John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Burke said he would, then asked if there was an Internet cafe in the neighborhood.

She lit a cigarette and gave him directions.

The Web was fantastic. He’d arrived at the Sava Cafe with nothing more than a name. And now, barely an hour later, he knew enough about Nikola Tesla – thanks to Google and the Wikipedia – to pass a third-grade Serbian science class.

A Serb born in Croatia, Tesla was a prodigious inventor, responsible (as the desk clerk had claimed) for alternating current, the Tesla coil, and scores of other devices. His patents numbered in the hundreds, and he was obviously something of a cult figure – and not just in Serbia. Tesla enthusiasts considered it a travesty that he had not been awarded the Nobel Prize, calling him “the Leonardo of the twentieth century.”

After moving to the United States and working with Edison, Tesla became a rival to the American when he invented and championed alternating current, rather than the direct current that Edison favored. With the backing of the Westinghouse Corporation, Edison mounted a propaganda campaign to make alternating current appear dangerous. Dogs and cats, and even an elephant, were electrocuted onstage to make the point, while Edison asked men in the audience if they wanted their wives to risk their lives every time they plugged in the iron.

Edison’s argument was false. Not only was Tesla’s alternating current safer than Edison’s direct current, it was more efficient and easier to deliver. Eventually, and with the backing of J. P. Morgan, the nineteenth century’s quintessential robber baron, Tesla’s technology won out.

It was the Serb who lit up the towns around Niagara Falls, and who won the contract to illuminate the “White City” at the Chicago World’s Fair.

In his heyday, Tesla lived in New York and was considered a trophy guest at the lavish gatherings of the gilded age. He partied with the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, and the Rockefellers, and hosted them and their guests in his Manhattan laboratory. A close friend of Mark Twain’s, he astonished the writer and his friends with demonstrations worthy of Dr. Frankenstein. While Twain and other guests watched in amazement, Tesla would stand on an improvised platform, wreathed in lightning. He’d pace the lab with tubes of light that seemed to have no power source, while juggling balls of fire that left no marks on his clothes or skin. Where Edison was a chubby plodder, who wore his wife’s smocks while he worked, Tesla was elegant and thin, a six-foot-six genius who performed his experiments in waistcoat and tails.

As quirky as he was brilliant, the inventor lived at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he dined alone each night in the Palm Room. There, he engaged in a ritual that involved a stack of linen napkins, with which he wiped clean every piece of cutlery, china, and glass on the table. That done, he could not eat until he’d calculated the cubic capacity of each vessel and, by extension, the volume of food before him.

It occurred to Burke that the Serb was a classic victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

And hypersensitive, as well. According to Tesla’s biographers, the inventor had almost supernaturally acute hearing. He could hear a watch ticking several rooms away, and could sense a thunderstorm in another state. Acutely sensitive to pressure, he could not walk into a cave, through a tunnel, or under a bridge without suffering.

He was so plagued by the city’s vibrations, by the passing of trucks and the rumble of trains, that the legs of his table in the Palm Room, like those in his laboratory, had to be sheathed in rubber. Sunlight pressed down upon him, and his vision was disturbed by flashes of light and auras that no one else saw. He counted every step he took, organizing the world around him in multiples of the number nine. He had a violent hatred of pearl earrings, and was horrified by the prospect of touching another person’s hair. But…

It was Tesla, rather than Marconi, who first patented a method for wireless broadcasting, and it was Tesla who harnessed the power of Niagara Falls. He worked for years on ways of transmitting energy wirelessly across great distances, and claimed that he could capture electricity – free energy – from “standing waves” at the earth’s core.

He died in 1943, while the Second World War was at fever pitch in Europe. At the time, he was living in reduced circumstances at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. According to reports, two FBI agents and a nurse were present at his death. When the inventor’s relatives came to the hotel, they found that his safe had been drilled and his papers removed. Soon afterward, the Custodian of Alien Property seized virtually all of Tesla’s papers, though the Custodian’s jurisdiction was questionable since Tesla had been an American citizen for decades. Those papers, which required a boxcar to transport, remained in limbo until the end of the war, when the American government uncovered Nazi documents in the course of an intelligence operation, code-named Paper-clip. The Nazi papers showed that German scientists and weapons designers had been developing new and frightening weapons based on Teslan principles and inventions. In 1945, Tesla’s papers were officially classified Top Secret and taken to Los Alamos.

Eight years later, a nephew of Tesla’s succeeded in gaining the release of some one hundred fifty thousand documents, and this trove became the founding archive of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

But the bulk of Tesla’s papers (including most of the scientific notebooks, research papers, and experimental notes) remain classified to this day. Since Tesla was such a cult figure, many researchers had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for documents concerning the inventor and his work. All had been rebuffed. On one website, a scientist wrote that while working at Los Alamos, he was permitted to view diagrams and papers concerning the hydrogen bomb, but not a page of Tesla’s work.

What could this scientist, who died more than sixty years ago, have to do with a bank account in the Channel Islands? For all Burke knew, Tesla was just a hobby, an interest of d’Anconia’s that was relevant to nothing and to no one. D’Anconia might just as easily have been interested in orchids. Or UFOs. Or Civil War reenactments.

Only he wasn’t. He was interested in Tesla.

Burke decided to take a break. Got to his feet and stretched. A girl with multiple piercings and blue streaks in her hair brought him a coffee that was strong and sweet. A pair of Israeli backpackers sat down at the terminal next to his.

Returning to his chair, he typed: “Tesla Symposium Belgrade 2005.” Twenty-three hits, most of them in a language he didn’t recognize. (Presumably Serbian.) But there were a couple in English.

The first was the home page for the Museum of Nikola Tesla, which contained a link to the symposium’s site. He wrote down the museum’s address, 51 Proleterskih brigada Street, then took the online tour, which guided him from room to room through the museum. Along with Tesla’s ashes, personal effects, and correspondence, there were many photographs, original patents, and models of his inventions. The museum also housed the Tesla archives, which included the documents his nephew had obtained from the U.S. government.

He returned to the Google list and clicked on the site “2006 Tesla Symposium, Belgrade,” which included details of the program. He scanned through, looking for d’Anconia’s name.

And so on. Looking through the list, the vocabulary alone drove home just how far out of his depth Burke was. Nucleons, flux intensity, Fourier frequencies, “magnetostatic scalar potential.”