He wheeled on the heel of one patent leather shoe and ran for the cage. Thinking it a useless precaution the night before, he had nonetheless given in to a niggling doubt. He had taken a sledgehammer from its usual location in the corner and rested its handle against the table’s edge.
Now he was grateful he had. In two long steps he reached the hammer. He wrapped his long white fingers around the handle and returned to his device. He lifted the hammer high and brought its head down on the deceptively small cylinder. The metal case cracked, but gears within continued to turn. He had engineered his device to withstand shock and force. Again, he brought down the hammer, and yet a third time.
The gears shrieked like a baby bird as metal ground against metal. He flinched, then hardened his heart against his creation. He smote it blow after blow until the misshapen steel fell to the floor and was still. He had stopped its mechanical heart.
Heavy fists pounded on the front door to the building, and angry voices outside shouted for admittance. He had only minutes before one of his neighbors let them inside. He must not be found down here with the device. It was still too hot to touch, so he kicked it into a corner with the toe of his shoe. He polished that toe against the back of his immaculate trousers, smoothed his hair, and settled his jacket into place.
His long legs skipped every other stair as he flew to his laboratory. He entered and closed the door quietly behind him. His assistants looked at him with surprise. He smiled to allay their suspicions and glanced around the laboratory.
Glass had broken in this room, too. The windows had given way, and one assistant sported a thin cut across his cheek. An oval bulb lay shattered on the floor.
His device’s power was writ large in the destruction that surrounded him.
Curious and exhilarating to think that something so small could produce such dramatic changes in the world. Yet he himself, like every man on Earth, had grown from something as small as an egg.
Angry voices grew louder. He couldn’t yet make out their words, but he understood the tone and recognized an Irish accent. The local constabulary, then.
Knuckles rapped against the door to his laboratory. Nikola glanced around once before calling out, “Enter!”
The door slammed open, and two men strode inside. They looked like life-size windup dolls in matching blue uniforms with silver buttons and with handlebar mustaches and worried eyes. They glared at him, although they could not know that he was at fault.
“There was an earthquake!” shouted the one in front, the leader. He was the fatter of the two, and he had the larger mustache — blond shrubbery against a face as freckled as a plover’s egg.
“A horse fell down and was almost run over by the cab.” The other policeman clenched his meaty fists.
“I don’t suppose you know about that?” asked the leader.
Both men hovered in the wooden doorway as if afraid to venture inside.
Nikola would not have let the building bury his hen, or himself. “The danger is past.”
“What danger do you mean? Why is it past?” The man’s freckles squirmed when he spoke.
“Why, the earthquake. I felt it here in the laboratory.” Nikola gestured to the broken glass on the floor so that they would see he hadn’t been spared. “It knocked my bulbs off the table and broke my windows, but it is over now, yes?”
Such a machine! It intrigued him; it did not frighten him. His heart soared at the thought of what such a device could do — send messages perhaps, or destroy rock for mining. Glorious possibilities flashed through his mind. If only mankind had the wisdom to harness such power for good use.
The freckled policeman looked at him with his mouth still partially open. Native intelligence and suspicion shone from his snapping blue eyes. “Just a simple earthquake then?”
“What else could it be, my good man?” Their imaginations could conceive of nothing but this natural explanation.
The man fingered the long black stick he carried in his belt. He looked as if he wanted to take it and strike Nikola.
Nikola drew himself up to his full height and stared him down. “That will be all.”
Anger flashed across the man’s face, but he turned away, dismissed. He had not found what he sought, and so he retreated.
Nikola thought again of the wisdom and courage his beloved bird had displayed by knowing how to find him and coming across snow and cold to say farewell. He had never met a person like her. And he never would.
He had already filed a patent for his device, which he had named the Oscillator, but he must revise the patent’s specification so that the device could not be built properly from those plans. Mankind was not ready for a weapon of such power.
He would rebuild the device, refine, and test it again, until he knew that he could control it, because he could not leave it uncompleted. After that, he would hide it away. The true device could be used only by one of uncommon courage and wisdom. He doubted that he would ever come to know such a person.
And so the device must remain hidden.
George Tesla was drunk. This wasn’t new for him, but the reason was. He was going to be a father. Fifty years old, and he’d knocked up a thirty-year-old carnie. Someone careful enough to live through a trapeze act ought to be careful enough to not get pregnant. But she hadn’t been.
Tatiana flat-out refused to talk about abortion or adoption or any sensible solution to the problem. She was perfectly willing to talk about leaving him to raise the baby alone, but nothing else. Her mind was set.
He leaned against the cold side of the bridge and took a long sip of Jack Daniel’s from his silver hip flask. He’d bought the flask when he was first made professor of mathematics at New York University. Another thing that would have to change, since Tatiana had told him she had no intention of giving up performing to move to New York and be a faculty wife. He couldn’t imagine the fiery Romanian trading her sequined leotards for wool skirts and pearls.
He dropped the flask in the pocket of his tweed jacket, where it clinked against the other metal object he carried. Before he met Tatiana, he’d gone on a quest to find this little thing. It had been hidden before his birth, but he’d found it anyway. He’d carried it around for years — its weight a constant reminder that he was squandering a great legacy. Many things were possible for those smart enough and daring enough. He suspected that he was neither.
A car roared down the road, its headlights blinding him. For good measure, the driver honked at him — another good citizen chastising him for being up here on a public road, drunk, at one in the morning. But he had nowhere else to be.
Seventy feet below, the black river rolled along like tar. If he jumped, that would solve his problem. He filed this away for later consideration.
He fumbled the metal object out of his pocket and set it on the railing next to him. It didn’t look like much — a square metal base with a cylinder sticking out the top — but Nikola Tesla had told his father that it could do great things. Nikola Tesla had patented it, but it had never worked. George wondered if he had patented a flawed device on purpose, to discredit his own theory. If so, maybe the object next to him could do great things.
He tapped his flask against the side of the device in a fake toast. “To great things. For one of us.”
The device didn’t answer, so he wasn’t that drunk. Maybe it knew it wouldn’t work.
But if it didn’t work, why had its creator entrusted the secret of its existence to only one man? George’s father said that he was the only one who knew about it, and he must have been, because once George had figured out its location, he’d found the device waiting for him. If anyone else had known where to find it, they would have taken it.