by Lou Cameron
There were times for sex and there were times for electrical experiments. He rolled off her and shucked every stitch he had on, telling her to do the same. He could see she was doing as he’d asked her to. He could hear it, too, for as she rolled her silk stockings down they gave off harmless but still astoundingly bright sparks!
She whimpered, “What on earth is happening to us, Jack?” as he lay her back across the linen sheets after shucking the silk-covered counterpane and braced his bare feet against the brass rails at the foot of the bed. He reentered her, this time without shocking her exactly the same way, and told her, with a chuckle, “That was high voltage indeed, may haps from a static generator you can buy in kit form to impress the neighbors. Some silly rascal on or about the premises has a hell of a static field going, but since I’m grounded to a hundred pounds or more of brass and neither one of us is in contact with silk, or amber, or such …”
“My hair still feels tingly.” She cut in. So he told her, “Hair’s close to silk and we’re way above sea level in thin air that’s inclined to make your hair sparkle in any case. Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s trying to electrocute anyone. But if he doesn’t cut it out he’s sure to get caught any minute.”
“You know where he’s running that mysterious spark coil, Jack?” she asked, adding, “Let me get on top if you’d rather chat than move the way I like it, darling.”
He started to move in her the way he assumed they both liked it. Then he wondered why he’d want to be so beastly to a lady who’d asked so politely and, as they changed positions on the bed, he assured her, soothingly, “I don’t have to figure out where the idiot and his demonstration gear might or might not be. He’s messed up all the juice in town for hours, now, and there has to be more than one crew of troubleshooters out there trying to trace the short circuits. I’m sure they know a heap more than you or me about the care and feeding of their county-wide power circuits. So let’s just enjoy the tingle our own way, while we can.” To which she coyly replied, “I don’t feel any electrical field now, darling. I’m doing that down there myself.” And all he could say was, “I know. Don’t stop. This is one pleasure modern science will never be able to improve!”
CHAPTER FOUR
Vania was a sport about it, once she recovered from the shock of having gone to bed with Jack London only to wake up in the morning feeling used if not abused by some other newspaperman entirely.
Knowing she’d have to be told sooner or later, if only as a common courtesy to the real Jack London, Stringer had waited until about as late as he dared and, knowing something about cold gray dawns, waited until he had her almost ready to come some more before he’d let her in on it, so after cussing him and begging him for more at the same time Vania had apparently decided no man who could make a lady come that hard could be all bad and, what the hell, she confided coyly, a newspaperman in her bush was worth two that couldn’t find Doctor Tesla for her any better.
Since she told him this fondly as they were sharing a warm shower and hot sex in the adjoining bath, Stringer suspected Vania knew as much as he did about timing one’s words with one’s actions. So, not wanting an argument at a time like this, for God’s sake, he just kissed her a lot and allowed he’d sure keep an eye out for old Nick as he went about his other morning chores, provided she let him get dressed this side of noon.
She must have wanted him to scout Tesla up for her and her Czar, for it wasn’t quite nine thirty by the time Stringer made it over to Nevada and Platte with a fair breakfast filling his innards above the belt and everything below the belt feeling just a mite drained.
Once more in control of his own movements, near the center of town, Stringer picked up some Bull Durham and directions at a corner tobacco shop, bought himself a new slicker, and hired himself a livery mount and stock saddle at the rather dear price of six bits a day plus deposit.
The new slicker was charcoal black and neither as light nor as bright as the one he’d lost. His reasons for switching to rain gear nobody’d ever noticed him wearing before were as obvious as they might have been uncomfortable and, what the hell, outside it didn’t look as if it was fixing to rain right now.
The livery pony, chosen with the same considerations in mind, was a nondescript bay gelding that could have passed for being part mule if such bloodlines had been possible. The saddle was a double-rigged roper, complete with a sixty or seventy-foot coil of grass rope.
Stringer felt no call to comment on a livery saddle gussied up so functional. He assumed they’d bought the saddle cheap as well as used off some hard-up working hand and while Stringer had been raised in Centerfire Saddle country, to rope dally style with a braided reata in chaparral that precluded such long tie down ropes, whether grass or rawhide, he could rope High Plains style if he had to, knew he wasn’t likely to have to, and felt he’d blend in better on the trail if he was traveling with a serious-looking stock saddle as well as Stetson, spurs and such. For since even before the turn of the century a heap of nesters, townsmen and even easterners had taken to dressing up cowboy-style whilst riding anywhere out West. Word had no doubt spread that certain hands with nothing better to do enjoyed rawhiding dudes. Meanwhile anyone with a lick of common sense could see the work duds of Cattle Country were most practical under the conditions one was most apt to encounter in the more primitive parts of the West. Save for a few trimmings, nothing much a real cow hand wore had ever been designed just to slow a man of action down.
With his new slicker tied across the saddle bags behind him, and said saddle bags packing provisions for a longer trip than he really intended, Stringer rode for Cripple Creek, trying to look more like a local cow hand hunting strays than an out-of-state newspaperman hunting a story some might not want to see printed.
The Gold Camp Road had to do some climbing, almost from the start. While the highest crest of Pikes Peak terminates a good ten miles west of Downtown Colorado Springs, it does so fourteen thousand feet and change above sea level. So to get there the ground has to start sloping just west of Fountain Creek and well inside the city limits.
Thus it came to pass that Stringer and his livery mount were well above the roof tops to their east when they came upon the oncemore quiet cow pasture Nikola Tesla had raised so much Ned in just a few short years before. The dairy herd was grazing, apparently un-tended, on the grassy slopes inside the three-strand barbed wire fence that ran alongside the Road. Near a gate on the upslope edge of the vast clearing Stringer spied a handful of frame buildings clustered around the base of a truncated timber tower. It reminded him of the oil derricks sprouting west of the Mississippi since the Spindletop Dome in Texas had proven there was rock oil out this way after all. The timber tower sprouting from this cow pasture had obviously been bigger, in its time. It was just as obvious a lot of the timber had been salvaged. So while the structure could have risen as high as three hundred feet in its day, they’d cut it down to no more than a three or four story stump since then. The buildings Tesla and his crew had used not all that long ago, had been worked over by the bone pickers as well. He saw a buckboard parked in front of the biggest barn-like structure, a swaybacked but still living draft critter. So Stringer reined in, tethered his own pony to a gate post, and rolled through the wire to mosey over and have a friendly word or more, he hoped, with whoever might have beat him out here this early in the morning.
As he approached the stripped-down lab, an older man wearing whipcord pants and lace-up boots under a sort of baseball cap and rough blue workshirt came out, looking disgusted until he spotted Stringer and decided to look more like a wooden Indian.
Stringer kept walking without breaking stride or swinging his gun hand anywhere near his right hip until, at conversational range, he called out, “Morning. Might you be in charge of those fine dairy cows?”
The stranger shot a morose glance at a contented looking deer-colored Jersey grazing just down the slope as he told Stringer, “I was fixing to ask you the same, cowboy. I answers to
Fletcher, Sparks Fletcher, and my chosen occupation would be troubleshooting for the Electric Company.”
Stringer allowed he’d noticed they had some trouble worth shooting and, after introducing himself and stating his own business, told the electrician, “Great minds seem to run in the same channels. Is this where Doctor Nikola Tesla played with lightning bolts that time?”
Fletcher nodded grimly and replied, “It was. Don’t ask me what he and them other infernal furriners figured they was doing up here. I only worked with the crew as run a plain old hundred and ten volt utility line this far to ’em. Hotwire Hamilton, the only licensed electrician from town that Tesla had working for him, swears that Tesla could crank the juice up past a million volts, and Lord knows how high they got her the night that Croation asshole blew every damn fuse in the county by running our main generator backwards, on lightning power, ’til it just naturally melted and set the whole damn plant on fire!”
Stringer nodded soberly and got out his note book as he said, “I heard a lot of folk out here were sort of vexed with Old Nick and his experiments. Seeing you’re the first paid-up electrician I’ve been able to ask, have you any notion just why Tesla felt the need to haul down lightning from the sky?”
The older man grimaced and replied, “Loco en la cabeza, most likely. Both Marconi and Edison are on record, now, as having allowed in as gentle a manner as possible that Tesla’s notions of invisible electrical rays don’t jibe with any they can get to work.”
Stringer sighed and said, “You’re already over my head, Sparks. I know the heavy thinkers have been playing with invisible rays since at least the late 1880s, but I’ll be scalded with sheep dip if I know what they’re talking about. I took General Science in High School. So I think I know how a wet cell makes an Edison bulb glow. But please don’t ask me why dipping two kinds of metal in acid creates an infernal electric current to begin with.”
Sparks chuckled and assured him, “Don’t worry. I don’t have the time, even if you had the interest, and there are too damn many licensed electricians in the city directory as it is.”
Stringer cocked an eyebrow and asked, “Did you just say one such gent named Hamilton worked for Doc Tesla in the flesh out here?”
Fletcher nodded and said, “I’d hardly call old Hotwire a gent, but she’s in the directory. I already asked her if she’s seen hide or hair of any of the old bunch this summer. But she tells me she’s sure her old boss is playing with lightning back east on Long Island and …”
“Hold it.” Stringer cut in, even as he wrote the name down, but demanded, “Are you saying one of the electricians Tesla hired to help him out here was a woman?”
Fletcher nodded and explained, “Widow woman. Kept the business going when her man Westinghoused his fool self with 800 Volts, a.c. She’s in the book and it’s a free country, but I doubt old Hotwire can tell you who or what’s been screwing up our system for weeks. Like I said, I asked her if she knew and she told me all she knew was that she’s been busy as hell fixing burnt-out appliances. We keep telling folk not to replace burnt-out fuses with copper pennies but they just won’t listen and you ought to see what a power surge can do to a lady’s hair curling iron or, for that matter, a lady curling her hair, at such wonderous times!”
Stringer grimaced and replied, “Jesus, has anyone been electrocuted by these mysterious modern wonders, Sparks?”
Fletcher shook his head, albeit dubiously, and said, “It’s only a question of time, if we don’t get a handle on the matter, pronto. If it was up to me alone we’d just pull the plug and let folk do with coal oil and candles „til we could trace the whole damn county grid from steam boilers to last outlying street lamps. But, considering how short a time we’ve had enough electric juice to matter, a heap of folk have grown dependent as hell on it. It ain’t just fear of the dark that causes panic every time the power fails us. Now that we got things from street cars to hotel elevators running with electric motors …”
“It’s a pain in the ass and even front page news.” Stringer cut in, adding, “Or it would be, if I could file more in the way of cause and effect. You say you’re sure the trouble’s not originating at the generating plant, itself?”
Fletcher looked injured and replied, “Bite your tongue. Where in tarnation did you expect us to start tracing the circuits from, the top of yon Pikes Peak? You’re as bad as that infernal Hotwire Hamilton, herself. She as much as accused the company of plotting to burn out all the fuses in town just so we could sell fresh ones to all our customers.”
“Does the local power trust sell gas and electric appliances as well?” asked Stringer, making a shorthand note as he waited for an answer. Sparks shrugged and answered the question with a question, asking, “Don’t tobacco shops sell matches?” Then he spoiled it all by adding, “You can buy fresh fuses, light bulbs and such at the same office where you pay your electric bill. The company offers its customers a real bargain, selling at cost just to keep everyone using plenty of juice. Every other outlet in the county has to charge twenty to forty percent more. That’s how come Hotwire spoke so spitefully. She knows we don’t make any real profit underselling her on damned light bulbs. Even if we did, we lose a bundle every damn time all the lights go out. For we bill customers by their meters and the damn meters don’t run when the power is off!”
Stringer stared thoughtfully at the ramshackle shed the trouble shooter had come out of, saying, “There has to be a less complicated way to peddle nickel fuses and two bit light bulbs. What were you expecting to find out here in the way of electrified skullduggery, Sparks?”
The older man sighed and said, “I hope I’ll know it when I see it. I don’t see how you can switch current off and on without no switch. I recalled a swamping switchboard they had in yonder shed when Doc Tesla was playing The Great Jehova out here that time. But they’ve about stripped out everything but a bolt here and a brass tack there.”
Stringer glanced up at the sky, noting the way the morning sun had risen whilst he could still see the rooftops of the city sprawling off to their east, and allowed it was a pure puzzle, but that he still had to get on over to Cripple Creek some time that day. So they shook on it and parted friendly.
Stringer hadn’t ridden much farther west when the road cut sharply south to follow a contour line around the southeast apron of Pikes Peak. Stringer didn’t argue. The road was still taking him skyward at a fairly wearisome grade. It was a funny thing, or would have been a funny thing to anyone less used to riding through high country, that this close to a mountain it got tougher to see the mountain. Gazing upslope once you were up the slope a ways, you had so many lesser bulges between you and the peak that the higher you went up a mountain the lower and less impressive it seemed. It was only when he gazed the other way, out across the rolling prairies to the southeast, that he could see how high he was now, even though the grass and gravel to either side of the road didn’t appear to slope this far down from the serious heights.
He was just getting used to the way the road seemed to gently wrap around the mountain, when he rode around a house-high outcropping and felt his heart skip a beat as his pony seemed to take wing and fly like Pegasus across the Colorado sky for a spell. Then Stringer saw they were still trotting along on solid ground, where the mountain road had been cut into an almost sheer cliff by some infernal engineer with a heap of dynamite and a lot more optimism than Stringer might have had faced with a damned wide canyon to cross.
There wasn’t any way to cross such a wide gulf, so after scaring Stringer good, the road hairpinned away from the drop-off to enter a deep dark tunnel blasted through solid granite. This naturally spooked the flying horse more than it did its human rider. So Stringer had to dismount and lead or, more to the point, drag the reluctant steed into what it likely took for a dragon’s lair.
It was just as well he’d done so, he felt sure, when halfway through the tunnel, just as Stringer had assured his fool mount on the scarcity of horse-eating dragons on
the slopes of Pikes Peak, they were beset by a roaring, honking, glary-eyed monster or mayhaps a horseless carriage, tearing up the road and into the tunnel after them at the scorching speed of twenty damned miles an hour!
The livery bay tried to buck off its rider and bolt, which may have been rougher on Stringer if he hadn’t already been afoot with a good grip on the reins. He clapped his free palm to the bay’s muzzle to calm it, or strangle it into submission, by covering its flared nostrils with a firm palm. For, unlike humans and most other critters, horses can’t inhale through their mouths and, since they know this, they know better than to argue with the smaller species than long ago outsmarted them, unless, of course, a human is dumb enough to give them an even break.
“Asshole!” Stringer hollered at the driver, if any, of the fancy black and tan Panard as it whipped through the scant space between him, his pony, and the far wall.
“Fuck you!” a cheery voice echoed through the tunnel amid the popcorn rattle of its tinny engine and the rumble of its red rubber tires over loose gravel. Stringer coughed dust, swore some, and led his now really spooked pony on until they were out in the sunlight again, with the road once more to themselves, albeit dust was still settling up ahead.
Stringer remounted and rode on, putting the rude road hog out of his mind as, for the first time since leaving town, the scenery began to get downright pretty.
