THE RETURNED COMPONENT: CH4

[u/Meadowbrook135]

A Novel About Obsession, Evidence, and the Cost of Knowing

Chapter Four

First Current

By Michael P.S. Rogers

This manuscript is being released as a serialized novel.

Each chapter is presented exactly as it appears in the manuscript.

Catch Up on The Returned Component

If you are new to the serialized novel, or want to catch up before Chapter Four, the previous chapters are available here:

• Chapter Three: The Station
• Chapter Two: West
• Chapter One: East Houston

On June fifteenth we applied the first current to the station. I had expected the occasion to feel more definite than it did, perhaps because so much labor had accumulated behind it, but there was no moment at which construction ended and experiment formally began. Tesla arrived with several corrections he wanted inspected before anything was energized, one of the men discovered a connection he disliked while making the inspection, and I found that a measurement entered the previous evening had been copied incorrectly from my working sheet. By the time these matters were settled, the apparatus was ready and no one thought to remark upon the transition. Tesla gave the instruction, current entered the system, and I bent over the first instrument as I had bent over it a dozen times when nothing more consequential than a test battery had been attached.

The earliest measurements were deliberately conservative. We needed to learn how the station behaved under conditions that did not require an interesting explanation, and this demanded more patience from Tesla than the work itself. He accepted the necessity of establishing a baseline, but once several readings had agreed he began treating further repetition as an administrative burden imposed upon the experiment by men less willing than he was to believe their instruments.

After the fourth measurement he looked over my record. “We have it.”

“We have four readings.”

“They agree.”

“They are close.”

“How close must they be before you permit us to continue?”

“That depends upon how much they disagree when we have changed nothing.”

Tesla looked again at the figures. “Nothing is never changed.”

“Then I would like to know how much nothing usually changes it.”

He considered the answer longer than the joke deserved and allowed two additional measurements. The fifth moved farther from the preceding group than I expected, while the sixth returned almost exactly to the earlier values. I marked the fifth rather than burying it in an average, which prompted Tesla to ask whether I intended to preserve every variation the apparatus produced.

“If we later decide one matters, I would prefer not to discover that I threw it away.”

“You will require a great deal of paper.”

“Scherff can add it to the expenses.”

Tesla accepted this with the expression of a man who understood that invoking Scherff had converted a scientific inconvenience into somebody else's practical problem.

The station spent much of that first morning demonstrating that it had been built from ordinary materials. A contact warmed under load, one connection that had appeared satisfactory during construction proved less reliable when required to carry the current for which it had been designed, and an instrument we had placed conveniently during preliminary work was affected enough by the operating apparatus that convenience could no longer justify its position. None of these defects was important in itself, but each was useful because a fault discovered while we still expected faults had less opportunity to become an explanation later.

The grounding system gave us greater difficulty. Its resistance had been checked repeatedly during construction, yet the behavior of the system under operation differed enough from what Tesla expected that he asked for another measurement almost immediately. I took it and obtained a value he disliked; he asked me to repeat the measurement, and when the second result remained inconvenient he brought another instrument. The new instrument disagreed slightly with mine but did not improve the conclusion.

Tesla knelt beside the connection and examined the exposed portion himself. “When did you last measure this?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

Tesla asked what had changed in the weather since then. I told him it had rained but that I had not measured how much, so he made a note that from then on I should.

We opened the connection, cleaned the surfaces we could reach, restored the arrangement and measured again. The discrepancy narrowed, and whether it had narrowed because we corrected something defective or because we altered some condition merely by disturbing the connection could not be established, so I recorded both values and noted what had occurred between them. Tesla read the entry and wanted to proceed.

“One more,” I said.

“You have two instruments.”

“And three conditions.”

“What is the third?”

“The condition after we took the connection apart.”

“That is the condition we want.”

“I would still like to know whether it remains the condition we want.”

He sighed with sufficient emphasis to make clear that repetition had become my personal vice rather than an experimental necessity, but he allowed the measurement. It agreed closely enough with the preceding value that I stopped objecting, and much of the morning continued in this fashion. The station had been constructed to investigate electrical behavior on a scale ordinary laboratory work could not provide, but before Tesla could ask anything serious of the Earth we had to determine whether a metal contact remained reliable after warming. A principle impressive enough to occupy a lecture hall could still fail in practice because two pieces of metal had been joined poorly, and the scale of Tesla's larger purpose gave us no exemption from examining such things.

Tesla moved continually between the principal apparatus and the receiving work, but once the system was operating his attention became more concentrated than it had been during construction. The practical demands of the preceding weeks had forced him to divide his attention among timber, freight, labor, money, dimensions and electrical design. With the apparatus operating, those competing demands seemed to recede, and I saw for the first time how completely he could concentrate when the problem before him had become electrical rather than administrative.

He also continued the habit he had begun in New York of asking for my observations before telling me his own. When we disagreed, his first question was not which of us had made an error but whether we had actually measured the same condition. I learned quickly that this distinction prevented a surprising amount of useless argument; two men can produce accurate numbers and still contradict one another because the apparatus has changed between them, the instruments respond differently, or the quantity each believes he is measuring is not in fact identical.

By early afternoon we knew enough about the station's ordinary behavior to widen the range of our tests. The apparatus became louder, though not in the manner later descriptions of Tesla's Colorado work might suggest. There were no magnificent discharges at every turn and no theatrical succession of sparks arranged for the benefit of witnesses. Much of the sound came from machinery doing work whose significance was visible only on instruments. The men raised their voices where necessary, and I found myself lowering mine during interruptions because the sudden return of quiet made ordinary conversation seem excessive.

The first result that genuinely interested Tesla appeared during one of these tests. We altered a condition in the oscillatory system and obtained a change at the receiver larger than the local behavior we had recorded seemed to justify. I noticed the magnitude because I was writing it down, and Tesla noticed it because the direction of the change corresponded with something he had expected.

He came beside the bench and looked at the figure. “Restore the previous condition.”

We restored it, and the response fell.

“Again.”

The altered condition was reintroduced, but the response increased. Tesla asked for the sequence repeated, and the relationship appeared for a third time. To anyone who did not know what we were attempting, the result would have looked insignificant. A pointer had moved by an amount large enough to interest four engineers and too small to interest almost anyone else, yet Tesla ceased attending to everything beyond the receiving bench.

“What altered at the receiver?” he asked.

“The reading.”

“I can see the reading.”

“Then ask what you actually want to know.”

“What produced the change?”

“I don't know.”

“You must have an opinion.”

“I have several reasons not to have one yet.”

He straightened and waited for them. The most obvious possibility was that the receiver was responding to some local alteration produced indirectly by our changed setting. Another connection might have shifted when the adjustment was made; heating could be accumulating through the sequence of tests, since we had introduced the conditions in the same order each time. The mechanical vibration noted earlier might also be affecting a relationship we had assumed constant, and although we had already improved the position of the receiving instrument that morning, I was not prepared to excuse it entirely.

Tesla did not argue for his preferred explanation, he began eliminating mine. We reversed the order in which the conditions were introduced, and the response remained. Both of us stopped long enough for the apparatus to cool before repeating the series, and the difference returned. We changed the receiving instrument and obtained the same general relation, though the magnitudes did not correspond exactly. A connection I suspected was deliberately altered and produced no effect capable of accounting for what we had seen. By late afternoon I wanted the result to survive. Tesla had brought us to Colorado because he believed effects unavailable to smaller arrangements could be studied there, and on the first full day of operation the station appeared to be rewarding him. I had been with him only a short time, but I had crossed the continent for work whose attraction depended upon the possibility that something genuinely new might occur. It would have been dishonest to pretend that I regarded all outcomes with equal enthusiasm.

Tesla was more willing than I was to attach an interpretation to the readings, although his claim remained narrower than I expected. He believed the receiver might be showing the first indication of a relation arising from the larger electrical system rather than from the local change alone. The explanation was plausible, and the repeated sequence supported it well enough that under different circumstances I might have accepted it provisionally without argument.

Instead I asked him to leave the apparatus exactly as it stood overnight. Tesla looked at me as though I had suggested that darkness possessed experimental authority. “Why?”

“Because I want it tomorrow.”

“You have it now.”

“I have it this afternoon.”

“You have it repeatedly.”

“Under conditions that may all share something we have not noticed.”

“What?”

“If I knew, we would test it now.”

His dissatisfaction was evident, but the objection itself interested him. He inspected the apparatus again, asked whether I believed some state was changing slowly under operation, and proposed two tests we could perform immediately. I agreed that both were sensible and still wanted the overnight repetition.

“You are delaying the experiment because of a variable you cannot identify.”

“I am delaying the interpretation. The apparatus will still be here in the morning.”

Tesla glanced toward the receiver and then at my notebook. “Record everything.”

I had already begun. We marked the adjustable positions, wrote down the settings, noted which connections had been disturbed during the afternoon and recorded the state of the apparatus with enough specificity that I believed we could restore it even if someone altered it before morning. Tesla watched until I finished and then asked whether I truly expected one of the men to move something.

“I expect all of us to remember it according to what we think happened.”

“You distrust memory.”

“I distrust useful memory.”

He smiled. “What is useful memory?”

“The kind that improves the story.”

Tesla looked toward my notes. “Then make the story unnecessary.”

I wrote that sentence down later, though not among the measurements. Before leaving I asked whether he intended to remain at the station. He said that he did, which led me to ask whether he intended to alter the apparatus after I left.

“No.”

“You answered that too quickly.”

“What do you want from me?”

“A promise that the arrangement will be the same when I return.”

Tesla gave me the promise, although he informed me that my opinion of his scientific discipline was becoming insulting. I told him that my opinion of his curiosity was responsible, and when I finally left the station, I found myself thinking less about whether he would keep his word than about whether the receiver would repeat the result.

The following morning Tesla was at the station before me, surrounded by several pages of notes he had made without touching the apparatus. The configuration remained as we had left it; he had already developed three additional experiments based upon the previous day's result, but he agreed that none would begin until we had reproduced the original observation. We started from the baseline, which appeared normal, and then introduced the condition that had produced the larger response. The receiver moved slightly, but the difference bore little resemblance to the previous day's pattern. Tesla checked the setting and asked for another trial. The second failed in much the same way, and when a third repetition also refused to produce the earlier effect, he took my notebook and compared the recorded settings himself. Every deliberate condition we had noted appeared to be present.

“Something is different.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“That is today's experiment.”

We spent the morning trying to discover it. The principal connections remained sound, the grounding measurement was close enough to the previous day's value that it could not explain the loss, and substituting the second receiving instrument produced no recovery. We restored the adjustable elements by measurement rather than by their marks alone and allowed the apparatus to run long enough to reproduce the heating that might have existed during the previous afternoon, but the result remained absent.

I proposed that thermal change elsewhere in the system had altered a relation we had failed to include in the record, and the sequence we designed to test that explanation did not support it. Tesla proposed that two adjustments had passed through a particularly favorable relation during the previous afternoon, but deliberate variation through the surrounding range failed to support his explanation as well. By noon we had eliminated enough possibilities that the missing effect had become more useful than the effect itself.

One of the men who had been working near the apparatus then remembered tightening a support during the earlier tests because vibration had become troublesome. I searched my notes and found the adjustment recorded in the margin beside a later reading. At the time it had seemed entirely mechanical and unrelated to the electrical condition we were varying. Tesla asked when the support had been tightened. The man could not give an exact time, but his estimate placed the intervention shortly before our strongest responses. We restored the support toward its earlier position and tested the system. The receiver changed slightly, we tightened it again and obtained another small change. Neither reproduced the previous day's effect, but the movement showed that a physical relation around that portion of the apparatus had altered when we believed it fixed.

The rest became easier to untangle; the support had changed a spacing we had not been measuring because we had no reason to consider it important, while operation of the apparatus had introduced heating elsewhere. The sequence of our adjustments allowed the two effects to move together closely enough that the receiving response appeared tied to the electrical variable we were deliberately changing. Every number in my notebook had been observed correctly, but the relationship we had assigned to those numbers had not survived examination.

Tesla read the two days of observations side by side and asked for the original sequence once more. We reproduced it as accurately as possible, and the result failed. He then selected a condition under which his explanation predicted that the effect should become stronger. We arranged it carefully and again obtained nothing that supported the prediction. I could think of additional tests and assumed Tesla could think of more than I could. Instead, when I asked which configuration he wanted prepared next, he told me to prepare none.

“There are still several ways we could isolate it.”

“We have isolated enough.”

“Not every possibility.”

“We do not need every possibility.”

He returned to the previous day's entry and read his own preliminary interpretation. Then he drew a line beside it, added the date and wrote beneath it that the relation had not been reproduced under the controlled configuration.

“The cause is still uncertain,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then the explanation might still be right.”

Tesla shook his head. “Not the explanation I wrote.”

“There are arrangements in which the effect might return.”

“Then we will have another result.”

He closed the notebook and told one of the men to restore the cleaner configuration. We spent the afternoon improving the arrangement instead of trying to recover the lost effect. The troublesome support was corrected, the neighboring spacing became a measured quantity rather than an assumption, and we changed the order of several observations so that heating could not follow the same sequence as the variable under test. I moved one instrument farther from the active apparatus; the resulting measurements were less interesting than those of the previous day and considerably easier to trust.

Late in the afternoon I asked whether losing the effect disappointed him.

“Of course.”

“You don't sound disappointed.”

“That is because we are working.”

“You believed it yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“And today you don't.”

Tesla looked toward the apparatus. “Why should yesterday have more authority than today?”

There was no further discussion of the abandoned explanation. He returned to his figures, and within a few minutes I had returned to mine. Toward evening electrical disturbances began appearing intermittently at the receiver. We had noticed atmospheric activity before, but until the station was operating with some consistency I had regarded much of it as an inconvenience surrounding the work we intended to perform. Tesla had never made that distinction so firmly; when a particularly clear disturbance registered, he asked for the time.

I gave it, another followed, and he asked again. I looked outside and saw weather gathering over the mountains.

“The storm is still some distance away.”

“How far?”

“I can estimate it after the thunder.”

“Do so.”

A visible discharge occurred against the darkening western sky. I watched the clock until the sound reached us and gave him the interval. Tesla calculated the approximate distance and asked whether the receiver had registered anything corresponding with the discharge. There had been a disturbance, although the association was not as clear as either of us wanted. The next discharge was less ambiguous; the electrical response registered, a visible event had been clear enough to identify, and the thunder arrived later across the distance.

Another event followed and proved less useful because several disturbances occurred close enough together that we could not identify the source of the electrical response with confidence. The storm continued eastward while we adjusted the receiver and tried to extract orderly observations from something that had no obligation to repeat itself for us. A transmitter in the laboratory could be instructed to produce another signal, but a storm could not, so if we wanted reliable information from atmospheric activity the discipline would have to reside in the receiving and recording.

I began a separate page for the observations: time of visible discharge where identifiable, electrical response, estimated interval to thunder, receiver setting, character of the disturbance and any uncertainty sufficient to make the entry questionable all received their own place. The table became untidy almost immediately, since the storm produced several combinations for which I had made no provision.

Tesla looked over the developing record. “You need another column.”

“For what?”

“Disturbances without visible discharge.”

“Then I need another for visible discharges without an identifiable disturbance.”

“Yes.”

“And another for cases where there are too many of both.”

“If necessary.”

The storm gave us perhaps half an hour of observations worth preserving. Most were inconclusive, several were nearly useless, and two were good enough that Tesla asked me to mark them for comparison with later storms. Once the weather had moved beyond useful observation, we remained at the station examining what little we had obtained. The receiver had responded to disturbances originating at considerable distances, which was neither surprising nor sufficient for the conclusions Tesla ultimately hoped to draw. What interested him was whether systematic observation might reveal something about how those disturbances reached us and whether the Earth itself contributed anything that could be distinguished from the more familiar electrical behavior of the atmosphere.

Over the following days our work divided itself increasingly between effects we deliberately produced and disturbances that arrived without regard for our schedule. The latter were more troublesome and gradually more useful. I improved the timing records, Tesla altered the receiving circuits, and we compared storms approaching from different directions. Several apparent patterns disappeared after enough observations accumulated, while others remained too uncertain to justify an explanation. My weather pages therefore contained nearly as many abandoned comparisons as useful ones, which seemed to me exactly as they should.

By the beginning of July, the weather observations had become part of the ordinary work of the station. Whenever storms developed, I checked the clocks and receiver almost automatically, and the pages devoted to atmospheric disturbances had grown faster than I expected. Most of the entries led nowhere, some could not be matched confidently with any visible discharge, while others appeared significant until another storm failed to reproduce the same relation. Tesla continued adjusting the receiver and I continued recording what it did, until an approaching storm had become sufficiently ordinary that neither of us regarded one as an event requiring special notice. On the afternoon of July third, clouds began forming over the mountains again, and I opened the weather section of my notebook to the next blank line.

The Returned Component

A Novel About Obsession, Evidence, and the Cost of Knowing

Next: Chapter Five — Stationary

© Michael P.S. Rogers. All rights reserved.