device a deception-detector and espionage-recognition motor.
But, alas, patronage for Tesla was not to be. Mr. Tesla, in a bid to impress his sponsors that his device was no mere quackery or hocus-pocusion, arranged a private demonstration for Mr. Dulles and Mr. Hoover. While posterity does not record the contents of what Tesla revealed, Mr. Dulles was said to have quipped to a young Senator John Kennedy that Mr. Hoover found enormous distaste for Tesla’s “sartorial speculations” about Mr. Hoover’s leisure hours.
Triumph and Death of Tesla, and the Disappearance of the Neurheographiton
Effectively indexed by the elites who could fund his research, Mr. Tesla embarked on a new odyssey: touring the United States with the smaller, more portable Electrical Neurheographiton, Mark 3, as part of “Genius Nikola Tesla’s Electric Circus,” announcing “electrical exorcism of various mental afflictions and neurological maladies.” Mr. Tesla eventually made enough money (and trade in chickens and illicit spirits) from his circus to fund his various researches for the remainder of his life, including into “electro-transdimensional portals.”
Finally tendering “exclusive” sales of the technical specifications of the Mark 4 to Warner Bros. Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and United Artists in 1939, Tesla departed from public life, offering occasional anti-Relativity screeds while devoting most of his time to developing a “teleforce projector,” or death ray.
On January 12, 1943, Mr. Tesla was claimed to have died, although reports were conflicting. Many in Hollywood conjectured immediately that assassins in the pay of Big Cinema had done in the Serbian genius for selling them “exclusive” rights to a device whose blueprints contained, in tiny print, the phrase “I have omitted an explanation only for the motive unit which makes the entire machine work, in fear that the alchemists of celluloid might enthrall their nation and the world with ludicrous tales of vacuous lives.” Others believed that Mr. Tesla’s madness finally claimed him, inflicting him with a Jovian “brain burst” that produced not Minerva but rather a puddle of bloodied grey matter upon Tesla’s hotel room floor. Among the modern-day Fraternal Society of Teslic Scientific Investigators, there remains the belief that Tesla’s “corpse” was an electrophantasmic discharge that had merged with organic materials in the hotel room to produce a permanent simulacrum of Tesla, while the “real” man departed from this world to explore the Universe, unhindered by the constraints of mortals.
Documentation released following the dissolution of Yugoslavia at least identifies the path that Mr. Tesla’s inventions took following their master’s putative death. Farmer and amateur inventor Mr. Rhett Greene tracked down every working or dysfunctional electrical neurheographiton and, by means of wagon train, transported their many parts back to his “robotorium” (barn) in the then Dominion of Newfoundland, where he, without success, laboured for several years to make them work. Then, on Christmas Day 1947, Yugoslavian agents forcibly entered Mr. Greene’s barn under cover of darkness and extracted all of Mr. Tesla’s creations they found there.
The Lambshead Imperative
Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, who had long enjoyed Mr. Tesla’s invectives against Dr. Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, in 1997 tracked the remains of Tesla’s most bizarre device (that had actually worked) to the Sub-Basement 6 of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito Museum of Yugoslavian Civilisation. Apparently long- forgotten, the neurheographiton had been used to produce an indiscernible, global, mental domination,
St. Brendan’s Shank
Documented by Kelly Barnhill
Museum: The Museum of Medical Anomalies, Royal College of Surgeons, London
Exhibit: St. Brendan’s Shank
Medium: Copper, silver
Date: 1270s (?) (disputed)
Origin: The monks of the Isle of St. Brendan, also known as the Isle of the Blessed (disputed); the Faroe Islands (undisputed point of collection)
St. Brendan’s Shank is a small device—eight inches long from tip to tip—made from thirty-seven interlocking copper globes, circular hinges, a narrow headpiece (with burrowing snout), and a winding key connected to a clockwork interior (silver alloy and iron). The device itself has an uncannily efficient winding system—a single turn of the pin sets its lifelike wriggle in motion for days, even months, at a time. More than one biologist has noted the device’s astonishing mimicry of the movements, behaviors, and habits of a tiny subspecies of the Turrilepad, or armored worm, called the Turrilepus Gigantis, found in the North Sea and other cold-water locations. Like its prehistoric cousins, the segmented body of the Turrilepus Gigantis was covered in a tough, calcitic armor, had a sharp, burrowing snout, and exhibited a distinct lack of fastidiousness when it came to its diet.
The name of the Shank originates with the brethren of the Order of Brendan, although not from the saint himself. St. Brendan (called the Navigator, the Voyager, and the Bold) was no inventor, being far more interested in the navigational utility of the heavenly stars, the strange insistence of the sea, and, in one famously preserved quotation, the curious hum of his small boat’s leather hull against the foamy breasts of the ocean’s waves: “So like the suckling child, I return, openmouthed, to the rocking bosom of the endless sea.” He was not a man of science, nor of medicine, nor of healing. He was known for his ability to inspire blind devotion and ardent love in his followers, who willingly went to the farthest edges of the known world to found fortresses of prayer, only to have their beloved abbott leave them behind.
One such monastery existed for many centuries on the cliffs of the Isle of St. Brendan—also known as the Isle of the Blessed—a lush, verdant island once inhabited by a strange pre-Coptic civilization that had since vanished, leaving only a series of man-made saltwater lakes that appeared to have some religious significance. The monks soon added to the many strange tales surrounding the place, for it was said that the monks themselves would never die unless they left the island.
St. Brendan’s Shank, made of interlocking copper pieces, with over thirty springs to keep the pieces in tension with one another.
It was here that the idea for the Shank appears to have originated, although the sophistication of the device has led to theories of outside collusion. Some, for example, believe that the device shows evidence of workmanship common to the Early Middle Period of Muslim scientific flowering in the 1200s, specifically the influence of the (nonmonastic) brothers known as Banu Musa, and their
Whether or not this legend is true, it seems incontestable that the development of the Shank followed eventually from an event in 1078, when the lonely order on the island found itself an unwilling host to the unstable and murderous son of Viking despot Olaf the Bloodless, King of Jutland. The arrival of the young Viking on the isle was recorded in the sagas of a bard known only as Sigi, who was present with the Viking entourage accompanying the prince.
“The son of Olaf, upon hearing tell of an Isle populated by the Monks-Who-Cheated-Death, became inflamed by desire to find the place and conquer its secrets. The Isle, like a coward, made itself difficult to find, but the Prince did give chase through storm, through mist, and through ice until at last, the Isle was in our sights. We arrived with swords in hand, slicing open the first two monks who greeted us, as a demonstration of force and might. It was in this way that we learned that the Monks-Who-Cheated-Death had only cheated the death of cowards and slaves—a death in a bed, a death of age, a death of sickness. The death of Men cannot be cheated,
