The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 20

Joe set his teacup on the coffee table, then plopped next to Edison in the parlor, watching the dog snooze in front of the fire. They’d played for a long time, and the dog was worn out. They’d stayed inside the tunnel in front of the house because Joe hadn’t felt safe enough to go play in their usual spot after the incident on the train.

He cracked open his laptop and wrote up the details of his encounter with the man by the clock — how he reminded Joe of the man who’d attacked him, how he’d followed him onto the platform and boarded the train. He didn’t mention when he’d gotten off the train, just that he had. Deciding that was enough, he sent the email to Detective Bailey and blind copied Vivian. They could track the man in the outside world, and he would track him underground.

Time to get started with that. He took a sip of tea and hacked into the surveillance footage for Grand Central. He’d done this often enough in the past that he could get in, back out, and cover his tracks in his sleep. He pulled up footage from Track 42 (green, blue) and followed the man back in time across other surveillance cameras. He had been wandering around in the concourse for hours before Joe spotted him. But he seemed to know exactly where the cameras were placed, and every single shot caught him looking away — head turned so far that his face was unrecognizable, or head tilted so far down that his face couldn’t be seen. The guy was clever.

Joe pulled up the footage from the evening when the man had tried to take his suitcase. That man wore large sunglasses and a hat, plus he was moving too quickly to register properly. Pellucid’s facial recognition software wouldn’t be able to produce an identification.

That left his experimental gait detection software. He loaded up clips of the man walking calmly, before he grabbed the suitcase and compared them to the man walking toward track 42 (green, blue). A match — both men had identical stride lengths and leg lengths, and their arms and feet moved in the same way when they walked or ran. Not enough to hold up in court, but enough to tell him that he hadn’t been paranoid — he’d been in danger. Still, an identification would have made everything a lot easier.

He carried the automaton into his billiards room, the spot where he had built him, set him on the table’s green felt surface, wound him up, and watched him wave his pointer around. This creation was at the center of everything. His father’s warning had been attached to its blueprints, and the man on the train had come after him twice. But why?

The automaton wound down, and Joe wound it up again, watching his waving arm. What if he was pointing at something, like a teacher at a blackboard? If Joe could figure out what the tiny man was pointing at, maybe he could figure out why his father had wanted him to build this automaton in the first place.

First, he needed to make the movements clearer. Nikola Tesla claimed to have extraordinary eyesight, but Joe’s wasn’t that great. He took out his set of small screwdrivers and removed the automaton’s delicate arm. Soon, laid out on the table were a dozen tiny parts.

Looking at the pieces gave him pause. He was altering Nikola Tesla’s original design on a hunch. That was practically the definition of hubris. He laughed, then remembered the scar on his father’s hand, the one that he had said was caused by hubris. Hubris, another word in the Tesla family lexicon.

His hands moved as if they had a mind of their own as he plucked tiny pieces from the green felt and fitted them into the tiny arm. At the circus he’d worked with Jackson, a quiet man with long fingers who always smelled like engine oil and Brut aftershave. Jackson was responsible for keeping the carousel and the rides running. He’d taught Joe about machines. Before he’d gotten the scholarship from MIT, Joe had thought of leaving the circus to become a watchmaker, particularly because he knew that it would horrify his father. The Tesla genius thrown away on watches, even if Tesla himself had been a mechanical genius.

His life would have been different, maybe better, if he had. He loved the contemplative nature of assembling simple, tiny pieces into intricate designs. Manhattan had watchmakers, too. Maybe he could find one who’d take him on as an apprentice. Or maybe he’d buy broken watches online and fix them so that they could be resold and go back to work in the world. He smiled at the headline: Multimillionaire Software Recluse Turns to Watch Repair.

A quick glance at the grandfather clock told him it was two a.m. (blue). The concourse was officially closed. It would take a while to get everyone herded out, clean up the worst of the mess, and leave the hall empty and quiet. He would wait.

He left the reassembled Tik-Tok in the center of the green felt, like a professor waiting for his class to arrive, and went to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. Edison, never one to sleep through the creak of the icebox’s door, trotted in. Joe had removed the interior and replaced it with a modern fridge to keep the period look but still have proper refrigeration. Considering the sound of that door was such a siren song for Edison, he wondered if he ought to replace the whole refrigerator.

“Here to see if you can beg some food?” Joe asked him.

Edison’s eyes went straight to the open refrigerator, and his tail gave a tiny wag. That was a yes.

Joe laughed and pulled out a white paper-wrapped packet of shaved ham. Edison licked his lips. He gave the dog a piece before making himself a ham on rye with a pickle. They both went upstairs to the library, Joe to catch up on some mindless TV, Edison to look mournful until he got more ham.