In the wine cellar under the house, I didn’t proceed into the basement corridor as before. Instead, I took the narrow service stairs up to the ground floor.
I entered the kitchen with caution, in case Chef Shilshom might be preparing a banquet for a celebration worthy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero. In an apocalyptic time threatened by a plague called the Red Death, the prince threw a great party to deny his mortal nature. That hadn’t turned out well. I suspected that the several residents of Roseland would not fare any better than Prospero.
The only illumination came from two lights above the sinks. The windows were covered by steel shutters.
At the moment, no freaks hammered at those defenses, and the house was hushed. Maybe the pull and push of Tesla’s machine had shoved them back to their time, but I doubted it. Something about the silence struck me as ominous.
Off the kitchen lay a room that served as the chef’s office. I stepped inside and quietly closed the door.
Here Chef Shilshom planned menus, prepared shopping lists, and no doubt puzzled over the proper thing to serve the master of the house when next a young woman, resembling the late Mrs. Cloyce, was brought to Roseland to be tortured and murdered. Meals for special occasions are always tricky to plan.
Constantine Cloyce might be the only one whose sense of superiority, arising from his potential immortality, inspired him to murder mere mortal people as sport, but the others in this place were just as insane. Their madness was evidenced by the fact that they assisted him, either to continue to be allowed to live forever or because they saw no crime in killing mortals who would sooner or later die anyway.
None of them had lived so long that longevity itself could have driven them insane. I could imagine that, after a few hundred years, the repetitive character of human experience might lead to a tedium that would leave them chronically depressed or so desperate for new and more extreme sensations that torture and murder became a kind of Valium that relieved anxiety. But Cloyce was only 134, the others most likely younger. Something other than longevity accounted for their descent into one form of madness or another.
In Chef Shilshom’s office, a massive chair had been custom built to accommodate his bulk, its seat as wide as two of me, its castors as big as baseballs. When I sat in it, I felt like Jack in the castle at the top of the beanstalk.
The computer on this desk was the only one I’d seen on the main floor, though there were probably others in the wing that contained the servants’ suites. I switched it on, accessed the Internet, and went looking for Nikola Tesla.
Apparently Serbian, he was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, which seemed to be either in Croatia or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or in a place called Lika, or in all three. It sounded sort of off-planet to me, but the problem was most likely just the semicoherence common to biography sites on the Web.
He died on January 7, 1943, in a two-room suite in the New Yorker Hotel, which was in New York and nowhere else. Two thousand people attended his funeral at St. John the Divine cathedral. Tesla was cremated, and his ashes were thereafter kept in a golden sphere at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
More than one online source informed me that a golden sphere was Tesla’s favorite shape.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
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 arrange
d 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.