The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 22

At three a.m. (red), Joe gathered up the automaton and took the elegant elevator up to the concourse. He hoped the guy who had been following him hadn’t somehow managed to evade Grand Central security and was still inside. Joe had kept an eye on the surveillance cameras while watching TV, and he’d seen only the regular nightly cleaning crew moving about the terminal.

A few minutes later he and Edison were alone in the vast room. Illuminated stars on the ceiling glowed softly. He had read that the LEDs installed in 2010 were equipped with special light-blocking filters so that each star glowed with the same relative brightness as its counterpart out in space. He liked that.

He carried Tik-Tok over to the corner under the constellation for Cancer the crab. Nikola Tesla was born on July 10 (cyan, black), which meant his astrological sign was Cancer. If Alan was right, and Nikola had spent nights here, walking the concourse alone, maybe Cancer would have special meaning for him, and maybe Joe’s father would have known that. Edison’s claws clicked against the marble as he walked, a sound Joe never heard during the noise and bustle of the day.

With a clink, he set the metal man on the polished floor and lined him up with Beta Cancri, the brightest star in the constellation. He wound him up, each click loud in the empty room. Tik-Tok raised his arm. Joe had changed the simple red bulb on the end to a laser pointer. He hoped the little man’s arm might point to the Oscillator.

But it didn’t.

He moved the man to various locations around the terminal, trying all the stars of Cancer, then Hercules, and then each constellation in turn. He even climbed the information booth and positioned the man atop the clock, trying not to think about the fact that each face of the clock was made of high-grade polished opal and that Sotheby’s had put a replacement value on each face of between two and a half and five million dollars. He’d also heard that the clock faces were made of opalescent glass, which would make them significantly cheaper. He hoped the second explanation was true.

Roger, the older gentleman who washed the floors, raised an eyebrow when he saw Joe crawling around with a doll, but he didn’t say anything. Joe officially had the run of the place, so he was allowed to be there, and he was considered eccentric enough that nobody questioned him. Perks of being a crazy rich guy.

By the time 5:30 a.m. (brown: red, black) rolled around, his knees hurt from kneeling on the cold Tennessee marble, his fingers were sore from winding up the little man, and Edison was sleeping on the bottom stair of the East Staircase.

The station would open to travelers soon, and he’d accomplished nothing. He felt as if he’d betrayed his father’s memory by not being smart enough to solve the puzzle left for him. More was expected of him, even if he wasn’t a Tesla after all.