Odd Apocalypse

Page 26

In 1882, Tesla solved the problem of the rotating magnetic field and built the first induction motor. Not that I have the slightest idea what that means. But the induction motor powered the industrial revolution at the turn of the century; it has been used both in heavy industry and for simple household appliances ever since.
Behind me, something outside scratched on the steel shutter that covered the window. Scratched, tapped, and scratched again.
The sounds were subdued, compared to the racket previously made by the pack of freaks, but I was pretty sure the creature inquiring at the window was not just a curious raccoon.
The freak was just trying to determine in what ground-floor rooms its lunch might be waiting. I focused on the computer again.
After coming to America, Tesla worked with Thomas Edison, but they fell out because Tesla believed that Edison’s direct-current electricity transmission was inefficient. He said all energies were cyclic and that generators could be built to transmit electricity first in one direction and then in the other, in multiple waves according to the polyphase principle.
Given that primate swine were stalking Roseland and a murderous sociopath was in charge of the place, I decided that I didn’t have time to look up and understand “polyphase principle.”
Anyway, Tesla went into business with George Westinghouse. Alternating current, which changes direction about sixty times per second and allows long-distance transmission with a minimum of energy loss, soon became the world standard.
In 1895, at Niagara Falls, Nikola Tesla designed the world’s first hydroelectric power plant.
Marconi is still cited as the inventor of radio, but Tesla patented the basic system of radio in 1900, years before Marconi. Marconi’s patent was eventually declared invalid.
Again at the steel shutter behind me: Tap, tap, tap … tap, tap, tap … tap, tap, tap.
The tapping was eerily discreet. As if some secret lover had come to keep a previously arranged assignation.
I didn’t answer with a tapping of my own, because I could too easily imagine a lady freak who wanted to be Juliet to my Romeo.
Reading further, I discovered that among Tesla’s discoveries were fluorescent bulbs and laser beams. Wireless communications. Wireless transmission of electricity. Remote controls. He took the first X rays of human bodies, ahead of Roentgen.
This was a superbrainy guy.
In Colorado, in 1899, applying something that he referred to as “terrestrial stationary waves,” he lighted two hundred lamps at a distance of twenty-five miles, without wires, by transmitting electricity through the air.
Here’s a cool one that’s related. He built a transmitting tower on Long Island, between 1901 and 1905, which rose almost to 190 feet, with a copper dome 68 feet in diameter, standing on hundred-foot-deep foundations. It was meant to turn Earth itself into a massive dynamo and, through a magnifying transmitter, send unlimited amounts of electricity anywhere in the world.
When J. P. Morgan, who was financing the project, realized there was no way to charge anyone for the electricity because there would be no way to know who was tapping the flow, he pulled all funding.
Albert Einstein was an admirer of Nikola Tesla. Einstein’s theory of relativity holds, among other things, that space and time are not absolute concepts, but relative.
Hmmmm.
Tesla was so brilliant that he could solve mathematical problems of the highest complexity entirely in his head, without resort to paper and pencil.
More astonishingly, he could visualize complex inventions like the induction motor in every detail and then diagram them as quickly as he could draw.
Scratching. Tapping.
“We don’t need any magazine subscriptions,” I muttered.
Reading on, I discovered that Tesla was a good friend of Mark Twain. In addition to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which is cast as a dream arising from a blow to the head but is for all intents and purposes a time-travel story.
Hmmmm.
In 1997, Life magazine placed Nikola Tesla among the one hundred most famous and world-changing people of the past thousand years.
Of course that was before reality TV, Twitter, Twaddle, and the like managed to reduce the average attention span of most of the world’s population to two minutes, wither our long-term memory to fourteen months, and convince us that the most admirable of all individuals are not the likes of George Washington, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa, and Nikola Tesla, but instead whatever celebrity just won Dancing with the Stars and whatever dancing cat just drew ten million hits for its YouTube video.
Tapping. Scratching. Knock-knock.
“Who’s there?” I asked softly. “Juno,” I replied in a quiet but authentic piggy voice. “Juno who?” I asked with sincere puzzlement. And I answered: “Juno how much I’d like to get in there and ham it up with you?”
I learned also that Tesla had his peculiar side. Sometime between 1899 and 1900, in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, he believed that he had received signals from another planet. Serious people examined his evidence and agreed. He once said that with the right application of an electric current, he could easily split the Earth in two. Fortunately, Tesla didn’t leave notes as to how this might be done, for otherwise those guys in the Jackass movies would already have done it.
In short, he not only could think outside the box, but he could think outside the bigger box in which the first box had come. Such a man might be able to meet the challenge of harnessing time and using it as he wished.
Before I was tempted to surf over to YouTube to look at that dancing cat, I backed out of the Internet and shut down the computer.
As the tapping and scratching came again at the shutter, I heard Chef Shilshom in the kitchen, cursing profusely, as though he thought he might be Victoria Mors. He seemed to be coming this way.
I sprang off the Jabba the Hutt office chair, snatched up the pillowcase sack, and darted through the door between the chef’s office and the walk-in pantry, which also had an entrance from the kitchen.
In the pantry, I left the door to the office a half-inch ajar and waited to see if the quiche king would appear.
The chef breached the room in great white billows, more than agitated but less than panicked, as though he had just seen Captain Ahab stumping toward him on one good leg and one of polished whalebone. He didn’t appear to be in a mood either to bake or to broil.
From a cabinet that might have contained a trove of exotic spices or his personal collection of antique egg cups, he took what appeared to be a 12-gauge semiauto combat shotgun.
Thirty-seven
A FRIGHTENED, ANGRY, FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND, ANTISOCIAL chef with a combat shotgun never leads to anything good.
I slipped away from the door between Chef Rambo’s office and the pantry. Eased through the dark. Found the other door by the thin line of light that glowed at the bottom of it. Entered the kitchen. Left the kitchen. I crept along a hallway where one door or another might suddenly be flung open by a Roselander, whereupon I’d be discovered and sternly reprimanded for not remaining behind locked doors in the guest tower—or shot.
When I reached a side hall and then a discreet service door to the main drawing room, I ducked into that vast space, which felt like a stately common room on some exceedingly formal luxury liner from a distant era, which in the movies are peopled by beautiful women in glamorous gowns and men in tuxedos and platoons of waiters in white jackets serving drinks on silver trays. Islands of Persian carpets offered several arrangements of furniture, armchairs and side chairs and sofas and chaises enough to seat a quarter of high society’s top four hundred.
The windows were shuttered. None of the Tiffany lamps glowed. Of the five chandeliers, only the one in the center of the room provided light.
Directly under that glitteration of candle-shaped lamp bulbs and pendant crystals stood a circular banquette that surrounded a twice-life-size statue of the Greek god Pan. Pan had the head and chest and arms of a man, the ears and horns and legs of a goat, and he was badly in need of a fig leaf.
The periphery of the room was curtained with shadow. The corners folded away in the dark.
My intention was to slip around the darker part of the chamber, staying well away from horny Pan, until I came to another service door, hidden in the wall paneling, catercorner from the one through which I had entered. That would take me to a short hallway that also served the library, where I hoped to climb the circular bronze stairs to the second floor.
I was still about six acres away from my destination when I heard hurried footsteps on marble. Through the deep, columned archway that separated the drawing room from the better-lighted foyer, I saw Noah Wolflaw—alias Cloyce—and Paulie Sempiterno, both with shotguns, coming this way.
Allergic as I am to buckshot, I dropped to my hands and knees and hid behind a sofa.
Even as the madman and his chief lieutenant arrived in the drawing room, a door opened toward the farther end of the chamber, perhaps the one I had used. Others joined Cloyce and Sempiterno at the center of the big room, under the lit chandelier, beside the shameless Pan.
Peering warily around the end of the sofa and over a forest of furniture, I discovered that Jam Diu and Mrs. Tameed had arrived. The gardener carried a shotgun. Mrs. Tameed, almost a foot taller than Mr. Diu, wore a gun belt with a holster on each hip, and in her right hand she held one of a pair of door-buster handguns, aimed at the ceiling.
The pistol-packing Swede could have kicked a lion in the butt and made it mewl like a frightened kitten. Jam Diu looked like Buddha gone bad.
The room had excellent acoustics, and I could hear everything they said. Victoria Mors had gone missing. She wasn’t in her private rooms, and she didn’t answer when called on her Talkabout, which was evidently a walkie-talkie that they all carried to keep in touch in the immense house. They were certain she’d been in the main residence when the shutters went down.
Not in the least embarrassed to declare the obvious, Paulie Sempiterno said, “Something’s wrong.”
That something was me.
Mrs. Tameed said, “Where’s that phony [expletive deleted] little [expletive deleted] bastard?”
Again, that would be me.
“Henry called from the gatehouse earlier,” Cloyce said, “after the shutters fell here. Thomas was pounding on the door down there, trying to get in. The freaks were after him.”
“Then he’s dead,” Jam Diu said.
Mrs. Tameed said, “Probably he’s dead. But don’t underestimate the [expletive deleted], [expletive deleted], [hyphenated expletive deleted] creep.”
Considering that Mrs. Tameed was far older than she appeared, I wondered if, under another name, she had worked in the Nixon White House.
“If he was out of the house when the shutters went down,” said Jam Diu, “then he can’t have gotten in again. Let’s not waste time worrying about him. He’s just an ignorant clocker.”
Clocker. Not cocker.
“Even a clocker can catch a lucky break now and then,” Paulie Sempiterno said.
“I’m more concerned there might have been a shutter breach,” Jam Diu said.
“There’s no shutter breach,” Cloyce assured him. “Whatever has happened to her, it’s not a freak that’s gotten her.”
They agreed to search the house for Victoria Mors, working in teams of two, always staying on the same floor, starting at the top of the house.
“She’s not in my suite,” Cloyce said. “But there’s a lot of other territory to search. Every damn closet, every corner. Let’s move.”
They all left the drawing room through the columned arch and, from the foyer, took the stairs to the second floor.
I settled from my hands and knees onto my side behind the sofa, and then rolled onto my back. Spears and daggers and darts of light, cast up from the pendant crystals of the chandelier, were frozen in bright violent patterns on the center of the plaster ceiling, but darkness bled away to the walls.
Clocker. I was a clocker because I was certain to age and die, at the mercy of the ticking clock. Being able somehow periodically to restore their youthful appearance and health, they were what Victoria had called “Outsiders, with no limits, no rules, no fears.”
They were also delusional. Reality imposes limits whether we choose to recognize them or not. These so-called Outsiders might be as bright as the prismatic reflections that the faceted crystals threw on the ceiling, but they were no less surrounded by darkness than were those spear-point patterns of light.
Perhaps these people did live without rules, at least in the sense that they acknowledged no natural law, but I had seen how fear circumscribed their lives. Victoria Mors would do nothing risky, lest she die by accident. Henry Lolam could not bear to be long outside the walls of the estate, because proximity to Tesla’s machinery and the Methuselah current was his best insurance of great longevity.
I could see now why Henry fantasized about having a close encounter of the third kind, during which aliens would grant him immortality. He wanted to live forever, but without the bonds that tied him so tightly to Roseland. They were all to one degree or another prisoners of this estate, psychologically if not physically.
The longer that they lived, the longer they wanted to live. And the longer they lived, the more their world shrank. Their spectrum of experience grew narrower year by year. Their sociopathic arrogance, their sense of godlike power, and their contempt for clockers were continuously distilled into an ever more poisonous brew.
I wondered who these people were with whom Constantine Cloyce formed the deranged community of Roseland. Did all of them date back to the 1920s, were they his servants then? What had been the original names that they had outlived?
If they were all from that time, I suspected that they must be far more insane than I yet knew. The gauntlet I must run to save the boy would be bristling with more and sharper spears than the arsenal of prismatic lights on the ceiling.
Thoughts of longevity brought me inevitably to memories of Stormy Llewellyn, who had died so young. Of necessity, I had come to be at peace with my loss, to live with a certain emptiness but not with a constant anguish. Now a melancholy ache weighed me to the floor longer than I intended to lie there. It seemed to me that if Nikola Tesla could have defeated Death by inventing a fantastical machine, I should have defeated the Reaper by being smarter and quicker than I was on that desperate day in Pico Mundo when I became the eternal lover of a woman I could never again kiss in this world.
Having given the four searchers plenty of time to ascend to the second floor and to proceed away from Cloyce’s suite of rooms, I got to my feet, drew the pistol from my holster, picked up the pillowcase sack, and slipped shadowlike along the dark perimeter of the drawing room.