The Last Days of Night(41)
A scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a reinterpretation of…stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable.
—THOMAS KUHN, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS
PAUL’S DISBELIEF MOMENTARILY immobilized him. This felt like a horrific hallucination, a deathly trompe l’oeil that had been hung before his eyes.
Men working on the floor above sprinted down the steps. Chunks of burning wood fell from beside them. Paul watched as one man placed his foot upon a board only to find it instantly give way. His companion grabbed him before he fell, steadying them both as they raced toward the ground floor. Before Paul could grab ahold of Tesla and join the fleeing workmen, a flaming plank crashed against the doorjamb, blocking his path.
Paul slammed the metal door shut, sealing out the fire. He stepped back, bumping into Tesla.
“The fire is already on the landing,” said Paul. “We’ve no chance that way.”
Tesla merely stared at Paul.
“There’s a fire,” said Tesla. The fact was apparently only beginning to penetrate his brain.
“Do the windows open?” Paul ran to the windows along the far wall of the room. He jerked open a curtain, tearing the fabric from its rods.
Outside, smoke from the floor above spread into the sky.
Tesla stood stock-still. The room was getting hot, the fire above and below turning Tesla’s laboratory into a block-wide oven.
“We have to get the windows open,” Paul insisted. But neither Paul’s words nor his hurry seemed to imprint themselves on Tesla in any way.
Paul grabbed a device from one of the tables and flung it at the window. Whatever the thing was, its long glass tube shattered on contact as its thick metal base crashed through the windowpane. Shards of glass flew in every direction, both out into the night and back toward Paul.
“Mr. Tesla,” said Paul, “come this way! We’ll have a better chance climbing out the windows than navigating the staircase.” He turned to see the inventor still standing near the door. The men made eye contact for a brief moment. For the slightest of seconds, Paul could see the blank emptiness in Tesla’s expression. He wasn’t afraid. It was, rather, as if he weren’t even there at all.
Then the ceiling caved in.
As technological systems expand, reverse salients develop. Reverse salients are components in the system that have fallen behind or are out of phase with the others.
—THOMAS HUGHES, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.
—BILL GATES
FOR WEEKS, PAUL Cravath drifted in and out of consciousness. His waking moments were as hazy as his dreams. Only the colors differentiated the two states of mind. One was a bright white sheen, more searing than an incandescent lamp. The other was dark. Black thoughts, red and brimstone. As the days dragged along and his hourly doses of morphine were halved and then quartered, Paul began to differentiate better between waking and sleeping. With a resigned dread, he realized that his black visions of fire were in fact just dreams, and that the real world, the one he woke to, was clean and shining and full of much greater horrors.
The top floor of Bellevue Hospital was easily the whitest place Paul had ever been. The bedsheets were bleached and crisped daily until they were painful to the touch. The coats and tall shirt collars of the doctors who flitted in and out of his private room were as white as the linens. As white as the narrow walls. As white as the fresh gauze wrapped daily around Paul’s tender belly.
Tesla was gone. Vanished. Paul could not remember exactly which of his visitors first broke the news to him. Had it been George Westinghouse, whose worried face Paul had seen more than once by his bedside? Had it been Carter? Or Hughes and his wife, who’d left white roses by Paul’s bedside early in his stay?
The factory space had been largely unoccupied at such a late hour, and the workmen Paul had seen on the staircase had made it out safely. Paul had apparently fallen amid the burning wood and been dragged to safety by an unknown Samaritan who had deposited him into a horse-drawn ambulance. Had the stranger seen Tesla as well? There was no way to know. If Tesla had not died in the building’s collapse, then how could he have fled the scene? The likeliest explanation was that his corpse had been incinerated by the fire. Or crushed by the collapse of the building. And yet no corpses had been found in the rubble.
Paul learned these details from a detective who visited him two weeks into his stay. The afternoon light in his room was quite pleasant, gently falling in from the gray October sky. From his bed, Paul had a view of Twenty-sixth Street. The wire springs of his mattress would squeak whenever he turned to the window, as if chastising him for his desire to flee. Any serious motion at all was exceedingly difficult in those early weeks. The mush poultice, composed of Indian meal and hot water and held tight to him by the gauze, felt strange on his healing ribs. Paul was relatively certain he would have been in quite a bit of pain had it not been for the morphine.
His ribs, nose, and left femur were broken. There had been considerable damage to his organs, though the terms used by the various doctors to describe these injuries were a matter of some dispute. The doctors could not agree on which internal injury was the most severe. But from his morphine-induced haze, he understood the point: He was beat up pretty good. But he would live.