“And none of this runs on electricity as it’s now understood?”
He gave me a look of amused contempt. “Of course not.”
“It runs on the secret electricity.”
“Yes. That’s what I call it.”
“A kind of electricity that nobody else has discovered in all the years since Scribonius. Until you came along. A minister who used to build battery-driven toys as a hobby.”
“Oh, it’s known. Or was. In De Vermis Mysteriis, written in the late fifteenth century, Ludvig Prinn mentions it. He calls it potestas magna universi, the force that powers the universe. Prinn actually quotes Scribonius. In the years since I left Harlow, potestas universum—the search for it, the quest to harness it—has become my whole life.”
I wanted to believe he was delusional, but the cures and the strange three-dimensional portraits I’d seen him create in Tulsa argued against that. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe all that mattered was whether or not he was telling the truth about mothballing C. Danny Jacobs. If he was done with miracle cures, my mission was accomplished. Wasn’t it?
He adopted a lecturely tone. “To understand how I’ve progressed so far and discovered so much on my own, you have to realize that science is in many ways as faddish as the fashion industry. The Trinity explosion at White Sands happened in 1945. The Russians exploded their first A-bomb in Semipalatinsk, four years later. Electricity was first generated by nuclear fission in Arco, Idaho, in 1951. In the half century since, electricity has become the ugly bridesmaid; nuclear power is the beautiful bride everyone sighs over. Soon fission will be demoted to ugly bridesmaid and fusion will become the beautiful bride. When it comes to research into electrical theory, grants and subsidies have dried up. More importantly, interest has dried up. Electricity is now seen as antique, even though every modern power source must be converted to amps and volts!”
Less lecture now, and more outrage.
“In spite of its vast power to kill and cure, in spite of the way it’s reshaped the lives of every person on the planet, and in spite of the fact that it is still not understood, scientific research in this field is viewed with good-natured contempt! Neutrons are sexy! Electricity is dull, the equivalent of a dusty storage room from which all the valuable items have been taken, leaving only worthless junk. But the room isn’t empty. There’s an unfound door at the back, leading to chambers few people have ever seen, ones filled with objects of unearthly beauty. And there’s no end to those chambers.”
“You’re starting to make me feel nervous, Charlie.” I intended it to sound light, but it came out dead serious.
He paid no notice, only began to limp up and down between the worktable and the shelves, staring at the floor, touching the green box each time he passed it, as if to assure himself it was still there.
“Yes, others have visited those chambers. I’m not the first. Scribonius for one. Prinn for another. But most have kept their discoveries to themselves, just as I have. Because the power is enormous. Unknowable, really. Nuclear power? Pah! It’s a joke!” He touched the green box. “What’s in here could, if connected to a source powerful enough, make nuclear energy as insignificant as a child’s cap pistol.”
I wished I’d brought my lemonade with me, because my throat was dry. I had to clear it before I could speak. “Charlie, let’s say everything you’re telling me is true. Do you understand what you’re dealing with? How it works?”
“A fair question. Let me pose one in return. Do you understand what happens when you flick a wall switch? Could you list the sequence of events that ends with light banishing the shadows in a dark room?”
“No.”
“Do you even know if that flick of your finger closes a circuit or opens one?”
“No idea.”
“Yet that never stopped you from turning on a light, did it? Or powering up your electric guitar when it was time to play?”
“True, but I never plugged into an amp powerful enough to light the whole East Coast.”
He gave me a look of suspicion so dark it seemed close to paranoia. “If you have a point, I’m afraid I’m not taking it.”
I believed he was telling the truth about that, which might have been the scariest thing of all.
“Never mind.” I took him by the shoulders to stop his pacing and waited until he looked at me. Only even with his wide eyes fixed on my face, it was more like he was looking through me.
“Charlie—if you’re done curing people, and if you don’t want to end the energy crunch, what do you want?”
At first he didn’t reply. He seemed to be in a trance. Then he pulled away from me and began pacing again, reverting to the lecture-hall prof.
“The transfer devices—the ones I use on human beings—have undergone a number of iterations. When I cured Hugh Yates of his deafness, I was using large rings coated in gold and palladium. They seem hilariously old-fashioned to me now, videocassettes in the age of computer downloads. The headphones I used on you were smaller and more powerful. By the time you appeared with your heroin problem, I had replaced palladium with osmium. Osmium is less expensive—a plus for a man on a budget, as I was then—and the headphones were effective, but they’d hardly look good at a revival meeting, would they? Did Jesus wear headphones?”
“Probably not,” I said, “but I doubt if he wore wedding rings, either, being a bachelor.”
He paid no attention. He paced back and forth like a man in a cell. Or the paranoids who circulate in any big city, the ones who want to talk about the CIA and the international Jewish conspiracy and the secrets of the Rosicrucians. “So I went back to the rings, and created a story that would make them… palatable… to my congregants.”
“A pitch, in other words.”
That brought him back to the here and now. He grinned, and for a moment I was with the Reverend Jacobs I remembered from my childhood. “Yes, okay, a pitch. By then I was using a ruthenium and gold alloy, and consequently the rings were much smaller. And even more powerful. Shall we leave, Jamie? You’re looking a bit unsettled.”
“I am. I may not understand your juice, but I can feel it. Almost like it’s putting bubbles in my blood.”
He laughed. “Yes! You could say the atmosphere in here is electric! Ha! I enjoy it, but then, I’m used to it. Come, let’s step outside and get some fresh air.”
The outside world never smelled sweeter than it did as we strolled back toward the house.
“I have one more question, Charlie. If you don’t mind?”
He sighed, but didn’t look displeased. Once out of that claustrophobia-inducing little room, he seemed sane again. “Glad to answer if I can.”
“You tell the rubes your wife and son drowned. Why do you lie? I don’t see what purpose it can serve.”
He stopped and lowered his head. When he lifted it, I saw that serene normality had taken a hike, if it had ever been there at all. On his face was a rage so deep and black that I involuntarily fell back a step. The breeze had tumbled his thinning hair over his lined brow. He swept it back and then pressed his palms to his temples, like a man suffering a monster headache. Yet when he spoke, his voice was toneless and low. If not for the look on his face, I might have mistaken it for reasonableness.