Tesla fiddled with a device on the table, while another eager assistant moved to what Paul thought might be a generator on a nearby tabletop.
“You just say the word,” said this student assistant. All the students were in suits of either brown or light gray. Not a button had been loosened on their collars. Not a roll was to be found upon their shirtsleeves. They had apparently inherited their teacher’s obsession with neatness.
“Robert,” said Tesla without looking up from his device, “climb aboard the table.”
The students exchanged confused glances.
“Pardon, sir?” replied the tallest of them.
“Mr. Robert Miles,” said Tesla. “Lift your corpse aboard this table.”
“You want me to stand on the table?” said Robert.
“No,” said Tesla. “You will not stand. I want for your laying yourself in front of the tube.”
Though this did little to clarify matters, Robert moved as instructed. He had clearly been studying with Tesla for some time and knew better than to question one of his teacher’s demands, no matter how odd.
Robert heaved himself onto the table and lay down with his feet pointing toward Tesla, his head aimed toward a silvery plate that rested on the tabletop, reflecting slices of light across the room.
“Revolve,” said Tesla. Robert, after performing a quick Tesla-to-English translation, turned his body ninety degrees. His long legs hung off the wide end of the table, and his head drooped out of Paul’s sight over the other side.
“Like this?” asked Robert.
“Just as so,” answered Tesla. “Now please raise your right leg.”
Robert strained to balance his leg in the air as Tesla adjusted something on the device before him.
“Mr. Jason Barnes,” said Tesla into the air. “Current now, please.”
A student by the generator turned two metal knobs. The machine began to hum.
“And here you will have it,” said Tesla proudly as he turned something on the device before him. The student near the silver plate watched it closely. Robert did his best to remain perfectly still on the table. The whole of the room seemed to breathe in with a nervous anticipation as long, tense seconds followed Tesla’s proclamation.
Nothing whatsoever happened.
Ten seconds of awkward silence lengthened into twenty.
Neither Tesla nor his students did so much as look up from the table. Paul was quite confused.
“Aha!” Tesla declared. He stood suddenly, the full length of his frame rearing up over the huddle of men around him. “Mr. Robert Miles, you may disembark.”
Robert hopped off the table. The students all stared at the silver plate. To Paul’s surprise, it was now growing black.
“You will all be patient for a moment,” said Tesla. “The salts are having their reaction.”
It was only then that Tesla noticed his visitors.
“Mr. Paul Cravath,” said Tesla with a smile. “It is pleasing to visage you.”
“And you too,” replied Paul. On the faraway shores of Tesla’s mind, visitors came and went. As to how they arrived or departed, Tesla seemed neither to know nor to care.
“What is it that you’ve created here?” said Paul. He did not recognize the device on the table. But if it either was—or prefigured—the device that Westinghouse needed, Paul felt certain he would not be able to resist physically embracing Tesla whether the inventor liked it or not.
“In scant seconds, you shall see. Come, come, come!”
Tesla motioned for Paul and company to join him and his students across the makeshift laboratory. The assembled devices and machines were less gargantuan than those destroyed in his burned-down New York lab, and yet their variety seemed at least as impressive. Glass objects of every shape that Paul might imagine lined one wall, mushroom bulbs and fat circles and long, delicate spears. Each was perfectly clear, hand polished into dustless radiance. Another wall held what seemed to be electrical components: the wound copper coils, spidery antennas, and precisely weighted gears that formed the backbone of all of Tesla’s work. With these tools, Tesla harnessed the mysterious liquid of electrical energy and built from it…something. The alternating-current motor had been only the first act of his performance; the giant coil of lightning Paul had seen in New York had been the second. Would an entirely new form of light bulb be the third? Would there be any end to the wonders that Nikola Tesla might conjure into the world?
“Come regard, Misters Cravath and Miss Agnes Huntington,” said Tesla. “I call it a shadowgraph.”
Tesla directed his guests’ attention to the once-silver plate. It was now mostly pitch black, with ghostly silver forms tracing through its center. It took Paul a moment to make out the shape etched in silver: It was a bone.
“Is that…?” asked Agnes, coming to the same realization.
“It’s my femur,” said Robert. “It’s inside my leg.”
“Nikola,” said Erastus, “did you just take a photograph of the inside of this man’s leg?”
“No, no,” replied Tesla. “Not a photograph; it is a shadowgraph. It records density of matter, not brightness of illuminations. On the shadowgraph, that which is of greatest density is lightest. That which is of none is dark.”
“It strips away the skin,” said Agnes, “and reveals an image of the bone underneath?”
“Precisely,” said Tesla.
Quietly, in secret, from an impromptu subterranean laboratory in the Tennessee plains, Tesla had teamed with the precocious sons of southern freedmen to engineer wonders stranger than anything Edison and his well-heeled peers might have dreamed. Paul had once thought that Thomas Edison was the most American man of his generation. But looking around the worktable before him at Tesla and his students carefully considering their darkening plate, Paul saw another America. This one had been born in an impoverished Serbian village and a West Tennessee cotton field. Where the first America was brilliant, the second was ingenious. What the first America did not invent, the second would tinker into being. What Wall Street would not fund, a Nashville basement would build. This was what men like Edison and Morgan feared. With checkbooks such as theirs, with the ability to buy and sell a place like Fisk with a single pen scribble, they still slept badly in their Fifth Avenue redoubts. They used their lawyers to batter down places just such as this. They had their patents, their carefully worded claims to preeminence. Tesla and his students had only their inventiveness. Paul saw on the faces of Robert and Jason and their peers that what these men did was not for money, it was not for class or some abstract social achievement. These men built things because they were smart. They were eager and they were precocious and they were curious. Paul wanted always to live in an America in which Thomas Edison would fear a smart kid in a basement whose father had harvested enough cotton that his son might harvest volts.
“Does it hurt?” Erastus asked Robert.
The student instinctively looked toward his leg and wiggled it. “I don’t think so?”
“You are quite well,” said Tesla. “So you witness the machine’s operation. Mr. Wilhelm Roentgen shall be pleasing.”
“This is what I’ve come to discuss with you,” said Paul. “You’ve grown healthy again. Your memory has returned, and so has your genius. I cannot tell you how happy I am to see it. This machine…or any of the others along the walls…is it an incandescent lamp?”
Tesla looked at Paul as if he were the one whose speech was largely indecipherable. “Why is it that they would be lamps?”
“A light bulb designed to make the most use of A/C,” offered Paul. “Something that would clearly in no way infringe on Edison’s patent. This is what Westinghouse needs to survive the lawsuit. That’s what you were working with his team to build. Can the device that you’ve created here help them in that regard?”