The Last Days of Night(40)

Footsteps in the distance. Paul heard what sounded like a hurried shuffling from inside. “Is that you?”

Still nothing in response. Paul took a hesitant step into the black room. Tesla’s laboratory could contain quite literally anything. This was not a place one wanted to wander blind.

“Nikola? Is there a light in here?”

There were a few more creaks in the distance before Paul heard Tesla’s nasal voice.

“I shall not illuminate you with mere light, Mr. Paul Cravath. I shall instead do so by electrical storm.”

Suddenly the heavens themselves split open and a divine lightning cleaved the room. Or so it seemed to Paul as he employed his coat sleeve to shield his eyes. He shut them to find scars of bright reds and purples imprinted on his vision.

A horrible noise accompanied the display. A spitting and sizzling, violently loud; it was as if the air were being ripped apart by elemental forces.

After a moment, he was able to blink his eyes open. What he saw in front of him, in the center of a huge room, was an electrical device the size of a trolley car. A glass shaft, shaped something like a light bulb, only many multiples the size, extended at least twenty feet above it. From its exterior there extended throughout the room what Paul could only describe as enormous tentacles of electrical energy. They grasped at the ceiling, the walls, the far corners of the cavernous space. They snapped out into the room like the grasping arms of a gigantic electrical beast.

Paul flinched from an instinctual fear that this beast might descend and devour him whole. But the maniacal tentacles of energy were somehow avoiding him. They avoided the scattered desks around the room, and they avoided the tall Serbian in a black suit who sat calmly in a wooden chair mere feet from the glass shaft. Nikola Tesla’s hands rested comfortably in his lap as all around him the air sizzled with energy.

“So then,” he said as he crossed his long legs and gave Paul a smile. “How goes the work in Mr. Westinghouse’s laboratory?”

—

It was something called a resonant transformer, Tesla explained after he shut it off. A coil that produced a rapidly alternating current of very high voltage and very low amperage. Quite safe, despite the spectacle. And though spectacle was the most obvious use for the device, its inner workings might be applied to telegraph machines, radio transmitters, medical devices…and possibly even the “wireless telephone” that Tesla was designing. Tesla confided all of this to Paul as the two men walked around the laboratory. Paul understood little of what Tesla showed him, and less still of what Tesla attempted to explain. Edison and a few others had been working on improvements to Alexander Bell’s initial “telephone” device. Tesla was attempting to make the devices work without the aid of any wires at all. One didn’t have to be much of a scientist to know that this was absurd. Even if by some miracle Tesla managed to make them function, who in the world would have any use for them?

Among the many differences between this lab and Westinghouse’s, two things most struck Paul. The first was an absence of even the smallest particle of dust. The second was an absence of even the barest trace of another human being. This was Tesla’s own private world, and he would keep it free from the impurities and irritations that marred his experiences outside it. He was alone, finally, with his wonders.

There was something Tesla called a Crookes tube on a table toward the back. It looked rather like an electric lamp, though about double the size. It was an eighteen-inch tube of glass, from which most of the air had been removed. One wire was connected to the base, while another poked into the sealed tube about three-quarters of the way toward the head. The device rested carefully on its side, above a glass base. Tesla turned a knob on the base, and instantly a ray of energy shot from one of the wire ends to the other. The ray was a sparkling blue, and yet the wide far end of the tube glowed a ghastly green. It gave the impression of a witch’s bubbling cauldron.

“Cathode rays,” explained Tesla. “Firing particles of a negative charge from one lead to the other.”

“What does it do?” asked Paul as he admired the pulsing colors.

Tesla looked at Paul curiously. “That is what it is doing. Tell me it is not a beautiful thing.”

“You should share these devices with the world. Tell people what you’re working on. Tell someone.”

“Am I not telling you, Mr. Paul Cravath?”

“You are. But I’m no scientist.”

“Perhaps that is the very reason I can be telling you,” said Tesla with a smile. “You could not steal my ideas even if you wanted to.”

“I suppose that counts as trust in our business,” said Paul.

Tesla laughed his high-pitched bark.

“I want to talk to you about rejoining Westinghouse,” ventured Paul.

“I had imagined that you would do so,” said Tesla coyly. “But for this conversation I do not share your enthusiasms.”

As Paul prepared to begin his argument, he found himself suddenly interrupted.

The sound of a commotion from the building’s central staircase caught both men’s attention. Boots were clomping against the steps outside. The footsteps sounded as if they were coming from at least a dozen people, and the commotion seemed only to be growing. Paul instinctively moved to the door to see what was going on.

As Paul pulled open the steel door, he saw that the central staircase, all five stories of old wood, was awash with flame.