In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  Less than nothing, he realized.

  Chapter Ten

  The Next Six Months

  Strasbourg, France, near the German Border

  Many of the Parisian workers in Strasbourg who initially installed the aging Kaiser’s unsuccessful generator either spoke only French or refused to admit that they understood another language. This behavior was thus coded into the actual workmanship of the installation itself and, along with certain design flaws, explained the blown out wreckage sitting where a railway power dynamo was supposed to be.

  Nikola’s fluency neutralized the language problem before it became an issue. His additional fluency in German also opened other doors in dealing with the many local workers and supervisors from Germanic regions.

  The job itself presented little physical difficulty. From his first glance he recognized that the dual problems of conductivity and resistance were obvious; someone had literally designed the flaws into the system. He spent the rest of the year organizing the rebuilding tasks and suffering through the arduous paperwork involved. Following the earlier failure, every step of the process had to be formally approved by the Kaiser’s administrative staff.

  Once the long months of the actual work process finally began, Nikola eventually came to consider the slow pace a gift. His personal access to the electrical laboratory combined with his spare time, which allowed him to build his first working model of the alternating current motor. It was a relief to craft it in metal at last; the motor and its whirling magnetic power source had existed nowhere but in his imagination since the inspiration first struck him back in Budapest.

  By the time summer was ripe, the railway lighting project approached readiness for its demonstration, and the aged Kaiser came for a brief visit. He also brought his fifty-two-year-old son, the Crown Prince Frederick William III, to handle all the details and make the final approval.

  When the big moment for revealing the finished work arrived, the old man did no more than throw a bored glance at the generating system. After that, he spent the rest of the afternoon in a long conversation with Nikola about the nature of electrical energy. By evening, the Kaiser was on his way back to Berlin, leaving the Crown Prince to tidy it all up.

  * * *

  Weeks later in Nikola’s hotel room, Strausburg’s Mayor Bauzin had joined the Crown Prince in observing Nikola’s tabletop electrical energy generator in action. The three men clustered around a small wooden table under the hazy yellow light of the gas flame sconces high on the wall to watch the hand-tooled machine run smoothly, even at thousands of revolutions per minute. It was powered entirely by the “impossible” alternating current. Both of the high ranking visitors realized that even in this age of emerging gadgets, they were looking at the first such device ever to exist.

  “Amazing,” said the Crown Prince. But he was not referring to the generator. “Not one offer of sponsorship?”

  “No, Your Majesty,” replied Mayor Bauzin in a tone of muted sorrow.

  “And you gathered these men together from the list of names my secretary supplied?”

  “Oh yes, Your Majesty. Just as you directed, but…”

  Frederick William waited for a hopeful moment. When it became apparent that Mayor Bauzin was not going to finish his sentence, the Crown Prince sighed in a tone of monumental boredom.

  “Monsieur Mayor, I dislike it intensely when people stop in the middle of a sentence, simply because they have something delicate to say, and thus choose to test my sensibilities by seeing whether or not I will ask them to continue with what they have almost—but not quite—actually said.”

  “Yes, sire,” Mayor Bauzin replied, crushed and not sure why.

  “…So?”

  “Ah! Yes! Well, sire, they, ah, each one of the investors, that is, ah, they kept asking when you were going to arrive.”

  “Idiot! You were to inform them that I was called away!”

  “Oh I did, sire. Most assuredly. They simply didn’t…”

  “Monsieur Mayor, you just did it again!”

  “Forgive me! I meant to say that they, ah… I am afraid they did not believe the story, Your Majesty.”

  “Didn’t believe it?”

  “They feared that your absence indicated that your father has not fully embraced this new kind of power system.”

  “Yes! Correct! He hasn’t! My father is an old man in poor health! What does he care about new inventions?”

  “Yes… but then… he is the Kaiser.” Mayor Bauzin quickly added, “Just as you will be one day, Sire! But since he is in Berlin and has left the handling of Herr Tesla’s work up to you, your presence was really what they… seemed to desire.”

  “‘Seemed to desire.’”

  “Strongly. Strongly desire. It was what they strongly desired, Your Majesty, some direct assurance of cooperation with the Kaiser’s government. That is, in order to feel confident enough to invest in Herr Tesla’s electricity device.”

  “Polyphase alternating current generator,” Nikola spoke for the first time. His gaze was fixed on the working model with a dreamy cast to his face. “And it is more powerful than a dynamo twenty times larger.”

  He turned to the Mayor. “Mayor Bauzin, I am grateful for your efforts on my behalf, but I fear that the failure tonight was mine. I was simply unable to make them see. It is a mistake I do not intend to make again. Because this—” he gestured to the motor and finished in a near whisper “—and the entire branch of technology it represents, is going to change the world. That’s correct, gentlemen, the entire world.”

  The Mayor and the Crown Prince looked at the strange little device humming away on the tabletop. Change the world? Their eyes met in a skeptical glance. For a moment, for one tiny moment, the two men were united by doubt. The Crown Prince and the Town Mayor were momentary brothers in the presence of this eccentric’s world view.

  The camaraderie was brief. The Crown Prince had many such moments of fleeting simpatico with eager underlings on a regular basis; he had long since learned to shrug them off before people got the chance to use the false sense of intimacy to cozy up to him and start asking for things.

  The Crown Prince grabbed Mayor Bauzin by the elbow and firmly escorted him toward the door. “Well, Monsieur Mayor, good of you to accompany me here this evening so that I could personally get the story on the financiers’ reaction to Herr Tesla’s interesting device.”

  The Mayor tried to resist by dragging his feet, but he was no match for His Majesty. “But Sire,” he protested, “we came in the same carriage!”

  The Crown Prince automatically slipped into the practiced tone he reserved for small children and the feeble-minded. “No problem at all, Herr Mayor, just tell the driver to return for me after he drops you off.”

  Mayor Bauzin planted his feet at the door and made one last attempt to remain a part of the evening. “But Sire, that will leave you with so much time on your hands until—”

  “Tut-tut! My curiosity is centered on the technical nature of Herr Tesla’s work. Heady stuff. Not for you.”

  “Sire—”

  “I insist! Goodnight! Goodnight!” The Crown Prince firmly waved the man into the hallway. Nikola gave a quick bow in Bauzin’s direction just as Frederick William III personally closed the door and Mayor Bauzin vanished from sight, still gasping with exasperation.

  The Crown Prince immediately spun to Nikola. “Good Job! I was afraid you were going to say something.”

  “Certainly not, Sire.”

  “My staff follows me like hounds. There was no other way to get here without causing questions.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, Sire.”

  “My father, Herr Tesla! He admires your scientific skill but fears you practice witchcraft with your healing apparatus. He has forbidden me to take more treatments. ‘Good Of The Empire’ and all of that.”

  “Sire, I explained to him that I cannot prove the healing powers of magnetic energy wit
hout more experimentation, and that you insisted on volunteering because of your recurring throat problems.”

  “Yes, and the fact that I assured him I feel benefit from it no doubt convinced him something is unnatural here.”

  “Disease is natural. Do we not fight it?”

  “You preach to the converted, Herr Tesla.” He clapped his hands together in anticipation. “Now! With the Mayor gone and pretense behind us, I would like for this last session to be twice as long in length.”

  Nikola blanched. “Session? Your Majesty, the Emperor has forbidden us—”

  “One! He does not understand. Two! He is not here.” The Crown Prince pulled up a chair next to the table and sat down by the electrical generator. “Three…Please get out your electrical coil device, Herr Tesla. I am not here to waste time.”

  Nikola felt himself squeezed between the two opposing forces of disputing rulers. But in his moment of hesitation, he realized that Frederick William must be suffering from unusually strong pain today; a slight grimace played across the older man’s face every time he moved, though he was trying to conceal it. Since the Crown Prince was a combat soldier, Nikola knew it would take an extraordinary level of pain to force him to seek out radical treatments that his own family and many of his subjects would consider witchcraft.

  His need was real, and Nikola had the means to help. The choice seemed to make itself. He set about getting the spiral coil of copper tubing and preparing it for use on the Crown Prince. As soon as everything was set, he laid the coil over Frederick William’s shoulders like an elaborate necklace, then turned on the power. The dynamo produced a low hum, and the coils quickly grew warm from the electrical resistance.

  The Crown Prince smiled in satisfaction. “Mm, that’s better, now.” He closed his eyes and smiled. “You know, Herr Tesla, I really believe that these treatments of yours will prolong my life; doctors could do nothing for me. Some days I can barely swallow food—not even soup! But after one of these treatments, I feel better for days.”

  “I am very glad to hear it, Sire. Once I have the opportunity to experiment more thoroughly in this realm, I am sure there will be many medical uses for magnetic fields and controlled bursts of electrical energy.”

  “Ha-ha! Invisible forces! The rabble will hang you, Herr Tesla! They will burn you at the stake. Higher. Turn it up higher. There… Now, I hope you can assure me that you plan on going to America at your first opportunity.”

  “America? I’ve not thought about—”

  “One! They are not as superstitious in the New World! Two! There is more money floating around there! Three! Here, if the Kaiser of the Prussian Empire decides that you really are a witch, you can still be tossed in prison and forgotten, even in this day and age! Remember, my father is the man who took a loose coalition of Prussian states and pulled them together for the first time into the true German Empire. This is where his concerns lie. All of Europe should expect to see big things from the Germanic race! Just not you. Conclusion: get yourself to America. Do it quickly.”

  Nikola sighed. “I suppose you are right. I went to Paris for her, and nothing has happened.”

  “What, ‘her’ again? That muse you talk about? Nonsense. But do not say ‘nothing’ has happened here! Your work in Paris is what sent you here, and here is where you built your machine for the first time! Here, we both learned that your theories about magnetic healing have promise! As for me, I do not doubt that this device has given me a new chance. This throat, it was going to kill me. I could feel that.”

  He lovingly patted the copper coil. “Why don’t you just accept that this ‘muse’ of yours, whatever she may be, actually sent you on a most productive adventure?”

  Nikola stepped away and softly replied, “Perhaps I should. Especially if she is merely a reflection of my own dreams.”

  “Or your insanity,” the Crown Prince cheerfully interjected. “Because I am convinced that you are of superior quality in your mental powers, Herr Tesla, and everybody knows that genius is always accompanied by an equal dose of insanity. It’s a Universal Law of some sort.”

  “Sire… you consider me insane?”

  “Tut-tut! Sane, insane, genius, witch, just relax and proudly play with your own excrement or whatever it is that you do in private! Ha-ha! Don’t look so shocked; you’re talking to an old soldier! You did not forget that, did you? Soldiers know all about playing with their own excrement, my friend—every time a cannonball lands too close! Ha-ha! Frankly I never enjoyed soldiering as much as I pretended to. But it was the only avenue out of my father’s castle if I wanted to avoid being constricted into the life of a royal moron. Now listen to me, I have information you can use: twelve years ago I commanded the Prussian army in the siege of Paris, and after my experiences with that city I am not surprised by the uncouth treatment that you received there!

  He curled his lips into the expression of a man who has bitten into a lemon. “The French? Pah! And French art? I sum up all of French art in two words, my friend—frilly nonsense! Do you paint? No? Good. I don’t care what kind of image the Parisian town dignitaries try to create; after a decent fellow washes down one of their fattening meals with a bottle of the local wine and then tops it off with a trip to the nearest whorehouse, he has completely exhausted the list of worthwhile pastimes to be found in Paris! I’m sure you agree.”

  “Well, I—”

  “I have polled every single one of my advisors and not one can explain to me how the French people justify their attitude. You cannot either, I’ll wager a new saddle! Ha-ha!”

  He squinted in concentration while he adjusted the coils tighter around his neck, then smiled at the sensation of warmth flooding his upper body. An additional thought occurred to him. “The Parisians are the worst, as one might expect, but all the French have it. Even their dogs. Those poodles. Somehow their national attitude seems to originate in their noses.”

  Abruptly, the Crown Prince laughed at himself and clarified the concept, “Excuse me! I must apologize. Ha! What an ignorant thing for me to say! You must think me a fool.”

  “Certainly not, Sire!”

  “Because of course I mean the people’s noses, not the poor dogs! You would be the man to determine what mechanism is at work there, but make no mistake, the French point of view has something to do with the nose. You can hear it in the basic sounds of their language. Well, never mind. As no doubt you already know, Francophiles are peddlers of illusion!”

  He leaned closer to Nikola and spoke in confidential tones, “Which is precisely what my aged father fears you to be, dear fellow. A peddler of illusion! Not that he isn’t pleased with the new railroad lights and all, but that little talk you had with him about ‘invisible magnetic fields’? About shaping these unseeable things ‘as one shapes a piece of clay’? Herr Tesla, the man is finishing his seventh decade, do you understand?”

  “Of course, Sire.”

  “Now, I see the difference between you and some godforsaken Francophile! Oh yes. I can feel the difference working on me through this magical coil of yours. This e-lec-tri-ci-ty of yours makes me feel warm right in my throat, right where that awful coldness always starts. I swear I feel it working already.”

  He flashed a grateful smile at Nikola, then turned away and relaxed his gaze onto some faraway point while he soaked in the sensations of relief that the odd little machine created in his troubled throat. Frederick William III, Crown Prince of Prussia and heir to the Kaiser’s throne, leaned his head over to the side and dropped into that fast sleep of a retired soldier who has learned from the tedious rituals of state how to put the best use to his time.

  * * *

  Many hours later in Nikola’s hotel room, the ticking clock was the only sound while he lay sleeping. It happened between ticks—the image of Karina walked through the outside wall and strolled into the room. Her presence snapped him out of his sound sleep. With no further warning, she stepped to Nikola’s bed and sat on the e
dge of the mattress as if this was something she did every night. The mattress seemed to sink under her weight, odd for an illusion, he thought. In a single motion, he contracted his body into a sitting position with his back to the wall.

  All he could do was stare. She appeared to be about his same age, nothing like her former schoolgirl image. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. She was dressed in a silver-white garment with the consistency of mist—a finger’s width of thick steam that somehow clung to her skin.

  He found a little bit of his voice. “I know this is only a dream. You are a dream.”

  The image of Karina smiled. “You are strange, then, to take time to speak to a dream. I’m pleased that you waste the effort on me. That is, I would be pleased, if dreams had the ability to feel. I don’t think they do. Do you?”

  Nikola considered the question while he looked for hidden angles to the query. Finally he shook his head and replied, “No. But I…” He sighed.

  In the next instant he realized that if she was not real, then here was someone he could safely tell about his tentative plans. What risk could there be in confiding to someone who doesn’t exist? He forced himself up into a normal sitting position, feet on the floor, and began.

  “If I am ever to get started translating the visions in my mind into objects that people can see and touch and use, then Prince William thinks I must to travel to the New World. To America.”

  Nikola stared into her eyes for a long moment before he broke his silence and urgently whispered, “If I am to go so far away, can you still…”

  Karina looked at him with a coy smile. “You mean, can I still find you when you are so far away, if I am real? I don’t know. Will you be taking your thoughts?”