The Last Days of Night(83)
“It strips away the skin,” said Agnes, “and reveals an image of the bone underneath?”
“Precisely,” said Tesla.
Quietly, in secret, from an impromptu subterranean laboratory in the Tennessee plains, Tesla had teamed with the precocious sons of southern freedmen to engineer wonders stranger than anything Edison and his well-heeled peers might have dreamed. Paul had once thought that Thomas Edison was the most American man of his generation. But looking around the worktable before him at Tesla and his students carefully considering their darkening plate, Paul saw another America. This one had been born in an impoverished Serbian village and a West Tennessee cotton field. Where the first America was brilliant, the second was ingenious. What the first America did not invent, the second would tinker into being. What Wall Street would not fund, a Nashville basement would build. This was what men like Edison and Morgan feared. With checkbooks such as theirs, with the ability to buy and sell a place like Fisk with a single pen scribble, they still slept badly in their Fifth Avenue redoubts. They used their lawyers to batter down places just such as this. They had their patents, their carefully worded claims to preeminence. Tesla and his students had only their inventiveness. Paul saw on the faces of Robert and Jason and their peers that what these men did was not for money, it was not for class or some abstract social achievement. These men built things because they were smart. They were eager and they were precocious and they were curious. Paul wanted always to live in an America in which Thomas Edison would fear a smart kid in a basement whose father had harvested enough cotton that his son might harvest volts.
“Does it hurt?” Erastus asked Robert.
The student instinctively looked toward his leg and wiggled it. “I don’t think so?”
“You are quite well,” said Tesla. “So you witness the machine’s operation. Mr. Wilhelm Roentgen shall be pleasing.”
“This is what I’ve come to discuss with you,” said Paul. “You’ve grown healthy again. Your memory has returned, and so has your genius. I cannot tell you how happy I am to see it. This machine…or any of the others along the walls…is it an incandescent lamp?”
Tesla looked at Paul as if he were the one whose speech was largely indecipherable. “Why is it that they would be lamps?”
“A light bulb designed to make the most use of A/C,” offered Paul. “Something that would clearly in no way infringe on Edison’s patent. This is what Westinghouse needs to survive the lawsuit. That’s what you were working with his team to build. Can the device that you’ve created here help them in that regard?”
Tesla came the closest to laughing that Paul had ever seen him.
“Oh, Mr. Paul Cravath. I have told you. Who is caring about light bulbs? We have them already. Now this, which I have built—Mr. Wilhelm Roentgen calls it an ‘X-ray,’ though I am liking my ‘shadowgraph’ more aptly. I have sent him my designs so that he may build these machines. This is a new thing. This is a wonder.”
“What the hell is anyone supposed to do with this X-ray?” said Paul.
If any man alive could save Paul’s career, his livelihood, it was Tesla. And yet he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. Perhaps for him there wasn’t even a difference. Paul cared about Tesla. Would Tesla ever care about him in return? He wasn’t sure. Tesla was unwilling to engage his mind in anything but his own daydreams, not even to save his only friends in the world.
Tesla noticed the defeated look on Paul’s face. “What is it that is the matter, Mr. Paul Cravath?”
“Paul is losing his lawsuit, Nikola,” said Agnes. “He’s worried that Thomas Edison is going to win.”
Tesla nodded sympathetically. “I have sadness about this also.”
Paul realized that there was a lot that had happened of which Tesla was unaware. He started talking fast. Maybe this would be his one chance to impress upon Tesla the importance of his work on A/C. Paul told the assembled everything, sparing no grisly detail of the past year. Damn confidentiality. His client had nothing to hide. The students took their seats, rapt with attention. It was quite a tale.
Paul watched Erastus’s face when he got to Westinghouse’s looming bankruptcy. There was little reaction. Erastus did not give Paul the sympathy he’d imagined, but neither did he present Paul with the pity he’d feared.
His sorry tale completed, Paul stood gloomily in the center of the room. What was there for anyone to say?
“Hmm,” said Robert. Paul turned, surprised to hear his voice.
“Robert,” said Erastus, “if you’ve something to add, you should add it.” Robert looked to his college president, then to Paul, then to Tesla.
“Well, it’s only…” Robert fidgeted. “Mr. Tesla says that there are two types of problems out there. On the one hand, you’ve got problems that people have been struggling over, solving or not solving, forever. Known problems. But then on the other hand, you’ve got problems that no one ever even thought to tackle—new problems. Uncharted ground, right? Unknown problems.”
“It is eloquently more so when I say it,” added Tesla, “but Mr. Robert Miles is correct.” He nodded at his student appreciatively. Somehow, thought Paul, Nikola Tesla had ended up being a surprisingly good instructor.
“And so?” said Paul.