Metamorphosis

by Sesh Heri

  “I’d like to talk to you,” Rohan said. “It’s a private matter. Could you come down to my office around five this afternoon?”

  I agreed to meet him, and at five o’clock I went to his office downtown, and he got up, put on his coat, and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We walked through the icy streets of Chicago. As we walked Rohan did most of the talking.

  He started by asking me a question: “Does the name John Wilkie mean anything to you?”

  I thought about it a moment. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it, and told Rohan so.

  “He’s an old friend of mine,” Rohan said, “and the Chief of the U.S. Secret Service.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He was recommended for his position by Frank Vanderlip, the undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury. Heard of Vanderlip?”

  “I’ve…I’ve heard of him,” I said warily.

  “Ought to have,” Rohan said. “He’s friends with someone you know.”

  “Who is that?”

  “George Ade.”

  I kept walking.

  “Vanderlip and Ade used to work together here in Chicago,” Rohan continued. “Vanderlip told me that you know Ade pretty well. Said you and Ade have done some traveling together. He told me that the two of you came back from…afar.”

  I stopped on the sidewalk. Rohan stopped beside me. We looked at each other.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “It’s not what I want but what you need,” Rohan said. “I’m here to give you a little help. I’ll give you a bit of a boost and then you can return the favor, but not to me. You’ll be returning the favor to others. What do you say?”

  We started down the sidewalk again.

  “Sure,” I said. “Just what are we talking about here?”

  “To start,” Rohan said, “let’s do a demonstration of your abilities down at the Central Precinct Station. I’ll set it up in the roll-call room, pack the place with police brass and the boys of the press. You can show ‘em what you can do. It’ll be some great publicity. You can get out of anything, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Good,” Rohan said. “Then I’ll have a mess of leg irons, shackles, chains— anything I can find. We’ll put on a helluva show.”

  “And in exchange for this,” I asked, “what will I have to do?”

  “No telling,” Rohan said. “Vanderlip wants you to work for him through John Wilkie. Wilkie has some assignments for you. I know that some things are going on out west, out in San Francisco. Lots of counterfeiting is being done out there among the anarchists. We’ll call them ‘anarchists,’ you and I. Of course, the anarchists are being led by others who have come from…afar.”

  I stopped walking and looked up at Rohan.

  “You know,” Rohan said. Then he bent down, and whispered, “The Martians.”

  We started down the sidewalk again.

  Rohan spoke in a normal voice again, “All I can tell you is that if you’ll work for Wilkie, you’ll be taken care of in a grand style. You’ll be on your way to the Big Time show business for sure.”

  “Well,” I said, “let’s get started. How will Wilkie contact me?”

  “He has men all over the country,” Rohan said. “They’ll contact you. I know they’ll be sending you out to San Francisco. They’ll set the whole thing up. It’s in the works right now.”

  Well, things happened just as Lieutenant Rohan predicted. I did the demonstration at the police station, and the next morning I bought a newspaper from a boy on a street corner. There on the front page of the paper was a drawing of me and a big headline: “Amazes Detectives.” I had done it. I ran back to our hotel, burst into our room, and held the front page of the paper up for Bess to see. Her hands went up to her face and cradled her cheeks.

  “I’m famous!” I declared.

  It was the first important step in my true professional career, but only the first one. A few more weeks transpired before the plan outlined by Lieutenant Rohan fully materialized. It happened at the Palmgarden, a beer hall in St. Paul, Minnesota where we were playing. One night, a party of theatre managers came in to see us perform. The next night, one of them came again, and he asked Bess and me to have coffee with him after the show.

  I had been producing live pigeons from silk handkerchiefs in our act and I now asked the theatre manager: “I bet you don’t know how I got the pigeons, do you? Nobody ever catches wise to that. It kills them.”

  “I would suppose,” the man said dryly, “you are producing them from standard loads under your coat, the same way all other magicians do.”

  His response set me down a notch. I looked over to Bess who was blinking. She was nervous.

  “I see you know your magic,” I said, smiling.

  “I know some,” the man said. “I’ve booked enough magicians and seen them perform in my day. They’re pretty much all the same. All their acts are the same, pretty tiresome. One thing after another at a break neck speed, so fast you don’t know what’s happening and you don’t care. It’s just terrible. Your act is just like that, just a nonsensical jumble, just a mess— a terrible bore.”

  The man picked up his cup and casually sipped his coffee. His words had thrust into me like a dagger, and now he just sat there in complete arrogance and indifference.

  I could feel blood rushing to my face. My heart began pounding. I clinched my teeth and my hands under the table knotted into fists. I felt like I could have torn this man apart with my bare hands, but he just went on denouncing my act between sips of coffee in that monotone voice of his. Something in me forced me to hold my tongue. I was glad I did, for what the man next had to say arrested my rage. I sat there frozen, dumbfounded.

  “Not that you don’t work at it. You have mental focus. I like that. But your act has no routine, no logic. One trick does not relate to or lead to another. You’re just doing a lot of miscellaneous stuff. However, there were two things you did that I liked: the trunk trick you did with your wife and your challenge to the audience for them to confine you with their own cuffs. That was all expertly done. Impressive, even. I liked it. I’d like you to work for me, doing just those two effects in an act which I will carefully hone.”

  “Work for you?” I stammered. I was literally reeling from shock. My heart was still pounding, but my hands had gone limp.

  I said, “I— I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I didn’t throw it, son. I’m Martin Beck, Orpheum Circuit.”

  I was speechless. This was it. This was the Big Time. Martin Beck was the king of vaudeville managers on the west coast of America, and he worked closely with Keith and Albee who owned all the big time vaudeville theatres in the east.

  I sat absolutely still, listening while Beck spoke about my act, taking it apart, examining its every detail, reassembling it in precise order. It was a work of mere words, but I could feel it as a real, physical thing. Beck’s analysis was masterful, gallingly but undeniably true, scientifically precise, artistically intuitive. Beck knew his business, and I absorbed his every syllable and nuance like a sponge. He finally stopped speaking.

  “When do we start?” I asked.

  “Immediately,” Beck replied. “I’ll start you at sixty dollars a week, and raise that figure as you prove your box-office value. We will develop your act in this region of the country, and then I’ll send you out to San Francisco as a headliner.”

  San Francisco, I thought, just as Lieutenant Rohan had predicted.

  After Beck had left us there at the table, Bess and I sat staring, too shocked to even move.

  Then Bess turned to me, and asked, “When, Harry? When?”

  I turned to her, and said, “Now, Bess. Now. Right now.”

  We started our first Orpheum tour at the end of March in Omaha. By the end of April I signed a formal contract with Beck. We played Kansas City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. My weekly salary would eventually go from $60 to $12
5, and then on up to $150, $175, $250.

  “Now,” Bess said one day. “That’s when ‘when’ is: right now.”

  In Kansas City, while paying a visit to police headquarters, Chief Hayes took me aside and led me to a back room where he showed me a machine that was being used to counterfeit $20 gold pieces.

  “They’re using one like this out in San Francisco,” Chief Hayes said, “but Treasury hasn’t tracked down its whereabouts yet.”

  Then the Chief gave me a table of ciphers, told me to memorize it, and then burn the table.

  “Secret Service will communicate with you by using this system of ciphers,” the Chief said.

  I took the table and did as Chief Hayes advised.

  In Denver, while waiting on the platform at the train station, a man bumped into me, and then disappeared into the crowd. A moment later I realized that I had been brushed by a pickpocket. I reached into my coat, but found I hadn’t been robbed. Instead I pulled out a slip of paper the man had deposited. A typewritten message written in the Secret Service cipher was printed on it. When I deciphered the message, it read, “Room 207, Alta Vista Hotel, Colorado Springs. Depart the station when you arrive. Meeting will be one hour in length. Do not bring your wife with you.”

  I knew that our route would take us through Colorado Springs and then on south to Albuquerque. When we reached the station at Colorado Springs, I told Bess I was going for a walk through town. I left her at a restaurant in the station. I asked directions to the Alta Vista Hotel and walked over there, went into the lobby, and up the stairs to room 207. I knocked. The door opened.

  Nikola Tesla stood in the threshold.

  “Ehrich!” Mr. Tesla said, breaking into a grin. “Come in, my friend. You are right on time. Apparently the railroads are running at top efficiency these days!”

  I came into his hotel room and Mr. Tesla closed the door. It was a large room, a suite with a long table in the center. On the table lay a number of blueprints and drawings. Two men sat at the table’s far end. I didn’t recognize either one of them.

  “If you gentlemen will excuse me now,” Mr. Tesla said.

  “We will resume our discussions this afternoon.”

  The two men rose from their seats and went out the door. They didn’t look at me, and didn’t seem to expect or require an introduction. After they had closed the door behind them, Mr. Tesla said:

  “My engineer and construction contractor for my latest project here in Colorado.”

  “Mr. Czito is no longer with you?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Mr. Tesla said, “Mr. Czito is still in New York preparing rail shipment for some of my equipment. He will be joining me out here later. May I offer you something to drink?”

  “No need to go to any trouble,” I replied.

  “Have some coffee at least,” Mr. Tesla said. “The high altitudes here accelerate dehydration and create a physical and mental lassitude.”

  He went to a table and poured coffee into two cups. I walked over picked up a cup and sipped the coffee.

  “The Martians have invaded earth,” Mr. Tesla said. “They have established bases of operation in tunnel systems beneath several of earth’s major cities. They are infiltrating and attaching themselves to our civilization, especially here in the United States. They are using counterfeit banknotes and coins to finance all their operations. They have recruited a number of earth people to act as their operatives. Their most concentrated operations are now occurring in the Philippines under the city of Manila and in San Francisco.”

  “And that’s why I’m going to San Francisco,” I said.

  “You must find their printing plant,” Mr. Tesla said. “Agents of the Treasury Department have been working on the problem for several months and are at a deadlock. The Martians and their operatives are using a complex system of decoys to escape detection. The line of their operation has been impossible to follow.”

  “I thought we were finished with the Martians years ago,” I said.

  Mr. Tesla heaved a sigh, and said, “If only it were that simple. The Martian aggression against our world is not a recent development. Its roots go back before the dawn of our present civilization six thousand years ago. This latest phase began in the 1850s and will no doubt continue for many years into the future. We must take a long-range view.”

  “Wasn’t the first Martian expedition to Earth undertaken in the year 1876?” I asked.

  “The first physical journey by chemical rocket, yes,” Mr. Tesla replied. “However, the first contact with Earth by the Martians— or by whatever intelligence is ultimately behind the Martian civilization— that contact was made earlier in the 1850s.”

  Mr. Tesla then went on to sketch for me a curious and arcane history of contact between Earth and Mars. In the mid-1840s, a young German by the name of C.A.A. Dellschau began experiments in mental thought reception, using a combination of ancient esoteric meditative techniques accompanied with the ingestion of certain vegetative alchemical concoctions. His main target was Mars, where he believed a lineage of wise men still lived. Dellschau received what he believed was a message from Mars which instructed him how to build an airship so that he might travel across space to the Red Planet. He found that the messages were incomplete. Enough information was received to build a crude airship that could only travel in earth’s skies. Dellshau’s plans fell into the hands of a German secret society that had been spying on him. Eventually this group built and flew an airship over Germany in the early 1850s.

  In 1847, Dellschau was instructed by his mysterious source to move to another locale where the transmitted thoughts would be received with greater clarity. One locale suggested was the Giza plateau, and the other was Pyramid Lake in the western desert of the North American continent. This second locale was a most curious selection, since the lake had only been discovered and named some three years earlier by John C. Fremont. In 1848 Dellshau arrived in San Francisco, and from there traveled to Pyramid Lake where he began making mental contact with what he believed were wise men on the planet Mars.

  By the 1850s, Dellshau had removed to Sonora, California, and with about sixty other men, had formed what they called ‘The Aero Club,’ a secret society that existed under the umbrella of an even larger organization called ‘NYMZA.’ Mr. Tesla told me that he held the opinion that ‘NYMZA’ was not an acronym, but rather the name of the group with which Dellschau was in mental contact. Dellshau thought ‘NYMZA’ was a group of wise men who were trying to overturn the tyrannical government that presently rules Mars with an iron fist. ‘NYMZA’ had no material resources to build an airship of their own, but were able to transmit their thoughts across space. Most of the Martian members of ‘NYMZA’ were starving prisoners held chained in dungeons. Their mental contact with Dellschau was a desperate call for help.

  From the 1850s to the 1890s Dellshau’s ‘Aero Club’ struggled to make sense of the mental messages transmitted from Mars. Actual airships were secretly constructed in Sonora and Oroville, California. Some of these ships were able to fly short distances over the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  In 1889 Nikola Tesla began the construction of an airship in a secret factory outside of New York City, hidden away in the woods of New Jersey. By 1893, not only was Mr. Tesla’s airship completed, but a near-duplicate version was also completed only a few miles away at another site in the New Jersey woods. The duplicate had been designed by Martian spies copying Mr. Tesla’s plans and designs. This duplicate airship was built by earthmen working for the Martians— the Martian faction presently ruling the Red Planet. Ironically, nearly all the men who had been working for the Martians believed that they had been secretly working all the time for the U.S. Government! In our 1893 journey to Mars, this earth-constructed Martian airship was destroyed, and, as far as any of us on earth knew, the ruling Martian elite had no further airships with which they could travel to Earth. But this presumption was wrong.

  On the evening of November 18th, 1896 a strange airship was sighted
flying over the State Capitol building in Sacramento, California. The Governor telegraphed an urgent message to President Grover Cleveland in Washington, D.C., and, in turn, President Cleveland dispatched Mr. Tesla to California in the airship Daedalus that had been newly-constructed by the U.S. Navy. On board were Mr. Tesla’s assistant Kolman Czito and six specially trained naval officers. Within a few days Mr. Tesla and his crew had determined that the airship sighted over Sacramento, Oakland, and San Francisco was a Martian-built airship disguised to look like an Aero Club ship. Since the U.S. Government had long been aware of the activities of the Aero Club, the Martians thought that they could maneuver in the sky over major cities and receive no military response, because they would be taken for the harmless ‘crank’ efforts of the ‘Aero Club.’ Mr. Tesla now believes that the rulers of Mars were able to partially block the mental transmissions of the Martian prisoners and use the garbled transmissions to their own advantage when they camouflaged their airships to look like craft built by the ‘Aero Club.’

  The situation was eventually brought to a conclusion in an aerial battle over the western Nevada desert where Mr. Tesla’s airship destroyed the Martian airship with a high-powered ray of electrical energy.

  After this, the ‘Aero Club’ was disbanded by the Interplanetary Unit of the U.S. Army; Dellshau was interrogated, and then released and allowed to remove to the town of Houston, Texas.

  However, Mr. Tesla informed me that Dellshau remained in contact with him, continually urging him to help him build an airship to travel to Mars. Mr. Tesla said that he never responded to any of Mr. Dellshau’s messages.

  “The man has been— and continues to be— dangerous,” Mr. Tesla said, summing up his tale. “He is toying with forces far beyond his comprehension. He has been manipulated, and not only by the Martians, but by another intelligence that stands behind them.”

  “What intelligence?” I asked.

  “You don’t need to know that, Ehrich,” Tesla said. “It is better that you don’t. Now, here is something you will need in San Francisco.”