“Oh Mr. Edison! I am so glad you are here! I was just telling these ladies and gentlemen about harmonic energy balancing—”
Edison was already on the move up the stairs. “Fine. Continue on, then. We all have lots to do.” He disappeared in the stairwell without making eye contact, leaving his foremen to themselves while he strode to his office and closed the door behind him.
He had a ship to run and a world to conquer. Not a single one of these fancy-pants private school boys would be given the chance to take anything away from Thomas Edison while he moved his operations toward that goal. How did the fools think he got where he was?
Nikola felt a harsh rush of fear shoot through him when he watched Mr. Edison leave the room. What just happened? He was doing exactly as ordered, yes? The repairs were going just fine. The other employees appeared to be interested in what he had to say. Nevertheless, the Boss just left the main floor as if something there had irritated him, without even looking over to check Nikola’s work.
He wondered if that could be a good thing. Was it that the Boss trusted Nikola already? If not—if Edison was rejecting him for some reason—how on earth did Nikola manage to anger the Boss on his very first day?
He was suddenly aware of the other employees’ stares. They showed no reaction to Edison one way or the other and appeared to be waiting for him to continue his lecture. Another startled chill shot through him; was their silence during his little speech only a form of social grace? Were they actually aching for him to shut up?
It struck him that this was just the way he felt at that awful moment back in Herr Doktor’s class when he finally realized how much hostility he had engendered with the other students by making them feel stupid. Was he doing that now? Was that why Edison stormed on through the room and barely acknowledged him?
The other employees were still politely waiting. He was unsure how long had it been. Two or three seconds, perhaps? He closed his eyes and squeezed all of his muscles for a moment, then stood up straight, took a deep breath, and turned back toward the others.
“Well then. As you see, there is still much left for me to do here.” He thought for a second, then added, “As I am sure is the case with you.” He put a period to the sentence with a tiny bow, then turned back to the large dynamo and busied himself.
The others, polite strangers, seemed to have no trouble accepting his dismissal; they drifted on their separate ways. Only two of the youngest lab assistants showed any reaction. A subtle pair of mutually fond young men tittered back and forth over Nikola’s intensity while they made their way outside to savor this rare chance for a smoke in the middle of a work day while the main generator was shut down.
Panic gripped him. How had he allowed his social graces to fail him so soon? All the way around, it was completely unacceptable to fail Mr. Edison; the shame would be impossible to bear. He had to do everything so well that they could not replace him.
Habit rose to protect him. The simple but laborious task of restoring the hulking Edison dynamos required only a few more slivers of awareness than he needed for ordinary walking and talking, so he kept moving through the world and working on the tasks before him, one giant electrical dynamo at a time. Meanwhile the rest of him condensed into the miniature version of himself. He got comfy in the tiny rocking chair behind the picture window eyes while his imagination raced free of the hard world. Time began to slip past him.
In this way, Nikola was able to pass unchallenged through his initial task. Subsequent encounters with Edison were seldom and brief, always with Nikola rising from his tiny rocking chair and pouring himself back down into his body in order to ensure sufficient awareness to remain socially proper with the Boss.
Weeks went by. The best Nikola could say in terms of evaluating his own performance was that as far as he could tell, he avoided offending the Boss. That was a feat, since he had already witnessed that the Boss could get angry with anyone over anything.
Beyond that, the Boss himself remained a mystery while Nikola’s automaton moved about the city, repairing and replacing the Edison dynamos wherever they were installed. He once again added refinements to their functions and increased the variety of their controls, as he did in Paris. It took anywhere from several hours to several days to get each one working, but the pace of his progress was relentless. He only slept for three or four hours each night and stayed fit by swimming in the East River every morning.
In the meantime, throughout the days and nights, he soared through a realm of questions regarding energy and matter. Was there any real difference between the two, beyond simple density? Insights begged for answers; if energy and matter are fundamentally the same, shouldn’t the transmission of energy be possible without wires? Is it not obvious that the path to that goal must somehow utilize the specific mutual traits between energy and matter? Further questions rose from every answer.
The challenges to his mind were not quite enough to keep him from being haunted by the desire to see Karina again. But unlike the thought problems he could grind away on at any hour, she remained a mystery in her absence. There was nothing he could do to reach her.
* * *
Edison worked away on a new light bulb connection until he shocked his finger with a loud zap. He yelped and popped the fingertip into his mouth, failing to notice when Yes-Man #1, Hawkins or Haughton or Harper, appeared in the open doorway.
“Excuse me, sir… Sir?”
Edison glanced up. “What is it?”
“Oh. Tesla, sir. He just installed the last of the new dynamos. Twenty-four new designs in all. He completely eliminated the use of long-core field magnets and replaced them with shorter magnets that have proven much more efficient.”
“Mm-hmm, fine. That Tesla has turned out to be a damn good man.”
“Well, yes.”
“And?”
“Oh. For the last two dynamos he invented automatic controls. Just for fun, he says. These controls won’t allow the wires to overload. And they work! That is, I saw them.”
“Mm.” Edison was busy. Anyone could see that he was so very busy. It was vital that he get this new filament tied off right at that instant. “That’s good. Talented fella.”
“Oh. But it was the last of them, sir.” His voice nearly faltered when he added, “He… ah… asked about his bonus?”
Hawkins was the man’s name. Hawkins. Edison finally looked up and stared his favorite yes-man squarely in the face. “I heard you, Hawkins. Dare say, I hear as good as you do.”
“Yes! I just wondered what—”
“Send him around.” Edison was already back at work. “Probably best to do it tomorrow. Tell him to come see me in the morning.”
Hawkins nodded, started to leave, then spun back around with a certain angry force, as if he just might give the Boss a piece of his mind. That snagged the Boss’s attention for a moment or two, long enough to see if this young fellow was going to actually muster the fortitude to speak up for himself.
It was after a very little bit of time and perhaps even a moment’s thought that Hawkins made his choice. Yes-Man #1 turned to the door and quietly walked out.
Chapter Fifteen
Weeks Later
New York
It must be the news, Nikola thought, feeling himself drain back into his body. Surely it was the sheer power of the news pulling him out of the automaton mode for the first time in many days. He returned to the hard world as soon as they told him. This was the first time he felt the need to be fully present for many weeks. It was, after all, a momentous achievement to be summoned for a private meeting at the Boss’s office.
He was well aware that no one had expected him to be able to complete the massive repair tasks, even though they only required a fraction of his attention. This personal meeting with Mr. Edison was the goal he had kept at the front of his mind throughout all the long months of numb routine, and at last he was being accepted as a proven colleague. He could hardly
wait for the appointed hour to visit with Edison at his office.
It was nearly midnight while he walked through the Battery Park area at a fast stride. The slaps of cold shoe leather on colder ground sent stinging sensations through his feet and legs. He felt the fatigue that racked him, but the heady prospect of a personal meeting with Mr. Edison filled him with such anticipation that sleep was out of the question. He needed to move and burn off nervous energy.
He had not only met the Boss’s requirements, he had done much more than necessary to earn the fabulous bonus. Fifty thousand dollars! Such an amount assured him that even if he could not convince his mother to move to the New World, he could permanently secure a safe living situation and guarantee proper care for her inside her own home. And so despite the late hour and the frozen ground of early spring, the sheer magic of this new nation seemed to radiate up from the earth and fill him with vital force. He felt better than he had since leaving Paris.
A cold wind blew in over the black water and made him wince and shiver. The sea breezes were so alive with energy and the air so fresh and invigorating, it was hard to imagine the choking clouds of daytime traffic.
Every few blocks, he passed another one of the local power generators that served small groups of homes or businesses. Many of the generators were subjects of his repair and redesign work over the past months. The direct current generators were so weak in power, with such poor transmission efficiency, they could never be more than a mile apart or the energy on their wires wouldn’t be enough to light a bulb. Even then, the customers farthest from their local power station had noticeably dimmer light than the lucky users closer to it.
Now without the protection of the distancing exercises that Nikola had employed over the last six months, he felt the full impact of the ugly and unnecessary D.C. dynamos. He heard each one humming away while he walked past, and the sound might as well have been music played on badly tuned instruments.
It struck him that his newfound credibility with the Boss had brought him the perfect opportunity to broach the subject of switching to alternating current, getting away from this direct current mess once and for all. This was going to be his first chance to show Mr. Edison that direct current is for things that run on batteries, whereas alternating current will drive the most powerful machine at any level of force from distances of hundreds of miles.
How to do it? How to maintain proper respect and humility while convincing the Boss to convert his entire power generating system to the “impossible” alternating current? He knew that citing the mathematical formulae would do nothing; Edison made it a loud and frequent point to value common sense over education. How was Nikola to communicate with a powerful man who placed such high value on something as hard to define as “common sense,” and liked the meat of his life served plain? For the Boss, the term “common sense” seemed to boil down to whatever he thought was right on any given topic.
The mid-morning appointment time at Edison’s office stretched into early afternoon while Nikola sat stranded in the lobby. Edison’s secretary repeatedly came by and apologized for the delay, but the Boss remained huddled in his office, calling in one engineer after another in an interlaced series of meetings.
At lunch time, Edison blew by Nikola without glancing at him while he tossed off a quick comment about having a very busy day and that he would see him when he returned. Since Edison didn’t indicate how long that might be, Nikola didn’t feel safe in leaving the building to get lunch for himself. Instead, he wandered around the factory until he found an engineer who wasn’t working at his easel and convinced the man to loan it to him, along with a drafting pen and a large sheet of paper.
He decided that as long as he was stranded in the lobby indefinitely, he might as well use the spare time to work up a detailed schematic drawing that would illustrate the potential power of his alternating current technology. He worked quickly, copying the lines and shapes straight from the empty space in front of him where the illustration was clearly visible, hovering in midair.
Hours passed. The afternoon dwindled. Evening arrived. The last worker shuffled out the door, yawning, while Nikola continued to sketch away at the large schematic and occasionally checked an empty space next to him for reference. By that point in the day, the design had advanced to a state of sheer elegance, with balanced forms that represented whirling magnetic fields joined by winding lines of circuitry. The whole schematic was laced with tiny paragraphs of annotation crammed next to each component.
Nikola managed to feel relieved that he had been made to wait there for so long; perhaps it was even a blessing in disguise. The opportunity to create a detailed schematic might prove to be just the thing to disarm Mr. Edison’s objections to alternating current and show that the technical problems around its use had truly been solved.
There on the easel was proof that he had surmounted all of the obstacles blocking the use of this gigantic power source. More importantly, it was evidence that he had indeed fulfilled his family obligation; not only had Nikola discovered his source of greatness, he was pursuing it with due determination. That $50,000 bonus was practically in his pocket.
Edison stepped out of his office and closed the door behind himself, putting on his coat as he walked away. He stopped, squinted at Nikola for a moment, then nodded and started toward him. When he walked down onto the main floor of the lab and saw Nikola’s elaborate sketch, a puzzled look came over him. Nikola was too absorbed to be aware of Edison’s approach.
Edison cleared his throat. “Still here, Eh? Good for you, Mr. Tesla. You are the only man I ever met who sleeps less than I do.”
Nikola continued sketching while he replied, “Actually, I’ve totaled your nap time throughout the day to an average of—”
“Care to tell me what you’re working on? My wife will be waiting with supper.”
“Yes! Thank you! I was hoping we could discuss this very thing! You see, this is an induction motor for alternating current. Sir, I have built three of them. They work! If you rotate a magnetic field fast enough—”
“Alternating current? You’re talking about putting the power of lightning inside of a thin copper wire? How is the public supposed to cope with such outrageous levels of power? Eh? No, no. Direct current, Mr. Tesla! America must run on direct current! There is no other safe means of electrical power for the masses. That includes industry, if you’re wondering. Industry is run by people, and people can’t be jeopardized by handling such a force! Otherwise, they will shock themselves to death, one right after the other.”
Nikola fixed Edison with a blank stare. He exhaled so deeply that the effort felt like it shrank him by two inches, but he steadied himself by clinging to the thought that he could always visit the alternating current debate with the Boss some other time. At the moment, the far more important matter was his bonus money—and the changes to his life that it had the power to bring.
“Ah. Well, then,” Nikola began, “I was merely passing time, waiting for you. You see, I have not been able to send much money to my mother, but if I may collect my bonus now, I can—”
“Your what?”
Nikola stared for a quiet moment. When he replied, he spoke in a slow, deliberate tone. “The fifty thousand dollars.”
“…Oh. That.” Edison picked up a light bulb filament off of a lab table and busily fiddled with it. “Your mother is back in Croatia somewhere?”
“Yes. But with the bonus, I hope to bring her here or at least take better care of her at home. She is very ill. Of course she won’t admit it in her letters to me, but with that money I can see that she gets the best care.”
“I looked for your home town on the map, the other day. Wasn’t there.”
“Lika is only a small province, and unless your map—”
“Is it a primitive place?”
“…Primitive?”
“Do you want money to use in support of un-Christian things?”
“Do I w
hat? Sir, what are you saying to me?”
“I’m saying that I am a Christian man, Mr. Tesla! And so I want you to tell me God’s Truth this very instant: Has anyone in your family ever eaten human flesh?”
Nikola could only gape, speechless. After another long moment, Edison broke into a wide grin.
“That was a joke, Mr. Tesla! A joke! You see? That’s the problem with you foreigners! You do not appreciate the American sense of humor!”
“Mr. Edison, I need to send my mother—”
“Do you have a contract to show me? Do you have any proof? In America, sir, our courts deal in proof.”
“I have earned this bonus.”
“And I just told you, Mr. Tesla—you obviously don’t appreciate the American sense of humor. Your ‘bonus,’ you see, was just a little joke.” He smiled with a kindly expression. “But you can rest easy. No need to get riled over such a thing. Take it from me, there’s plenty of money to be made in this country by a hard working young man. You’ll get your chance.”
Nikola’s expression moved from shock to rage. He felt his breath become ragged and uneven. On quivering legs, he stepped up close to Edison’s face and spoke so quietly that his voice was nearly a whisper. “So you share a sense of humor with your French counterparts…”
“Eh? Speak up!”
Nikola raised his voice a notch. “Mr. Edison, we are men gifted with the future. Dishonor is beneath us. And if you fail to understand that simple idea, then your reputation will be the only real inventing you ever do.”
“Now you listen to me, mister! That is the kind of talk that will get a man fired!”
“Fired!?” A sharp laugh burst out of Nikola before he could stop it. “You think I would come back to work here? I brought you a gift, tonight! Drew it out right in front of you! But what for? What could you do with it?”
Nikola moved in closer to Edison until he was nearly pressed against the big man’s torso. “Your reputation is a sham. Your greatness is stolen from others.” He turned his back and walked out the door.
In the Matter of Nikola Tesla Page 12