Alternating Current: A Tesla Novel Read Online Free Page A

tasty.”
    “I’ve never heard
of them.”
    “They came out
about a year before he died. We had some friends that traveled to Pennsylvania
quite a bit. They always brought your grandfather back some Charles Chips. I
don’t know if they’re still around.”
    “What’s in the
cans?”
    “I’m not sure.
Your grandfather always said they were great for storage. He thought they were
fireproof.”
    “Let’s open them
up.” Phillip took the top can from the stack and popped off the lid. It held
hundreds of old photos.
    “I’ve wondered
where those pictures disappeared to. That’s your mom there, she was five years
old.”
    Phillip stared at
the photo.
    They rummaged
through other photos. Phillip saw relatives he’d never met and a few
celebrities, too. His grandfather took their pictures when they stayed at The
New Yorker.
    The second can had
more National Geographic Magazines. The more valuable issues, Phillip thought.
Why else would his grandfather store them in the fireproof can? The third can
was packed full of paper. Mostly drawings and sketches. Schematic diagrams with
notations. Some right out of a science fiction movie. A giant telephone booth
with rods and coils protruding from the top. And schematics for something
labeled “Hypersensitive Vacuum Tubes,” which, if you believed the notations,
detected the presence of ghosts. There was even a drawing for something that
looked like a Death Ray.
    “I didn’t know
Grandpa was into science fiction.”
    “He wasn’t. Some
old man that lived at The New Yorker gave him that stuff for safekeeping. He
said the government was after him. He died a few months later; he was
eighty-six years old. Your grandfather was quite fond of him. Saved all his documents,
just in case. Ridiculous, huh.”
    Phillip opened the
remaining canisters and found more diagrams and drawings.
    “You can throw
them all away now.”
    “I might keep them
awhile. Just for laughs.” Phillip picked up the pace, suddenly motivated to
finish cleaning the attic.
    ***
    A Charles Chips
canister holds upward of two thousand sheets of paper. Phillip spent the rest
of the day examining the contents of the three canisters. Try as he may, he
didn’t understand anything; incomprehensible mathematical formulas, logarithms,
mathematical equations; many several pages long. The pages varied in degrees of
whiteness, tinged nicotine yellow to eggshell. The dates spanned four decades. Most
baffling was the sporadic social commentary interspersed among such intellectual
ideas. They didn’t make sense, either. For example, one comment read, “The
tyranny of dictator’s pales when compared to the tyranny of entrepreneurs.”
    Phillip didn’t
understand the correlation between a dictator and an entrepreneur. Hitler came
to mind at once, he had read a few books about World War II and flawed German
combat strategy. An entrepreneur took a bit longer. A few minutes later, Bill
Gates flooded his thoughts. He had to laugh. Bill Gates more tyrannical than
Hitler? How? And why would the developer of such high concepts make such a
notation?
    Philip dove
deeper. He tried to maintain a semblance of order among the notes, drawings,
and commentary. He separated the few concepts that were recognizable from the
many that were not. The latter ones concerned him most. Page after page of
equations; molecular structure; chemical compounds; physics; gravity; inertia,
they boggled his mind. Concept names that conjured up visions of Doctor
Frankenstein in his laboratory or aliens from other galaxies. “Vixen Venom,”
poisonous to all, but humans, the key word, poisonous. How could something be
poisonous to insects or animals, but not harmful to people? Had he discovered
some genetic code that differentiates humans from other species? And how could
he prove this claim? Phillip, eyes bloodshot and heavy, read on.
    “The
Electrostimulator,” as far as Phillip could tell, regulated the bioelectric
activity of the human nervous