“I take no offense,” I said. “Indeed, I thank you for your protection.”
He stared down at the floor for a moment, and then, apparently forgetting the incident entirely, said to me, “Look! Let me show you what my ray can do!” With that he drew aside the velvet drapes and raised the dusty window wide open. The windowsill was stained with bird droppings like a thick spill of white paint. Outside, the city was now cloaked in night. In the distance, the silhouette of the Woolworth Building was visible, the newly-erected colossus of the skyline.
“Do you carry a mirror with you?”
I produced a gilt-backed hand mirror from my handbag, and Tesla secured it upon the workbench in front of the ruby apparatus with a clamp. He adjusted the mirror until it was angled to his satisfaction, and then once again set the ruby to flashing.
The tiny dot of light suddenly appeared on the facade of the building across the street. What must the passersby be thinking of it, I wondered, a mysterious dot of light above their heads? I thrust my head out to look down, but of the few pedestrians below, none thought to look up. Tesla adjusted the direction slightly, and then angled the mirror to point over the rooftops.
To my astonishment, the crimson spot appeared on the Woolworth Tower itself, although it must have been half a mile or more distant. “The beam does not disperse,” he said proudly. “I could bounce it off of the moon; I could send it to Mars.”
“Can anyone see it?” I asked.
“Certainly,” he said. “They will see it, and be puzzled indeed.” He laughed, pleased with the thought. “I believe that none of them will guess at the origin of the miracle in a humble laboratory distant across the town.”
Following that, he disappeared into his laboratories, and although Robert and I both attempted to entice him out with invitations to dinners and garden parties, he was hard on one of his ideas, and would not be seen again for several weeks, save only as a furtive figure, walking through Bryant Park in the early morning with a handful of peanuts to feed his beloved pigeons.
On an afternoon some months later—the weather that July of 1914 had turned suddenly sweltering—Robert and I were prepared to insist that Mr. Tesla must join us in our excursion to see the fireworks at Coney Island. “We will bring him with us by force if necessary,” Robert said, “but come with us he must, for he will ruin his health with excessive work.”
I came to his apartments at the Waldorf-Astoria to deliver our invitation, but found him already seeing a visitor in the anteroom of his suite. The door was open, and without turning he gestured me to enter. His visitor was perhaps sixty or seventy years of age, and despite the great heat she was dressed in long skirts and a laced-up white linen blouse covered with several shawls, and had a scarf over her head in the style that I have heard called a “babushka.” She was pleading with Tesla in her own language, and Tesla was answering her with a calm, soothing voice in the same language. I took this speech to be Serbian, Nikola’s native tongue, for I speak a few phrases of Russian, and understood enough words to recognize it a kindred tongue.
After some talking, Tesla stood to his full height, and in a voice of momentous tone, made her a great pledge. Such was his personal magnetism that even I, unable to understand a word, understood completely that whatever it was he had promised her, not heaven nor Earth should prevent him from accomplishing. At this pledge, his visitor fell to her knees and attempted to kiss his feet; although Tesla moved back slightly, just enough to avoid her touching him. Something had transpired, although I did not know what.
Later, when I talked with Tesla alone, he explained that this was a Serbian woman, with whom his family was acquainted, for she was native to the same small village as he. She had come to plead for the lives of her thirteen grandchildren.
“For war is coming, Katherine, a great and awful war, and it will sweep over Serbia like a tide of destruction, leaving only death behind.”
“Surely it will not be so bad. We are civilized now, Nikola—”
Tesla’s eyes were cold fire. “You understand nothing, my darling Katherine, nothing at all. We know what war is like, we Serbs, as you innocents do not. For five hundred years we have lived in the paths of armies, and when the rest of Europe looked away, we stood down the Turks, and died for it. The armies have washed over Serbia for years, like tidal waves, like plagues of rats, diseased and crazed with aggression, ravenous and destructive, leaving only corpses behind. Before, at least some survived, but in these days of Gatling machine guns and poisoned war gases, war will be total—there will be no survivors, I fear, in little Serbia.”
“It will not be so bad, Nikola, I am sure of it. What did she ask of you, that woman?”
“She asked if I could help her sons, and their wives, and their children, to come to America to avoid the war. She asked me for money to pay the passage, and promised that she would herself work day and night to pay me back.”
I winced inside, for I knew of the inventor’s straitened circumstances. A genius he most undoubtedly was, but for all his inventions, his genius had not made him rich. “And you said?”
“I told her I could not do that, but I would do something else for her.”
“How can you help her? What will you do?”
“I told her that I would stop the war.”
“What?”
“I gave her my pledge, my word of honor. I, Nikola Tesla of Smiljan, will stop the coming war.”
I was amazed. Tesla was a prodigy, the greatest genius of our age—possibly of any age—but this was more amazing than anything I had yet seen. “But how will you accomplish that?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “It will require, I believe, some study.”
We sailed to Europe on the Cunard liner Lusitania. She was perhaps somewhat less elegant than the late, doomed Titanic, but still quite richly appointed, her interiors lavish with columns, works of art and tapestries, mahogany paneling and gilded furniture. More importantly, she was fast; the greyhound of the seas. Tesla said that making the passage quickly was of the essence, and worried that even the six-day passage to Liverpool would be a crucial delay. Lusitania also had capacious holds, enough to carry the crates of mysterious electrical equipment that Tesla paid to have shipped across with him.
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, nothin
g 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.
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