He saw more, too…
An underground chamber, far below a mountainous desert region, where a robed figure glides toward a glowing city of light…
…a frozen island at the edge of a dark stormy sea, a Nazi flag waving above as a submarine surfaces at a lonely dock…
…a flying machine with rotating blades and a long tail circling the Statue of Liberty in daylight as men inside fire at it with a hail of bullets…
Tesla groaned and had to hold his head as another wave of visions assaulted his mind: lunar craters and flashing lights, a comet streaking toward the sun and breaking apart, the red surface of Mars trembling and a single eye gazing up at him from the rocky terrain…
He reached for the back of a chair to steady himself—
And sees his body lying on the bed, arms crossed over his chest as shadowy men in hats stand around him, as if proud of their work…
Groaning, his heart thundering in his frail chest, he moved away from the window toward the door, even as the handle turned.
More visions fly at him: a filthy alleyway littered with bottles and refuse, dozens of pigeons swirling about the air and congregating on the ground, and people shaking their heads as they rush past…
…An immense tower rising out of the waves, with a dazzling mirror at its apex…
…a doorway beckoning between the paws of the Great Sphinx…descending now to find a chamber where high priests in jackal masks bow before a tablet of shimmering emerald radiance…
So many more sights all came at him at once, intermingling with a smattering of inventions designed and yet to be completed.
A radar-dish aims at the sky as nearly imperceptible waves flutter through the air… and a plane breaks apart and its fuselage bursts into flames before it crashes…
A grid-like series of lines crisscross the Earth, lit up like countless runways just as a sparkling field of energy expands around the planet….
Cities wracked by sudden earthquakes as the ground rends itself apart and swallows entire blocks…
A massive ring-shaped construction, with energy spinning around and around inside as charged air coalesces into something like a doorway…
“Enough!” he shouted as the mundane returned, and the normal door to his room opened.
He had seen this moment — or some variation of it many times. There were several possible outcomes for what would happen after this point in time.
“Ah,” he said upon seeing the four soaking wet men in hats and dark suits enter, leading in a fifth. “At least it’s not the Nazi scenario.”
The lead man paused, said something to his colleague, then approached. “Mr. Tesla. What have you seen?”
Tesla couldn’t contain the laugh. He thought about telling the men to please back into the hall and not drip rainwater onto his perfectly clean and dry and germ-free room, but there really was little point. “What haven’t I seen?”
“Do you know why we’re here?”
Tesla sighed and turned to the window, after glancing first at the bed — and again seeing himself lying there. A self that looked, not surprisingly, like the fifth man, standing in the doorway in a similar suit. Slightly different tie, which was the giveaway.
“You are here,” Tesla said, seeing now for the first time, the true vision out the window. The dreary skyline, the clouds and the water dripping in perfectly predictable patterns down the outside of his window. “To kill me.”
A full minute of silence followed. Silent, except for a thin gasp. Tesla didn’t need to look to see what was transpiring behind him. The door had eased shut and the fifth man, the one who looked so much like him, old and infirmed, likely a volunteer but not knowing exactly for what, barely felt the pinprick at his neck. The injection took effect immediately, and the two other agents carefully collected the man, lifted him and brought him to the bed.
“You are right, of course.” The first agent never turned to see how his partners were arranging the body, making it look to all the world as if Tesla had died peacefully in his sleep, an old man who had worked himself to the extreme and had at last expired, a genius who had come and gone without the recognition or triumph he deserved. A man whose inventions had all too practical, yet limited commercial use, whose ideas were far too advanced for the age — and some of them, as he well knew, far too deadly in the wrong hands.
“As I said,” Tesla murmured, “at least you are not the Nazis. Can’t abide them.” He reached for the desk, and his hat.
“They’re coming,” the agent said, “which is why we had to act now. You need to leave with us.”
“Of course.”
“Do you know where?”
“I have an idea, yes.”
“And what you’ll be doing?”
Tesla smiled. “I imagine I will be continuing my work.”
“In secret, yes. Among other things. Don’t worry sir, we have been watching you for a long time.”
“Not worried for myself.” Tesla’s attention lingered on the pigeon cage. Until today it was almost always full with at least one, but sometimes several birds that he would nurse back to health and then release. He thought of the alley beside Bryant Park and the hundreds of pigeons, his friends and companions for years. He imagined hearing their wings beating in his ears, their cooing, sad and desperate. “I will be missed.”
The agents said nothing. Just waited patiently for him to fix his hat and join them at the door.
As if just now hearing their previous comment, Tesla let out a slight laugh. “So you’ve been watching…” If they only knew.
They opened the door for him to leave first. “What’s so funny?”
Nikola Tesla gave a weary sigh and turned, looking past them, again to the window, where the bright zeppelins soared on arced lightning across a shimmering sky.
And a lone white pigeon with grey on its wings fluttered close to the glass, then soared into the sky, back into the rippling clouds.
“Everything.”
Part 1
1
As the last remnants of the flames died out and the embers turned to ash and scattered into the wind, the camera view panned east and revealed the rows and rows of homes, the thousands of lives and property miraculously spared from the wrath of one of the worst wildfires in California history.
The scene abruptly shifted, transitioning to a moving camera point-of-view atop someone’s head — an agent following six more blue-clad officers rushing into a suburban home.
“Here we go,” said the man in front of the huge projection screen at the head of the auditorium, his back turned to the class. Looking like he was trying too hard to fit the professor dress code, he wore a grey suit without a tie, a slightly wrinkled cotton button-down shirt, and discolored jeans. His hair was graying on the sides, matching the peppered shades in his groomed beard.
“First, you witnessed on a massive scale the result our skills, saving an entire city from the ravages of an unpredictable fire — a natural disaster we nonetheless predicted weeks in advance. Now,” he said in a lower, more cautious tone, “we have a special treat where we are going to be joining a live mission of a much more personal nature. Another team has been working with the FBI since last week, trying to pinpoint the location of an eight-year-old girl abducted four days ago from her school. Our efforts presented the authorities with a plausible alternate scenario, but still…as you all have been told repeatedly in your introductory classes, this is anything but an exact science.”