Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  Now, his head feeling uncomfortably light, nothing left to lose, Carter thought of his loved ones. His dead wife. He felt guilt. He felt like a failure. He thought of his animals, whom he loved, and yet having Baby and Tug in his mind simply made him realize how he would miss them. He imagined his mother and father and James standing on the dockside, waving to him broadly, loving him from a distance, the way you love an odd pet, and he choked. His knees gave way. He brought his hands against his face, water pouring all around him, a mess, and lonely. Hello, folks, hello, James. Which, after a heartbeat, became Good-bye. The human heart was a terrible thing. His family would mourn him, and then they would survive. The essential resilience of human nature made his throat contract. Here, in his horrible crate, he admitted something he hadn’t before: he no longer mourned Sarah. But he just couldn’t bear to be one of the ones who forgot.

  And then he said, “I am not fine. I’m a goddamned wreck,” with a burst of laughter that became tears, saltwater joining saltwater. The crate shook, and water rushed into his face until he didn’t care.

  He almost gulped down the sea that was now rising over his chin. There was a continuous grinding noise outside, an engine close by, a seafaring vessel that made the waters vibrate. Then he thought: Phoebe.

  It surprised him so much he tossed his head back from the water, banging it against the crate with a curse. He rubbed his head. Phoebe, with whom he’d spent a few quiet hours, and that was all.

  She knew him. Somehow. And wasn’t that quite marvelous? He didn’t know her yet, as much as he felt her. He guessed she, too, would survive if he died. But the thought did not weaken him. It lit a candle somewhere in a distant corridor. He couldn’t stand forcing her to be resilient.

  When had that engine become so cripplingly loud? The crate bumped against something, stalled there. Carter winced, covered his ears. There was a small pocket of exhausted air left. Phoebe, he thought again. And the word was enough. He inhaled slowly, as if sucking in only the oxygen, and held on to it, and dipped below the surface. He slid to the end of the crate, put himself squarely in place, feet underwater, ready to push, his shoulder, his back, his upper thighs burning, ready. All he needed to do was force his body to stand straight, and the crate would burst.

  . . .

  Hollis returned in the truck and brought an armload of crowbars with him. Samuelson directed him to dump them on the dock. He’d been silent the past few moments, as the distant boat was now much closer, its bow still dead-on. He extinguished his pipe.

  The others were quiet, too, until O’Brien said, “There’s a hundred places for that boat to dock. You don’t think . . .”

  . . .

  Balls of his feet against the planks, back ready to topple temple columns, Carter didn’t count off as he held his breath, there was no point, for he didn’t need to know when his limit was approaching. Humming in his ears, the crate shaking, the last pocket of air was gone in a flash, fully consumed by the bay, no time to think about that, his heels were made of iron, his back and shoulders made a fine jack for which nails and boards were no match, he could hear Ledocq telling him to move it, and James, who stood with Tom, and even Tom was cheering him, C’mon, get those bastards, they’re annoying me, and there was Borax telling him to give it the old heave-ho, the strain on his thighs was unspeakable, that sound, was that nails beginning to give way, his head was about to burst, he went beyond his limits, to where he smelled gunpowder, and saw a crowd of thousands out there in the Palace, some worried, others chanting “push push push,” and beside him, quietly, there was a woman. She was beautiful.

  I’m sorry you’ve been hurt. She touched his scar. Breathe with me.

  He said something, he didn’t even know what, and with a strength he didn’t actually possess he pushed. There was a horrible wrenching sound.

  CHAPTER 23

  With the rain pounding down on the windows of the great Wheeler Hall, Ledocq pointed at a mass of cotton sheets covering a table at the front of the room. “There is what you call tons of ponderous impedimenta.” He scratched his beard. “He has something there. I wonder if it’s a working system, or a mock-up.” Under the clock, which showed 5:05, was a set of chalkboards, also covered with cloth. A girl came from the wings, looked at the clock, and disappeared back into the wings. She reappeared with a pitcher of water and a glass, which she put on a table by the podium.

  “This is a little bit exciting,” Tom allowed. The girl stood beside the chalkboards, holding a long pole to pull the cloth away when cued to do so.

  A boy joined her, and they quietly exchanged words. He wore a white laboratory jacket, slightly too big for him. He reached for a pair of rimless spectacles and slid them onto his nose. He walked to the center of the lecture area and coughed into his fist.

  “Hello,” he said, sounding exactly seventeen years old.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Tom whispered. “Is that him?”

  “Thank you all for coming. My name is Philo Farnsworth.” He was not helped by this fact. In the crowd, neighbor turned to neighbor, checking to see if they had all heard correctly.

  He rocked from leg to leg. “Yes, I know,” he said. “I apologize for being so young, it’s my fault for being born so recently.” He said this in a rush, and listened carefully.

  Tom leaned in toward James’s ear. “That was his little joke.”

  “Yes, I know. Shhh.”

  Farnsworth glanced around gravely. “Let’s start with something we can agree on. Pem, board one, please?”

  Using her pole, Pem bared the lower left-hand chalkboard, which had a drawing of a circle; within it, a spiral of diminishing holes, like on an abalone shell. At once, twenty people in the audience groaned; these were the scientists.

  “The Nipkow disk,” Farnsworth pointed at it. He spoke, but it was hard to hear him, as several of RCA’s men were packing up their notes. The rest of the crowd had no idea what was going on. The Nipkow disk was the basis of mechanical television, an arcane idea that had been investigated by John Logie Baird of England. No matter how huge the disk or small the screen, the only images that appeared were blurry silhouettes. Farnsworth looked at them, and said, almost trilling, “All I’m going to say about that idea is it isn’t mine. Really, honest. I’m not trying to sell you mechanical television.” He turned to Pem. “The only way to go is electronic. Board two, please.”

  When this board was uncovered, it was half-filled with diagrams and equations. “Twelve years ago,” Farnsworth said, “Swinton said something interesting, that if you put together a mosaic of cubes of rubidium, you could turn light into electric current, and, well, he’s right, and we know that because of Zworykin.” He pointed at a diagram, seven or eight improbable geometric shapes connected with squiggly lines. This made James squint, for he had no idea what it was, but it did hold Ledocq’s attention. Farnsworth continued, “So Zworykin, he said, well, let’s put a photoelectric surface, like this, on a plate, and then, here, a layer of aluminum oxide, like so, for insulation. So the light takes away these electrons and leaves positively charged atoms, see they still have their protons here, and that made sense to me, but I was thinking that even if he had a million, say, yeah, a million potassium hydride droplets, and each of those droplets electrically separate so the charge wouldn’t dissipate, see, even if he did that, it just wouldn’t do the job.”

  “And why is that?”

  Philo had been speaking with increasing conviction, and the interruption seemed to knock him offtrack. He searched the auditorium until he saw a hand waving. It belonged to RCA’s West Coast laboratory chief, who looked as if he’d eaten a bad sandwich for lunch. Philo said, “You aren’t Dr. Zworykin, are you?” which caused a small ripple of laughter.

  “No, I’m Dr. Talbot. I’m familiar with his work.”

  Philo went back to his chalkboard and pointed. “Here’s his mechanical scanner and his cathode ray tube. And the beam goes here, on a fluorescent screen, I’m guessing. I mean, gosh, he hasn’t pub
lished anything about it, but it has to be that way, and the idea is, the image would be reproduced there. Like I said, maybe that works. Sir, maybe, but—”

  “What do you suggest?” Dr. Talbot accompanied that “you” with a grand spread of his palms.

  Philo took a drink of water, red patches blossoming on his cheeks.

  “Or hadn’t you thought of that,” Dr. Talbot continued.

  “Okay, all righty.” He seemed to be gathering up his nerves. “Board three, Pem.” Pem pulled up the cloth and revealed a fresh chalkboard, this one tightly packed with small diagrams of triangular and oblong shapes, surmounted with function and integral signs, Greek letters, and scientific symbols.

  All around the room, men who had notepads out froze. What was this mishmash? Suddenly, Philo began to speak, and as he did so, he gestured at the board precisely, but he never took his eyes off Talbot. “It’s called an anode finger. It has a small aperture and the electrical image formed on the cathode end is emitted here and sent across the tube, toward the anode. Erase, please.”

  Pem erased it.

  “Hey!” someone called out involuntarily.

  “I’m sorry,” Farnsworth said. “I’m sure you all understand.” He pointed to another diagram and spoke clearly, enunciating each word, enjoying the way it sounded, but also quickly, like there were even better things to come. “The magnetic coils here move the electric image over the anode finger’s aperture, left to right, line by line, so a picture forms just like the original source image. Erase, please.”

  Pem erased this diagram, too, to the sound of a dozen pencils slamming against desks. Talbot looked at H. J. Peterson, the War Department’s top electronics man, who also shook his head. Neither of them had gotten it.

  Farnsworth continued, his voice seeming smoother, more controlled, with each word. “The output current creates a corresponding current in another cathode ray tube, which creates an electron beam that causes a fluorescent surface on the end of the tube to glow. Erase, please.”

  The board was now blank, dripping wet where Pem had erased it especially hard. She looked out into the audience with a smile that looked ready to burst, as she watched all the heads shaking, beards being pulled, frustrated white-jacket sleeves moving hopelessly along graph paper.

  “Questions?” Philo asked. Unlike Pem, he seemed to take no pleasure in his audience’s reaction. Instead, he was ready to continue his fight. He recognized an enemy in Dr. Talbot and knew, simply knew with the objectivity that made him a scientist, he could convert the man to his way of thinking.

  For much of the room, there was disbelief, of course, but overall an air of suspended judgment. They were businessmen, mostly, and until they saw something with their own eyes all they had to go on was how well Farnsworth handled himself against an informed heckler. So they welcomed Talbot clearing his throat.

  “What about magnetic focusing?” Talbot fired back. “Signal amplification?”

  “Well, at first we thought we could use an Audion tube, or of course, a series to amplify the signal—”

  “That would motorboat the whole system until it was out of control!”

  “You’re right! You’re absolutely right! So we built what I call a tetrode, a shielded grid tube, and then I switched from potassium to cesium oxide.”

  “You haven’t explained to me the focusing.”

  “We use willemite—zinc silicate—as a photoelectric surface, as a coating for a tube, and bombard it with an oscillating beam of electrons from an electron gun.”

  “That can’t function?” Talbot spat, but with the slightest inflection in his voice.

  “We’re working on it. And we’re working on—”

  “Synchronizing the scanning coils?”

  “Precisely.”

  Talbot folded his arms, unconvinced. Philo touched the board Pem had erased and found it just dry enough to draw on.

  He was doing a sketch of his Multipactor tube, and answering more questions from Talbot, when he sensed that he was losing his audience. He wasn’t sure why—wasn’t he being informative enough? Finally he heard someone yell, “Hey, Farnsworth, when are we going to see some money in this?”

  James hung his head, for it had of course been an impatient Tom yelling this.

  Chalk between his thumb and forefinger, Philo asked, “Is five minutes good?”

  Some laughter, then rustling as the attendees struggled to become comfortable. The Spider, for the tenth time, looked at his contact to see if he could shoot Farnsworth yet, but he received a stern shake of the head. So he sank down into his chair, sulking.

  “I had the idea for electronic television a long time ago. I was thirteen, and I was plowing a field, and I looked back at the furrows, and I thought, Gee, if I could make electrons behave that way magnetically, that would be something. So I bought most of the material I needed to make a working system, and made everything else, but what completely defeated me was the tube. All I needed was an optically clear Pyrex vacuum tube, with one end completely flat.”

  This caused those in the white coats to snicker, some of them sounding nasty, but most compassionate, as this was like admitting all you needed to do was reverse Niagara Falls.

  Someone, not Talbot, yelled out, “That’s impossible.”

  “They told us that, too,” Farnsworth said in a conversational tone, “but we needed it, so we just went ahead and made it. Look.” He reached behind the podium and pulled out exactly what he was talking about: a vacuum tube with a flat end.

  There were gasps everywhere. Even Ledocq gasped.

  “What?” asked James.

  “How did he do that?”

  “Do you smell a scam?” James whispered.

  “No. How did he do that?” he repeated, leaning forward and putting his chin on his fists.

  At the front of the room, Philo and Pem worked together to uncover their bulky apparatus. Philo spoke nonstop, listing off the components without giving away enough detail for someone else to copy him. He mentioned nichrome wire, radio tubes, resistors, transformers, the crystal that provided polarized light. He had used a manually operated coil-winding machine, and shellac, and heavy paper strips.

  Beside the banks of equipment was a nickel-alloy Kerr light, which he tilted backward, uncapping a small bottle over it. “The slightest humidity causes this to smoke,” he explained, using an eyedropper to coat the surface. “So this is 240-proof alcohol.”

  A voice from the audience, “Is that registered?”

  “Yes,” he said without smiling, “I certainly am not going to violate the Volstead Act. Even for science.”

  His calm, humorless response began to tilt the scales for Farnsworth. It struck the literal-minded financiers that once the equipment was unveiled, they would perhaps see something interesting. As Philo checked all the connections, he flicked on switches to the condensers, and remarked so that only Pem could hear that he was fairly sure the fuses on the university could handle the power his television would draw. “There’s a small possibility that this could go up in flames,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she smiled, “I guess maybe you could be a complete charlatan.”

  He smiled at her. He touched her on the wrist. It was a sweet gesture, one even the Spider had trouble hating, but hate it he did. He touched the butt of his pistol.

  Philo turned the wooden cabinet that held the body of his working television box toward the audience. It was a flat-matte white.

  “This will take several seconds to warm up,” he announced. “Can we turn off the lights?”

  This command caused the Spider to sit upright, as he could no longer see his contact, or his target. His fingers closed around the handle of the pistol, in its leather holster.

  With the lights out, the audience rustled and adjusted. Ledocq closed his eyes. James listened to the sound of rain pelleting against the skylights far above. He called out, “Mr. Farnsworth?”

  “Yes?”

  “What uses do you project for tel
evision?”

  “Yes, good question.” His voice came through the darkened auditorium while the screen began to turn a deep blue. “First and foremost, it will be a medium of education. I suppose it could be used for entertainment, as well, but primarily, it will bring the world closer together, I believe.”

  “Thank you,” James said, and sat back.

  No one asked further questions as the screen glowed brighter, and when Philo spoke again, James anticipated he would describe what they were going to see. He was wrong. Perhaps it was the dark, and the sound of rain, and the attendant feeling of safety, or perhaps the excitement of having more than a hundred people hear for the first time what he had only hinted to President Harding, but Philo continued answering the question in a way he hadn’t intended on revealing. “It will end war.” He said this shyly. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all until a phantom voice from the front said, coarsely, “Say that again.”

  Philo squinted. “Did someone just ask me to repeat that?”

  “Yes,” said the Spider, who couldn’t believe his ears.

  “This is about keeping world peace. Forever. We set up captive balloons to carry the transmission signals around the globe,” he said with conviction. “And if someone in Berkeley, California, could sit in his house and see a man from Berlin, Germany, and how he eats his breakfast,” he swallowed, “how could they kill each other, then?”

  There was no direct response, just an elaborate, embarrassed silence, as if he’d cut his promising presentation short to give a speech on the virtues of temperance. Ledocq leaned over to James. “It’s becoming clear,” he hissed.

  “How much will you charge licensees to use it?” Someone else yelled out.

  “Oh, that’s the beauty of it. It’s going to be free.”

  Had there been crickets in the auditorium, crickets would have been heard. “Did you say free?”