Polar Shift (NUMA Files 6)

Hibbet's reply was succinct. He only said, "Ah."

Zavala picked up the story thread, and told the group about boarding the resurrected ship. Hibbet was keenly interested in his description of the power plant and the damaged electrical framework on deck.

"I wish I could have been there to see it," he said.

"I can do the next best thing," Zavala said. Moments later, the digital photos he had taken of the mystery ship were displayed on the computer screen.

Austin asked Hibbet what he made of the images. The NUMA scientist stared at the screen with a furrowed brow, and asked for a second run-through of the photos.

"It's fairly obvious that a great deal of electrical power is being fed into a central point." He pointed to the cone-shaped framework. "It's hard to know what this apparatus is for in its present state."

"Joe described it as a giant spark plug," Austin said.

Hibbet scratched his head. "Probably not. More like a giant Tesla coil. Many of the circuits that make this thing tick are not visible. Where is the ship now?"

"It sank to the bottom of the sea again," Zavala said.

Hibbet's reaction wasn't what Austin expected. There was excitement in his gray eyes as he rubbed his palms together. "This beats fiddling around with antennae any day." He clicked through the computer pictures again, then he glanced around the table. "Anyone here familiar with the work of Nikola Tesla?"

"I'm the only one who reads Popular Science on a regular basis," Zavala said. "Tesla invented alternating current."

Tibbet nodded. "He was a Serbian American electrical engineer. He discovered that you could rotate a magnetic field if you took two coils at right angles and juiced them with AC current out of phase."

"I wonder if you might put that in English," Adler said politely.

Hibbet laughed. "I'll put it in a historic context. Tesla moved to the United States and worked for Thomas Edison. They became rivals. Edison advocated direct current, and there was a fierce battle. Tesla got the edge when he was commissioned to design the AC generators at Niagara Falls. He sold the patents to his induction motor to George Westinghouse, whose power system was the basis for what we use today. Edison had to be content with the electric lightbulb and the phonograph."

"Tesla filed a bunch of wild patents, as I recall," Zavala said.

"That's right. He was an eccentric genius. He filed a patent for an unmanned electrically propelled aircraft that could fly at eighteen thousand miles per hour and could be used as a weapon. He came up with something called 'teleforce,' which was a death ray that could melt airplane engines at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. He did a lot of work on wireless transmission of electricity. He was fascinated by the possibility of focusing electrical force and amplifying its effect. He even claimed to have once produced an earthquake from his lab."

"Tesla may have simply been ahead of his time, with ballistics missiles and lasers," Austin said.

"His concepts were sound. But the execution never lived up to the expectations. He's become something of a cult figure in recent years. The conspiracy-minded suspect that various governments, including our own, have been experimenting with the more destructive aspects of Tesla's work."

"What do you think?" Austin said.

"The conspiracy theorists are missing the boat. Tesla attracted a lot of attention because he was such a flamboyant figure. The work of Lazlo Kovacs had far more potential for destruction, in my opinion. Like Tesla, he was a brilliant electrical engineer. He was from Budapest, where Tesla worked in the late eighteen hundreds, and picked up on his work in the 1930s, concentrating on extra-low-frequency electromagnetic transmission.

He became worried about the possibility of electromagnetic warfare. He said that certain transmissions could be used to disrupt the atmosphere, and produce severe weather, earthquakes and all sorts of unpleasant results. He took Tesla to the next level."

"In what way?"

"Kovacs actually developed a set of frequencies whereby electromagnetic resonance could be focused and thus amplified by the material surrounding it. They were called the Kovacs Theorems. He published his findings in a scientific journal, but he refused to make public the complete set of frequencies that would allow the device he described to be built. Other scientists were skeptical of his findings without proof."

"It's lucky no one believed him," Professor Adler said. "The world has enough trouble controlling the types of warfare we have already."

"Some people believed him. The Nazis were very open to ideas of mysticism, the occult and pseudoscience. Those stories about Nazi archaeologists searching for the Holy Grail are true. They pounced on Kovacs and kidnapped him and his family. After the war ended, it was disclosed that they had put him to work in a secret lab on a project to develop a superweapon that would win the war."

"They lost the war," Austin said. "Tesla wasn't the only one with a credibility problem. Kovacs apparently failed too."

Hibbet shook his head. "It's more complicated than that, Kurt. Papers uncovered after the war suggested that he was on the verge of an electromagnetic warfare breakthrough. Luckily, it never happened."

"Why not?"

"The Russians overran the lab in East Prussia, where he was said to be working. But Kovacs had already disappeared. After the war, the Soviets carried out research based on the Kovacs Theorems. The United States was aware of their work, and would have loved to talk to Kovacs. The significance of electromagnetic radiation was not lost on our military. There was a big conference years ago at the Los Alamos lab to talk about applied weapons technology based on his work."

"Home of the Manhattan Project? That was fitting," Austin said.