by Sesh Heri
Weeks later, a commando unit of the U.S. Army under secret orders of Majestic Seven approached Antarctica in a submarine, landed on the coast in rubber rafts, and stormed the German’s transmitting station on the coast. The commandos found an abandoned underground installation leading to an empty chamber, its walls and floor covered with tiles. The commandos returned to the United States, and days later everyone in the unit died from the same mysterious illness at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Later, George Ade informed Tesla.
“They all died,” Ade said, “in a state of extreme muscle paralysis. Their limbs turned black, and as soon as they died, their bodies disintegrated into black, gelatinous blobs.”
“That is a known effect of the Bell,” Tesla said.
“What is it?” Ade asked. “Some kind of radiation?”
“Radiation is not the right word,” Tesla said. “I would call it ‘temporal compression.’ They died from being exposed to too much time.”
“Well,” Ade said, “I’ve heard of people dying of boredom from too much time on their hands, but from too much time— itself?”
“Yes,” Tesla said. “It can happen. The atoms of a body are accelerated through time faster than their own internal time. It results in a dissonance in inertia and mass and this literally tears the atoms and molecules of a body apart, with the macroscopic result of a black gelatin or viscous liquid.”
“Oil,” Ade said.
“Yes,” Tesla said. “The mass sometimes looks something like oil.”
“So,” Ade asked, “what do we put on these poor soldiers’ death certificates as the cause of death?”
Tesla replied, “Just put— ‘poisoned’— in the line of duty.”
Ade asked, “And this happened just because they walked into that empty chamber down in Antarctica?”
“The chamber wasn’t empty,” Tesla said. “It was still etherically active, even though the transmitter, the Bell, had been removed. I would advise that no one enter that place without wearing a force-field suit.”
Another unit of soldiers returned to the abandoned German installation on the coast of Antarctica, this time all of the soldiers wearing hermetically sealed force-field suits with red visors. The installation was dismantled. The interior of the chamber that had contained the Bell was neutralized by a bombardment of precisely tuned longitudinal electric rays. In the course of the neutralization process, the interior of the chamber melted and collapsed.
Now Majestic Seven kept watch for power drains throughout the world. But once again, all power disruptions soon ceased, and, once again, Nikola Tesla made a prediction to George Ade.
“1935,” Tesla said. “This will be when the Germans will perform their next series of tests. At that time the solar system will once again be in an approximate resonance with the galactic center.”
And so it was that when 1935 came, electrical power drains began occurring again around the globe, not only at power plants, but in cities, towns, farms, and in stretches of complete wilderness. This time, however, Tesla began detecting a focused area of activity, similar to what occurred in the Niagara Falls area in 1931.
“The center of the power drain,” Tesla said to George Ade, “is in the Sonoma Valley of California.”
“The London Ranch?” Ade asked.
“Yes,” Tesla said. “The Germans seem to be attempting to use the Bell to interact with the time machine buried under Sonoma Mountain.”
George Ade passed Tesla’s instructions along the chain of command of Majestic Seven and soon radio engineers appeared on Sonoma Mountain above the Jack London Ranch. There they erected a new radio tower to send out longitudinal waves tuned to a specific frequency designated by Tesla. As soon as the broadcasts began from the new radio tower atop Sonoma Mountain, full power returned to the electrical generating station at Folsom, California. A day later, all power disruptions around the globe ceased abruptly.
“We got ‘em!” George Ade exclaimed to Tesla.
“We have gotten no one,” Tesla said. “We are barely keeping our adversaries in sight while they continue to race ahead of us. You must listen to me and make the Seven listen to me before it is too late! Majestic Seven must understand that the Germans are very close to re-engineering the Martian Bell! We must formulate a plan and we must do it now so that we will be ready when 1937 arrives— for that is a year of great danger! In 1937 the Germans will complete their tests, this next time on the island of Guadalcanal. It is there that they will finally be able to interface the Bell with not only the time machine on Guadalcanal, but the whole system of ancient time machines buried around the globe! Tell them! Tell the Seven! No. Tell them that I must speak before them. I must be allowed to address a session of Majestic Seven.”
“That will be difficult for me to arrange,” Ade said.
“Keep in mind that I was once a member of the Seven, myself,” Tesla said.
“That was a long time ago,” Ade said.
“I still know what I’m talking about, or you wouldn’t be listening to me,” Tesla said.
“I’ll try,” Ade said.
George Ade convinced the members of Majestic Seven to convene a session for the purpose of being briefed by Tesla, and so, after nearly twenty years, Tesla once again met with Majestic Seven and spoke to them for over two hours. By the time the meeting had concluded, a plan of action had been formulated. The plan would nest into several other on-going secret projects. The secret action that Nikola Tesla and George Ade were allowed to know in full was called The Purdue Plan. The title referenced Purdue University, for it was there at that institution of learning that Majestic Seven decided to launch one of the most secret intelligence operations in the history of the world.
The Purdue Plan began to be implemented shortly after Nikola Tesla’s meeting with Majestic Seven, appropriately enough on the campus of Purdue University at an alumni-faculty dinner. Among those attending the dinner were George Ade himself, one of Purdue University’s most prominent alumni, and Amelia Earhart, world-famous aviatrix and women’s career counselor at Purdue, along with her husband, George Palmer Putnam II. This alumni-faculty dinner had been arranged a few days after Amelia Earhart and her husband had attended a dinner at the house of Dr. Edward C. Elliot, President of Purdue University. It was at this dinner, also attended by David Ross, that G.P. Putnam presented the idea of a “Purdue flying laboratory,” which, in substance, would be the state-of the-art Lockheed Electra all-aluminum airplane, capable of flying two hundred miles an hour. This idea would become the public face of Project Electra which, in its secret phase, was already well underway.
After the dinner party at President Elliot’s home, the alumni-faculty dinner was soon hastily arranged through David Ross. The evening of the event, a dining hall on the campus of Purdue University was decorated; the tables were covered in fine linen and arranged with exquisite silverware. At seven o’clock, the hall was filled with diners: men in tuxedos and dark suits, women in formal gowns. At the raised platform at the front of the hall, President Elliot sat with George Ade, David Ross, and R.B. Stewart, secretary-treasurer for Purdue University. At five minutes to nine o’clock, President Elliot rose from his seat and introduced George Ade to the assemblage. Ade rose from his place at the dais, and made his way slowly to the speaker’s podium. He was dressed impeccably in a dark suit, contrasting with the silver sheen of his hair. His long, sharp features and wry smile proclaimed his identity as of a certain type which only a single word could express: American.
Ade looked back and forth upon the diners, smiling all the while, as their applause subsided. Then he said:
“Well! I guess this means that some of you actually have a vague idea of who I am!”
The audience chuckled, and Ade went on:
“You know, here in Indiana everybody thinks I’m a writer who is trying to be a farmer, and in New York everybody thinks I’m a farmer— who is trying to be a writer.”
The men seated at the dais burst into laughter, and ano
ther wave of laughter passed through the audience.
“Not too bad,” Ade said, nodding and looking back and forth at members of the audience. “That’s not so bad. I can get a laugh or two. That’s something of a real accomplishment. Mark Twain once told me that it’s much harder to be a humorist than a tragedian, because a humorist must invent, but a tragedian need only make an accurate report.”
Ade took a drink of water from the glass on the podium, and then went on:
“When you reach my age, you have to wet your whistle if you’re going to carry the tune. Now let’s see. Oh, yes. Here we all are— alumni of Purdue University. Well, not all. There are a few of the faculty here tonight, I see. Nothing better to do, I suppose. We alumni of Purdue like to get together and reminisce from time to time, and here is one of those times again, and I’ve been asked to do the reminiscing tonight, no doubt because I am probably the oldest living of all the alumni— who is still capable of reminiscing. I know I’ve been around a long time, because that’s what everybody tells me. They say, ‘George— you’ve been around a long time— too long. So sit down and let somebody else talk!’ And I’ll do that in a minute. I’ll keep my remarks short so as not to impose on everyone’s enjoyment of their deserts.
“Every time I return to Purdue, I’m always transported back in time to the very first day I arrived here as a freshman in 1883. I was determined to come to the university prepared. And I did come prepared, or so I thought. I had set out for Lafayette with a canvas telescope containing my other suit and a change of shirt and underwear. I also carried three cookies and three sandwiches, made by my mother, of course. How’s that for being prepared? I thought it was all very elaborate. I can’t say my father had a great deal of confidence in me. I think the limit of his hopes for me was that eventually, somewhere, somehow— by some miracle— I would make a living.
“Well, Purdue was two miles from the train station and there were no streetcars in those days, so I rode up here in a delivery wagon and got off over there at the summit of Chauncey Hill.
There were only four austere buildings standing over there across the way back then. They had just been standing there long enough for their plaster to be nearly dry. Not much to the campus back then, only 200 students enrolled that year, and only 30 of us freshmen. I was assigned to the dormitory, a chamber of monastic simplicity. It cost me fifty cents a week. As I look back on the fashions of that time, I find them quite ludicrous, but I embraced them along with everyone else. That’s the way fashions work. We favored the ready-made cravat. That was because we didn’t have brains enough to know how to tie a real one. The derby hats we wore seemed to be forged in a foundry. I decided on the scientific course, which would eventually give me a Bachelor of Science. A bachelor was all I wanted, since I wasn’t serious enough about science to contemplate marriage. Really, I just pursued the bachelor to dodge all the higher mathematics. I did a lot of dodging and weaving. By carefully dodging and weaving in and out of the optional courses, I also avoided the ancient and modern languages. There should have been a bachelor in strategic dodging and weaving. I would’ve excelled in it. But I will tell you one thing: Any college boy who can establish a reputation for studiousness the first year may be pleasantly surprised at what he can get away with later on.
“Somehow, by 1887, despite all my dodging, weaving, pranks, stunts, hokum, and general foolishness, I found myself commencement speaker at our graduation ceremony. I think I was as surprised with how my education turned out as everybody else. My father was flabbergasted. He shook my hand and said, “Son, you did it. I don’t know how you did it, nobody else knows how you did it— but you did it.” He was proud, but more relieved than proud.
“After graduation I became an advertising man for a patent medicine company, a newspaper reporter, and finally was discovered as a novelist and playwright and sold— if not my soul— then a good deal of my scruples to the theatrical syndicates. We had a good run on Broadway with some of my plays for about ten years. I don’t write plays any longer now. If you want to worry yourself to death, write a play and try to get it produced on Broadway. I think in those ten years I spent more time pacing back and forth in theatre lobbies than sitting at the table writing.
“I’ve done a good deal of traveling through the years. I’ve come back from…afar…several times. It may give consolation to the many of you who stay home and never travel to know that only about five percent of foreign travel is worthwhile. There are so many little annoyances, hardships, and long stretches of just pure, dumb patient waiting that you pay ten times in all that compared to what you pay in money just to get a few scraps of enjoyment. If you’re patient, then travel; otherwise, I say: stay home.
“A few years back now David Ross here approached me with a request to come with him to look at a hole in the ground he had discovered. It was a big hole, I should add, carved out by a glacier eons ago. David thought it would make a great natural football stadium. I thought David was a genius, and he agreed with me— didn’t you David? See, he’s nodding. So he and I and a few other enlightened individuals got together and worked to get financing for the stadium. I was glad to get involved. I’ve never had much luck getting others to follow my promotions, so simply to help someone else with their project was a great relief. Somebody suggested that our construction project be called the Ross-Ade Stadium. I have to admit, I like the ring of that. Students who come here a few years from now will know nothing about a fellow named Ade who wrote some plays and books, but with my name on the stadium, they’ll be tipped off that someone named Ade was identified in some way with Purdue University. I like that, even though some might think that Ross-Ade is the name of a new drink.
“I’d like to conclude my comments by quoting from one of my own works if that is permissible, ‘The Yankee’s Prayer’: ‘Help me get things straight. Give me an outlook on the whole world…. Let me read history aright and learn that people can seldom be made happy and prosperous with ponderous legislation. Assist me and my associates to look to ourselves and not to Congress. Give me patience and tolerance and strength to brace myself against sudden and hysterical changes of popular feeling. Let me not construe the rule of the majority into a fool axiom that the majority is always right. Cause me to bear in mind that in every age of which we have record, an unpopular minority advocated measures which later on were accepted by the majority…. Lead me to an understanding of “service.” Help me to believe that the man prospers best and longest who is concerned about the welfare of the people about him. Compel me to see that our organization is a huge experiment in co-operation and not a scramble for prizes.’ That’s it, folks. Thanks for lending an ear. Now let’s have desert!”
George Ade started away from the podium. The audience applauded as he sat back down.
The evening wound to a close as coffee and desserts were served. The random chatter and clatter of a late evening filled the air. Slowly the room emptied until there were only three people left sitting at their tables: George Ade seated at the dais and Amelia Earhart and her husband seated far on the other side of the room. Earhart and Putnam sat looking at Ade and Ade sat looking back at Earhart and Putnam.
Finally George Ade spoke up: “I thought they’d never leave.”
Earhart smiled while Putnam only glanced over to his wife, his face impassive.
“I know who you are,” Ade said, “and I think you know I am, but we’ve never been introduced.”
“Introductions are unnecessary,” Amelia Earhart said. “Why don’t you join us over here?”
“Thanks,” Ade said. “Love to.”
George Ade stood up and walked across the room. Earhart noticed how the old man moved; at 69 Ade still had the balance and grace of a man half his age; his stride was that of a man who had been many places and done many things and yet still had some “going” in him.
Ade reached the Putnam’s table, stopped before Earhart, and extended his hand. Earhart extended her hand and shook Ade’s. In th
e grasp of their hands was a surprised recognition of a quality of their own in the touch of the other. They did not exchange a word, but only a glint in each of their eyes.
Ade turned to Putnam and shook his hand; here, there was no recognition, only an act of business.
“Please have a seat, Mr. Ade,” Putnam said coolly.
“George,” Ade said with a grin. “Call me George.”
“George,” Putnam repeated, forcing a slight smile.
George Ade sat across from Putnam with Amelia Earhart on Ade’s left side.
“David Ross speaks highly of you,” Amelia Earhart said to George Ade.
“Does he now?” George Ade asked.
“I spoke to him not long ago,” Amelia Earhart said. “He said you’re the man to see to get anything done around here. So, I’ve been hoping to meet you one day.”
“Well, I’ve been hoping to meet you one day,” Ade said to Earhart. “I’ve had a great interest in your work.”
“Do you fly, George?” Earhart asked.
“No,” Ade said. “I try to keep my feet on the ground as much as possible. I’ve been up in the air before, sometimes pretty high, actually, but always by necessity, I should say. That’s why I admire flyers like you so much. You freely choose to do what I would only have forced upon me.”
“Why should you have flying forced upon you?” Earhart asked.
“There’s a very simple answer to that, Miss Earhart,” Ade said. “I’m a chicken.”
“You?” Earhart asked.
“Fear of heights,” Ade said. “I nearly took a very long fall from a very tall place when I was a young man. Fortunately, a lady saved me just in time.”
“Really?” Earhart asked. “Where did this happen?”
“In a foreign country,” Ade said. “Very foreign, and very long ago.”
“What about the lady?” Earhart asked.