ReVISIONS (3 page)

Tesla had brought with him piles of newspapers, in a dozen languages, proposing to use the time of the passage to study the situation. The headlines spoke of the coming war. The first day of the voyage he spent inspecting the ship's steam turbines, and the radio shack; following that, he divided his time between reading, and pacing along the promenade deck, staring across the water and watching the gulls, who apparently lived on the ship and soared in updrafts of the ship's passage.

All during the passage I dreamed of icebergs, although Tesla laughed, and said that in July it would be unlikely for us to be lucky enough to even see one.

“I should like to see an iceberg,” Tesla told me. He was standing on the main deck, at the very bow of the ship, gazing into the horizon. “I am told that they are a most startling shade of blue, and I would like to see this myself.” The day was warm, but the wind of passage ruffled Tesla's ascot and blew strands of his hair across his face, despite the tonic he had combed into it to avoid just that. He tossed his head to free the errant strand from his eyes, just like a young girl, probably not even noticing he did it.

“I have been designing an invention that will remove the threat of icebergs forever,” he said. “A ship will broadcast high-frequency electrical waves, and from reading the reflections of the waves, will instantaneously know the location of all of icebergs to a distance of hundreds of miles.”

“And so chart a course to avoid them,” I said.

“Yes, avoid them. Or, when I am done, if they prefer not to deviate from their path, they will simply melt the iceberg out of their path.”

“You can do this?” I said. “Oh, with your new ray! Can it be made powerful enough?”

“The ruby? No. It is a toy, nothing more.” He shook his head, the errant strand once again swinging like a pendulum. “But the principle of light amplification by resonance—ah, that is something very wonderful indeed.” Tesla smiled. “I have produced some improvements, and combined it with certain features of my earlier work, to make something quite—interesting.”

I shuddered involuntarily. Was this, then, how he proposed to stop the war, with a new death ray? If so, his quest was doomed, for I knew that, once started, armies were not so easily stopped. Tesla's ray might level battlefields and set aflame all of the capitals of Europe, but the war would go on.

But when I mentioned this to Tesla, he merely shook his head. “In war, I think, as in physics, the key to effect must be to choose the right place to apply a force. It is not the magnitude of the force, but its precision, that is most critical. Resonance, Katherine, resonance is always the key—if an action is placed in the correct spot, it will be amplified by circumstances into a great effect. If we but knew enough, I have not a doubt that a single flap of a pigeon's wing would be enough to change all the course of history.”

“And your many boxes of equipment? Are they filled, then, with pigeons?”

Tesla laughed in delight. “Ah, Katherine, wouldn't that be rather cruel, to so confine such noble birds? No, I would that I had the subtlety of knowledge to be able to apply so gentle a force, but I must make do with lesser knowledge, and so apply a greater force.”

An electrical ray, then, I thought. A death ray.

 

The
Lusitania
arrived in Liverpool, and we then shipped immediately to Paris. From France I had expected Tesla to book passage on the Orient Express toward the Balkans, but instead he surprised me by taking rooms for us on the Seine. He spent his days reading newspapers, and the afternoons and evenings simply sitting in cafés, and talking earnestly to people he met long into the night.

I have always loved Paris, but that July the weather was beastly hot. I had expected the mood of the city to be somber, anticipating the looming war, but instead there was almost a visible eagerness for battle, with all the young men of the city excitedly discussing plans for the coming conquest of Germany. Not a single one had even a casual thought that perhaps the Germans had other plans. “It will be over in a month,” one of them told Tesla. “We will bring the Kaiser to heel, and wipe out the arrogance of the Prussians. The occupied territories of Alsace and Lorraine will again be French, and Germany will be made to pay dearly for their arrogance.”

“Vive la France!”
was the cry, and no one talked about death. Or if they did, it was a romantic image of death they pictured, all heroic poses, with no actual pain or dying involved.

Tesla's questioning was about the diplomats, and by what means they were endeavoring to stop the war. It gave me great cheer that he still had hope for diplomacy, although the young men he talked to seemed visibly disappointed at the prospect that diplomacy might thwart their desired war. “Austria will declare war upon Serbia; the honor of the Hapsburg emperor allows no other course,” one of them said. “And so Russia will come to defend their ally, and then Germany must certainly attack Russia in defense of their ally, and when they do, as Russia is our ally, we will defend them—and thus we will invade Germany!
Vive la France!
”

“Serbia,” Tesla said. “Austria, then Russia, then Germany, then France. And then Britain, I am sure, and then America will be unable to stay out of it.”

“Yes,” I said. The coming sequence reminded me of the chains of dominoes with which we had often played, in happier times, at parties. Each country falling into war would bring in the next one in the sequence, until the whole world was at war.

“Indeed,” said Tesla, when I told him of the dominoes. “And that is the key. If we can remove one domino . . .”

“Then the chain will still stand, and another day, the slight touch of a wind will set off the reaction,” I said.

“Perhaps,” Tesla said. “Or, if I calculate correctly, perhaps not. The engines of commerce are slowly but inevitably drawing Europe together, and if the war can just be postponed, I think that soon Europe will be so well entangled in commerce that there will be no France, no Germany, no Austro-Hungarian Empire, only a prosperous and peaceful Europe.” At my evident skepticism, he said “Observe the table you sit at.”

He picked up the glass sitting in front of me. “Sparkling water, from France,” he said. “It is in a goblet of Czech crystal, sitting next to a plate of Dresden ceramic, with English silverware, and a napkin of Italian lace. On the table is a Chinese vase, holding a tulip grown in Holland. And so, as you see, even the least café in France is international.”

A table setting seemed to me to be a rather weak guarantee of peace, but I did not say so, and in a day we left Paris, and set forth for Russia.

 

To embark by train across Germany would have entailed too many uncertainties, so from Paris we went by ship first to Rotterdam, then from Rotterdam to Riga, and from Riga we arrived in Saint Petersburg. Tesla's crates of equipment followed half a step behind us.

Saint Petersburg was a surprise to me. I had always pictured Russia as gray and cold and uncultured, but the city was bright and gay, the summer climate pleasingly cool compared to the brutal heat of Paris, and the lazy evening twilight was long and delicious, with the sky still aglow well into the night. The city seemed filled with treasures of art and sculpture, with golden-domed cathedrals and palaces of marble. The people were quite cultured, and although my Russian is so poor as to be nearly useless toward being understood, I discovered to my delight that a great number of the Russian citizens spoke quite good French, and reveled in the possibility of conversation with foreigners.

Tesla found us apartments near the Troitzky Bridge, with windows that looked out across the Neva toward the Tsar's summer palace and the Field of Mars. Petersburg was not as well electrified as New York, or even Paris; the streetlights here were gas lamps, and not electrical. With the long evenings, though, streetlights were little needed. The lack of electricity drew disapproval from Tesla, but he set up in his rooms an electrical generator of his own, using a small but powerful turbine he had designed, and soon he had a miniature electrical laboratory in his rooms.

He was still reading piles of newspapers, turning the pages so quickly that I wondered how he could absorb any information at all. His questions, now, had turned to a single purpose, to learn the movements and activities of the Tsar. I cautioned him that the incessant questioning would most certainly tag him as a foreign spy, and that he would be arrested, or worse, but it turned out that all the Russians loved nothing more than to gossip about the affairs of the Tsar (and more particularly of the Tsarina), and we were soon swamped in rumors, speculation, and most scurrilous innuendo about the movements and motives and intentions of the imperial family.

The conflagration we were all dreading was coming fast. On the afternoon of July 23, Austria delivered an ultimatum to the Serbian embassy. Confident in the support of Russia, Serbia rejected it.

I put down the paper, where I had been puzzling out the Cyrillic characters to read the headlines. “The war has begun,” I said. “The Austrian armies are on the move. We are too late.”

“Not quite yet,” Tesla said.

Tesla, at last, had the information he had sought. He knew precisely the movements of the Tsar.

“At one-fifteen tomorrow afternoon, Tsar Nicholas the Second will declare the support of the Russian Empire for their ally state Serbia, and instruct his generals to mobilize all of Russia for war,” Tesla told me. He pointed to his crumpled map of the city. “He will stand here. The Tsar has a great fear of assassination, and so he will appear on a balcony, out of the range of a thrown bomb, and no one will be present who has not been searched, to make sure no one has a gun.”

“I fail to see your point,” I told him. “Unless you intend to assassinate the Tsar?”

“As he stands, he will grasp this brass railing,” Tesla continued, ignoring my comment, “which I have ascertained is electrically grounded.”

“And?” I said.

“I have made reservations for us to leave Saint Petersburg at noon on a ship bound to Helsinki. I expect all of Russia to be in chaos by then, but I believe that the ports will not yet be closed.”

“You do intend an assassination,” I stated.

Tesla lowered his head, and did not respond.

“And so,” I said, “for all your exalted talk about removing a single domino from the chain, I find now that you intend no more than a common assassination. Surely you know that this entire situation is the result of a political assassination? Has any assassination, at any time, ever produced any positive result? Nothing good can come from such a deed, I believe, not a thing.”

Tesla turned his back. Without looking at me, he said, “Ah, Katherine, your idealism is as great as your beauty, and I cannot deny the depravity of my intended deed, but I simply have no more time. This once, we must hope that good can come out of evil. Russia is the critical link; once the Tsar mobilizes the Russian army, no force in the world could stop the war. How many people are in the armies of Europe, do you think? Five million? Ten?”

“Perhaps twenty million, as I count it,” I replied slowly, for I was averse to following his reasoning.

“And what fraction of those will die, if the coming war is allowed to take place? Half?”

“Ten percent,” I said, and then reluctantly added, “in the war. But disease and starvation follow war, and those will kill twice that number.”

“Six million, then,” he said. “Tell me, then, is the life of one man worth so much?”

His plan was simple. He had affixed a mirror near the field. With his ruby beam, he adjusted the inclination of the mirror until, by bouncing the beam from our apartments onto the mirror, the crimson spot appeared exactly where the Tsar would stand. Then he had cemented the mirror to fix it in its position.

The ruby beam, however, was too low in power to have any useful effect. For his needs, he had made a much larger apparatus, working upon the same principle of concentrating light by resonance, but this one using an electrical discharge in a blown-glass tube of rarified gas. The more powerful beam would, he told me, actually break down the air itself, turning it from an insulator into a conductor.

“And so?”

He pointed behind him. I had seen high-voltage generators before, of course, in his laboratory in New York, but had not paid attention to the fact that he had set one up in his chambers here. “Ten million volts,” he said. “It will discharge along the path of the beam.”

And at this, I had nothing at all to say.

 

It dawned a clear, cloudless day.

Tesla had spent the night and the morning working on his apparatus, adjusting and tuning every piece. I had hoped against hope that something would go wrong, that the day would be gray with fog shrouding the city, or the Tsar would change his mind, but exactly on schedule, the Tsar, in a blue military uniform bespeckled with gilt and medallions, appeared on his balcony to address his generals.

The generators whined like dogs eager to be unleashed, and the air was filled with the bite of ozone from the high-voltage generator and the smell of the heated oil from the transformers. My hands were trembling so much I could barely hold a pencil, and I sought desperately for something to say.

But Tesla was ice steady. He watched the spectacle across the river for a minute, judging exactly where the Tsar stood. Tsar Nicholas moved forward to grasp the brass railing and my heart went still, but Tesla did not move. Why, why didn't he fire his machine? Had he had a sudden change of heart?

Then a pigeon sitting on the brass railing spread its wings and flew off. As if this were his signal, Tesla said, very softly, “Now.”