patted a sheet metal enclosure on one of the supports. All eight supports boasted the same. “Just finished installing the base isolators.”

  “Base—?”

  “A kind of shock absorbers to make the tower earthquake resistant. Like I said, the clan has a lot of money sunk into this.”

  “You’re not going to enclose it?”

  “Nah. The inside would cook in the summer. Cooler to leave it open. Tesla never enclosed his tower.”

  Daley waved a hand in the air. “It this really going to work?”

  “We hope to find out tonight. We may learn there’s still a lot of kinks to work out.”

  Daley noticed a ladder leading up to the cupola.

  “What’s the view like from up there? Can we go up?”

  Rhys hesitated. “People go up, but…”

  “But what?”

  “It’s there for workers, not sightseeing. I’d never forgive myself if you fell.”

  Daley decided then and there she was going up, and started walking around the base.

  “Don’t worry about me.” She pointed to a thick insulated cable running up the inside of one of the supports. “Is it electrified?”

  “The dome? It’s not live. Still some wiring to finish. It’ll be done by tonight for the trial run.”

  “Good.”

  When she reached the ladder she started climbing.

  “Daley,” he said from behind and below, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Pard floated beside her. (“And here’s where I do agree with him: This ladder is just a bunch of open rungs without a safety cage. It’s much too risky.”)

  I’ll be fine.

  (“Please … if you get killed, I die too.”)

  Nobody’s going to die.

  As she continued her ascent, she glanced down and began to wish for a safety cage around the ladder. Because, damn, the ground looked awfully far away. She noticed Rhys climbing below her.

  Good for him.

  She was winded by the time she reached the opening in the platform and climbed through, and was still chasing her breath when Rhys arrived.

  “You’re crazy,” he said, panting as well. “You know that, don’t you?”

  (“Again I find myself in agreement with this man.”)

  “Could be. What I do know is I seem to be out of shape. And I also know the view from up here is spectacular.”

  She stood and saw the whole lower Imperial Valley spread out before her. A sliver of the Salton Sea gleamed silver to the north while the whole area south of it showed a patchwork of startling green.

  “The miracle of irrigation,” he said, following her gaze. He stood by the central steel pipe. “All those veggies … with two crop cycles instead of one, this part of the desert has become known as America’s Salad Bowl.”

  She ran a hand over the copper fittings of the dome. “And this is going to send electrical power through the air?”

  “That’s the hope.” He pointed toward Brawley and El Centro and the more populated areas of the valley. “If it works, and if you’ve got the right kind of antenna and transformer, you should be able to run your household appliances with electricity from the air.”

  “No offense, but it sounds kind of dangerous.”

  “Yeah, it does. I guess we’ll find out when we start testing it. We’re in terra incognita here. Nobody’s ever succeeded at this.”

  “And your people think they’ll be the first.”

  He shrugged and smiled. “Someone’s gotta be first.”

  (“I beg to disagree. No one is going to be first if it’s impossible.”)

  Her attention was drawn to the donut-shaped coil encircling the steel pipe.

  “What’s that?”

  “A type of resonant transformer known as a Tesla coil. Don’t ask me to explain any more than that. We have electrical engineers in the clan who understand it, but electricity remains a mystery to me.” He smiled uncertainly. “Can we go back down now?”

  He was trying to hide it but he looked unsettled.

  “Tell me: Are you afraid of heights?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘afraid.’ Let’s just say that standing in the open almost twenty stories up doesn’t top the list of my favorite things.”

  “You could’ve stayed on the ground.”

  “I was afraid you’d fall. I wanted to stay behind you so I could catch you if you slipped.”

  Well, well, well … my hero.

  (“Still more sarcasm?”)

  Not at all. I’m touched.

  (“Sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.”)

  Yeah, well, that’s not a new problem.

  She smiled. “That was sweet of you. Okay, then, let’s get back to earth.”

  “I’ll go first.”

  “To catch me if I fall?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said in a Duh! tone.

  You know, I could get used to this guy.

  (“I hope you do. He has a core of decency I find very attractive.”)

  I thought you said you weren’t gay.

  (“I’m not. I’m simply free from hormonal taint, which allows me to appreciate people for what they are regardless of gender.”)

  She followed Rhys to the ladder. The descent was a lot hairier and seemed a lot longer than going up, but they made it to solid ground without mishap.

  “Well now,” he said, brushing off his hands, “you may think you’ve seen the tower, but you’ve seen only the part that goes up. The rest of it goes down.”

  “Down?”

  “More than a hundred feet down. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Daley followed as he ducked under the trusses onto the tower’s base and led her to a low wall bordering a large, squarish opening in the concrete, maybe a dozen feet on a side. The steel pipe running through the center of the tower vanished into its shadowy depths. The walls of the shaft appeared lined with steel, supporting an elevator that was little more than a platform running on two vertical tracks. Rhys lifted the cover of a junction box to reveal a toggle switch. He flipped it and a vertical row of bulbs began to glow down the length of the shaft.

  “Want to take a look?” he said

  “Why not?”

  They stepped onto the elevator platform and Rhys closed the waist-high gate. The air grew cooler as they descended. Daley noticed another thick insulated cable running down along a seam between two of the wall sections.

  “Did you hit water on the way down?” she said.

  “The Livermore Lab did a groundwater survey back in 2008 that showed you have to go pretty deep in this area of the valley—like almost a thousand feet—before you hit water.

  The shaft ended at a rocky floor where another Tesla coil was attached to the steel pipe. The pipe continued into the earth.

  “We stopped here because this is the depth where Tesla stopped. This, however”—he tapped the pipe—“keeps on going down.”

  “How far?”

  “Another three hundred feet.”

  “What? We’re already a hundred feet down—”

  “A hundred and twenty, to be exact.”

  “Okay, fine. What’s the point of another three hundred?”

  “Tesla had this idea of anchoring the tower deep into the earth so he could ‘make the planet quiver with energy’—his words—and turn the earth itself into a giant conductor.”

  Daley shook her head. Rhys might as well have been talking Hindi for all she understood.

  “Don’t take this wrong, but that sounds crazy. What’s it even mean?”

  “Well, we’ve known for well over a hundred years that electric currents run through the upper layers of Earth’s crust. They’re called telluric currents. Tesla wanted to create standing waves in the planet’s crust as a means of transmitting power.”

  “Oh, well, that clears up everythi
ng.”

  He laughed. “I don’t pretend to understand it either.”

  She leaned closer to the coil. “Do you hear a hum?”

  He cocked his head, then nodded. “Yeah. I guess they’ve already completed the wiring down here.”

  “So it’s running?”

  “Not at all. I’ve seen films of these coils. They shoot sparks and arcs in all directions. Very impressive.”

  She spotted four smaller galvanized metal passages—pipes really, but wide enough to crawl through—heading off into the ground in different directions.

  “Where do those go?”

  “Ventilating shafts running up to the surface to keep a little air circulating down here. They can also be used to help in an extraction in case of a cave-in.”

  “Cave-in? You’ve got steel walls here.”

  “Yeah, but the valley’s a hotbed of seismic activity. The San Andreas runs partway down, and we’re practically on top of the Cerro Prieto and Superstition Hill Faults here. And the Laguna Salada Fault runs nearby too.”

  Daley suddenly felt hemmed in.

  “You know how you didn’t like being on top of the tower? Well, I’m starting to feel the same down here at the bottom of this shaft.”

  Rhys smiled. “Well then, let’s get back topside.”

  (“A little claustrophobic, are we?”) Pard said, hovering beside the platform as she stepped back on the elevator.

  I never thought so. I still don’t think so. I just think I can find better places to spend my time than a hundred and twenty feet underground in an area that’s “a hotbed of seismic activity.”

  (“Can’t argue with you there.”)

  When they returned to the top of the shaft they found a half dozen serious looking men waiting.

  “Rhys,” said the oldest, “you’re not supposed to be here.”

  Rhys looked miffed. “I don’t see why not.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

  “Really?” Rhys said. “What’s up?”

  “We’re waiting for your father and the other Elders. They have a meeting scheduled here.”

  “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Just the Elders and us.”

  “We were just leaving.”

  Once they were back in the Highlander, Daley said, “Who are they?”

  “The clan’s engineering crew.” He nodded toward a couple of big SUVs pulling up. “There’s my father and the other Elders. Let’s go.”