by Sesh Heri
Tesla continued to stand still for a moment, then shook his head, and said slowly, “No, I am only a farmer. Cliff Warden is the name. The milking machine is all I made. It had problems. It was too rough on the cows. Too rough. I had to destroy the machine. I had to udderly destroy it.”
Professor May stood silently, staring at Tesla.
“Udderly destroyed it,” Tesla repeated, as he turned away.
“Wait!” Professor May shouted.
Tesla turned back around, and said, “Oh yes, the Egress. Mustn’t miss that.”
Tesla started toward the exit flap.
“Wait!” Professor May shouted again. “You can’t go! You haven’t heard me out yet! You haven’t even given me a chance!”
“To do what?” Tesla asked, stopping and turning back to face Professor May.
“To tell you why I have gone to all this trouble to bring you here!” Professor May said. “It is of the utmost importance. You must listen to me, Mr. Tesla! You must!”
“I will listen,” Tesla said, “but my name is— “
“Never mind that!” Professor May shouted. “Listen to me! I have been sent here by my boss, a most important man, to speak with you!”
“About milk prices?” Tesla asked.
“About many prices!” Professor May said. “Such as the price you have paid to live your life. You have paid a very high price to live the life that you have chosen to live.”
“Yes,” Tesla said. “My farm is heavily mortgaged.”
“And your life,” Professor May said. “Your life is heavily mortgaged to institutions like Westinghouse and the Yugoslav government and— Majestic Seven.”
Professor May stared at Tesla.
Tesla stared back.
Finally Tesla asked, “Majestic Seven? Is that who took over the Farmer’s Bank in Waterloo?”
“You know very well what and who Majestic Seven is,” Professor May said. “You were once one of that circle yourself.”
“Do you mean the Rotary over in Des Moines?” Tesla asked.
“You know exactly what I mean!” Professor May exclaimed. “Drop this charade and admit your true identity!”
“I like charades,” Tesla said. “I see that you like them, too.”
“Very well,” Professor May said. “I will give a little to get a little. I’ve been sent by my boss to discuss an important matter with you. We need your help, your assistance on this matter. I speak of— A.E.”
Professor May drew his head to the side, almost in profile, but kept looking at Tesla out of the corner of his eyes.
“A.E.” Professor May repeated. He turned his head full face.
Tesla smiled and shrugged.
“Amelia Earhart,” Professor May said.
Tesla spun about suddenly and ran toward the entrance.
“Stop him!” Professor May shouted.
Kel-Kar the Martian came around through the entrance.
The circus usher appeared at the exit, barring the way.
“Mr. Tesla!” Professor May shouted. “You force us to do it the hard way! Gilgo!”
A large clown came from behind the stage curtain.
“Gilgo!” Professor May said to the clown. “Hit him with the gas!”
Gilgo the clown jumped off the stage. Alayna, the girl in the Pocahontas costume, came from around the curtain and jumped down off the stage behind Gilgo. Kel-Kar the Martian stepped toward Tesla. The circus usher closed up the circle.
“Not too close!” Professor May shouted down from the stage at his human menagerie. “Keep out of range!”
Tesla spun about, looking for a way out, but saw that he was surrounded.
“All right, Gilgo!” Professor May shouted. “Let him have it!”
Gilgo advanced upon Tesla and raised his arm, exposing a hose extending from the sleeve of his clown suit. Tesla now noticed that Gilgo was not wearing clown makeup. It’s a clown mask, Tesla thought, a clown mask that covers—
A yellowish puff of gas exploded from the hose protruding from Gilgo’s sleeve. Tesla’s lungs felt as if fire were flashing through them.
A clown mask that covers a gas mask, Tesla thought as his vision dimmed.
Tesla spun about. To him, the tent seemed to rotate. Kel-Kar, Gilgo, Alayna as Pocahontas, the circus usher…and Professor May still standing upon the stage, trainer of this human menagerie…all of them were spinning around Tesla…all of them were riding the same, mad merry-go-round. Tesla’s brain was the operator for this ride. His brain was now speeding up the spin and dimming out the lights, but the music’s volume was increasing and the music was “Turkey in the Straw.” Where is the turkey? Tesla wondered. Where is the straw? And where is the little boy asleep in the hay? Oh, that’s me and I’m right here….
All the others in the tent knew nothing about the little boy in the hay; they only saw Nikola Tesla sprawled unconscious upon the tanbark-covered ground in his once-neatly-pressed gray suit.
“He’s out cold!” Gilgo announced.
“Get him up!” Professor May ordered. “Get him up carefully and carry him to the advertising car. Hurry!
Gilgo and the circus usher picked Tesla up off the ground, Gilgo taking Tesla’s shoulders and the circus usher taking Tesla’s feet, and they carried Tesla to the back of the tent and through a flap beside the stage. Alayna, Kel-Kar the Martian Prince and Professor May followed.
When Professor May reached the flap, he went through it, but then turned around, stuck his head back through the flap, looked about at the empty tent, and said to the vacant space:
“So long, suckers! You can keep the robot. Small change for a small world!”
Then Professor May’s head disappeared back through the canvas flap.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Site Y
“Where the lion’s skin will not reach,
you must patch it out with the fox’s.”
— Plutarch
Nikola Tesla’s head felt like it was spinning around at the rate of one hundred miles an hour when he began to awaken with fluttering eyelids.
Above Tesla stretched a dome of glass and beyond the dome sped a surface of something flashing with reflected light. It was a curved ceiling, and, as Tesla’s gaze dropped downward, he realized that his head had been thrown back against the seat upon which he was now reclining. He tried to raise his head, but the spinning sensation increased. He closed his eyes and tried to stop the spinning. The spinning never stopped, only gradually faded from his view as Tesla lost consciousness again.
What Tesla did not know was that he was seated in the rear-most seat of what Professor May had referred to as “the advertising car”— a long, slender automobile with a chrome-plated body shaped like a rocket. The car had seats for nine passengers: three wide car seats, one behind the other. The car had no conventional windshield and roof, but rather three clear glass domes over each of the passenger compartments. Painted on either side of the car’s body where the doors would normally be were the words: “SEE THE 1939 N.Y. WORLD’S FAIR.”
The flashing, curved ceiling that Tesla had just glimpsed was the interior of the Lincoln Tunnel. When Tesla had collapsed in the tent, he had been carried out to the back lot where “the advertising car” had been parked. Gilgo the clown and the circus usher had placed Tesla into the back seat of “the advertising car” and then had gotten into the car with him. Kel-Kar and Alayna had gotten into the seat ahead, and Professor May had slipped into the driver’s seat. There, the Professor pressed a button on the dashboard that pivoted the triple-domed glass roof down over their heads. Professor May then started the car’s engine, took a quick glance over his shoulder, and then drove the car out of the back lot, waving to the crowds as they emerged through the gate and on to the main grounds.
Professor May got to a fairgrounds’ exit, gave a nod to the gate attendant who waved them through, and then took the car out on to the main highway headed for New York City.
The Professor took them over the Queensbor
ough Bridge and into the tangle of traffic in Manhattan. All in the car waved at the crowds along the sidewalks— all except Tesla who was unconscious. Gilgo pinched the sleeve of Tesla’s coat, raising Tesla’s arm like a puppet, and waved the unconscious arm in the air.
Professor May happened to look behind and caught sight of Gilgo’s manipulations.
“Stop that!” Professor May barked.
Gilgo dropped Tesla’s arm.
Professor May shook his head, and then turned, grinned at the crowd, and resumed waving.
After a slow crawl through city traffic, “the advertising car” reached the Lincoln Tunnel. Just as Tesla lost consciousness inside the tunnel, they came out on the other side, and the light of day burst forth around them again.
“The light of day!” Professor May intoned. “Nothing can be hid from the light of day— they say! But then— when have ‘they’ known anything? How’s he doing back there?”
“He’s all right,” the circus usher said. “He’ll live.”
“He had better live!” Professor May said. “He had better live— if you want to live! Get me?”
“Ah, I get you,” the circus usher said.
The Professor turned south and picked up his speed. A few miles before reaching Grovers Mill, New Jersey Professor May turned off the main highway and on to a country road that took them through a thick wood. After a few miles, the Professor turned on to a dirt road and continued deeper into the woods. They crossed over a small creek on a wooden bridge, turned another bend in the woods, and then came upon a clearing.
In the center of this clearing, like a feudal castle, rose a brick factory building ten stories in height. Several large smokestacks on the building’s rooftop suggested the towers of a castle. Adding to the feudal effect was a 12-foot high corrugated steel fence surrounding the factory on all sides, like a curtain wall of a medieval fortress. Above the line of the 10th story windows appeared the faded words in white painted letters: “Salet Boiler Works.”
Professor May pushed a button on the dashboard in front of him and a gate in the steel fence suddenly opened and slid aside, revealing a weed strewn lot and the brick walls of the factory beyond. Professor May drove “the advertising car” through the gate and pulled it to a stop near the wall of the factory. The gate in the fence automatically slid shut and locked.
“I don’t think we were followed by Majestic Seven or anyone else,” Professor May said. “But just to be safe, get him inside the building quick!”
Professor May pushed a button on the dashboard, and the glass domes over the passenger compartments pivoted upward.
Gilgo got out of the car and he and the circus usher began dragging Tesla out, Gilgo pulling under Tesla’s arms and the circus usher holding Tesla’s legs.
Meanwhile, Professor May got out of the car, went to the door of the factory, unlocked it, and went through it. Kel-Kar and Alayna followed the Professor inside, with Gilgo and the circus usher coming through the door last, carrying Tesla between them.
Inside the factory, Professor May and his human menagerie— along with the unconscious Tesla— made their way down a long hall with doors on either side until they emerged into a large, central room with a ceiling 150 feet high. A heap of bricks and rubbish lay at one end of the room. The place was pitch-dark until Professor May found a switch and turned on two work lights hanging on a wall. The big room was nothing but exposed brick walls— silent, musty, and empty.
Gilgo and the circus usher deposited Tesla on an old couch that was set against the nearest wall.
Professor May came over to Tesla and looked down at him as the others in the menagerie stood behind in the semi-darkness— Alayna dressed as Pocahontas, Kel-Kar with marble-colored skin and wearing a white robe, Gilgo in his clown costume and mask, and the circus usher.
Professor May reached over and shook Tesla’s shoulder. Tesla’s hand came up unconsciously and brushed Professor May’s hand away. Then Tesla’s eyes fluttered open. He looked about, moving his glance over the dark space above him, down at the dim brick walls one hundred yards away, and then upon Professor May who stood motionless looking down at him.
“You,” Tesla said. “You again.”
“Me again,” Professor May said.
“Then you are not a dream,” Tesla said.
“No,” Professor May said.
“The tent,” Tesla said.
“We’re no longer in the tent,” Professor May said. “We’ve moved to another place while you slept. It might be said that you’ve come back full circle, back to where it all began for you, in a way.”
“Where all what began?” Tesla asked.
“You know,” Professor May said. “All of it. Your work with Majestic Seven. Your voyages to Mars. Your trips through time itself. In a way, it all began here, right here.”
“Where?” Tesla asked.
“Right here,” Professor May said. “We’re in the old Salet Boiler Works— the old factory where you built the first airship that took you to Mars in 1893! I thought of trying to teleport you here using astral energy, but it was just too complicated. To make some kind of double of this place on the grounds of the New York World’s Fair would have taken some doing, and, anyway, I think I made my point with the other teleportation at the fair. I wanted to show you that I was no ordinary sideshow huckster. I wanted to prove to you that I knew what I was doing and that when I say that my boss wants to see you about A.E., I’m saying something with a good deal of meaning in it.”
Tesla slowly stood up unsteadily and looked about.
“Easy on your feet, there,” Professor May said. “That knock-out gas has muscle paralyzing properties. It takes a little while for it to wear off. You had better go easy until it wears off completely. You had better just sit right back down.
Tesla looked at Professor May and his human menagerie, and then slowly sat back down.
“What do you want with me?” Tesla asked.
“I told you,” Professor May said. “My boss wants to see you.”
“Why,” Tesla asked, “didn’t your boss come to see me like civilized human beings do when they want to see me?”
“I notice that you do not ask who my boss is,” Professor May said.
Tesla said, “If you were going to tell me that, you would’ve done so already.”
“Good answer,” Professor May said. “And since you’ve given me a good answer, I will give you one as well. My boss didn’t come to see you because he can’t. He has some difficulty getting around and about the U.S. of A.— and in Europe as well.”
“What difficulty?” Tesla asked.
“Well,” Professor May said, “let’s just say he doesn’t want to be recognized.”
“Your boss is a wanted man,” Tesla said.
“Wanted?” Professor May asked. “I suppose he could be wanted if someone recognized him. But until someone does, he’s not wanted.”
“Is that a riddle?” Tesla asked.
“Of a sort,” Professor May said. “How’s you head?”
“It’s slowing down,” Tesla said. “The spinning. Is your boss coming here?”
“Oh, no,” Professor May said. “He’d never do that. No, this is just sort of a station on the way for us to go see him.”
“Why make this a station?” Tesla asked.
“Because,” Professor May said, “this is the last place Majestic Seven would ever suspect that we would take you— to the ruins of your old airship manufacturing plant, the old Salet Boiler Works— Salet— Tesla spelled backwards. It wasn’t boilers you were making here but a steel-hulled airship capable of interplanetary travel. Ah, that must’ve been a sight in those old days when a hundred men toiled away here building what they thought was a secret submarine for the U.S. Navy! That was the story, wasn’t it?”
“You seem to have all the answers,” Tesla said.
“Yes,” Professor May said, “I do.”
“Where did you get them?” Tesla asked.
“From my boss,” Professor May said. “He has a lot of answers.”
“Where did he get his?” Tesla asked.
“Well,” Professor May said, “I suppose I can tell you this much for right now: My boss used to work for Majestic Seven, just like you did. My boss knows a lot about the Seven— and a lot about you.”
“Indeed,” Tesla said.
Professor May nodded, and said, “And my boss wants to talk to you about A.E.”
“What about A.E.?” Tesla asked.
“My boss will tell you,” Professor May said. “I believe you will want to hear what he has to say.”
“You believe a great deal,” Tesla said. “Much of it quite erroneous. Such as that I care to know about this A.E. And as for the boilers, I have no use for them. All my farm equipment runs on gasoline. I have no interest in purchasing any of your boilers, especially any that were made back in ’93. The old things have probably rusted through long ago. Now, if you will show me the way out of here, I will go call a cab and return to the fair.”
“Still insisting, eh?” Professor May asked. “Very well, I will play along for now, but you are still going to see my boss— Mr. Tesla!”
“Warden is the name,” Tesla said.
“Cliff Warden,” Professor May said.
“Yes,” Tesla said. “Now that you finally understand, which way out?”
“Which way out?” Professor May asked with a laugh. “Why, Mr. Tesla— I mean, Mr. Warden— there is only one way out for you— one way and one way alone!”
