too close to a power plant working at full bore, close enough to feel the stray volts zinging the metal fillings in your mouth.
“I’m currently generating electricity by geothermal means.” He patted the green box. “This is a geosynchronous generator. Below it is a well pipe no bigger than the kind that might serve a medium-size country dairy farm. Yet at half power, this gennie could create enough superheated steam to power not just The Latches, but the entire Hudson Valley. At full power it could boil the entire aquifer like water in a teapot. Which might defeat the purpose.” He laughed heartily.
“Not possible,” I said. But of course, neither was curing brain tumors and severed spinal cords with holy rings.
“I assure you it is, Jamie. With a slightly bigger generator, which I could build with parts easily available by mail order, I could light up the whole East Coast.” He said this calmly, not boasting but only stating a fact. “I’m not doing it because energy creation doesn’t interest me. Let the world strangle in its own effluent; as far as I’m concerned, it deserves no better. And for my purposes, I’m afraid geothermal energy is a dead end. It’s not enough.” He looked broodingly at the horses galloping across the face of his computer. “I expected better from this place, especially in summer, when . . . but never mind.”
“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