town. He was waaay ahead of his time, so he certainly had the smarts
and gear to knock down a few trees. It would have been the last in a
long line of tests that--some say--included sinking the French ship
lena by electrical bolts generated miles away.'
'Apparently Tesia didn't much care for the French,' Alex said,
smiling.
'He didn't care much for anybody,' Jay said.
'Anyway, in 1906, J. P. Morgan financed Tesia, and he built a bigger
generator than the one in Colorado, this was on Long Island. Eighteen
stories tall, topped with a huge metal globe that weighed more than
fifty-five tons. Eventually he and Morgan had a falling out, and he
made a couple of bad choices, so he ran out of money before he proved
it could work. According to his theory, you could focus the power just
right, and turn it into what would essentially be a death ray with the
power of a small nuke, and send it anywhere on the planet by bouncing
it off the ionosphere.'
'Fascinating, Jay. Are we getting to the point any time today?'
'There's a great story about Tesia going to a bridge with a hammer and
a stopwatch, tapping the metal at precise intervals, and damn near
taking the bridge down with the Galloping Gertie effect. I'm telling
you, Tesia was head and shoulders above everybody else of his time.'
'Jay. Hello. Earth to Jay?'
'It's the same technology. Boss, pumping juice into the air without
wires! The HAARP people aren't doing anything Tesia didn't think of a
hundred years ago.'
'All right, I'm impressed. He was a genius. Get to the point.'
'Well, according to my mole in the CIA--and that's for the benefit of
any CIA ops listening to our conversation, good luck on finding
him--even after the demise of the evil empire, the Russians continued
their experiments with ELF radiation, using devices that Tesia would
have recognized as his own. Ivan hasn't found the magic combination
yet, that we know of. Aside from HAARP, which is the biggest, there
are other 'atmospheric heaters' like it all over the world, at least a
dozen, not counting any somebody might be hiding in the woods
somewhere. And using the ionosphere to bounce off of--like playing
pool, you can bank the shot--any one of them could be driving the
Chinese bonkers--if they've figured out the correct frequency to do it.
And given what we know, it seems as if somebody might have figured it
out.'
'Sounds like science fiction to me.'
'No, that is the point. Boss--it's old tech, the root stuff. Anybody
with some wire and a lot of time on his hands can produce it. It's the
frequency stuff they need, not the hardware. It's like plug-'n'-play;
you don't need to be a whiz to get it to work. Tesia did the basics a
century ago. Certainly a theory we ought to check out.'
'And how do you propose we check it out?'
'Hey, that's the fun part. We go into the wonderful world of VR and
hunt it down on the net. I bet that somewhere, sometime, somebody has
put something about this into the ether, and even if they hid it, I'll
