Edison Effect, The: A Professor Bradshaw Mystery (The Edison Effect)

by Bernadette Pajer

  Justin rolled his eyes. But his smile grew.

  “Can I have the bottle, son?”

  Justin handed it over. Bradshaw dug into his pocket and found a quarter. “Now you can buy me a present.”

  “I already made you something.”

  “You did? Well, you keep the money then. How about we go downstairs? You can finish stringing popcorn, and I’ll read us a story.”

  “‘A Christmas Carol’?”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  With a copy of Scrooge’s tale in hand, they headed downstairs to the parlor, and it occurred to Bradshaw he’d spoken the truth of his beliefs to his son, and they echoed not the Catholic Church, but Missouri Fremont.

  ***

  When Mrs. Prouty arrived home at ten, Bradshaw was dressed to go out.

  “Don’t wait up,” he said, wrapping a woolen scarf around his neck and pressing his hat low. The night was cold and clear and tinged with frost. He walked briskly, hands deep in his pockets. The streetcars were still running, and restaurants and places of entertainment open. He made his way down to the corner of Second and Pike and stood across the street from the Bon Marché, which was still busy with customers taking advantage of the extended hours. The Men’s Wear window display was lit up, with the mannequins depicting a jovial holiday morning, but there was no tree in the scene, nor any of Edison’s holiday lights. He stood for a quarter hour, willing inspiration to come, imagining someone tapping on the window to be let inside.

  Who had it been?

  What did he not yet know?

  He tried to keep his thoughts focused on the case, but they kept returning home, to Justin’s cubby in the closet, and the sight of the carbolic acid in his hands. What if he’d taken a few minutes longer to go in search of his son? What if Justin had decided to taste it?

  The thought sent a panic through him, his every nerve screaming, and his brain spiraling. He couldn’t stand still, so he began walking again, and then he ran for a few blocks, heedless of looks from others on the street, until a stitch in his side forced him to slow. When a streetcar passed, he hopped aboard and was soon headed north. He stood near the door, clinging to the strap until the end of the line, then walked again, his frenzied stride leading him toward the university. He avoided the lamps that lit the walks, staying in the shadows until he reached the Observatory. When he reached for the handle, he begged to find it unlocked, and nearly whimpered when it swung open for him. He lit the lantern kept near the door and carried it up into the dome. When he had the narrow section of roof open, he collapsed against the wall, head tilted back, praying to the stars in the heavens to instill in him a sense of perspective. There were more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth, Taylor had said. But Earth held just one small boy named Justin Bradshaw who was all the world to him.

  If only he had someone to talk to. Someone who understood not just his fears for his son, but everything. O’Brien, Henry, Mrs. Prouty, Professor Taylor—he knew they understood him to a point—only Missouri understood him completely. If she were here, she’d word her advice poetically. Something about roses and cycles and how men complicate things that are simple and try to simplify things that are complicated. She would tell him to stop trying to be perfect, stop trying to control everything. To simply be. Relax and be. And listen. In that regard, she would agree with the priest. He should stop struggling to make sense of it all because the noise in his brain was keeping out answers.

  And so he sat. He breathed. The stars winked. He shivered and dug his hands deeper into his pockets. Daulton had spent time here, just like this. Alone. So utterly alone, without the support of family nor any close friends, not trusting his teachers or government. Not trusting anyone.

  Bradshaw’s thoughts and breathing quieted. He allowed the silence to fill him.

  And that’s when he heard it. The clicking Taylor had mentioned. Not the creaking of the metal dome, but a snapping sound, like static electricity. He focused on the sound as it came and went, tilting his head to try to determine where it was coming from. It was quite near. On hands and knees he slowly crawled toward it until his head hit the base of the telescope.

  The sound came from within. He stood to open the door in the pedestal that allowed access to the weights. The snapping sound grew louder, then silenced. All was still within, the chain and weights unmoving. The pedestal was hollow below the level of the weights, but it was too dark to see anything. He lifted the lantern, but the light didn’t penetrate far enough. He set the lantern down, knelt beside the opening, and reached inside. His fingertips met the cool base, slightly gritty and dusty. The base was L-shaped. He moved his hand into the lower part of the L, a space a little more than an inch in height. His fingertips met something within that felt hard, smooth, like glass. He was able to move his fingers around the object and carefully pulled out a glass cylinder. When he held it to the lantern light he could see hundreds of thin discs of metal, stacked together.

  A closer inspection in better lighting was needed to draw a definite conclusion, but if he wasn’t mistaken, what he held was a miniature version of a battery known as a Zamboni pile. He’d built many of them over the years with his students, but never one this small. In Oxford, England, a pair of Zamboni piles had been set up to ring a bell. The movement was small, the clapper making little sound as it was pushed and pulled by the electrostatic force, but it had been moving continuously since it was assembled in 1840, sixty-three years ago. This Zamboni pile, if indeed that’s what it was, looked as if tiny holes had been punctured in the thin metal-coated discs. For what purpose? And is that what had produced the irregular static tick? Did the holes trigger some sort of intermittent electric discharge? And what on earth was it doing here, hidden away in the base of the telescope?

  He carefully set the battery aside and reached again into the small recess. His fingers met something else, something thinner and made of paper. He pulled the object out to find it was a handmade journal designed to fit the space. He sat propped against the telescope, heart beating rapidly as he opened the journal and immediately recognized Oscar Daulton’s writing. It was more hurried than usual, more frantic, as if he were greatly agitated or elated at the time of the writing.

  They will regret laughing, they will regret ignoring the warnings, as if I didn’t matter, as if none of us mattered. How easy it will be to take control and give power to those who deserve it, to each one of us so that we will never be used or abused again. Is this what Man felt when he invented the wheel? Did it make him laugh at how simple it turned out to be? Did it make him swell with pride that he could see what others could not? It is here, I see it in my mind as clearly as if I hold it in my hands, and its power is beyond imagination. Weapons will have no strength to defend against it. It is the ultimate weapon of peace.

  Page after page the writing continued, veiled and threatening. Rantings against the evils of politics and the freedom of anarchy. And the revolution of a weapon. His weapon. Daulton gave no specifics as to design, not even to say if the miniature dry pile battery stored with the journal was part of the weapon he wrote of. But one sentence sent a chill through Bradshaw that shook him to his core:

  At the exhibition, they will get a glimpse of what it can do, but they will never guess the true, magnificent, destructive power of my design. And it’s simple. So simple. Like the wheel. Why is everyone else so blind?

  There was no question as to what exhibition Daulton referred. He had participated in just one, the student exhibition in May of 1901. It was there he’d demonstrated his mysterious cigar-box invention that was now on the bottom of Elliott Bay.

  The writing was too vague to be theory, too far-fetched, radical, and unproven to hold truth. And yet. Hadn’t others had such visions? Didn’t Nikola Tesla see his inventions in a flash? Fully formed in his brain down to the last detail before he ever began to sketch them out?

 
Bradshaw thought of his own deductions as to what was in that cigar box. He’d not experimented with his ideas, true, other than to melt sulfur, but he had thought he was likely correct in deducing the main components. But an ultimate weapon? His speculation had never gone there.

  It wasn’t possible. Nothing in so small a space as that cigar box could contain anything as powerful as what Daulton intimated. And yet at the exhibition, Bradshaw had seen the silent flame emitted by the device. A flame that should not have been there. What else could the components of that cigar box do that was yet inexplicable? It had been used to kill three individuals in three different circumstances that Daulton had never explained. Could it also be harnessed to kill many? To be a weapon capable of defeating armies?

  Crazy. Impossible. And yet, if true, if Daulton’s terrible genius had seen what others could not yet attempt to grasp, and he had conceived of an ultimate weapon, and if that was the device he’d displayed at the exhibition and later tossed overboard into Elliott Bay, then, dear God.

  Bradshaw had wanted perspective, and he’d found it. All else in his life receded as one fact took precedence. Oscar Daulton’s mysterious box lost in Elliott Bay potentially held the secret to a terrible weapon of unthinkable power. And Bradshaw had thrown a ticking locator into the bay, in full view of a ferry full of witnesses.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sometime after midnight, clouds had moved in, insulating the city. By the time Bradshaw walked Justin home from Early Mass, delivering him to Mrs. Prouty’s care, the frost had melted entirely. He didn’t linger, not even for coffee. He hugged his son more fiercely than usual, then headed downtown. A cool wind gusted in from the bay and up the hill, sweeping away smoke from chimneys and buffeting his clothes, reminding him of time spent at the ocean this past summer, of how he’d hunkered against the wind to keep it from his ears, and how Missouri had tossed her arms open wide to embrace it.

  More proof of the disparity of their natures he did not need. Yet a part of him had wanted to embrace the wind, to pull off his shoes and splash barefoot in the sandy surf. There was a time in his younger days, before his disastrous marriage, when he’d been far bolder, when a tingle of fear only enhanced the excitement of an adventure. Never foolhardy, he nonetheless had taken calculated risks and enjoyed life. He’d rediscovered some of that thrill through his investigations, but that boldness had yet to enter his personal life. Would it ever?

  Out of habit, he joined a small group of pedestrians crossing Second Avenue—there was safety in numbers when traffic was thick, but today being Sunday, it was light—he wondered if the boldness had even abandoned his investigations. Where was the excitement? The drive to find a solution to the case? Last night he’d learned news that terrified him, and this morning?

  This morning he was locking away the source of his fear and when done, he wished only to go home and go back to bed. Fear of Daulton’s invention falling into the wrong hands, and the idea of Mrs. Prouty fussing over him like he was a sick child, prevented him from doing so.

  He’d examined the small glass cylinder he’d found in the telescope base and discovered his initial deduction to be correct. It was a miniature Zamboni pile. Inside he’d found thin paper discs with a zinc coating on one side and manganese peroxide on the other. Typical and ordinary. The perforations in the discs baffled him, and he’d not heard it emit any static sounds. He had no idea if the battery was related in some way to Daulton’s ramblings about a weapon or the cigar box out in the bay. But why else hide it away with his secret journal? Surely it had meant something of vital importance to Daulton. But what?

  It was a question Bradshaw could not now answer. Nor could he take the time to ponder. Before settling on his wall safe as the temporary repository of last night’s finds, he’d been tempted to destroy them. Only a profound abhorrence to the destruction of knowledge prevented him. What if someday the knowledge could be used for good rather than evil? Or if Daulton’s vague ramblings held the key to stopping an even greater evil? He didn’t want the responsibility of monitoring the world for such a need, but for now, having it all locked away gave him a small measure of—if not peace—then time. Or it would, once he found that wretched box lurking in Elliott Bay.

  With Daulton’s journal and the miniature dry pile battery safely locked in his safe, Bradshaw continued down to the waterfront where the streets were planked rather than paved because beneath them was not solid ground but a network of pillars and piers and scaffolding, swept twice daily by the tides, and always in need of repair. Railroad Avenue was to him an engineering marvel. One hundred and fifty feet wide and several miles long, the avenue was in reality a timber trestle that supported the weight of a dozen train tracks and their massive burdens, along with horses and freight wagons and constant traffic.

  It was just one example of the tenacity, the audacity, of the sort of men who changed the future. Such men could see possibilities where others saw only muck. Everywhere Bradshaw looked in Seattle, he could find examples of such confidence and success. Tides and hills did not defeat such men. And such men did not allow life’s cruel events to cower them or cripple them with fears. No. They faced life bravely and made things happen. How did one become such a man? How did one stand in the face of opposition and adversity and find joy in the challenge?

  What had O’Brien said? That he didn’t want to see Bradshaw become a dour plodding old fool again? Well, neither did he. This roller coaster ride of fears had to end. It was no way to live.

  He marched on, his back erect, his jaw set. He counted no fewer than seven languages as he made his way along Railroad Avenue, and identified the flags of six countries flying from masts at the wharves. The counting, he knew even as he did it, was a diversion from an idea. A bold, ridiculous, lunatic idea, that nevertheless took hold of him and would not be silenced.

  When he reached the office of the Seattle Salvage Company, his stomach was in knots.

  “Your ticking device has not moved,” said Captain Donovan, a tall sandy-haired fellow with touches of white at the temples. Donovan owned the company, captained the tug, the Beverlee B, and was his company’s master diver, although he rarely went down himself anymore. A bout of pneumonia the previous year had left him with scars that impaired his breathing. His office was no shanty like Galloway’s, but a modern space in a modern brick building on the avenue, across from the modern, new five-hundred-foot wharf extending out into the harbor. The floors did not shine, as polished flooring wasn’t practical to such a business, but they were clean, the plaster walls white, the charts and nautical items well displayed.

  “We set a buoy nearby but couldn’t mark the exact spot since it’s too near the traffic lane. One of my men scooted out there this morning in the launch and listened with one of your portable microphones. Still ticking and gonging like clockwork.” He chuckled at his pun. “I’d say it’s sitting about sixty feet down.”

  “Sixty? That shallow?”

  “It doesn’t seem so shallow when you’re down below with sixty feet of water above your head. But yes, sixty is easier on a man than a hundred, and we did expect your ticker to be in much deeper water. Boulder reefs run into the bay in that area. Looks like your ticker box landed on one. It doesn’t appear it was carried far by underwater currents or the tide before it settled, so let’s hope it’s pointing the way to Daulton’s box. Your man Ruzauskas is here. He just checked out with our gear. He’d make a fine professional, if he decides to change careers.”

  “How many men are you able to send down at a time?”

  “We’ve got pumps for four, but not the manpower currently. One of our divers is out sick, and we loaned another to Tacoma Wrecking, so we’ve got just Charlie and your man for this dive. We agreed on two originally, but I can try to find a third diver. A good man will add another ten dollars a day to your cost.”

  “I’d like to talk to Troy before I answer that. He’s on the dock?”r />
  The captain led him across the train tracks to where the Beverlee B and her diving scow were berthed. Troy was there, still in a diving suit but with the helmet and weight belt removed. His youthful face was flushed with the exhilaration of his dive.

  Bradshaw looked at Troy and heard himself ask, “How would you feel about me going down with you?”

  Troy’s eyes opened wide with surprise, and a grin gave away his pleasure. “You? But Professor, you said—”

  “And it’s still true. I’m terrified. I’m afraid of heights and depths and tight places. I’m light-headed at the thought of it, but I have one thing in my favor, and that’s dedication. To your safety and to our mission. I want to find Daulton’s box, now more than ever. If after attempting this, I find I can’t do it after all, or if I feel I will not be safe for you, I won’t go through with it.”

  “All right. I know you can do it.”

  The young man was a hopeless optimist. Bradshaw turned to the captain. “What do you say? Can you teach me what I need to know by tomorrow?”

  “We can try,” said the captain, rubbing a doubtful jaw. “But at the end of the day, it’s my call.”

  “Fair enough. Is sixty feet manageable for a beginner?”

  “It is for some beginners. It’s a game of nerves, Professor. It’s not a matter of you being physically capable, but mentally able. I’ve never known a man with such fears as yours who’s been able to do it. Sometimes men don’t even know they have such fears until they put on the gear.”

  “At least I know what I’m about to be hit with.”

  “It will kill you or cure you, Professor Bradshaw. One or the other. I’ve got a list of instructions and safety rules to go over with you, but there’s no sense in spending the time if the suit proves too much for you.”