by Sesh Heri
“What about your navigator, Noonan?” Tesla asked.
“He is here also,” Amelia Earhart said. “He, too, has new work to do.”
“What am I to tell Majestic Seven?” Tesla asked.
“Nothing,” Amelia Earhart said. “Tell them nothing.”
“Then I return to Earth completely empty-handed,” Tesla said.
“Not completely empty,” Amelia Earhart said.
Out of the clear, blue sky Tesla saw a fleck of white. It grew in size, fluttered, and became a bird. Tesla saw that it was a white pigeon— with gray-tipped wings— the white pigeon with gray-tipped wings. The pigeon came down and landed upon Amelia Earhart’s open palm.
“It is you,” Tesla said, tears welling in his eyes.
Then the bird transfigured into a young woman in a white robe with long, flowing white hair.
“It is I,” the young woman said, “Electra, the daughter of Atlas. Return to Earth, Nikola. Your work is not finished there.”
“What is my work?” Tesla asked, his body shaking from head to foot.
“You must see for yourself,” Electra said, “find for yourself, the answer you have sought throughout your life. The key to your mystery is to understand conflict— conflict, Nikola, conflict. Without it, nothing can stand, nothing can manifest. And what comes of the manifestation? Go, Nikola, go discover what comes of the manifestation. And when you finally discover, when you finally know— we will meet again.”
“We will meet again,” Tesla said solemnly.
“By decree of the Neniu,” Electra said. “By decree of the Neniu nothing in Time is wasted. You will now return to Earth.”
Tesla stood gazing upon Electra whom he knew so well and Amelia Earhart who stood beside her in perfect repose and peace.
In the next instant, Tesla realized that he was lying in bed in the darkened bedroom of his apartment in New York City and there was a loud, insistent knocking coming from his front door.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Projection
“I think it’s too bad when aviation movies depend for their excitement on plane wrecks and lost flyers and all that sort of thing. Perhaps that’s good drama but it certainly isn’t modern aviation.”
— Amelia Earhart
Tesla felt that the gold box was missing from his hand. He reached into the pocket of his coat and found that it was not there. The KA Projector was missing.
“The Neniu,” Tesla whispered, sure that they had took it.
The knocking at Tesla’s front door continued.
‘ Tesla pushed himself up on one elbow, and looked through the curtains of the window in front of him. It was night and the lights of the city glowed from the streets below.
The knocking at the front door persisted.
Tesla slowly rose from his bed and stood upon his feet. He felt his coat and reached up to his necktie. He found that he was still fully dressed. Only an instant earlier he had been in another star system, and now he was back in New York. He felt that he had not moved an inch.
The knocking at the door was all the yet louder.
Tesla turned into the darkness and made his way by habit to the front door of his apartment. He opened the door and the light of the outer hall blazed in his face. He blinked, and the figure of a man— a silhouette— appeared before him.
Tesla’s eyes adjusted to the light. He could now see that the man’s face beneath the shadow of his hat brim; it was a blank face, expressionless. However, Tesla recognized the man; he was an agent of Majestic Seven.
“I thought you were home,” the blank-faced man said. “I was sure of it.”
“What time is it?” Tesla asked.
The blank-faced man glanced at his watch. “1:26 am,” the blank-faced man said.
“That late,” Tesla said.
“That early,” the blank-face man said. “The President wants to speak with you.”
“Now?” Tesla asked.
“That’s right,” the blank-faced man said.
“Very well,” Tesla said. He stepped out of his apartment and closed the door behind him.
Tesla and the blank-faced man rode the elevator down to the lobby in silence, neither man looking at the other. They reached the ground floor, stepped out of the elevator, and crossed the lobby to the revolving glass doors.
Tesla pushed through first, and then the blank-faced man came behind after him. Outside at the curb a black Ford sedan waited with its lights on and its motor running. The blank-faced man opened the back door, Tesla got inside, and then the blank-faced man slid in beside Tesla and slammed the door shut.
The driver behind the wheel of the sedan turned on to 34th Street.
“The President is here in the city?” Tesla asked.
“No,” the blank-faced man said. “He’s at the White House. We’re taking the tube there.”
“Really,” Tesla said.
The sedan made its way along 34th Street, turned left on Fifth Avenue and proceeded north until it reached 40th Street. There, the driver pulled the car to the curb and brought it to a stop. The blank-faced man opened the car door, got out, and held the door open. Tesla got out of the car. The blank-faced man closed the car door, and the car pulled away from the curb.
Tesla and the blank-faced man walked across Fifth Avenue. The street was empty and silent. Tesla knew exactly where they were going: to the building directly across the street from the library. They reached the door of the building and went through it.
In the lobby, the blank-faced man pushed some buttons on a wall next to an elevator, and the elevator door slid open. They got in the elevator, its door closed, and the elevator car began descending deep into the bedrock of Manhattan— to Tesla’s old Majestic Seven laboratory— a place long barred from his use.
Tesla and the blank-faced man reached the laboratory, the car stopped, and the door slid open. They stepped out of the elevator and went to a small monorail station and stepped into an egg-shaped rail car that sat on a single track. Inside, they sat down, the door of the rail car closed, and they began moving down the track at an ever increasing speed. The lights of the tunnel through which they passed blurred into a single streak of light on either side of them. Then, just as the car hurtled forward at top speed, it began slowing down. In a few more moments it came to a stop. They had just traveled the distance between New York and Washington in a mere flash of time. The door of the railcar slid open and Tesla and the blank-faced man stepped out. They were now in a duplicate rail station directly below the White House in Washington, D.C.
The blank-faced man pushed the elevator button on the wall, and the elevator door slid open. Tesla and the blank-faced man got in the elevator, the door closed, and the car began ascending to the White House. In a few moments, the elevator door opened, and Tesla and the blank-faced man stepped out. They were in a hall inside the White House. They went to the door of FDR’s Map Room, and the blank-faced man knocked.
“Come in,” FDR’s voice sounded from inside.
The blank-faced man opened the door, Tesla stepped through it, and the blank-faced man closed the door behind Tesla, leaving Tesla and FDR alone in the Map Room.
FDR sat behind a table, fully dressed, smoking a cigarette in a long holder.
“Have a seat, Mr. Tesla,” FDR said.
Tesla sat down at the table across from FDR.
“Now,” FDR said, “let’s get down to business. My men spotted you down there at Site Y, but we weren’t certain that you were among all those who were killed.”
“I’m alive, as you can see,” Tesla said.
“Yes,” FDR, “and I’m very glad to see you, my friend. What happened to Marconi? Did the Nazis kill him?”
“I know nothing about the Nazis killing him,” Tesla said. “There was much confusion. I was returned to New York.”
“Not interested in Marconi’s grandiose plans, eh?” FDR asked.
“Colonizing the stars?” Tesla asked.
FDR nodded.
“No,�
� Tesla said. “Why transmit the germs of man to other worlds?”
“Why, indeed,” FDR said. “One cannot solve the problems of mankind by running away from them. Marconi can’t understand that— or couldn’t understand that, as the case may be. I suppose he told you that he had been working for us.”
“He did,” Tesla said.
“And he tried to convince you to join him on his interstellar expedition,” FDR said.
“He did,” Tesla said.
“He thought he had given us all the slip,” FDR said, “Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill…me. But we all knew exactly where he was all the time and exactly what he was doing down there in South America.”
“Spies everywhere,” Tesla said.
FDR nodded, blowing smoke.
“The forces of all sides were greatly reduced in the space battle,” FDR said. “The Martians and the Germans lost nearly all of their ships.”
“What about our space force?” Tesla asked.
“All gone,” FDR said. “All gone but the U.S.S. Cosmos, and it is badly damaged. It will take several years for everyone to rebuild. Meanwhile, we still have our conventional forces.”
“Quite a loss,” Tesla said. “It is clear that much work lies ahead.”
FDR nodded, and said, “That’s why I wanted to have this chat with you. Want to come back to work for Majestic Seven?”
“Doing what?” Tesla asked.
“Project Rainbow,” FDR said. “It’s basically your old idea about fixing up a ship with high frequency inductance coils to deflect mines. We’ve got Lieutenant Brown working on applying your idea to radar invisibility. He tells me we can do a few other things with the coil set-up, like camouflage— optical invisibility— maybe even teleportation. What do you think about that? Think we could secretly nest that kind of technology into a conventional war ship?”
“Seems that young Brown has all the answers,” Tesla said.
“He says he needs your help,” FDR said.
“Teleportation cannot be accomplished with a simple coil system,” Tesla said.
“No?” FDR asked with a grin.
“No,” Tesla said. “The electrical pulsations must be precisely modulated to correlate with local gravitational conditions as well as all of the geometries of the masses to be affected.”
“And how do we accomplish that?” FDR said.
“It can only be done with an extremely sophisticated switching system,” Tesla said. “An electronic brain, if you will.”
“An electronic computer,” FDR said.
“Yes,” Tesla said.
“Vannevar Bush has John Von Neumann building several of them now,” FDR said. “They’re filling up a large room with the things. I’ve seen it.”
“Von Neumann’s contraptions will never work properly for the purposes you have in mind,” Tesla said. “Von Neumann’s system is digital. What is needed is an analog system— the system I have been designing for nearly fifty years.”
“I see,” FDR said. “Very well. As of right now, you’re the head of Project Rainbow. I want you to go down to Philadelphia and meet with Brown and Von Neumann, see what they’re doing.”
“You mean,” Tesla said, “what they’re doing wrong.”
“Good luck, Mr. Tesla,” FDR said, extending his hand to Tesla. Tesla took FDR’s hand and shook it, then rose from his seat, and went to the door.
“We shall soon see some results, Mr. President,” Tesla said.
“Very good,” FDR said.
Tesla went out of the door. As soon as he got out to the hall, the blank-faced man asked, “How did it go?”
“I am now the Director of Project Rainbow,” Tesla said.
“Then now we go to Philadelphia,” the blank-faced man said.
Thus it was that Nikola Tesla became the head of Project Rainbow.
Over the next three and a half years, Tesla traveled back and forth between New York and Philadelphia to consult with Navy Lieutenant Thomas Townsend Brown and John Von Neumann. In November 1942, Tesla prepared to depart for Washington, D.C. to meet with FDR and Vannevar Bush about beginning the first model tests of Project Rainbow. Tesla called his assistants George Scherff and Kolman Czito to his laboratory on 40th Street. They stood before a large circuit board covered with vacuum tubes. The board took up one end of the room from floor to ceiling.
“The system is almost complete,” Tesla announced to his assistants. “I need to make only a few adjustments to the gravimeter and then— then we will be able to place the fixed stars in the pans of the balance scale and weigh each one individually!”
“Incredible,” Scherff said.
“That is the least of it,” Tesla said, “but it is the whole basis of the rest of it.”
“Yes,” Scherff said, “but will they understand that in Washington?”
“That is my job,” Tesla said. “To make them understand it.”
Soon Tesla departed for Washington. At the White House, he met with FDR, Vannevar Bush, and John Von Neumann. Tesla explained his switching system in detail. It was an electronic computer that could analyze the minute electrical discharges in a series of dielectric capacitors so as to individuate and measure a great number of standing waves in the gravitational field at any point in space. Such an individuation of standing waves would make it possible to determine the mass of any object in space propagating a gravitational wave to the point of analysis. Such individual measurement would include the stars within the galaxy. The volume of data points was therefore enormous, far beyond the calculating capacity of any human brain.
“We must be able to analyze the local gravitational field in order to create an accurate field template,” Tesla said. “Once we have an accurate template of the gravitational and mechanical forces surrounding and interpenetrating any object, we can then project that object along an appropriate wave-guide— say, a lateral gravitational node extending across the surface of the earth. As the template is projected along the node, the object or objects contained within it are carried along with it.”
“How fast can they be carried along?” FDR asked.
Tesla replied, “We now have the capability to project a space template at superluminal speeds, several times that of light.”
“But what about friction?” FDR asked. “Wouldn’t the thing move so fast it would just burn itself up?”
“Oh, no, no,” Tesla said. “The space itself in which the object exists is transported— teleported.”
“What about the space that it displaces?” FDR asked.
“As the object moves,” Tesla said, “the space in front of it moves aside rapidly as a fluid.”
“You mean, like a fish moving through water?” FDR asked.
“Like a fish moving through water at a speed faster than light,” Tesla said. “When the object reaches its destination— another spatial node— it instantly re-integrates with the local environment, that is, if the original template is precisely accurate. Otherwise….”
“What?” FDR asked.
“There is an instant fusing of matter,” Tesla said.
“An explosion?” FDR asked.
“No,” Tesla said. “More of an instant transformation, a crystallization. With something like a battleship, a vessel such as we are considering, the parts of the ship would fuse with the seawater and air at the destination site. This could cause great damage to the ship. If the template had an even greater imprecision, then more extreme effects would be produced, such as the collapse and fusing of bulkheads and decks. If men were aboard such a ship, it would certainly kill them. The bodies of the crewmen might fuse with the decks, the bulkheads, or on board equipment— furniture— anything aboard.”
“But your system would guarantee that wouldn’t happen,” FDR said.
“I can guarantee nothing,” Tesla said. “I can only attempt. One thing is certain: we must thoroughly exhaust all tests with models before proceeding to tests with actual ships.”
“Dr. Von Neumann here says th
at he can guarantee results with his system,” Vannevar Bush said.
“Nonsense,” Tesla said. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Von Neumann’s system is digital. Mine is analog. A digital system cannot provide the precise measurements that are required. One must not only create a template of the gravitational field, one must also create a template of the etheric field, the more fundamental substratum of space.”
“Dr. Von Neumann says that there is no such thing as an etheric field,” Vannevar Bush said.
“Further nonsense,” Tesla said. “The etheric field is an established fact. I have measured it. It is the basis of all that I have done, including the design of the Majestic Seven airships.”
“Thank you for your views, Mr. Tesla,” FDR said, extending his hand.
Tesla shook FDR’s hand, stood up, nodded to Vannevar Bush, glanced at John Von Neumann who sat impassively, and then turned and went to the door. He opened the door, but then stopped, turned around and said, “If you use Von Neumann’s computer, it will be a disaster.”
Then Tesla turned and went out the door, closing it quietly behind him.
Two days later Tesla received a telephone call at his apartment in New York. It was from Vannevar Bush.
“The President on the recommendations of numerous advisors is on the verge of deciding to go with Von Neumann,” Vannevar Bush said.
“It is a grave mistake,” Tesla said.
“Frankly,” Vannevar Bush said, “I share your concerns. Personally, I am not completely convinced that Von Neumann’s system will work adequately. I think you’ve made some very good points. That’s why I’m calling you. I can give you two more weeks to get your system up to speed. Can you be ready for a demonstration in two weeks?”
“I need two months at least,” Tesla said. “But I will try to do what I can in two weeks.”
“Good,” Vannevar Bush said. “If all goes well with your system, in two weeks we’ll move your whole operation down to Philadelphia. If you have anything further to tell me, do it by courier. I’ll have a new Navy liaison officer assigned to you.”