"I'm the only one who reads Popular Scienceon a regular basis," Zavala said. "Tesla invented alternating current."
Tibbet nodded. "He was a Serbian American electrical engineer. He discovered that you could rotate a magnetic field if you took two coils at right angles and juiced them with AC current out of phase."
"I wonder if you might put that in English," Adler said politely.
Hibbet laughed. "I'll put it in a historic context. Tesla moved to the United States and worked for Thomas Edison. They became rivals. Edison advocated direct current, and there was a fierce battle. Tesla got the edge when he was commissioned to design the AC generators at Niagara Falls. He sold the patents to his induction motor to George Westinghouse, whose power system was the basis for what we use today. Edison had to be content with the electric lightbulb and the phonograph."
"Tesla filed a bunch of wild patents, as I recall," Zavala said.
"That's right. He was an eccentric genius. He filed a patent for an unmanned electrically propelled aircraft that could fly at eighteen thousand miles per hour and could be used as a weapon. He came up with something called 'teleforce,' which was a death ray that could melt airplane engines at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. He did a lot of work on wireless transmission of electricity. He was fascinated by the possibility of focusing electrical force and amplifying its effect. He even claimed to have once produced an earthquake from his lab."
"Tesla may have simply been ahead of his time, with ballistics missiles and lasers," Austin said.
"His concepts were sound. But the execution never lived up to the expectations. He's become something of a cult figure in recent years. The conspiracy-minded suspect that various governments, including our own, have been experimenting with the more destructive aspects of Tesla's work."
"What do youthink?" Austin said.
"The conspiracy theorists are missing the boat. Tesla attracted a lot of attention because he was such a flamboyant figure. The work of Lazlo Kovacs had far more potential for destruction, in my opinion. Like Tesla, he was a brilliant electrical engineer. He was from Budapest, where Tesla worked in the late eighteen hundreds, and picked up on his work in the 1930s, concentrating on extra-low-frequency electromagnetic transmission. He became worried about the possibility of electromagnetic warfare. He said that certain transmissions could be used to disrupt the atmosphere, and produce severe weather, earthquakes and all sorts of unpleasant results. He took Tesla to the next level."
"In what way?"
"Kovacs actually developed a set of frequencies whereby electromagnetic resonance could be focused and thus amplified by the material surrounding it. They were called the Kovacs Theorems. He published his findings in a scientific journal, but he refused to make public the complete set of frequencies that would allow the device he described to be built. Other scientists were skeptical of his findings without proof."
"It's lucky no one believed him," Professor Adler said. "The world has enough trouble controlling the types of warfare we have already."
"Somepeople believed him. The Nazis were very open to ideas of mysticism, the occult and pseudoscience. Those stories about Nazi archaeologists searching for the Holy Grail are true. They pounced on Kovacs and kidnapped him and his family. After the war ended, it was disclosed that they had put him to work in a secret lab on a project to develop a superweapon that would win the war."
"They lost the war," Austin said. "Tesla wasn't the only one with a credibility problem. Kovacs apparently failed too."
Hibbet shook his head. "It's more complicated than that, Kurt. Papers uncovered after the war suggested that he was on the verge of an electromagnetic warfare breakthrough. Luckily, it never happened."
"Why not?"
"The Russians overran the lab in East Prussia, where he was said to be working. But Kovacs had already disappeared. After the war, the Soviets carried out research based on the Kovacs Theorems. The United States was aware of their work, and would have loved to talk to Kovacs. The significance of electromagnetic radiation was not lost on our military. There was a big conference years ago at the Los Alamos lab to talk about applied weapons technology based on his work."
"Home of the Manhattan Project? That was fitting," Austin said.
"In more ways than one. The manipulation of electromagnetic rays could be more devastating in its own way than a nuclear device. The military took Kovacs very seriously. Electromagnetic pulse weapons were tested during the first Gulf War. Some people claim that those experiments and similar ones conducted by the Soviets caused earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and weather disturbances. That's why I was interested in the bright light flashes in the sky."
"What's so significant about the bursts of light?" Austin asked.
"Many of the cases reported by witnesses to the Soviet and American experiments said they saw an aurora borealis, or great burst of light caused by electromagnetic transmissions," Hibbet said.
"Tell us more about these experiments," Austin said.
"There's a great deal of controversy over a project called HAARP, short for the High Frequency Active Aural Research Program, being carried out by this country. The idea is to shoot a focused electromagnetic beam into the ionosphere. It's been billed as an academic program to improve worldwide communications. Some people speculate that it's mainly a military project aimed at a wide range of goals, from 'Star Wars' defense to mind control. I don't know what to believe, but the project has its roots in the Kovacs Theorems."
"You said something about a Tesla coil," said Austin. "What did you mean?"
"It was a simple type of resonant transformer made up of two coils, actually. Pulses of energy are transferred from one to the other to produce a lightninglike discharge. You've probably seen them in the movies, where they seem to be a common fixture in the lab of the mad scientist."
Gamay had been listening intently to the discussion. She leaned forward. "We've talked about the transmission of these waves into solid ground or the atmosphere," she said. "What would happen if you sent them into the bottom of the sea?"
Hibbet spread his palms wide apart. "I don't have a clue. Ocean geology isn't my area of expertise."
"But it is mine," Paul Trout said. "Let me ask you a question, Al. Could amplified electromagnetic waves penetrate deep into the earth's crust?"
"Without question."
"In that case, it's possible that the transmissions could cause some anomalies in the earth's mantle in roughly the same way the HAARP program you talked about disturbed the atmosphere."
"What sort of anomalies?" Adler asked.
"Whirlpools and eddies, possibly."
"Could these create disturbances in the sea?" Austin asked.
Hibbet pinched his chin. "The swirling molten layer under the crust is what creates the magnetic field that surrounds the earth. Any disruption of the field has the potential to cause all sorts of disturbances."
Professor Adler pounded his fist on the table. "I knewI was right! Someone has been monkeying around with my ocean."
"But we're talking about vast distances and miles of surface material," Trout said, temporarily squelching Adler's exuberance. "My sense of this discussion is that it's going back to Joe's big spark plug. Or Al's coil. Even if the device turned out enormous power, it would still be puny compared to the mass of the earth."