In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  * * *

  Nikola lay in the shadows of his darkened hotel room and kept himself as numb as possible by focusing his attention the intricate patterns of the room’s Victorian wallpaper. He reached out with his eyesight as if he were touching a fingertip to the wall and slowly, steadily, traced the pattern’s curves and twists. He never allowed his vision to focus on an area wider than a few centimeters. The rigors of his careful tracing project numbed most of the scalding pain that the disaster burned into him. The process helped prevent the remnants of his life from crushing him.

  His eyes tracked the curling lines on the walls and slowly rode the interlocking patterns from one corner of the room all the way around and back to the other side. Each circuit took him approximately ninety minutes and nine seconds—handily divisible by three and more reassuring for it. He did three circuits in a row each time without interruption, then took a few moments to move around the room or to relieve himself down the hall. That much physical activity drained him, so he lay back and started the tracing process all over again.

  It was late on the second day before sleep found him. By the time his eyelids at last began to droop, small gaps between the window curtains showed that the second day’s light was nearly gone.

  He felt no awareness of falling asleep or of feeling his eyelids close, so he failed to notice that he had switched from the view of wallpaper patterns to the view in his mind’s eye. The transition was so smooth it never occurred to him to wonder why or how he found himself gazing far out into a night sky.

  His vantage point seemed to be above the misty cloud cover beneath a crystal-clear dome of stars. He began tracing the patterns of recognizable constellations. He didn’t get far; a tiny movement in the corner of his eye made him shift focus slightly below his eye line. In the next moment, she was there. And just as it had always been with her, his sense of need to demand answers about her origin and resolve the question of his sanity completely left him.

  “Where are we?” he felt himself whisper.

  “Nowhere,” she smiled. “This is a dream.”

  There was an explosion of light and sound that overcame his senses for a moment. When he got them back, Karina was in his arms with her own arms tightly wrapped around him. The feel of her grip was real.

  She laughed and the sound of her laughter ran through him. When she lightly stroked her fingers across his face, he immediately reappeared back in his hotel room and found himself flat on his back in bed. There was still almost no light coming into the room from outside and no lamps lighted within, but now he saw the brightly colored wallpaper as clearly as if one of his arc lamps illuminated the area. The scrolling patterns separated and defined patches of color in their hollow spaces.

  And with the first sight of the bright colors, her message arrived in one fell swoop: colors are distinct from one another because the colored surface only reflects back those wavelengths of light that would be associated with each color. Just as different wavelengths express different tones of sound, so do differing wavelengths express what is called color.

  With that he realized he could allow each color to represent a musical tone, translating each color’s light waves into their comparable component in sound waves. Combined shadings of color could become complete chord structures and make music.

  In that single instant, the knowledge became real to him—all he had to do was run his eyes along the same wallpaper patterns, and this time the colors translated themselves into sounds, tones, chords, full melodies. He moved his gaze from one piece of the wall to the next, and the walls sang to him. He flicked his gaze around the room, searching out other color patterns—all of them sang. Some sounded their melodies in tune while others screeched a torture of noise. Some were brief little bird calls; others played out subtle chords and complex interwoven melodies.

  His spirits gradually began to lift, and after a few more days was finally enough to lift his spirits and lure him out of the darkened room in search of new patterns. Store windows would be full of them, he realized. The park too. Even the sky, it turned out, was a symphony of shaded clouds amid the blue of the atmosphere.

  The hunt for color him out of isolation. He set the automaton to the task of taking care of rudimentary chores and listening to the unbearable speeches of condolence that well-meaning others hastened to offer as soon as he emerged from his self-imposed isolation. The automaton offered terse answers to the same few questions over and over, cringing every time it was necessary to admit that the lab had not been insured. He knew from their eyes that most people figured such carelessness deserved harsh consequences.

  Since the automaton barely felt pain, he allowed it to take most of the blows for him while he played sky music with his eyes. He kept a reasonable illusion of social function in place while his true self swam in the sea of images. He never mistook them for the hard world, but they were just as clear and present to him, all the same.

  The automaton was sitting alone on a wintry park bench tossing seeds to pigeons when Nikola found himself yanked back into the hard world so abruptly he was left reeling. It happened at the moment his eyes focused on George Scherff, who had apparently come looking for him. Scherff radiated excitement and delight.

  “Sir! We have it! You have it! Congratulations! The support is out there! There are people who understand! They know your work must not be allowed to falter!”

  Scherff explained that he had indeed found a benefactor, a Mr. Stanley Adams, who would put up an immediate forty thousand dollars, plus provide work space. He was willing to do it on very favorable terms just for the privilege of being in partnership with Nikola Tesla. The money was available at that very moment, waiting in Mr. Stanley Adams’ New York office.

  The only proviso was that Tesla should employ his benefactor’s grown son at the new laboratory. “Naturally,” Scherff explained, “I accepted on your behalf, because as long as he shows up, there’s always something he can do. And if he doesn’t show up, problem solved!” He laughed in spite of himself.

  Nikola was so moved by Scherff’s loyal accomplishment that the two men spent the rest of the evening over a long celebration dinner. Throughout the evening, he stayed inside of the present moment and there was no pain. The company was as warm as those friendships Nikola sometimes watched between other men. For those few hours, he got a glimpse into what kind of relationship he might have had with his brother Dane. Even though George Scherff was a good ten years younger, the protective attitude he displayed toward Nikola made him feel safeguarded in a way he had not in many years.

  * * *

  The routine of setting up the laboratory was enough to fill the coming weeks. Most of it was automaton-level work, so Nikola had no real need to attend. His excess energy manifested an abundance of fresh compulsions if he left it alone. His senses themselves were thus affected, strangely heightened. The noise of a crowd was deafening. The smell of a warm room full of people nearly took him off of his feet. He occupied his compulsive energies with challenges such as counting every step he took throughout the day and adding up the sub-totals of steps used to walk to and from any given destination. He forced himself to work it out, so the last step he took from the floor into bed at night created a final total that was evenly divisible by three. He had no conscious reason for it, merely a strong sense of taboo over failing to do it.

  After the new lab got up and running, Stanley Adams’ son proved himself so incompetent that he was a genuine detriment. Nikola had to return to physical reality to finesse his way through the tricky challenge of firing the boss’s son without having to close down the lab altogether. As it turned out, either the father understood his son’s shortcomings more than he cared to admit or else he had begun to understand that the Tesla partnership was too valuable to jeopardize. The lab stayed open.

  With that crisis averted, Nikola disappeared back into the timeless place to work on the continuing mystery of whether or not gravity could be vibratory in ori
gin. Even if a solid granite mountain range was measured as having more gravity than the surrounding land because of its greater density, perhaps that density itself merely reflects a harmonic overtone of the same vibratory energy which creates the gravity pocket that attracted the planetary matter into a revolving ball, so the harmonic points within the earth’s gravity field would be where the denser matter would congeal.

  He mentally searched for any proven science that prevented the concept from being possible. One problem especially consumed him: how to design a means to seek the proper vibrations to create or negate gravity? Just as he once discovered through experimentation that a sound wave can be “cancelled out” by an identical sound wave travelling out of phase with the original, it stood to reason that if the vibration of gravity could be experimentally determined, then the same cancelling-out procedure of beaming the wave back at itself in opposite wave phases should stop the pull of gravity in that location. His imagination staggered under the implications for the fields of heavy construction and transportation.

  It was in that private place where he ceased to have any meaningful grasp of the flow of time. The through-line of his work and its challenges were the only markers of his life. If not for the loneliness, it would have been as close to heaven as he could imagine.

  * * *

  Even more of Nikola had to stay present in the following year, when the great Tesla/Westinghouse generating plant at Niagara Falls successfully started up and created international acclaim. It required a major portion of his energy each day to cope with the promotional speeches and the society party appearances and the unending social challenges, because they often blended with technical conversation that required his full attention. When slow moments between occasions allowed his senses to overflow with excess energy, his compulsion to count things and divide them by three returned in full force.

  His heightened sense of smell also began to trouble him. He repeatedly found himself feeling physically revolted during encounters with men and women who seemed to know little about personal hygiene and to care even less. His fertile imagination plagued him with thoughts of the many kinds of microscopic colonies that lived in the unwashed head hair of such people. When they brushed their hair against him in a crowd it nearly caused him to vomit. Now that people on the streets were regularly recognizing him in the wake of the Niagara publicity, he found it necessary to wear cotton gloves everywhere he went because so many people insisted on grabbing his hand and pumping it up and down.

  He realized that such things bothered him more than they had in the past, but there was no accounting for the feelings when they arose. Physical concerns were dwarfed by his increased awareness of his own loneliness. It flooded him whenever too much of his awareness was present in the hard world. The sound of public laughter made it worse. More than anything else, the sound of crowds of people getting together and talking and laughing made him realize his choices had sealed him off from such things. With practice, he had developed a smooth and charming demeanor for use at social occasions which served its practical purpose but brought no real pleasure.

  Karina sometimes came to him while he slept, or at least he had perfectly convincing dreams that she did. In them he celebrated all the reasons why he had no cause to envy anyone over anything. In them there was no need to seek comfort elsewhere.

  He could feel her leading him farther down her mysterious trail when he was compelled to spend several months of 1898 attending to a dazzling exhibition to be held at Madison Square Garden. The compulsions she visited upon him held him in their grip, but through them he managed to stun a capacity crowd with his newly patented remote-controlled boat. It shocked them to see an iron boat barely two meters long maneuvering itself in intricate patterns across the surface of a giant water tank. When he concluded the demonstration by removing the top of the boat so that people could see for themselves there was no dwarf pilot inside, those who didn’t suspect witchcraft were openly amazed. The concept of radio communication was itself a brand-new idea for most of the public, and the invisible control of a mechanical object was a futuristic phenomenon that boggled everyone who witnessed it.

  She led him further still. Later the same year, when his patent was approved on a guidance system for use inside of a remote-controlled rocket, he was flushed with gratitude for the turnaround in his fortunes and so confident of having hit his professional stride that an expansive mood spread through him.

  That mood and its attendant generous spirit motivated him to write to the U.S. War Department with the news of his new invention. He asked for an appointment to come in and meet with someone who could listen to his plan to build an arsenal of automated weapons that would be capable of operating in battle without human presence, saving many lives. He insisted that automated machinery could do heavy and dangerous work while human controllers stood back. He openly suggested that the specter of possessing such powers, once demonstrated for all the world, might in itself serve to keep enemies at bay.

  If his fascination with the field of remote-controlled machines had not absorbed so much of his mental energy, he might have followed up on the letter to the War Department. But he remained in an ecstasy of creative inspiration while Karina led him further into his visions.

  And so, having sent that letter, he simply let go of it. The tiny amount of mental energy that it took to write it went back into his general mission. He never bothered to mention to anyone at work that he had written to the government about robot workers and automated war machines, so there was no one else to follow up on it for him after he became distracted by his next project.

  This effectively removed all opportunity for anyone to inject a common sense point of view into the situation and ask Mr. Tesla whether he was absolutely certain that the response to such a letter would represent a nation’s gratitude.

  Chapter Thirty

  1889

  New York

  J. Pierpont Morgan’s office was still as much the Lair Of The Alpha Male as ever, but on this particular day he found himself sitting upright with his hands folded neatly atop his desk and an attentive expression fixed to his face. Morgan even squinted a little while he listened, just to make it clear that he was paying careful attention to the man from Washington.

  “So this was the fifth attempt we made,” the man continued, “and I just happened to be the one who got lucky and managed to get hired. George Scherff told me that he was doing the interviewing that day because Tesla was occupied with something he couldn’t interrupt. We understand that he usually does all of the hiring himself.”

  Morgan nodded, just to make it abundantly clear that he had listened and understood. “Yes, well I’m sure he has to. There must be plenty of inventor types who would love to infiltrate the laboratory of a bona fide electrical wizard.”

  “If that’s what he is,” the G-man countered.

  “Oh well naturally. If. Cigar?”

  “Do you mind not lighting up while I’m here?”

  “Not at all! Filthy habit, truth be told.”

  “Tesla,” the G-man prompted the topic.

  “I’m listening.”

  “He needs to prove himself to the country that adopted him. To the people who run things. After all, this place made him rich and famous.”

  “He’s not rich anymore. Lost it all in a lab fire.”

  “Is that America’s fault?”

  “Well no.”

  “Of course not. So. The question is, why would he contact the federal government with such fantastic claims and then drop the matter entirely?”

  “And as I’ve said, I don’t know.”

  “Was it a veiled threat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he just want our top people to think that if they don’t help him achieve these things, he is just as likely to go somewhere else?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Seek support from some monarch who would be happy to turn aro
und and use them to attack American interests?”

  “Our way of life.”

  “Precisely! Now Washington is curious; a man with the brain capable of doing half the things this Tesla can do… what kind of politics does this man have?”

  “He’s never said a political word to me, you understand.”

  “Never?”

  “Oh no. Not one time.”

  “Do you find that odd? I mean, isn’t it normal for people to make political remarks—you know, just passing remarks about politics? Maybe a particular politician?”

  “Mm, now that you mention it, I’d have to agree. Most people I know do that.”

  “Of course they do. It’s normal. American. Washington knows that.”

  “Really? The whole city?”

  “Mr. Morgan, are you employing an ironic tone?”

  “I’m sorry. It was just the way you said ‘Washington.’“

  “Because a tone like that indicates to me that you may not appreciate how deeply it will affect your little personal empire here if Washington gets tired of turning a blind eye to your attempts to build an industrial monopoly.”

  “I told you—there are no monopolies! It’s a free country. People can go into any business they want.”

  “Unless it’s something you want.”

  “All right let’s remain calm here. I was having a little humor about the way you said ‘Washington’ which I can see is not what you care for, yourself. So that’s it. No joking.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So you were saying?”

  “I was saying that Washington is interested in infiltrating him because we need to answer these questions. He took a sharp breath and got down to the core of things. We cannot help but wonder if you are a loyal enough citizen to offer to bankroll his so-called worldwide power research.”