Breakthrough Read online

  “Uh… Doctor Tesla, I’m very surprised that you have been firing this device when we had agreed…”

  “Ah!” Tesla waved his hand dismissively. “We were ready, so why wait? So much to learn! But here, let me introduce you to my assistants.” He reeled off a string of names but Andrew had no hope of matching them to the men standing there. Almost as an afterthought he introduced the commander of Fort Niagara, an ordnance officer named Thompson wearing captain’s bars who must have been twice Andrew’s age. The man frowned at him, but nodded.

  “So you have been able to get this to work?” asked Andrew pointing at the machine. “Your last telegram only said you hoped it would be possible.”

  “Yes, yes! The method by which the Martians control the device is still a mystery - but I will solve that. When I attempted to feed power to it I determined that a mechanism which I must describe as a switch - although unlike any switch I have ever seen - was blocking the flow. Unable to close it, I decided to simply remove it and use my own switch. That proved the key. It works! Here, I think it has cooled enough. Let me show you.”

  At that point, a man who had been standing to the side came forward. He was older and wore a conservative and well-made business suit. “Nikola,” he said, “how many more firings do you plan to do today? I really need to know.”

  “What? Oh, a dozen more, I suppose,” replied Tesla. “Ah, Captain! I forgot to introduce Mr. Harper. John Harper, the chief engineer of the magnificent hydroelectric plant which provides the power for these experiments. I met John back when I was working with Edward Dean Adams to build this place, and we have worked together from time to time. He and the owners have graciously agreed to help.”

  “Our patriotic duty, Major,” said Harper proudly. “But taking the plant out of service for this is quite a hardship for our customers.”

  “It requires the whole plant?” asked Andrew.

  “Almost the entire capacity of Plant Number One, Major. Nearly fifty thousand horsepower.”

  “Yes!” said Tesla. “An amazing amount, isn’t it? We had to lay a whole new set of lines from the plant to here. Look at the size of the busbars we needed!” He gestured to the heat ray. Looking closer, Andrew saw that the device had been fitted to what he recognized as the mount for a coast defense mortar. It could be elevated and depressed by a hand-wheel connected to a set of gears and traversed by another - just like an artillery piece. Although with the two massive cables attached to the back of the ray, it was obvious the thing could not be traversed very far. The cables were connected to the busbars Tesla had boasted of and then more cables ran back across the beach to disappear into the bluffs. One of the buildings on top of the bluff had dozens of heavy wires strung from it to a series of poles that marched off to the south, apparently connected to the power plant along the Niagara. Fifty thousand horsepower! It was amazing, but also daunting. A power plant the size of a city block to supply just one ray device; somehow the Martians did it with something a tiny fraction of the size…

  “Oh! And that reminds me, Captain,” said Tesla wheeling to face him, his expression stern and unsmiling now. “I have been informed that you have delivered several of the Martian power generators to Edison! Why were they not given to me?”

  “That was General Crozier’s decision, Doctor. With so much to examine, he decided the task should be split up. You got the heat ray, Edison and… several others were given the power devices. Metal samples were sent to…”

  “Bah!” snapped Tesla angrily. “Edison will learn nothing! He is a good man, don’t mistake me; he helped me so graciously when my laboratory burned down. But his grasp of the electrical forces is rudimentary. He will not discover the Martians’ secrets. Give them to me, Captain, and I shall!”

  Andrew, used to Tesla’s tantrums, replied levelly. “That’s not my decision, Doctor, but I will pass along your request to the general. Now, can I see the demonstration of the ray?”

  The man fussed for a few seconds more, but then seemed to forget about it entirely and was snapping out instructions to his assistants. Two of them shooed the spectators back from the ray device while another got on a telephone, apparently connected to the power plant. Tesla stood next to a large electrical switch mounted to a table a dozen yards to the rear. “Is all ready?” he demanded to know, and his men acknowledged with quick nods of their heads. “Very well! Stand by!” Andrew retreated another dozen yards behind Tesla. He found that he was beside Captain Thompson.

  “This fellow is mad as a hatter, you realize,” said the captain none-too quietly.

  “Yes, but he is brilliant.”

  “Firing… now!” cried Tesla, and he threw the switch.

  Prepared for it this time, Andrew managed not to flinch, although the noise still set his teeth on edge. The ray, not terribly visible in the bright morning sunlight, blasted outward and struck the surface of the lake a few hundred yards away. The water instantly exploded into steam that erupted up and out in a thundering white cloud. He was surprised that there was almost no heat to be felt from where he was standing. He remembered what it was like when a ray came close and he’d assumed it would be like that even standing behind the device. But it wasn’t. Apparently all the heat was going the other way.

  After boiling Lake Ontario for a few more seconds, Tesla opened the switch again, and ray and sound ceased. The scientist came bounding over, the lunatic grin back on his face. “Well? Well?” he shouted. “What do you think?”

  “Uh… congratulations, Doctor, on getting it working. It looks and sounds exactly like what I saw in New Mexico.”

  “Ah! But of course! I was forgetting that this is nothing new to you. But to a man of science like myself this is nothing short of astounding. To take electric current and convert it into a focused beam of raw energy like this opens up a whole new realm of research!”

  Captain Thompson noisily cleared his throat and stepped forward, holding up a file folder. “Yes, Doctor, and according to this set of orders I was given, there is a great deal of research which we are supposed to be doing today. I’ve had my men working for the last three days preparing the targets listed here. Can I suggest that we leave the poor lake alone and get to work?” He gestured down the beach to the east.

  Looking that way, Andrew saw that there were groups of men with piles of… he wasn’t sure what they were piles of, spaced a few hundred yards apart stretching for a mile or more until the beach ended where the bluff curved out to the lake. Ah, yes, he remembered now. Assuming Tesla could get the ray working, they were to test the effect of the ray on various materials at various distances.

  “Yes, of course, Captain,” said Tesla. “Now that we know the ray is working properly, we can begin the tests.”

  “Very well. Sergeant, signal the men.” One of Thompson’s men pulled out a green signal flag and waved it briskly. The groups down the beach went to work. The first test was to try and determine the effective range of the ray. Some people - like Andrew - had seen the Martian weapon in action and lived to tell the tale, but no one really had the time to take any precise measurements. So now, the teams of men were setting up mannequins dressed in full combat gear in a precise line laid out by army engineers at intervals of five hundred yards. Meanwhile, several men were swinging the heat ray around on its mount to aim exactly down that line. Every bit of information was important, so two other men were recording the air temperature and pressure, humidity and wind speed.

  As each group was ready, they waved a flag. Thompson was watching them through field glasses. “We should have laid some telephone lines,” he muttered. Finally, he was satisfied and his sergeant waved a red flag. The work parties scampered off to sandbagged sanctuaries well out of the line of fire. “All right, Doctor, you can fire when ready.” Tesla’s people called the power plant and after a few moments he stepped up and threw the switch.

  The heat ray stabbed out again and a series of smoke clouds exploded down the beach. After a moment, Tesla shut off the ray
. Andrew had his own field glasses out and when the smoke cleared he trained them at the targets. Or where the targets had been. The first and second ones were gone completely. The third also appeared to be gone, but it was a long way off and it was hard to be sure. Beyond that he couldn’t see clearly, although something appeared to be burning near the end of the beach.

  “Well, let’s go have a look, shall we?” said Thompson. He and Andrew climbed into the cab of one of the trucks, with Thompson’s sergeant driving. They chugged down the line of targets, looking at each in turn. The men who had set them up had come out of their refuges and were writing down their observations.

  As he expected, the first and second targets had been completely obliterated. There were just some scorched marks on the sand and a few clumps of ash. The third target, at fifteen hundred yards, wasn’t completely destroyed; there looked to be a few melted bits of metal - buckles off the equipment, Andrew guessed - and the barrel of the rifle was clearly identifiable, even though it was twisted and blackened.

  The one at two thousand yards showed the first significant change. The mannequin was not totally destroyed. There was a sizable lump of remains, with bits of uniform and gear only scorched. The metal helmet sat on top of the pile and the rifle was almost intact with wisps of smoke still curling up from the wooden stock. Still, if it had been a real person, it would be very dead.

  The next target, the one at twenty-five hundred yards - the beach was longer than it had looked - wasn’t in bad shape at all. It still stood on the pole that held it erect. The uniform was charred and blackened on the side facing the ray, but the other side was untouched. “If the fellow could find any cover at all, he would probably be all right,” observed Andrew.

  The last target, at three thousand yards, was barely touched. A little charring to the uniform, but not much. “You wouldn’t want to expose bare flesh to it, I don’t imagine,” said Thompson, “but with the anti-dust gear, the mask, gloves, and leggings, you’d probably be okay for a while.”

  “Yes,” agreed Andrew. “So, against infantry, the thing is lethal to two thousand yards and then its effect tails off sharply after that. Horses would probably do badly out to three thousand.” He walked around the mannequin wondering if there was any change that could be made to the uniform or gear which would increase the survivability of the infantry. “You know, if we were to…”

  The sudden noise of the heat ray blotted every thought from his mind except to take cover. He flung himself down to the sand and covered his head with his arms.

  “What the hell…?” he heard Thompson say. “God damn the man!”

  When he felt no heat, Andrew dared take a look. The heat ray was firing, but it was aimed out at the lake again. “What…? What’s he doing?”

  “Playing with his toy again!” snapped Thompson. “I swear he’s like a child!”

  The ray switched off and Andrew got to his feet, dusting sand off his uniform. “We better get back there before he does anything else!” They climbed into the truck and drove back to where Tesla and the ray device were waiting. The scientist seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he’d nearly given Andrew a heart attack. “Just checking on something,” he explained.

  “Doctor Tesla,” said Thompson. “There are basic safety regulations which must be followed on a firing range - any sort of firing range! From now on, I will have a man posted by the firing switch and he will not allow you to operate the device unless an officer is present.”

  Tesla just waved this off and asked: “What were the results?”

  Andrew gave him a brief, and stiffly worded, report on what he’d seen, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “So what’s next? Tests against metal plates?”

  “Yes,” said Thompson. “The men are setting up frames to hold sheets of metal right now. It might take a while - those sheets are heavy. Do you want to come back to my office for some coffee?” Tesla accepted, but Andrew begged off.

  “It’s such a beautiful day, I think I will stay out here,” he said. But in truth, he was still shaking inside from the incident with the ray. He needed to walk it off. He wandered east along the lake shore again, pretending to watch the work parties. My God, what’s the matter with me? He hadn’t fallen apart like this out in New Mexico. He dodged Martians and their rays for a week or more, helped blow up one of their tripod machines, and come home a hero. And now the mere sound of a heat ray set him quivering and running for cover!

  And there were the nightmares. Not every night; sometimes weeks would go by without one. But still far too often. They were always the same: he’d be standing there and a heat ray would be swinging along, burning a glowing trench in the ground. However, it was never coming at him, it was always coming at someone else: Victoria, his mother, Colonel Hawthorne, Sergeant McGill, that Harding girl, someone he knew. And they’d be oblivious to it, unaware of their peril. He’d try to warn them, pull them aside, but he’d be frozen in place, dumb and paralyzed - until it was too late. He’d wake up quivering and dripping with sweat. He shivered, despite the July sun overhead, and shook his head. Some hero I am!

  But as he stood there, looking out on the lake, the fit passed and he breathed easier. With any luck he’d never go through anything like that again. He wasn’t a line officer, after all!

  A noise drifting across the water caught his attention. A boat had come into view from around the headland and he realized it was full of reporters, probably the frustrated ones from the gate. Captain Thompson had posted several guard boats to keep anyone from drifting into the firing area on the lake and one of them was moving to intercept the intruders. The sightseers withdrew, but stayed in sight. It didn’t really matter, he supposed. The whole world knew the Americans had captured some Martian devices - and it wasn’t like the Martians were going to be reading the newspapers!

  Eventually Thompson and Tesla returned and the work parties finished getting things set up. “If the last test was any indication,” said Thompson, “I doubt the ray will even make it all the way to the last target.”

  “Yes,” agreed Andrew and a sudden impulse took him. “I think I’ll observe from down range. Between targets two and three.”

  Thompson’s eyebrows went up. “All right, Major, but do stay well back from the line of fire.”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll hold our fire until you are in position.” He glanced at Tesla and frowned. Andrew turned and walked off. He wasn’t exactly sure why he was doing this. Just to prove to himself his courage? Maybe. Probably.

  It was the better part of a mile from the ray device to where he wanted to go and he was sweating by the time he got there. Once in position—about a hundred yards uphill of the firing line - he got out his field glasses and then waved his hat back at Thompson. After a few seconds, the heat ray fired. He had his glasses trained on the first target and he was seeing it from the side opposite that the ray struck. For an instant, there was a bright glow all around the edges of the metal plate. Then, almost immediately, a spot in the middle turned red, then orange… yellow… white. From start to finish it couldn’t have been more than a second, and then the gobs of molten metal were flying in all directions as the ray burned through.

  He immediately shifted his field glasses to the second target. The glow around the edges seemed brighter but the red spot was longer in coming. He counted seconds as the metal went from red to white and he was all the way up to six before the ray blasted through. Again he shifted his focus, now to the third target, and he was seeing it from the front. The whole plate slowly turned a dull red, but there was no hot spot like before and then the ray shut off. The plate quickly cooled to a dull gray.

  He walked down to inspect it, but didn’t get too close. He could feel the heat radiating off it. But there was no burn through and no obvious damage. He was still looking when Thompson arrived in the truck. “So! At fifteen hundred yards the metal will stop it, eh?”

  “Stop it, yes. But if this had been the fr
ont of a steam tank, the crew probably would have been roasted alive. It got damn hot! But the ray definitely starts to spread out with distance. Still, this plate was only subjected to the ray for a short while before we had to shut it off. If it had hit this one first without wasting seconds on the first two plates…”

  “Yes, well, let’s take down what’s left of the first two and try it again on this one.”

  So they did that, but the third plate survived again, although it was glowing orange and there was a bit of melting in evidence. After that they took the plate down and shot directly at the one at two thousand yards. Andrew moved down to stand close to it and was pleased that he wasn’t shaking at all. When the ray fired, the plate didn’t even get hot enough to change color, although it was far too hot to touch. They didn’t bother firing at the last two.

  After a break for lunch they did some more tests against different types of materials. First was an invention that some engineers and metallurgists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had come up with which sandwiched a layer of asbestos between two thin sheets of steel. At five hundred yards, the ray blasted through in only a slightly longer time than against the solid metal sheet. But at a thousand yards it took significantly longer, and at fifteen hundred it couldn’t get through at all and the plate on the side away from the ray did not get terribly hot. Andrew felt that this approach had some potential.

  The last series of tests were against slabs of concrete six inches thick. Interestingly, the concrete proved more resistant to the heat ray than anything else. The slab at five hundred yards eventually cracked and crumbled, but the farther slabs were barely touched. “I doubt we can build tanks out of concrete,” said Andrew, “but perhaps a layer on the front.”