by Lou Cameron
Stringer hung his hat on a bedpost, peeled off his damp denim jacket as well, but decided to leave his gun rig right where it was as he told her, dryly, “I didn’t know I was on such close terms with old Nick Tesla, Miss Vania. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last I read about him, in Scientific American, he was building this swamping tower on Long Island, back east, to compete with Professor Marconi. I’ll be switched with snakes if I can figure out what either of ’em think they’re up to, shooting all those sparks at the stars.”
Uninvited, she sat on the bed to favor him with a puzzled smile and insist, “You have to know where he is, Mister London. Why else would you have wired him, asking for an interview regarding his more recent experiments, and why else would you have checked into the very room Doctor Tesla occupied during his earlier experiments out here near Pikes Peak?”
Stringer sat down beside her and got out the makings to give himself time to think. As he carefully rolled a smoke, going back over what little Jack London had told him about his wild goose chase, Stringer sealed the straw paper, lit the results, and thoughtfully blew some Bull Durham smoke rings before he told her, pretending reluctance, “Well, since you and your pals seem to know so much about my mysterious comings and goings, I may as well admit I hoped to catch old Nick here in Colorado Springs again, up to the same old stunts. You only have to glance at the ceiling fixture above us to see that something mighty odd has happened to the electricity in and about Colorado Springs of late. It’s my understanding the power company has been trying in vain to locate the source of the trouble and, of course, we all recall how strange things got that time Professor Tesla played with artificial lightning out here, a few years back.”
She said, rather severely, “It’s Doctor, not Professor Tesla, Mister London. Our Croatian genius has never taught the subject of electricity. How could he? He’s so advanced that not even Thomas Edison can follow his convoluted reasoning.”
Stringer nodded and replied, “I read the mean things Edison said about Tesla and George Westinghouse during the Battle Of The Currents that was going on about the time I was enjoying the Battle of Santiago down Cuba way. Since Tesla and Westinghouse turned out to be right about Alternating Current, I’d say your point about Edison not knowing what in thunder Tesla was talking about half the time may be well taken. Let’s get back to what your Doctor Tesla might or might not be doing to the local current, alternating or direct. Are you saying he did come back out here, after all?”
She sighed and replied, “We think so. Nobody knows for certain. In recent weeks certain, ah, parties have been trying to contact Doctor Tesla at his new research facilities at Wardenclyffe, Long Island. The huge tower he’s built there to compete, as you put it so crudely, with that Italian upstart, Marconi, has yet to go into operation. Some of our, ah, friends who managed to pay the installation a friendly visit say that certain vital electrical gear that should be there simply isn’t, as if Doctor Tesla has been, let us say, holding out on his backers?”
Stringer had no idea what sort of stuff might or might not go into a sort of Eiffel Tower designed to do Lord only knew what way the hell back east, but she seemed to think he might. So he tried, “Old Nick could be up to most anything and I doubt there’s a licensed electrician born of mortal woman who could tell you what it might be. I know he made a bundle for Westinghouse the time he showed „em how to run motors and such on alternating current, after Edison said the notion was just dumb. But haven’t other backers lost a heap of money since then on some of Old Nick’s more imaginative notions about talking to the folk on Mars by wireless telegraph, or running electric trains and streetcars with no wires, either?”
As if someone on Mars had been listening in, the ceiling fixture and bedlamp lit up brightly, more brightly than human eyes felt comfortable with. Stringer whistled and rose to flip off the overhead fixture. Nothing happened. He tried to switch off the bed lamp, muttering, “Here we go again. They thought they had things working right around here after they ran Doc Tesla out of town that time.”
When the bedlamp refused to switch off, Stringer pulled its plug out of the wall socket. Then he scowled and meant it sincerely when he gasped, “What the hell?” For the lamp went right on burning, a lot brighter than it had been meant to burn in the first place, and Vania Hovich sounded downright triumphant as she said, “That’s no short circuit the local power company has anything to say about! Only one of Doctor Tesla’s wireless generators can feed power to switched off or disconnected appliances!”
The bed lamp bulb blew out with a blinding flash. The overhead bulbs faded to a dull throbbing orange. In the flickering light that made everything in the room, including them, fade in and out with a sickening strobe effect. He grabbed her to hold her still, muttering, “That can’t be anyone who knows how to use Old Nick’s wonderous wiring, if that’s what they’re doing all this with.”
He noticed she wasn’t really bobbing back and forth at him after all. But since she was hanging on to him as well, he didn’t let go as she said, “He has to be somewhere about, as we surmised he might be. We know that when Doctor Tesla was forced to abandon his Colorado Springs experiments he left a lot of his electrical gear in storage if not simply abandoned out here. Nothing but one of his wireless generators could account for that disconnected bulb burning out like that, or the way that ceiling fixture is behaving right now!”
Stringer answered, “I’ve seen stage shows featuring one of those high voltage coils performing electrical wonders, but what point could a halfway sensible scientist be trying to make with all this stage magic?”
Unexpectedly, the telephone set on the other bed table rang loudly, making them both jump, albeit not too unpleasantly, since their chests bumped together. She pulled back slightly flustered, “We’re only suffering the side effects. Doctor Tesla’s not trying to unsettle anyone. He’s just testing his wireless coils, somewhere close, one imagines.”
The telephone rang some more as Stringer muttered, “I read how he blew fuses all over town and set the main generator on fire, clear downtown, whilst he was trying to do something else entirely. But let’s not worry about what Tesla or some other electified lunatic is trying to test. Let’s figure out where he is, so we can ask him to cut it out before he sets the whole damned town afire this time!”
As the phone rang yet again she asked why he wasn’t answering it. He growled, “I can’t think of any sensible reason to. Nobody I know in town ought to know I’m here and you just saw the lamp on the other table blow out for no better reason.”
But even as he groused, he reached for the infernal telephone and she didn’t seem to mind when he had to lay her back across the bed and roll halfway across her to get at it. He propped the speaker as chastely as he could manage atop her well padded chest and held the hard rubber earpiece to his head, shouting, “All right, genius, you can turn your spooky spark machinery off, now, if you’re listening at the far end of all this bodacious ringing!”
The unexpected but familiar voice of Jack London crackled back at him, “Don’t shout in my damned ear, Stringer. Are you drunk or in any shape to heed your elders for a change?”
Stringer blinked in surprise and replied, “I’m not drunk. I’m just being haunted by our mutual pal, Nick Tesla. I thought that was him playing with telephone bells just now. Where are you calling from at this hour and how come?”
London told him, “Castle Rock, halfway to Denver. It’s the first place I could get off to give you a holler. You’ve got to get out of there, Stringer! The balloon’s about to go up and the boyos tell me they don’t want any newspaper coverage of the opening rounds this time.”
Stringer grimaced and said, “I think I met up with the same boyos about an hour ago. Do you know a lady calling herself Vania Hovich, blue-eyed brunette with a wasp waist but nicely padded everywhere else?”
“Stop that!” Vania protested as he verified her dimensions below that waist cinch by rubbing his own jeans closer to her side-
button skirt as, meanwhile, Jack London told him, “The name sounds familiar, but I can’t connect it up with Colorado Springs. Should I be able to?”
Stringer didn’t want Vania to grab the set from him as she seemed about to. So he rolled away from her, asking London, “Do me a favor and call me back if it comes to you, amigo. I’ll likely be staying here at least until the end of the week.”
At the other end of the line Jack London swore and insisted, “Not if you enjoy breathing half as much as 1 do, damn it! It’s too big a boo for the space rates, cowboy! There are stories that run on the front page and there are stories that run on page three if at all. No paper as conservative as the San Francisco Sun is going to headline a struggle between Big Bill Heywood and the forces of Law And Order, no matter how many working stiffs get killed on either side. So why take a chance on being one of the casualties for Pete’s sake?”
Stringer turned his back on the busty brunette, who seemed to be trying to tell him something, as he told London, “Sam Barca won’t let me cover the current action in the Philippines. I’m stuck with the shoot-outs he’ll send me to. What’s that crap you told some local gunslicks about the Russians and Japs getting set for a showdown? I heard that argument had blown over.”
London answered, “It could be brewing up again. The Czar keeps throwing his weight around in Siberia and the Japs keep warning him he’d better pull back. Each side acts as if it thinks the other side is bluffing. So one of these days … Oops, there goes my train’s whistle. I gotta run. Do yourself a big favor and do the same while you still can. There’s no story there worth your life or, hell, even a black eye.”
Stringer tried to ask whether London had been chased out of town by the M.O.A. or his pals in the W.F.M. but he was talking into a dead line and Vania seemed to be trying to undress him, at least until she’d snatched the telephone set away from him and yelled into it in some Slavic lingo. He took it back from her, more gently, and put it aside on the bed table, saying, “It wasn’t for you to begin with. Who did you think I was talking to, Doc Tesla?”
She sat up to stare down at him sort of owl-eyed, demanding, “Why were you talking about the Little Father and The Yellow Peril? Who was that, just now?”
He started to tell her the truth. Then he wondered why any news gatherer with a lick of sense would want to do a dumb thing like that.
He said, “A pal called Stringer MacKail just telephoned from up the line a piece to warn me there could be trouble brewing here in the shadows of Pikes Peak. I never would have figured that out all by myself. As for the war brewing up betwixt the Japs and Russians over Port Arthur, neither you nor Nikola Tesla look all that Japanese to me. I didn’t know he was a Russian, though.”
She almost sobbed, “The Little Father, as everyone knows, backs the Slavs of Croatia against the ambitions of the Austro-Hungarian despot, Franz Josef, and Doctor Tesla is a Croat, despite his American citizenship. So you must help me find him, Mister London! I’ll do anything, anything you desire of me, if only you’ll help me find Nikola Tesla in time to help my cause!”
He hauled her down beside him and bestowed a not-too-brotherly kiss upon her before he told her to just call him Jack and added, “I might be better at it if I knew more about this cause we’re talking about, honey.”
She started to stiffen up on him, decided to go limp in his arms instead, and confided, “The Japanese treaty with Great Britain gives their navy free access to the most modern weapons and equipment. The stupid King Edward doesn’t seem to trust his own nephews, the Kaiser and the Czar, as much as he does those awful little yellow warlords!”
Stringer repressed a yawn and muttered, “Maybe King Edward knows his own kin best. But what could trouble in the Far East have to do with trouble in the Colorado gold fields, old-fashioned or new?”
She snuggled closer, as if afraid of being overheard, as she explained, “Nobody in Moscow, Tokyo or even Kansas City is apt to be helped or hurt very much by brawling mine workers. The Japanese Navy has the best wireless equipment on the international market. Thanks to the stupid British, Japanese warships can communicate in Morse code now from farther apart than they can see one another in broad daylight!”
He snuggled her closer and allowed his free hand to wander over her some, enjoying his little prank on Jack London if she wound up thinking that was the fresh cuss she was slapping, and told her he’d heard old Marconi had gotten his wireless down pretty good, these days.
She paid no attention to his roving hand as she replied, “Pooh, Doctor Tesla has told his own backers that Marconi is a fool, barking up the wrong tree, and Doctor Tesla was right in his big feud with Edison, in case you’ve forgotten.”
He let his idle fingers toy with a button holding her skirt together just above what felt like a garter under the black poplin as he chuckled and answered, “Who could forget? Edison still prefers „Westinghouse Chair’ to that electric chair they’ve been using instead of a gallows tree back East of late. But you have to admit Marconi’s wireless sets send their dots and dashes mighty far and fast as long as there’s no lightning in the vicinity.”
She said, soberly, “Nikola Tesla has been working on a wireless system able to transmit normal conversation for hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles. No need to encode and decode messages as dots and dashes. It would be as if the admiral of a fleet at sea had telephone connections to all his officers as they steam into battle, see?”
He whistled softly and replied, “An invention like that would come in so handy it sounds sort of spooky.” But when she added that Tesla thought they’d even be able to send pictures back and forth by wireless some day, Stringer decided, “Now that’s just daydreaming. But whether Old Nick knows what he’s up to or not, I can see a front page story in it, even if he only blows out all the fuses in town some more. So I’d be proud to help you track him down, little darling, but don’t you think it’s getting sort of late at night to hunt for mad or any other kind of scientists?”
She must have grasped his intent from the way he was grasping her bare thigh just inside the now open slit of her side-button skirt, for she grasped his wrist firmly to point out, “The lights up there are still acting oddly, so Doctor Tesla must still be up and about, doing something funny, right?”
He sighed, rolled off the bed, and flipped off the wall switch. Only nothing happened. He muttered, “When you’re right you’re right. Unless that coil or whatever he’s fiddling with is so powerful it’s downright scary, he has to be no more than a country mile from this hotel. That still leaves a heap of territory to worry about, but …”
The overhead bulbs flashed brighter and then went out all the way, whether the switch he’d flicked was set one way or the other. He tried the same again, with no results, as she asked, “Didn’t you say the lights had blown out all over town before, Jack?” To which he could only answer, “Me and my big mouth. But hold on, an overload anywhere near the generating plant could have shut off the power from here to yonder and back. Those more tricky effects you get with a high voltage coil can’t have near that range or, hell, Tesla would have already made good on those offers to run electric trains all over creation without any juice hooked up to ’em directly.”
He sank back down beside her, too interested in the puzzle now to worry about how much trouble he could get Jack London into with a Russian spy. He lay beside her on one elbow, musing aloud, “If only I knew where Old Nick had that tame thunder laboratory, the last time he messed up all the current in town …” and that seemed to inspire her to grab at him, this time, saying, “I know! I don’t know if there’s anything out there now, but I’ve seen photographs as well as a city map from the archives. The lab was, let me see, on or near the grounds of the county farm, just south of the Gold Camp Road and well up the lower slopes of Pikes Peak. I think they graze a certified herd of dairy cows there now. Cows that give milk safe for the T.B. patients at the sanitariums further up the mountain to drink, I mean.”
He said, �
��Let’s not worry about any cows that might or might not be conducting electrified experiments. If that old lab is on the Gold Camp Road, I may be able to cover two stories for the time and trouble of covering one. If anybody points a gun at me for wandering too close to what they’re up to, I may just be able to convince ’em I’m nosing into something else entirely.”
Then he chuckled at the picture and added, “Unless it turns out old Nick Tesla has taken sides in the miner’s strike or that the boys are really striking the power company, that is.”
She said she was going with him in the morning. He shook his head and said, “Not hardly. I can find the old Tesla lab or Cripple Creek without your help and, either way, I’d as soon have nobody else to worry about but my own fool self. So why don’t we just get you on back to your own room and see if we can’t both get some shut-eye, Miss Vania? It must be way past midnight by now and Cripple Creek’s a good morning’s ride, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise.”
She said, “You have to let me come along at least as far as the old Tesla lab, then. I’m not going to let you get a wink of sleep until you promise.”
He didn’t want to promise any such thing. So he started fooling with her buttons some more as he growled, “Well, if you mean to spend the night here pestering me, we may as well both get some fun out of it.”
She didn’t argue, unless one wanted to call it a protest when she kissed him back but told him he was awfully fresh. He noticed she hadn’t done anything about the buttons he’d already opened along the side of her skirt. So he took advantage of that advantage and when it developed she wasn’t wearing anything under her outer duds, betwixt her gartered silk stockings and black waist-cinch, Stringer just did what seemed most natural at such times and though she seemed to be welcoming him with yawning thighs, she suddenly gasped, “Oh, Jack, what’s happening’?” as he began to enter her and did some gasping as well. Aside from the way her moist innards seemed to tingle, he couldn’t help noticing that every hair on her head had come unpinned to stand up straight and, worse yet, snap and crackle in a big halo all around her head. She yelped that he’d shocked her just awful when she tried to move his jeans down further off his bare buttocks and when he reached down to do it right he swore like a trooper and told her, “Jesus H. Christ! You’re right! One or more of us seems to be wired a.c., d.c., or both!”