The Prestige

I am learning about my old adversary. Through Olivia he was trying to misdirect me. His illusion uses the sort of flashy effects that ordinary people think are the power of electricity, but are in fact nothing more than flashy effects. He thought I would go on a wild-goose chase, while Tesla and I are actually confronting the heart of the hidden energy itself.

But Tesla works slowly! I am anxious about the passage of time. Naпvely I had thought that once I commissioned Tesla it would be a matter of hours before he produced the mechanism I required. I see, by the abstracted expression he bears as he mutters to himself, that I have started a process of invention that might know no practical end. (In an aside, Mr Alley confirmed that Tesla sometimes worries at a problem for months.)

I have firm bookings in England in October and November, and must be home well before the first of them.

I have two idle days until Tesla returns, and so I suppose I might use the time to research train and ship timetables. I find that America, a country great in many things, is not good at providing such information.

21st July 1900

Tesla's work apparently proceeds well. I am allowed to visit his laboratory every two days, and although I have seen something of the apparatus there has been no question yet of a demonstration. Today I found him tinkering with his research experiments. He seemed abstracted by them and was partly irritated and partly puzzled to see me.

4th August 1900

Violent thunderstorms have been playing around Pike's Peak for three days, casting me into gloom and frustration. I know that Tesla will be involved with his own experiments, not with mine.

The days are slipping by. I must be aboard the train out of Denver before the end of this month!

8th August 1900

Tesla told me on my arrival at the laboratory this morning that my apparatus was ready for demonstration, and in a state of great excitement I readied myself to see it. When it came to it, though, the thing refused to function, and after I had watched Tesla fiddling with some of the wiring for more than three hours I returned here to the hotel.

I am told by the First Colorado Bank that more of my money should be available in a day or two. Perhaps that will spur Tesla to greater efforts!

12th August 1900

Another abortive demonstration today. I was disappointed by the outcome. Tesla seemed puzzled, claiming that his calculations could not be in error.

The failure is briefly recorded. The prototype apparatus is a smaller version of his Coil, with the wiring arranged in a different fashion. After a prolonged lecture about the principles (none of which I understood, and which I soon came to realize was delivered by Tesla mainly for his own sake, a form of thinking aloud), Tesla produced a metal rod which he or Mr Alley had painted in a distinctive orange colour. He placed it on a platform, immediately beneath a kind of inverted cone of wiring; the apex of the cone focused directly on the rod.

When at Tesla's instruction Mr Alley worked a large lever situated close by the original Coil, there was the noisy but now familiar outburst of arcing electrical discharge. Almost at once the orange rod was surrounded by blue-white fire, which snaked around it in a most intimidating way. (I, thinking of the illusion I wished to work on the stage, was quietly satisfied by the appearance of this.) The noise and incandescence built up quickly, and soon it seemed as if molten particles of the rod itself were splashing to the floor; that they were not was evidenced by the unchanged, unharmed appearance of the rod.

After a few seconds Tesla waved his hands dramatically, Mr Alley threw back the control lever, the electricity instantly died away, and the rod was still in place.

Tesla immediately became absorbed in the mystery, and, as has happened before, my presence was thereafter ignored. Mr Alley has recommended me to stay away from the laboratory for a few days, but I am acutely conscious of time running out. I wonder if I have sufficiently impressed this upon Mr Tesla?

18th August 1900

Today is notable less for a second failed demonstration than for the fact that Tesla and I have argued with some bitterness. This quarrel happened in the immediate aftermath of his machine's failure to work, and so we were both keyed up, I with disappointment, Tesla with frustration.

After the orange-painted rod had failed to move again, Tesla picked it up and offered it to me to hold. A few seconds before it had been bathed in radiant light, with sparks flying in every direction. I took it from him gingerly, expecting my fingers to be singed by it. Instead, it was cold. This is the odd thing: it was not just cool, in the sense that it had not been heated, but actively cold, as if it had been surrounded by ice. I hefted the rod in my hand.

"Any more failures like this, Mr Angier," Tesla said, in a friendly enough voice, "and I might be obliged to give you that as a souvenir."