The First Casualty by Gregg Loomis Read Free Book Online Page B

reading as it is. My Kindle is loaded up. Besides, we really don’t have anything to talk about. I’m retired. I mean it this time.”
    Undeterred, Momma laid the volume in the seat of the chair she had occupied. “Take it as a gift. Retired, you got plenty of time before Dr. Bergenghetti—Maria—comes back, certainly enough to at least look through it.” She glanced around the room, taking mental inventory. “Not like you got anything else to do. You don’t even have a TV.”
    True. The European Yagi aerial got blown off the roof in the first week of Jason’s residency, ending what fuzzy reception it provided. He detested the ugly mushroom-on-steroids dishes required for satellite, which provided equally poor service during the six-month rainy season. And, even when functioning, the viewing menu might as well have consisted of events on Mars: soccer, foreign language reruns of American sit-coms and films, and news from world capitals on CNN Europe. TV on Sark was a classic example of something not worth the effort.
    â€œThat’s a blessing, not a hardship.”
    Momma pointed to the book as Samedi opened the door. The howl of the wind all but drowned her out. “At least take a look.”
    Jason started to reply, but she was gone.

11
    Excerpts from Nikola Tesla: Genius or Mad Scientist
by Robert Hastings, PhD
    Nikola Tesla was born in humble circumstances­ in Smiljan, Lika, then part of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, now Croatia, on July 10, 1856. His father, Milutin, was an Orthodox priest and his mother, Djuka Mandic, an inventor in her own right of household appliances. Young Nikola attended the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, and the University of Prague, where he became fascinated with electricity. He was working for a telephone company in Budapest when he conceived the idea of a rotary magnetic field, an idea that would play a significant role in his later life.
    Having been employed by the Continental Edison Company in Paris, he emigrated to the United States in 1884 to work with the great American inventor. It was during this association that a divergence of opinion began. Edison had invested millions in producing direct current (DC). The alternating current (AC) invented by Tesla obviated the need for power stations every two miles. Alternating current, by its very nature, moves back and forth, needing little of the “boost” required by direct current.
    Edison refused to pay the bonus he had promised should his young protégé be able to improve Edison’s system. Outraged, Tesla quit. Recognizing genius, George Westinghouse hired the young émigré and the “Battle of the Currents” was on.
    Edison’s propaganda described direct current as flowing “smoothly, like a river while alternating current runs roughly like rapids,” although this simile’s influence on the public is unclear. To make his point, Edison even arranged the first execution by electricity, having the warden of a prison employ alternating current instead of hanging before a horrified press corps. The anticipated national revulsion against alternating current did not occur.
    Propaganda or not, alternating current was selected to illumi­nate the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and, subsequently, streets and homes across the country.
    The battle was over.

12
    Derrible Bay
    Sark, Channel Islands
    Two Hours Later
    Recently published novel in hand, Jason was swaddled in a comforter, a mummy wrapped in eiderdown, stretched out on the bed that occupied the sole room of the cottage’s upstairs. Corelli’s Concerto Grosso No. 4 in D Major filled the room, violins punctuated with occasional brass. Fundamental order, yet tuneful, sometimes exuberant. The sound came from a turntable playing a 33⅓ LP vinyl record. CDs were digital, records analog. Since actual sound is analog, digital reproduction is like comparing a