The Wells Bequest (17 page)

“That must be Louis Latimer!” Jaya whispered to me excitedly. “He was a big deal in Edison's company. Is, I mean.”

I nodded. We'd done a unit about Latimer in science class last year. I thought he was really cool. His parents escaped from slavery, and he joined the navy at sixteen to fight for the Union in the Civil War. After the war was over, he taught himself mechanical drawing and worked his way up from office boy to draftsman in a patent law firm. He went on teaching himself—science, engineering, languages. He patented a bunch of inventions, including a better carbon filament lightbulb and an improved toilet for trains. He spent years working for Edison as a draftsman and electrical engineer. And he played the flute and wrote poetry.

“If you say so, sir,” said the doorman. He stepped aside disapprovingly. Apparently he didn't like the idea of ladies in the lounge, not even princesses.

Jaya and I walked past him and the automatic door swung shut behind us. Mr. Latimer gave it a satisfied look, as if he expected us to be impressed. Evidently automatic doors were still new and exciting here.

The place was super-fancy. On the right was a long double room with gold-and-white wallpaper and furniture upholstered in yellow. On the ceiling, painted angels were waving lightning bolts around their heads. The lightning forked and zigzagged, and the angels' hair stood out in sparky halos. You could almost hear it crackling with static electricity.

“Are you an electric angel?” I whispered to Jaya. “They have your hair.”

“Shh!” she hissed. “Servants don't make personal remarks.”

Mr. Latimer came over to us. “May I introduce myself? I'm Louis Latimer,” he said.

“Jaya Rao, Rani of Chomalur,” said Jaya in her best Auntie Shanti accent, holding out her hand. “And this is my . . . servant, Leo.”

Mr. Latimer raised an eyebrow and shook her hand. “An Indian princess, are you? We don't get many of those here at the Electric Club.”

Uh-oh, I thought. He doesn't believe her. And as Edison's patent guy, won't he be on Edison's side of the great current rivalry—against Tesla?

“Even in faraway Chomalur we have heard of this country's great electrical scientists and their inventions,” said Jaya. “Our palace is lit with American technology. I wanted to learn about it for myself. Am I right that you are the author of
Incandescent Lighting
?”

“Oh, you know my book?” Mr. Latimer looked pleased. Good one, Jaya, I thought. “
Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description,
” he said. “I hope you don't mind my saying—you remind me a little of my elder daughter.”

That was promising. Latimer had to face plenty of prejudice himself and so did his daughters, probably. Even if he didn't believe Jaya about being an Indian princess, it sounded like he sympathized.

“And you remind me a bit of my royal father,” said Jaya.

He looked amused. “Do I?” he said. “Well, well. Perhaps we're related somehow.”

“Oh, we're all related somehow, if you believe in the theories of Mr. Darwin—or in Adam and Eve, for that matter,” said Jaya, way too pertly. “Tell me, Mr. Latimer,” she continued. “You're in charge of Mr. Edison's library, aren't you?”

“That's right,” he said, surprised.

Uh-oh, I thought again. Where was she going with this? Latimer was a key figure in nineteenth-century technology. Without him, Alexander Graham Bell would never have filed his patent for the telephone in time to beat Elisha Gray. Latimer had worked on a lot of Edison's most important patents too. What if Jaya said something to him that changed the course of history?

“Your Highness,” I hissed.

Mr. Latimer glanced at me.

“Later, Leo,” she said dismissively. “And are you involved with the New-York Circulating Material Repository?” she asked Mr. Latimer.

“I think I've heard of it,” he said.

“Jaya!” I hissed as quietly as I could, “what are you
doing
?”

She ignored me. “I imagine you would find it very interesting. I believe you could make an important contribution to the scientific collections,” she said. “The repository provides study materials for workmen who are trying to better their condition. Physical objects—laboratory materials and so on.”

Jaya was going way too far. How could I stop her? I couldn't kick her. Servants don't kick their bosses, and besides, even if I did, it wouldn't shut her up. Dragging her out by the hair wouldn't work either. Jaya would just march back in. If she didn't, we would lose our chance to talk to Tesla.

“Oh, that does sound interesting,” said Mr. Latimer. “I've been teaching immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement. They could use some hands-on experience. I'll look into it—thank you.”

“Wouldn't you like to start an important collection of electrical technology?” said Jaya. “I'm sure the librarians at the repository will be open to it.”

Maybe if I started to choke or something, Jaya would have to stop talking and help me?

Then Jaya shut up all by herself. The automatic door had opened and a very tall, very thin man walked in.

It was Nikola Tesla.

Two Geniuses and One Very Long Lecture

I
recognized Tesla right away from pictures in history books, but no still photo could capture the man's intensity. With his flashing blue eyes, gaunt build, and spiky limbs, he looked like a walking lightning bolt. The room changed when he came in. The corners seemed to crackle.

Mr. Latimer strode over to greet him. “Good evening, Tesla. I've been looking forward to hearing you talk,” he said.

“Latimer! I'm glad you could make it,” said Tesla, shaking his hand. He spoke quickly, with a Serbian accent—he sounded like my uncle Dragomir. I was relieved that he didn't seem to hold Mr. Latimer's association with Edison against him.

Jaya hurried over too. “Mr. Tesla! There you are,” she began.

Tesla trained his electric eyes on her, taking in her silk scarf, her ruby, and her Jaya-ness. “Madam,” he said.

“Nikola Tesla—the Rani of Chomalur,” said Mr. Latimer.

Tesla bowed over her hand and kissed it. “Enchanted, Your Excellency,” he murmured.

“Mr. Tesla, I need to talk to you about . . . about a very important matter relating to your research,” said Jaya.

“Nothing would give me more pleasure, Your Highness. Now I must prepare for my lecture, but you will do me great honor if you will be my guest for dinner afterward.”

Jaya mastered her impatience. It looked like it almost killed her. “Thank you,” she said.

“Can I help you set up, Tesla?” asked Mr. Latimer.

“You are very kind. If you'll excuse us, Your Excellency.” Tesla bowed at Jaya, Latimer winked at her, and the two geniuses walked upstairs, leaving us alone in the room.

“Jaya,” I growled, trying to keep my voice down, “what did you think you were
doing,
telling Latimer about the repository? You could change history! What if he interferes with the collections?”

“But that's
exactly
what he's going to do. It's what he was
always
going to do! Who do you think started the repository electro-technical collections in the first place? It was Latimer! He was a big friend and patron of the repository. Mr. Steel was so impressed with those collections that he left us the Wells Bequest. We wouldn't be here—you and me—if it weren't for Latimer! Ask Dr. Rust if you don't believe me.”

“But maybe he was supposed to find out from somebody else, and now he'll never start the collections, and Steel will leave his stuff to the library in Pittsburgh or someplace, and none of this will happen, and you and me—maybe we'll never even meet!”

“Calm down, Leo. We did meet, didn't we? You're standing right here. It's the other way around. Maybe if I hadn't said anything to Latimer, he would never have started the electro-technical collections and
then
we wouldn't meet.”

The automatic doors swung open. “Shh—someone's coming,” I said.

A man walked in, swinging a cane. He had shaggy hair and a big, bushy mustache. His eyebrows bristled in opposite directions, like a pair of push brooms trying to get away from each other. He paused to take off his coat and joke around with the doorman.

I had definitely seen his picture somewhere. Where?

After a second I came up with it: on the back of a book.

“Oh, quark!
Top
quark! Is that who I think it is?” whispered Jaya.

“You mean Mark Twain?” I whispered back. “
Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain?
Huckleberry Finn
and the telelectroscope?”

She nodded. “Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain is his pen name. But what's he doing here?”

“He's best buds with Tesla,” I whispered. There was a picture of Mark Twain in my Tesla book, I remembered, taken in Tesla's lab, with Twain holding a glowing orb and looking a little like Einstein.

Jaya said, “Cool! I always wanted to meet Mark Twain.”

“Don't you dare talk to him about his books!” I said.

“You goofball—writers love it when you talk about their books. Look at Latimer.”

“I know, but it's too dangerous. You could mess up and talk about the ones he hasn't written yet.”

“Oh, he wrote all the important ones years ago,” said Jaya airily.

Mark Twain and the doorman burst out laughing at something Twain had said. He slapped the other man on the shoulder and came into the parlor. He was a large man, tall and loose limbed, like some big-headed western animal—a bison or something. He walked with a sort of energetic shamble.

When he caught sight of Jaya, he stopped dead. “Bless me!” he drawled. “Either I'm dreaming or you're real!”

“I could say the same thing about you,” said Jaya. “Why shouldn't I be real?” She was talking in her normal voice, not her Rani-of-Chomalur Cambridge accent.

“I thought you were a dream, all those years ago!”

“Really? We've met before? Well,
that
makes things easier! Hey, why aren't you wearing a white suit?”

“Should I be wearing a white suit?”

“You always do in the movies.”

“What are ‘the movies'? And why don't you look older?”

“Moving pictures—cinema. Hasn't it been invented yet? If not, it will be soon. There's a really cool early movie where they build a rocket and fly to the moon—the rocket's in the Phénoménothèque Centrale Supérieure de la Ville de Paris. Quit it, Leo!”

I was kicking her hopelessly. “Jaya!
You
quit it!” I hissed.

Mark Twain looked at me. “Jaya! That's it! I've been trying to remember that name all these years. It
is
Jaya, isn't it?”

“Yes.” She held out her hand. “Jaya Rao, Rani of Chomalur.” This time she remembered to use the accent.

“Oh, so you're a princess now?” He folded Jaya's hand in his big paw and shook it vigorously. “What about you, young man? Are you a prince?”

“No, he's my servant, Leo,” said Jaya.

“Your servant, eh?” Twain guffawed. “Well, how do you like
that,
young man?”

“I . . .” I didn't know how to answer. “But how do you know Jaya?”

“I met this young lady ten years ago. She crushed my favorite hat. And she told me all about
you.
” He shook his shaggy head at Jaya. “Funny thing, you don't look a day older than you did then. Which makes sense, if what you told me was true. Well, well, well! I'm glad you're real after all. Bless your heart, you gave me a splendid idea for a novel—but I guess you already know that. I always wanted to thank you, and it's no use trying to thank a dream.”

“What novel?” asked Jaya, forgetting the accent again.

“Why,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
It's the story of a modern man who visits the past. Don't they read it anymore in your time? No, don't tell me. The news of my book's death might finish me off, and I'm nowhere near ready for my own funeral.”

“Oh, don't worry!
A Connecticut Yankee
is a classic. So I inspired it? Cool!”

“Jaya,” I said, “is that true? Did you really go visit Mark Twain in the 1880s?”

“Well, no, not yet. But I'm obviously going to.”

“When you do, will you do me a favor?” said Mark Twain. “Warn me not to invest a single penny in that diabolical typesetting machine.”

“Sure,” said Jaya.

At the same time, I said, “She can't!”

“Why not? I would take it as a great kindness.”

“Well, she didn't, or you wouldn't have to ask her to now,” I explained. “So that means she won't, so she can't. And if she did, it might change history, which could have terrible consequences.”

“Oh, you and your terrible consequences!” Jaya snapped. “What makes you think all my consequences will be so terrible, anyway? I inspired
A Connecticut Yankee
—that wasn't such a
terrible consequence,
was it? And yes, I can
so.
The Wells machine is unrestricted, so the fact that I didn't warn him yet doesn't mean I won't. I can do whatever I like. But don't worry, Mr. Clemens—your financial situation isn't a problem in the long run. You'll sort it out soon.”

“Thank you—that's a great relief,” said Mark Twain.

“Jaya! You can't go around prophesying like that!”

“I don't see why not. He
does
sort out his finances, so what's wrong with telling him? But Mr. Clemens, I need you to do me a favor. Can you help me get a private word with Tesla?”

“Leave it to me.”

To my relief, the electric door opened and the room filled with lecture guests, so Jaya stopped talking to Mark Twain about time travel. After a few minutes Mr. Latimer came down to usher us upstairs into the lecture room.

• • •

“Ladies and gentlemen, Your Excellency,” said Tesla, bowing slightly toward Jaya, “I propose today to address you on a subject of universal concern. I will speak of nothing less”—he paused dramatically, glaring around the room at everyone—“than the future of mankind!”

The audience of thirty or forty men and three women—counting Jaya—sat up straight in their chairs to listen.

“The progress in a measured time is nowadays more rapid and greater than it ever was before,” said Tesla in his quick, light, accented voice. “This is quite in accordance with the fundamental law of motion, which commands acceleration and increase of momentum or accumulation of energy under the action of a continuously acting force and tendency and is the more true as every advance weakens the elements tending to produce friction and retardation.”

He paused. The audience had slumped a little. One man surreptitiously pulled out his watch, frowned at it, and tucked it back in his vest pocket. Another man sitting near us nudged the guy next to him and whispered, “Look! Isn't that Lillie Langtry—the actress?” He pointed his chin at a curvy woman in an enormous hat.

“For,” continued Tesla, “after all, what
is
progress, or—more correctly—development, or evolution, if not a movement, infinitely complex and often unscrutinizable, it is true, but nevertheless exactly determined in quantity as well as in quality of motion by the physical conditions and laws governing it?”

Jaya squirmed. For the zillionth time, I wished she had chosen something else to leave as a deposit at the repository. Her bossiness or her perfect skin—anything but her patience. “Princesses don't squirm,” I whispered.

“How do you know? How many princesses have you met?” she whispered back.

Mark Twain, who was sitting on her other side, whispered, “Princesses don't whisper, either.”

“Neither do famous authors,” whispered Jaya back.

A man behind us cleared his throat. We all shut up, trying fairly successfully not to laugh.

Tesla was saying, “What has been so far done by electricity is nothing as compared with what the future has in store. The safeguarding of forests against fires, the destruction of microbes, insects, and rodents will, in due course, be accomplished by electricity.”

The audience perked up. I guess they didn't like insects and rodents.

“The safety of vessels at sea will be particularly affected,” Tesla went on. “We shall have electrical instruments which will prevent collisions, and we shall even be able to disperse fogs by electric force and powerful and penetrative rays.”

That sounded like a good idea, actually. Maybe I could adapt it to solve Jaya's problem of the hands-free umbrella. I got distracted trying to think of how you would do it, exactly—what kind of rays?

When I tuned in to Tesla's lecture again, he was saying, “Great improvements are also possible in telegraphy and telephony. The use of a new receiving device will enable us to telephone through aerial lines or cables of any length by reducing current to an infinitesimal value. This invention will enormously extend wireless transmission.”

Scattered applause from the audience. “Wow, he really is a genius! He's describing the cell phone—decades before it was invented!” Jaya whispered.

Tesla continued, “The time is bound to come when high-frequency currents will be on tap in every private residence. We may be able to do away with the customary bath. The cleaning of the body can be instantaneously effected simply by connecting it to a source of electric energy of very high potential, which will result in the throwing off of dust or any small particles adhering to the skin.”

Mark Twain muttered, “The very thought makes my hair stand on end.”

Tesla paused dramatically again. “But let us turn now to a far graver question: that of warfare—and, far more important, of peace.”

I nudged Jaya. “Pay attention! I think he's about to talk about the death ray.”

I tried to listen, but his language was so dense and abstract that my mind kept wandering. From what I could tell, he thought that future wars would be fought by high-tech robots deep in the oceans or high in the atmosphere, leaving people on Earth in perfect safety and peace.