Tesla

by Vladimir Pistalo

  Not before spring would he allow himself a game of whist at the local El Paso Club.

  “We live in the oddest place in the world,” Jeremiah Falconer, the fat president of the club, bragged. “Many come to Colorado Springs for their health, but only bachelors”—he drew a line along the threshold of the club—“enter here.”

  There was a shadow under the learned treasurer’s eyes.

  The secretary with a goiter handed him a business card the size of an opera program. It bore the inscription: John “Duck” Harris: I believe in peace, progress, and brotherhood of all the people in the world. Below it was a picture of the smiling “Duck” with his sideburns and mouth full of large teeth. The sworn misogynist warned Tesla: “You’ll see how mountain ranges and other giant things will look dwarfed in this place.”

  “On the contrary, people far away will seemingly acquire gigantic proportions,” Falconer rasped.

  “The light and the laws of optics play games with our eyes here,” the treasurer added in a dull, onanistic voice.

  “You’ll see.” Falconer put down an empty glass of claret. “Colorado Springs is a different world.”

  As a matter of fact, the clarity of the atmosphere intoxicated Tesla. He had never seen such light. The distant lamps at the bottom of the mountains shone as clearly as if they were just a few blocks away. Sound spread unusually far, especially high-pitched voices. As in Budapest long before, Tesla heard bells ringing in far-off towns right in his head. On Knob Hill, the squealing of wheels and people’s voices from the town seemed to be right outside his door.

  “I ascribe this to the high level of electricity in the air,” he explained to his faithful Lowenstein. “Electricity purifies and amplifies everything.”

  “Can you believe that the best photographs of the snowy mountain peaks were taken in moonlight?” the learned bachelors from the El Paso Club asked him.

  In moonlight, the inky shadows of the clouds rushed silently across the prairie. One evening, Tesla recognized Joseph Dozier’s melancholy face from a quarter mile away.

  “How are you?” Tesla took his hat off to him.

  Dozier pointed his finger toward the sky: “Huh! The moon! The stars! Huh?!”

  Did not Tesla’s father, Milutin, once see a waterfall of sparks that appeared both distant and yet so close he could touch it with his hand? The sparkling waterfall left blue tracers behind and “paled the stars.”

  Colorado Springs was a beautiful phenomenon every day. Here more shooting stars glided across the firmament than there were wishes to make. Once he saw a star explode and bloom in the sky. “Is this the true face of the world?” Tesla shook in hope. Goose-bumpy intuition tickled the marrow of his bones.

  Here he embarked on something truly cosmic and—for the first time in his life—was able to work as hard as he possibly could.

  Each morning was worth waking up to. As soon as Helios moved his coach, parts of the sky would turn the color of blood. Mountaintops became furnace doors gushing out molten ore. Clouds formed and dissipated quickly. Huge masses of something resembling snow floated through the air.

  One evening, he wrote in his diary:

  The whiteness and cleanliness of the clouds is such that nothing, not even an angel, can touch them without soiling them.

  The hovering icebergs looked so solid it was hard to believe they were made of vapor. It was impossible to distinguish the celestial mountain ranges from the real ones. Tesla wrote to Robert and Katharine that he had seen an ocean with deep green, dark blue, and black waters in the sky more than once. Green islands, shiny icebergs, sailboats, and even steamships were strewn across the ocean, and they were not less real because they were made of glittering mist. Another time he saw something like heavenly Switzerland.

  John Ruskin said that he poured clouds into bottles, like his father, the wine merchant, used to do with sherry. Clouds became Tesla’s exterior soul. He categorized them with love:

  The red ones, the white ones, those that look like enormous nuggets of gold, the clouds that contain a bit of copper, and those blinding like the sun itself.

  CHAPTER 77

  The Gorgon’s Hair

  A glowing stinger flashed in the distance. It exposed the shining fabric of the sky, woven of lightning and metals. For a second, Fritz Lowenstein appeared in the angelic world, but another thunderbolt spiked him back into the darkness.

  “Forty-eight point five seconds exactly!” Manfred noted in a ringing voice while everything around them shook, rattled, and shivered. The seismic wave he correctly anticipated almost ripped the laboratory off its foundation.

  “Pssst!” Tesla hissed at Lowenstein.

  The underground reverberation of the thunder disappeared and came back. As pale as a jasmine flower, with his hair sleekly brushed back, our cosmic spy listened to how that abated and then stirred again. Two hundred miles away, he could still hear the oscillations.

  “That’s important, that’s very important…,” he whispered.

  “Bang! Dang!” His assistant tripped over a broom at the other end of the laboratory.

  “Fritz! Be quiet…”

  Lowenstein shivered whenever he as much as brushed Tesla with his elbow. He constantly apologized, felt chilled, and hunched his shoulders around Tesla. His thinning hair looked more like down than hair. The young man’s skin was as delicate as an eyelid. He saw Tesla—who considered clumsiness to be rude—as divine. Finally, when Lowenstein ignored Tesla’s pssst too many times, his boss sent him back to New York.

  “He’s not good to the ones who love him,” the young German complained to Scherff.

  Scherff looked at him through his monstrous glasses behind which floated the eyes of a giant emotionless squid.

  The man with dangerous-looking eyes, Koloman Czitó, replaced Lowenstein as Tesla’s assistant. He brought a letter from the Lighthouse Board in Washington in which they informed Tesla that they would much rather sign a contract regarding wireless communication with an American than with Marconi. Tesla was already convinced that doing business with the military was like dealing with fools. He responded with demonic pride:

  Gentlemen, no matter how much I appreciate your proposition, if I want to remain true to myself, I must refuse any preferential treatment, especially if you compare me to those who follow in my footsteps. I am completely indifferent to any financial gains I could make based on such an advantage.

  What was it Johnson told him? “There’s no happiness outside the community of humans?” Ha!

  Non serviam!

  They did not call him Manfred in Prague for nothing. That same evening he proudly wrote in a letter to Johnson, “I am ready to produce effects bigger than any effects ever produced by a human factor.”

  The next morning, Manfred turned his mighty machines on for the first time. The Gorgon flamed with all of her bright hair. Tesla pumped electricity hundreds of times stronger than lightning into the ground. The ground shivered slightly. The vibrations spread over the entire planet in ever widening circles and formed a bow on the opposite end—right between the French islands of Amsterdam and Saint Paul.

  The earth was a huge cat.

  Now he knew who was rubbing it.

  The earth purred.

  The wave turned into an echo, which produced the same effect in Colorado Springs. As he kept pumping in more electricity, the resonance grew like the snowball he made in his childhood. In theory, that “electric avalanche” could destroy the planet.

  Under the sublimely clear skies his mighty machinery registered three signals from Mars. On the planet Colorado Springs, Tesla flew into the depths of cosmic reverberations. Taking each breath was a miracle. He was steeped in a remorseless natural force. There was no going back—he was wedded to it. He had to deal with phenomena as big as death.

  John Muir was far away. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was dead. Who else could understand his ideas that ripened in the wilderness? Did not Mara tell the Buddha: Don’t even try to announce it!
And yet… Letters flew to New York and letters flew back from New York.

  “Imagine spherical lightning that the wind blows across the nocturnal wasteland,” the hermit who went wild wrote to his urban friends. “Imagine a race of spirits through the night! Such lightning that resemble tumbleweeds are naturally created here in the prairie. Something similar was released during my experiments—it snapped my mast, and damaged some of my equipment. The Gorgon’s hair hissed around me, and I had to roll across the ground.”

  “I’ve had wonderful experiences here,” the bandaged Tesla wrote to Johnson. “I was taming a wild cat, so I turned into a mass of bloody scratches.”

  He dropped the pen that wanted to embellish the story.

  “The Furies!” he whispered in disgust. “The Furies!”

  He grabbed the disobedient pen again. He subdued it and continued to write. “The wireless transfer of messages, images, sounds and—most importantly—energy will be possible,” he promised in the letter to somebody who could not understand him. “I personally tested the transfer of energy at a distance of twenty-six miles. Trust me, Robert, with a 3000 HP pumping oscillator, I could light up a lightbulb anywhere on earth.”

  CHAPTER 78

  Zeus Commands the Thunderbolt

  Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a violent wind,

  which filled the entire house in which they were sitting;

  And there appeared to them tongues as of fire; these separated

  and came to rest on the head of each of them.

  They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

  The Acts of the Apostles 2:2–4

  “Zeus creates lightning—people don’t,” Koloman Czitó murmured to himself. The assistant stood with his legs apart and furtively observed his boss. Although he was not exactly a hunchback like Igor from Edison’s circus tent, the Hungarian was still somewhat stooped.

  “When the gush of magnetic energy hits the Gorgon,” Tesla shouted, “the coil will create an avalanche that will raise the electrical potential of the earth. Do you see? Electricity will erupt back from the ground. See?” he snarled. “Our mast will fire up thunderbolts.”

  “Zeus commands the thunderbolt,” Czitó whimpered.

  The assistant realized that Tesla was ready to risk his own life using the highest voltage ever produced. Czitó too was playing Russian roulette since he, not Tesla, operated the switch that controlled the flow of electricity from the power plant.

  “When I give you the sign, pull the lever,” Tesla ordered with suicidal resolve.

  He found a spot from which he could see through the open roof.

  “Now!”

  Czitó jerked the lever. A swarm of electrical snakes covered the coil. A hissing sound spread throughout the room.

  “It works,” Tesla’s voice thundered. “Do it again!”

  The fairy’s hair got entangled on the coil once more. The laboratory turned blue and started to crackle. A dull boom reported from the mast.

  “I’m going to go outside and look at the mast,” Tesla was merciless. “I want you to pull the lever and hold it till I say so.”

  Swaying on his thick rubber-soled shoes, Manfred stepped out of the barn.

  “Pull the lever!”

  Czitó pushed the lever and held it with his extended arm, waiting for the signal to jerk it back.

  A few seconds passed. The sorcerer and his apprentice were still alive. Nothing smelled burned. Like a gold coin, a whole wondrous minute fell with a clink on the stone floor. Then came the real awakening of the Furies. Tesla crossed the point of no return as he launched into the shoreless void of a new phenomenon. Inside, the crackling of the Gorgon’s hair rose to a crescendo. Outside, a single thread of lightning wriggled off the mast. Then a second one, a third, a fourth. Thunder exploded and Tesla flinched against his will. Dear Mother! Thunder exploded again. He ducked as it cracked once more. The noise from the mast sounded like a rifle, then like a cannon—and soon became even louder until it seemed as though they were in the middle of the Battle of Austerlitz. The building was a straw in a flashing whirlwind.

  “The Furies,” the first human thunder maker whispered vengefully. “The Furies!”

  Spectral blue light appeared in the barn. A mass of live electrical hair slithered around the coils. Everything in the building spewed needles of light. A pandemonium of sounds broke free. There was a stench of sulfur. Czitó clinched his jaw and broke a tooth as he tried to suppress the trembling in his body, lest he might let go. His left arm shook so much he was not able to cross himself. In the blue shimmer that completely surrounded him, he almost expected to see the spirits of his late parents. He felt sparks popping painfully from his fingers. He felt that his blood would gush out from under his nails.

  The electrical maelstrom threatened to destroy the barn.

  Nikola Tesla stood outside, neatly dressed, with his laced high-top shoes and bowler hat. The skies screamed and the earth responded. A new Mephistopheles grew taller under the night sky starched by lightning. Sparks flew around the rubber soles of his shoes. The awakened earth had a message for him. The awakened earth sparked all around him.

  Lightning became thicker and brighter, clearer and bluer. Sparks as big as a fist shot into the sky. Sea snakes wriggled upward, eighty, then one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. The rumbling echoed for miles. With his face alternating from black to silver, the Victorian thunder maker in his Prince Albert coat surveyed them. He was the light—a flashing, impersonal force.

  “How long has this been going on?” Czitó trembled. “This is forbidden! A mortal shouldn’t do this!”

  In the blink of an eye, everything went dead.

  Everything.

  “Czitó, did you pull the lever?” Tesla lunged at him.

  The Hungarian looked at him with his bloodshot eyes, hunched like a bull with banderillas sticking in his back.

  “No!” he gasped.

  “Call the power plant. They mustn’t do this to me. They mustn’t cut me off.”

  “What are you talking about?” a deranged voice shouted on the phone when Czitó called. “You caused a short circuit. Our generator is on fire.”

  CHAPTER 79

  Tesla Toasts the Twentieth Century

  After which time the sun’s bright light will have ceased to shine,

  and its life-giving heat will have ebbed away, and our own earth

  will be a lump of ice, hurrying on through the eternal night…

  Meanwhile, the cheering lights of science and art,

  ever increasing in intensity, illuminate our path.

  Nikola Tesla in the Century (1900)

  After the silent planet of Colorado Springs, Tesla landed on clamorous Broadway.

  Black engines pulled elevated trains. Tourists read A Guide for the Perplexed.

  Dr. F. Finch Strong was trying to convince mankind that electricity made the old smarter and the stupid younger.

  Ah! A new century was on its way.

  Traveling troupes visited theaters in godforsaken towns, bringing a thing unheard of: a gramophone!

  Audiences applauded the ghostly singers.

  Freedom, Wisdom, World’s Exposition, and America—everything had its own Muse and each Muse had its buxom personification.

  “Laws are becoming more just,” visionaries insisted. “Rulers more humane; music is becoming sweeter and books wiser and the individual heart is becoming at once more just and more gentle.”

  The severed heads of the Boxers hung on the walls of Hunan. Water buffalo sniffed the dead in the rice fields of the Philippines.

  “Everyone feels four hundred times bigger,” Tesla’s friend, the railroad magnate and senator Chauncey Depew, crowed.

  Did not Gargantua write Pantagruel that their time was better than all previous ones put together?

  A lamp in Scofield, Utah, transformed a mine into a fiery tornado. The miners were blasted from the shaft as if fired from a cannon.

  A
h! A new century was on its way.

  Immigrants disembarked from sad ships and filled tenements. The next day they went to moving picture arcades to see the sixteen-second-long kiss along with a train entering a station and some women leaving a factory. All of a sudden, miracles that were thousands of miles away started to happen right before their eyes.

  In towns across America, the summer was hot. Theodore Roosevelt’s eyeglasses gleamed as he grinned from train windows during the election year.

  Standing next to her husband, President McKinley’s fragile wife, Ida, looked like a bird on the back of a buffalo.

  Publications were adorned with the pictures of the independent yet melancholy Gibson Girl.

  A new century was on its way.

  Truth-loving illustrations withdrew from newspapers under the onslaught of lying photographs. In the Century article “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” Tesla was calmly reading in Colorado Springs while—next to him—lightning flew from one coil to the other.

  Tesla the thunder maker toasted a lot. He toasted the new century at the Johnsons’, at Delmonico’s, at the Waldorf, at Stanford White’s.

  A new century was on its way.

  He toasted with Ava and Colonel Astor.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven…

  He toasted with the Vanderbilts. He toasted as the masks surrounded him.

  A new century was on its way. Six, five, four… People anticipated it with fear and excitement. Three, two, one…

  At that moving moment, Mark Twain turned his back on thundering fireworks. He extinguished his corncob pipe and declared, “To this century—I don’t belong.”

  Purple, red, and blue stars unlocked the sky.

  Willows made of light, dazzling dandelion fluff, red and white sparks, smoke and explosions multiplied above their heads.

  Like the ancient Chinese, Tesla believed that fireworks wake up the gods.

  But which ones?