Metamorphosis

by Sesh Heri

Mr. Tesla handed me a small metal box with two circular areas covered with perforations.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A wireless telephone,” Mr. Tesla said. “You will be able to stay in contact with the Treasury agents when you are on an assignment. Certain agents carry these. Press this button to open the line and transmit. You’ll be able to do so within a five mile radius of San Francisco.”

  Then Mr. Tesla turned to the blueprints on the table and began speaking to me of his latest project in Colorado. I realized the business part of our meeting had concluded.

  “A world-wide system of wireless communication!” Mr. Tesla finally said. “Not a five-mile radius coverage like with your little telephone! The world system will be a reality in less than two years.”

  “What about Marconi?” I asked. “I’ve been reading quite a bit about him lately.”

  “Let the young man proceed,” Tesla said. “He is using a number of my patents and so he should achieve some success— for the time being. Shortly, however, his charade will come to an end.”

  My hour was up. Mr. Tesla did not extend his hand, but only solemnly bowed, and I bowed in return.

  “We have come from…afar,” Mr. Tesla said, “may we each go much further yet.”

  I gave another short bow, opened the door, and went out. I was back in the ordinary world, but I carried Mr. Tesla’s otherworldliness within me.

  Our train journey out west was a long, hot dry affair, and although success loomed before us with every mile traveled down the rail, we were short on real cash. In Albuquerque we made a stop, and I got off the train, found a quick card game in a nearby saloon, won a bundle of money, and then dashed back to the train station carrying a bucket of ice cream that Bess and I shared with everyone in our car! I thought of Mr. Tesla and his admonishment against gambling as I ate that ice cream.

  “Just this one time!” I said out loud between gulps of the cold ambrosia.

  “What?” Bess asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. “Just thinking of an old friend who told me not to gamble.”

  “Oh, it paid off big this time, young man,” Bess said.

  “Just this one time!” we both said in unison.

  In San Francisco I made contact with the Treasury and Secret Service agents. I followed them as they shadowed the suspected counterfeiters. I soon could see the mistakes the agents were making. In a meeting with the agents I said:

  “I’m going to show you how to be a shadow of a shadow— to think and act like a shadow of a shadow. The counterfeiters are doing some extremely complex brush-passes in the vicinity of Lotta’s Fountain on Market Street. They are then doing drops in certain places you would never suspect. Later, probably late at night, one of their confederates is picking up the drop.”

  I re-organized the team of agents, and we soon began capturing our culprits red-handed. None of the counterfeiters, however, would reveal to us the location of the printing press plant. Most of us believed that they really didn’t know the location.

  I finally solved the problem when I began a late night surveillance of the continuing counterfeiting operation. The Martian operatives had become particularly careful, since they knew we were watching them.

  One night I climbed the outside wall of a building in downtown San Francisco until I reached the fifth floor. From my perch on a cornice, I crouched for some two hours before the man I was waiting for appeared. He picked up the secreted package and made his way down the street and turned at the corner. He believed no one was watching him. On my wireless telephone I was able to call an agent down the street who then was able to pick up the tail on our man. I climbed down the building, reached the ground and ran several blocks until I came upon our man again, walking into Chinatown. I followed him down an alley to where he removed a manhole cover and went down through the opening. We knew the counterfeiters were operating underground, but until this moment, we did not know their point of entrance from the surface.

  This was the turning-point of the San Francisco investigation. The location of the printing plant was found by Treasury agents in a maze of tunnels under Chinatown. A gun battle brought the operation to an end, and three actual Martian beings were killed.

  My successes in San Francisco both on-stage and off led to my first European Tour. In England, I was approached by Inspector Melville of British Intelligence to spy out German war production. My passport was altered to identify me as a native-born American citizen.

  I was in Germany on tour when I received word that President McKinley had been assassinated by an “anarchist” at the fair in Buffalo, New York. Later, an agent from the U.S. Army’s Interplanetary Unit told me that the President was assassinated as reprisal for the actions we had taken in San Francisco in 1899 and that George Ade and John T. McCutcheon had taken in Manila about a year later. In both operations Martian printing plants were destroyed and this dealt a heavy blow to the Martian’s plans to infiltrate and dominate our world. It was suspected that Martians had made secret contact with the German government. While in Germany I followed the trail of a secret society that was harboring one of the people who had planned President McKinley’s assassination. With George Ade, John T. McCutcheon, and five members of the U.S. Army Interplanetary Unit, we located and destroyed yet another printing operation of U.S. currency, this time on German soil. No direct proof was ever obtained tying the Kaiser’s government to the Martian counterfeiting operation, but our suspicions of a connection remained. In April of 1902, I returned to New York for eleven days and was debriefed by the Interplanetary Unit of the U.S. Army.

  It was during this debriefing that I first learned that I was being referred to as a member of ‘The Mars Club,’ since I was one of the few humans who had ever actually traveled to the planet Mars. Later, George Ade told me that Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla made the actor Joseph Jefferson an honorary member of ‘The Mars Club’ and initiated him in an outrageously hilarious ceremony at the Players Club in New York. Jefferson became friends with George Ade and they often discussed Mars and other arcane matters at the Players.

  President McKinley’s assassination electrified the highest levels of political power in Washington. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the formation of a new secret organization to deal specifically with the Martian threat. He named this organization ‘Majestic Seven’— the ‘Seven’ referring to the seven members of which it was comprised, these being: President Theodore Roosevelt; Elihu Root, Secretary of War; John Hay, Secretary of State (and an old friend of Mark Twain’s); Adjutant General Corbin; Admiral Dewey; General Nelson Miles; Nikola Tesla.

  In July of 1903 the first meeting of Majestic Seven was convened to discuss photographic images received from a special telescope invented by Mr. Tesla. The images showed a gigantic object positioned between Earth and Mars which was formed in the distinct shape of a bell!

  “It is undeniably a Martian construction,” Mr. Tesla told the rest of the members of Majestic Seven.

  “What is its purpose?” President Roosevelt asked.

  “It is an interplanetary station of some sort,” Mr. Tesla said. “It is of the most dire and utmost urgency that it be destroyed.”

  “You believe it is that dangerous?” the President asked.

  “I cannot convey to you fully the danger of this thing to our world,” Mr. Tesla replied.

  “Can you destroy it?” the President asked.

  “I can, if you will sanction it. Mr. Morgan has presently tied my hands with the Wardenclyffe Tower. He is now determined to prevent its operation, and is giving full support to Mr. Marconi’s feeble and misguided efforts. If I can receive funding from Majestic Seven to activate the tower, I will be able to destroy the object in interplanetary space.”

  “I will give you the funding,” the President said. “And I will speak to Mr. Morgan, informing him of our actions.”

  So on July 15th, 1903, and continuing for some weeks afterwards, Mr. Tesla began hurling electrical bolts across milli
ons of miles of space to the bell-shaped object that he estimated was nearly some one thousand feet in diameter. A field of force surrounded the object, and only repeated assaults upon this field from Mr. Tesla’s tower, could break through it. For many nights in July of 1903, the people of New York City and Long Island observed gigantic bolts of electricity explode skyward from the vicinity of Shoreham, the site of Mr. Tesla’s dome-topped Wardenclyffe Tower. Finally, a beam of powerful electricity broke through, and the bell-shaped object was vaporized.

  For a number of years afterwards I had no contact with Mr. Tesla, although on occasion I would receive assignments from Majestic Seven to perform tasks involving a surveillance of the Martians, tasks that required absolute secrecy. I also did work for American and British intelligence involving the observation of military developments in Germany. There were a number of us in the intelligence field who believed that a secret alliance had been forged between the Martians and the Germans, but as the years passed, it seemed that the Martian’s activities on earth had greatly lessened, or perhaps had even come to a complete standstill. However, a few curious incidents punctuated the years 1905 to 1915. In July of 1906, my brother Leopold Weiss, M.D. told me that he thought he heard a burglar in my bedroom while Bess and I were away from the house, and in October 1907, Leo discovered a burglar trying to break into a secret safe in my bedroom. The burglar fought my brother with a knife all the way to the outside hall and down the stairs to our basement. There, the burglar escaped, leaving my brother in a pool of blood, and my mother screaming for help. Fortunately, help came quickly, and my brother’s life was saved. I was in Los Angeles at this time, and coded telegrams flew across the country between Leopold, Dash, and me. We concluded that the burglar was my brother Leopold’s Negro servant. In a secret interrogation, the servant revealed that he had been paid by some mysterious men to break into my safe. Using the servant’s information, the men were tracked down and apprehended. They were Martians who were trying to find all my secret research papers concerning their activities. My brother Leopold and I created a cover story to explain the burglary and his servant was sent to prison.

  In 1910, while giving air shows in Australia, I discovered someone trying to sabotage my Voison biplane. Once again, this individual turned out to be a paid operative of the Martians, and, again, this matter was pursued and concluded with no information about it getting out to the public— or even, for that matter, to my wife Bess.

  It was only after I had returned from Australia that summer of 1910 that I once again had the opportunity to secretly meet with Nikola Tesla. We first discussed the recent death of Mark Twain that previous spring. This led us to discuss the recent activities of the Martians, and this, in turn, prompted me to bring up his 1903 electrical assault upon the mysterious bell-shaped object positioned between earth and Mars.

  I mentioned the incident that occurred to me in Pennsylvania some years before and the bell-shaped hieroglyph I had been shown. Mr. Tesla nodded, and said, “I know all about it.”

  I asked, “Did that hieroglyph have anything to do with the thing you found in space?”

  “Never tell anyone, Ehrich,” Mr. Tesla said, “but, yes, unfortunately— quite unfortunately— it did.”

  I then asked, “Why would the Martians need that bell-shaped space station if they now have anti-gravity ships that can travel here in a short interval of time?”

  “Ah, Ehrich,” Mr. Tesla said to me, “you show acuity of perception lacking in the members of Majestic Seven. No one asked me that question, and I was relieved. But you have asked it, and I feel compelled to answer what you have asked, but you must keep my answer an absolute secret.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “The bell-shaped object was not a space station, nor a habitat of any kind.”

  “Was it a weapon?” I asked.

  “The most dreaded weapon in the universe,” Mr. Tesla said. “The horror of millennia, the abomination of ancient wars! Ehrich, oh, Ehrich. It was a machine that distorted the ether— that tore at the fabric of space— that shattered the foundations of our reality! Monsters of Monsters, Doorway to Hell! Ehrich, that bell-shaped thing hovering between Earth and Mars was a time machine— a time machine— that bell was a time machine sent to destroy our world, our minds, our souls!”

  I was standing on the sidewalk in Oakland, California in 1915, but I was still hearing Mr. Tesla’s words echo in my ears— and five years later they still sent an electric shock up my spine and a wave of terror to the pit of my stomach— for I knew that every syllable he spoke was true— absolutely true!

  I looked about me. Could the strange events I had been experiencing this day in Oakland be the result of a tampering with the fabric of space and time? The only man who could answer that question was Nikola Tesla, and he was far away from me now.

  I turned, and walked toward the train station, trying to shake away the thoughts that had been running through my brain. The present reality returned to me as a mist upon my face descending from the darkening gray sky overhead. Against that sky the buildings of the city rose as hulking black masses. I quickened my pace. For now I was in time, and decided to take whatever time held in store.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Diver

  “Imagine yourself jammed head foremost in a cell filled with water, with your hands and feet unable to move and your shoulders tightly lodged in this imprisonment…. I believe it is the climax of all my studies and labors. Never will I be able to construct anything that will be more dangerous or difficult for me to do. Having flown a biplane and taught myself to become an expert aviator, I am in a position to state that flying is child’s play in comparison.”

  Houdini, on his Chinese Water Torture Cell

  Still the mist descended from the dark gray sky, but now I gazed upon that sky as if it was below me, far below my feet, my feet bound tightly together by coils of rope. I was hanging by the end of that rope, upside-down, seventy-five feet above the surface of the earth, looking up at the gray sky beyond my feet, and strapped into the strongest straitjacket I had ever encountered up until that moment in my life. Two days had passed since I had stood down there below on the sidewalk and thought of Mr. Tesla and his terrifying revelation of the Bell. It was now Tuesday, November 23rd, 1915, twelve noon precisely.

  I had arrived in the city square of Oakland some thirty minutes earlier in an open automobile with George Ebey and Sheriff Frank Barnet of Alameda County who were seated on either side of me in the back. As soon as we turned on to Broadway we encountered an immense crowd of people filling the street. Mounted policeman cleared a path for us, and we slowly made our way up Broadway through a vast, shoulder-to-shoulder throng, the surface of which swayed with gray felt fedoras, gray woolen caps, black derbies, and black and tan umbrellas. At intervals we would come upon a few escorted ladies who would snap their heads toward us as we passed, their faces flashing a look of astonishment, perhaps at suddenly being so close to the magic. It was mostly a crowd of men, city workers on their lunch hour; men in a man’s world.

  “What’s the estimate?” Mr. Ebey asked, his eyes twinkling with amazement and delight.

  “Twenty thousand down here on the street,” Sheriff Barnet said. “Up there in the buildings— I couldn’t say. A lot. A helluva lot. What a sight!”

  “What a day!” Mr. Ebey added.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it in this city. In any city,” Sheriff Barnet said. “Have you?”

  “Never!” Mr. Ebey said.

  We looked up to the tall buildings that loomed ahead of us. Every window and every roof was lined with spectators, some of them waving handkerchiefs, some waving flags. A man high in a window suddenly unfurled a long banner that unrolled and dropped five stories, revealing the words “GO HOUDINI!” in giant block letters.

  “Was that your idea?” I asked Mr. Ebey.

  “No,” Mr. Ebey said, “but I wish I’d thought of it.”

  “Me too,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Once you get a crowd this big, those kinds of things just happen by themselves,” Sheriff Barnet said.

  “How do you feel?” Mr. Ebey asked me. “Are you all prepared?”

  I glanced over at Mr. Ebey. He was grinning widely, but I suddenly recognized an expression of uncertainty, even panic, in his eyes.

  “Mr. Ebey,” I said coolly, “I will now prove to you that I am Houdini.”

  I continued to look into Ebey’s eyes. The teary panic suddenly dried up, his eyelids dropped downward almost imperceptibly; I could sense that he was drawing strength from my glance. I kept looking at him. His smile faded; his expression shifted to a blankness.

  “No ‘Column of Air’ to assist you?” Mr. Ebey asked.

  “Thin air, Mr. Ebey,” I said. “Nothing but thin air. And, as you know, thin air offers no assistance whatsoever.”

  Mr. Ebey smiled again. It was not the same smile of panic, but a smile of sudden recognition, such as one might possess upon waking up from a wonderful dream and discovering that it was real.

  Ahead of us a streetcar slowly made its way through a sea of derbies and umbrellas in a lane opened up ahead by a mounted policeman. Our driver followed in the wake of the streetcar with just enough space ahead to make a creeping progress before the pavement closed up again with heads, shoulders, and legs.

  We reached the First National Bank Building at Fourteenth and Broadway. Our driver stopped the car in the middle of the street, where we sat surrounded on all sides by onlookers. I suddenly stood up in the automobile, took off my hat, and swept it in an arc over my head.

  A great cheer arose from the crowd on all sides and from above us in the buildings.

  The mounted policeman came forward, stirring up turbulence in the crowd, and reached our car. From the sidewalk three other policemen pushed through the mass of heads, shoulders, and arms in front of the bank building.

  “Step aside!” the policemen were shouting. “Make a path! All of you step aside!”