Tesla (39 page)

which filled the entire house in which they were sitting;

And there appeared to them tongues as of fire; these separated

and came to rest on the head of each of them.

They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Acts of the Apostles 2:2–4

“Zeus creates lightning—people don’t,” Koloman Czitó murmured to himself. The assistant stood with his legs apart and furtively observed his boss. Although he was not exactly a hunchback like Igor from Edison’s circus tent, the Hungarian was still somewhat stooped.

“When the gush of magnetic energy hits the Gorgon,” Tesla shouted, “the coil will create an avalanche that will raise the electrical potential of the earth. Do you see? Electricity will erupt back from the ground. See?” he snarled. “Our mast will fire up thunderbolts.”

“Zeus commands the thunderbolt,” Czitó whimpered.

The assistant realized that Tesla was ready to risk his own life using the highest voltage ever produced. Czitó too was playing Russian roulette since he, not Tesla, operated the switch that controlled the flow of electricity from the power plant.

“When I give you the sign, pull the lever,” Tesla ordered with suicidal resolve.

He found a spot from which he could see through the open roof.

“Now!”

Czitó jerked the lever. A swarm of electrical snakes covered the coil. A hissing sound spread throughout the room.

“It works,” Tesla’s voice thundered. “Do it again!”

The fairy’s hair got entangled on the coil once more. The laboratory turned blue and started to crackle. A dull boom reported from the mast.

“I’m going to go outside and look at the mast,” Tesla was merciless. “I want you to pull the lever and hold it till I say so.”

Swaying on his thick rubber-soled shoes, Manfred stepped out of the barn.

“Pull the lever!”

Czitó pushed the lever and held it with his extended arm, waiting for the signal to jerk it back.

A few seconds passed. The sorcerer and his apprentice were still alive. Nothing smelled burned. Like a gold coin, a whole wondrous minute fell with a clink on the stone floor. Then came the real awakening of the Furies. Tesla crossed the point of no return as he launched into the shoreless void of a new phenomenon. Inside, the crackling of the Gorgon’s hair rose to a crescendo. Outside, a single thread of lightning wriggled off the mast. Then a second one, a third, a fourth. Thunder exploded and Tesla flinched against his will. Dear Mother! Thunder exploded again. He ducked as it cracked once more. The noise from the mast sounded like a rifle, then like a cannon—and soon became even louder until it seemed as though they were in the middle of the Battle of Austerlitz. The building was a straw in a flashing whirlwind.

“The Furies,” the first human thunder maker whispered vengefully. “The Furies!”

Spectral blue light appeared in the barn. A mass of live electrical hair slithered around the coils. Everything in the building spewed needles of light. A pandemonium of sounds broke free. There was a stench of sulfur. Czitó clinched his jaw and broke a tooth as he tried to suppress the trembling in his body, lest he might let go. His left arm shook so much he was not able to cross himself. In the blue shimmer that completely surrounded him, he almost expected to see the spirits of his late parents. He felt sparks popping painfully from his fingers. He felt that his blood would gush out from under his nails.

The electrical maelstrom threatened to destroy the barn.

Nikola Tesla stood outside, neatly dressed, with his laced high-top shoes and bowler hat. The skies screamed and the earth responded. A new Mephistopheles grew taller under the night sky starched by lightning. Sparks flew around the rubber soles of his shoes. The awakened earth had a message for him. The awakened earth sparked all around him.

Lightning became thicker and brighter, clearer and bluer. Sparks as big as a fist shot into the sky. Sea snakes wriggled upward, eighty, then one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. The rumbling echoed for miles. With his face alternating from black to silver, the Victorian thunder maker in his Prince Albert coat surveyed them. He
was
the light—a flashing, impersonal force.

“How long has this been going on?” Czitó trembled. “This is forbidden! A mortal shouldn’t do this!”

In the blink of an eye, everything went dead.

Everything.

“Czitó, did you pull the lever?” Tesla lunged at him.

The Hungarian looked at him with his bloodshot eyes, hunched like a bull with
banderillas
sticking in his back.

“No!” he gasped.

“Call the power plant. They mustn’t do this to me. They mustn’t cut me off.”

“What are you talking about?” a deranged voice shouted on the phone when Czitó called. “You caused a short circuit. Our generator is on fire.”

CHAPTER 79

Tesla Toasts the Twentieth Century

After which time the sun’s bright light will have ceased to shine,

and its life-giving heat will have ebbed away, and our own earth

will be a lump of ice, hurrying on through the eternal night…

Meanwhile, the cheering lights of science and art,

ever increasing in intensity, illuminate our path.

Nikola Tesla in the
Century
(1900)

After the silent planet of Colorado Springs, Tesla landed on clamorous Broadway.

Black engines pulled elevated trains. Tourists read
A Guide for the Perplexed.

Dr. F. Finch Strong was trying to convince mankind that electricity made the old smarter and the stupid younger.

Ah! A new century was on its way.

Traveling troupes visited theaters in godforsaken towns, bringing a thing unheard of: a gramophone!

Audiences applauded the ghostly singers.

Freedom, Wisdom, World’s Exposition, and America—everything had its own Muse and each Muse had its buxom personification.

“Laws are becoming more just,” visionaries insisted. “Rulers more humane; music is becoming sweeter and books wiser and the individual heart is becoming at once more just and more gentle.”

The severed heads of the Boxers hung on the walls of Hunan. Water buffalo sniffed the dead in the rice fields of the Philippines.

“Everyone feels four hundred times bigger,” Tesla’s friend, the railroad magnate and senator Chauncey Depew, crowed.

Did not Gargantua write Pantagruel that their time was better than all previous ones put together?

A lamp in Scofield, Utah, transformed a mine into a fiery tornado. The miners were blasted from the shaft as if fired from a cannon.

Ah! A new century was on its way.

Immigrants disembarked from sad ships and filled tenements. The next day they went to moving picture arcades to see the sixteen-second-long kiss along with a train entering a station and some women leaving a factory. All of a sudden, miracles that were thousands of miles away started to happen right before their eyes.

In towns across America, the summer was hot. Theodore Roosevelt’s eyeglasses gleamed as he grinned from train windows during the election year.

Standing next to her husband, President McKinley’s fragile wife, Ida, looked like a bird on the back of a buffalo.

Publications were adorned with the pictures of the independent yet melancholy Gibson Girl.

A new century was on its way.

Truth-loving illustrations withdrew from newspapers under the onslaught of lying photographs. In the
Century
article “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy,” Tesla was calmly reading in Colorado Springs while—next to him—lightning flew from one coil to the other.

Tesla the thunder maker toasted a lot. He toasted the new century at the Johnsons’, at Delmonico’s, at the Waldorf, at Stanford White’s.

A new century was on its way.

He toasted with Ava and Colonel Astor.

Ten, nine, eight, seven…

He toasted with the Vanderbilts. He toasted as the masks surrounded him.

A new century was on its way.
Six, five, four
… People anticipated it with fear and excitement.
Three, two, one
…

At that moving moment, Mark Twain turned his back on thundering fireworks. He extinguished his corncob pipe and declared, “To this century—I don’t belong.”

Purple, red, and blue stars unlocked the sky.

Willows made of light, dazzling dandelion fluff, red and white sparks, smoke and explosions multiplied above their heads.

Like the ancient Chinese, Tesla believed that fireworks wake up the gods.

But which ones?

CHAPTER 80

The Fearsome Nose

That’s not a nose! That’s a monument!

Edmond Rostand

He pulled his gloves off with his teeth, shook his umbrella, and put it into the elephant’s foot. He held on to the gloves and hat because it was an official visit. In a desperate whisper, he told himself:

“Don’t look at the nose.”

Rumor had it that Morgan lived in a building that was the Milan Cathedral on the outside and the Library of Babel on the inside. The entire manor was laughing with the glitters of the silver plates. Maids polished them, readying them for Christmas. Tesla shook the snow from the folds of his overcoat. Snow flurried outside, but inside black peacocks strutted throughout the marble hall.

Don’t touch your face
, the inner adviser warned him.
Blink only when necessary. Breathe slowly.

In the fountain, black fish swirled their fins like smoke. A mosaic goddess kissed his feet in the octagonal entryway. A servant discreetly pointed him toward the salon.

When he closed the door, his shoes sank into the carpet. He felt claustrophobia and the fear of heights at the same time.

“Don’t look at the nose,” he pleaded with himself.

“Good day!”

The voice produced goose bumps on Tesla’s right cheek and stiffened his neck.

It was the same voice that had given orders to create the first billion-dollar monopoly.

Do people know how many zeros are in a billion?

Zeros with eyeglasses, zeros with the black clerical sleeve protectors, zeros with gold teeth, zeros with workers’ flat caps, zeros with police badges and Pinkerton badges—they all responded to the voice of the man with the monstrous nose: John Pierpont Morgan.

Blinking antique dealers and thin-lipped connoisseurs chose paintings, tapestries, and bronze sculptures for his collections. Tireless fingers counted J. P. Morgan’s money. Morgan’s deep voice quoted Ovid: “He who knows how many sheep he has is a poor man.”

John Pierpont Morgan had strong eyebrows. His frown could bend a horseshoe. His cheeks were rounded, his eyes small and funny looking. He almost resembled Balzac—except for his fearsome nose.

A merry voice spoke inside Tesla’s head:
Where would we be without noses? Believe me—nowhere! People sniff each other out in social situations as well. We’re all familiar with the “smell of money” and the “stench of poverty.”