by Bill Blowers
Just ten minutes to go.
Viko stepped out into the cold night air—it invigorated him. He looked around. The lights of a ship were coming into view off to the east. He lifted his binoculars to his eyes.
Four stacks, the ship had four smokestacks! The rate that coal smoke was coming up from three of them and blowing straight back indicated that she was steaming fast. It had to be Titanic.
One minute to go.
He went inside and held his hand near the transmit switch and watched the secondhand step precisely around the face of his timepiece. The seconds ticked by—forty, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven. Time seemed to stand still. After what seemed like an eternity, the moment arrived, eleven-thirty-five p.m. Viko’s finger hovered over the switch.
There was a moment’s hesitation—“Morgan, this is for you.”
His finger pressed down with firm determination. The circuits within his transmitter came alive and sent a series of powerful electrical signals traveling up to the Californian’s antenna. Silent deadly pulses of electromagnetic energy raced into the atmosphere, reaching out for three unique receivers hidden in Titanic’s structure. Wireless operators in the area heard a strange warbling sound as the electrical pulses sped through the “ether.”
On the bridge of Titanic the wheel suddenly fell limp in the hands of helmsman Robert Hitchens as a loud WHUMP was heard from beneath his feet. Everyone in the bridge turned in the direction of the sound as the faint odor of burning insulation wafted through the bridge.
In the Titanic wireless room, Jack Phillips was in the middle of a frivolous transmission when the panel in front of him seemed to reverberate like a snare drum. He was exhausted and frustrated and was not sure what he just heard, if anything. He continued keying in the Morse code but was aware that something had definitely changed. The usual authoritative sounds that came from the powerful transmitter were now more like soft whispers.
A message from the Cape came through: “TITANIC. WHAT HAPPENED? I HAVE LOST YOU. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE.”
Phillips repeated his message but once again received the reply: “TITANIC — SIGNAL IS VERY WEAK.”
Viko went out onto the walkway and watched Titanic through his binoculars. Nothing seemed to happen for several minutes, and then he noticed a definite slowing of the ship’s progress. The smoke from her stacks no longer trailed straight out behind her, it was rising at an ever-increasing angle and after nearly five minutes was going straight up.
He had done it, he had brought the beast to a stop, and in the middle of an ice field where no one would dare to venture.
He went back to the wireless and put on the headphones. The only sound was a gentle hissing: no transmissions from Titanic.
Mission accomplished!
Viko went back outside to watch as the Titanic’s crew and passengers began to realize they were stranded.
CHAPTER 45
April 15, 4:00 AM—Californian
Viko felt no remorse for the passengers on board Titanic. The spectacle he had witnessed during the night as Titanic tried to get someone’s attention was amusing. Why would they fire rockets into the air? Were they that frightened just because they had to stop? He was delighted that the two crewmembers assigned to the watch on the Californian had stayed in the galley all night. He didn’t want the Californian finding Titanic so quickly. No, that was not part of his plan. Titanic and all on board needed to drift for a few weeks.
He had watched as the great ship’s lights were turned off around two-thirty in the morning, most likely at the urging of Thomas Andrews. He would be the one with the most common sense. He most likely had convinced them that they needed to conserve fuel until they figured out what to do about their predicament. All had been quiet for the past hour and a half. Viko sat in front of the Marconi wireless and listened, but there was nothing at all, no ships, no land stations, no sounds of wireless traffic of any kind.
Something was wrong. There was always some minimal communication activity, even in the middle of the night.
He glanced down at his transmitter under the table. He had forgotten to reconnect the antenna to the Marconi wireless! He stared in disbelief at the mistake he had made.
No wonder he heard none of the familiar dots and dashes always coming in from a distant ship; he had spent the night listening to nothing but the hiss, that ever present noise, a sound like the rustling of leaves from within the receiver. His Marconi wireless was not able to receive signals because the antenna was not connected. He had been in the dark, literally and figuratively.
“What have I missed? What has been going on?” Viko muttered to himself.
He reconnected the antenna. A wireless signal was in the process of coming in. It was from a ship named Carpathia.
Carpathia’s operator was in contact with the Cape, asking for the last known location of Titanic. Carpathia was closest to the disaster. What disaster?
Carpathia was steaming north at full speed to come to the rescue of Titanic’s passengers. They also wanted to know how many lifeboats they could expect to find in the water.
Survivors? Lifeboats? This line of questioning made no sense. Why would the passengers leave Titanic? Even when disabled, she was still a warm and safe place. As he continued to listen to messages from Carpathia to the Cape and to other ships attempting to reach her location, Viko began to piece it together. Titanic had foundered. Captain Rostron of Carpathia was asking for help from anyone who knew of the whereabouts of Titanic when she sent her last message, “WE ARE GOING DOWN AT THE HEAD.” and then cut off before it could finish.
Viko understood. Titanic must have been close to ice when he disabled the steering. The ship did not stop right away as he predicted it would but rather ran head-on into the ice field. Twenty-four knots! At that speed the damage must have been immense, too much for even the mighty Titanic to endure. He couldn’t believe his ears, but the great ship was gone, on the ocean floor twelve thousand feet below.
Viko knew of the limited number of lifeboats and the concerns of Thomas Andrews.
How many people had he killed? How many innocent lives—fathers, mothers, and children—went down? How many froze to death in the water? All because of him, Viko Tesla! How many were out there right now on the freezing ocean in lifeboats or clinging helplessly to floating pieces of wood?
He could listen no longer. He ripped the antenna wire from the Marconi wireless.
He screamed in anguish. What hatred drove him to this point? He could not contain the boiling emotion that was exploding within him. He grabbed a hammer and smashed the transmitter that had caused this tragedy. He crammed it into the trunk, ran outside, and with all his strength threw it as far from the ship as he could, watching as it fell to the ocean and sank out of sight.
“I must help them. I have to find them and tell them that help is on its way. Off to the east, that’s where they are. It’s not too far, only a few miles. I have to get to them.”
Viko took off his heavy sea coat and shoes and threw them into the water. The cold of the night spurred him on.
“I must hurry!”
He climbed to the top of the railing, took one last look back at the wireless room where he committed this terrible crime, and dove into the water. He was a powerful swimmer and began to swim through the subfreezing water, ignoring the hundreds of tiny needlelike stabs penetrating his skin. He swam away from the Californian and off toward the east where the first pink rays of sunlight illuminated the floating mountains of ice, shedding light onto a surreal ocean graveyard.
And the greatest irony of all, the one purpose of his plan of revenge, now turned to one of murder, was that his enemy, J.P. Morgan, was somewhere back in Europe, not among the multitudes of bodies frozen to death and floating silently on the ocean currents.
CHAPTER 46
April 15, 10:00 AM—Aboard Carpathia
Carpathia’s Captain Arthur Rostron and Titanic Second Officer Charles Lightoller stood together in the bridge of the
Carpathia looking out at the ice field that surrounded them.
“Are you sure there are no more lifeboats?” Rostron asked.
“Quite sure, there were sixteen on board when we sailed, plus the four collapsibles we were able to launch, and all are accounted for.”
“By my count we have brought about seven hundred people aboard.”
Hearing this, Lightoller put his head in his hands. “My God, there were twenty-two hundred people on board; all those souls, drowned or frozen to death—I can still hear their screams for help.”
Rostron put his hand on Lightoller’s shoulder. “You have done all that can be done. Get below and get warm. We will continue the search for survivors, but in this cold water I doubt we will find any alive.”
Lightoller left the bridge. As Carpathia moved cautiously ahead, the crew continued to scan the water for signs of life. An hour later, the two crews out in the rescue skiffs rowed back, reporting that no living people could be found. Rostron turned to his crew: “Well, what more can we do? Those few that we have found floating are dead. It has been nearly eight hours since Titanic went down; there can be no one left alive out there. Get underway and let’s get these people to New York.”
As the second officer was about to send the command “ALL AHEAD ONE-QUARTER,” a shout came from a crewmember standing near the starboard rail. He was looking off to the west and spotted a body in the water. At first he thought it was a dolphin, but no, someone was in the water—he saw movement.
They put one of the rescue skiffs back in the water and within minutes pulled the nearly lifeless body of a man from the freezing water. His skin was deep blue, his hair and full beard encrusted with ice. He was not wearing a life vest. At first they thought he was dead, but when he opened his eyes and tried to speak they bundled him in as many blankets as they had on the skiff and got him back to the ship.
Carpathia’s doctors were certain he would not survive, but by the next morning he was still breathing and they were able to get him to take warm liquid. Miraculously, he recovered. He suffered no long-term physical effects of several hours in subfreezing water, but he never spoke to anyone as they tried to find out who he was. He would mumble, appearing to be in a trance, trying to speak. At times he would say something that sounded like “organ,” at others “curt” The only complete word he could form was “uncle.” But mostly he simply stared at others, or his eyes seemed to focus on some unknown image that only he could see. He occasionally shook his head; otherwise he was quiet and motionless. But when he was left alone he would become very agitated, his behavior bordering on violence. They had no choice but to restrain him.
They never determined his identity and, most surprisingly, no one remembered ever seeing him onboard Titanic. Carpathia’s overworked doctors surmised that he was suffering from severe emotional shock from the trauma of the sinking.
When Carpathia docked in New York, he was the last survivor taken from the ship. There was no one waiting for this strange man. With no other options, and over seven hundred other Titanic passengers to deal with, Captain Rostron arranged for him to be admitted to a local asylum for the insane, hoping that rest and treatment would restore his mind.
EPILOGUE
1943
The wars in Europe and the Pacific were raging. Each day brought news of the advancing armies of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. The lives of young American men were being wasted at an alarming rate. And from Europe came unbelievable reports of German exterminations of “undesirables”: Jews, gypsies, the elderly, and anyone else that the madman Hitler had a whim to eliminate.
Nikola Tesla, now in his eighties, lived as a virtual recluse in his rooms at the top of the Waldorf-Astoria. He was a beaten man. All of his wonderful inventions and creations had been stolen, altered, and their credit given to others. People like Marconi, Edison, and Steinmetz, all dead, but credited with radio, AC power, the “newly” invented and highly secret RADAR, and on and on, all of which had been his original ideas, and it was so easily proven, but no one cared. Untold millions of dollars had gone into the pockets of Morgan, Westinghouse, and Astor, all money that was rightly Tesla’s.
Over forty million AM radios graced the homes of Americans who sat by them each evening listening to Edward R. Murrow’s reassuring voice report on the progress of the war, as they anxiously hoped to learn the fate of their son or father or husband in some far-off hellhole of death and destruction.
Instantaneous news from thousands of miles away was delivered over this miraculous medium of wireless communication, given to the world by the genius of a forgotten, beaten old man and stolen by Marconi and the greedy barons of the financial world, bent only on enhancing their already huge fortunes.
Tesla was gaunt, frail, and despondent. His closest friends were dead. Except for his beloved white pigeons, he had no one. Those few people who did see him in his last days remember him fondly with birds perched on his arm eating seeds from the palm of his hand, talking quietly and lovingly to them in his native tongue.
It was January 7, 1943. Tesla once again allowed himself his one connection to the past, his reminder of how great he had been. He went into the sub-basement of the hotel where his trunks full of notes, writings, drawings, and manuscripts were kept. He found solace in these interludes. He would read and reread the hundreds of New York Post clippings reporting his latest accomplishments, or his original treatise on AC power, its edges still showing the scorch marks from the suspicious fire that had destroyed his laboratory so many years ago.
Of great pain to him was his correspondence with the US government when he tried to tell them of his experiments with death rays, remote-controlled torpedoes, and methods of creating massive destruction through his principles of mechanical resonance and acoustic location. Those blind fools! If only they had listened. If only he had not been stopped by their unfounded fear and prejudice toward him. These horrible wars would be over by now. No foreign power could beat his inventions. But alas, all to no avail.
On this cold winter day, sitting in the solitude of the Waldorf-Astoria’s basement, Tesla searched for and found his designs and treatise on the remote-controlled torpedo, or as he had called it, the “automaton.” He had not seen this in many years, and why he would look at it now he was not sure, but for some reason he was attracted to it. As he began to leaf through his sketches and notes from so many years before, he was surprised to find a large envelope among his notes—one he did not remember.
Puzzled, he opened it, finding that it contained several of his notes on the new wireless system, now called FM, that he and his lost nephew Viko had stumbled upon thirty years ago. He was puzzled. His perfect photographic mind had lost none of its sharpness. He knew something was wrong. What are the notes about FM doing in here? They don’t belong here! Was someone into my things? Have those bastard government agents been here again? Have I no privacy at all?
As he bristled with rage and pain at this further violation of his life’s work, he turned a page and immediately recognized Viko’s handwriting on a sketch that was not his.
Memories of his nephew flooded back. He realized it must have been Viko who mixed things up. Viko, his brilliant protégé. His heart was filled with an overwhelming wave of sadness for the lost Viko.
He remembered the citywide search for him. How he had simply disappeared one day, never to be heard from again. Tesla had engaged every means, every agency, had inquired everywhere as to his whereabouts. In fact, Tesla had raised the specter that Viko, knowing and understanding the intimate details of all of Tesla’s work, had been kidnapped or killed by a foreign government, or even by the US military. And of course all of this fell on deaf ears.
The pain of Viko’s disappearance lifted slowly as his reverie drifted through their past enjoyable days and evenings together, as Tesla continued to leaf through the papers in front of him. How curious, he thought, as he realized that the drawings depicting his underwater acoustic experiments were marked up with
notes regarding an acoustic homing device. What had Viko been thinking about, and why hadn’t he discussed this with me? After all, they were each other’s best sounding boards.
Stuck between two of the drawings Tesla found an envelope, sealed with wax and addressed “To the Greatest Mind the world has yet to know, My Uncle, Nikola Tesla.” Tesla smiled at this, thinking so typical of Viko.
Tesla opened the envelope, which crumbled slightly at the edges; it was obviously very old. Inside he found a letter, written on Tesla’s original stationery from so many years before.
As Tesla began to read, his smile turned to a frown and then to disbelief. This wasn’t real. This could not be. Detailed in front of Tesla’s unbelieving eyes were Viko’s plans to disable Titanic. It went on to explain and ask forgiveness for his behavior that had so confused and upset everyone.
My Dearest Uncle Nikola:
I am sure that by now you know that a few days ago the ship Titanic disappeared from the seas. Let me assure you that she is afloat but wandering helplessly about the North Atlantic awaiting a savior to rescue her. You are to be that savior. For you see, it was me, operating alone, that disabled the ship and destroyed her wireless. She cannot communicate; no one knows where she is. I simply placed two simple explosives on board and detonated them from the Californian a few miles away. Her steering is destroyed. I did this all for you.
I am so sorry that I did not say goodbye to you, but you would have stopped me. You are a great man, my dear uncle, but you are a coward. You are so naïve. You live not in this world of corrupt men but in your world of science and dreams and childish trust. It has pained me deeply to watch you beg them for money, to give away inventions worth millions for mere pennies, when it is they who should be begging from you.