inventions. Greek statues filled corners; photographs and paintings packed every available inch of wall. The room felt both cluttered and spacious; objectively grand and intensely personal.
At a simple rolltop desk in the middle of the room, a rumpled middle-aged man slumped in a tilt-back chair, angled away from them, his worn boots resting on the edge of an open drawer. He appeared to be asleep; a steel bowl sat in his lap below his folded hands. Touseled, graying hair lay every which way on his large, noble head. Jack signaled the others for silence, and he crept closer to the man in the chair. Lionel Stern suddenly gasped.
'Do you know who that is?' whispered Stern.
Two steel balls fell from the man's hand and clanged in the steel bowl. The sound woke him; instantly alert, looking up to face them; broad brow furrowed to a deep cleft between bushy white eyebrows, a wide frowning mouth, and the keenest intelligence in his eyes. He spotted Jack first and beckoned him to the desk, shaking his hand, exchanging quiet pleasantries.
'That's Thomas Edison,' said Stern.
Jack waved them over and made the introductions: Edison lit up like his famous incandescent bulb when he met Doyle.
'The Holmes generator, in the flesh,' said Edison with a laugh; to their puzzled silence he explained that the 'Holmes generator'' was well known in scientific circles as a precursor to the electromagnetic engine.
'Oh,' said Doyle.
Edison seemed unable to express strongly enough his enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes: Most novels teemed with creatures of such uninspired and feeble dimwittedness it was a wonder any author could be bothered to write about them; but what a joy to encounter such unapologetic brilliance in a fictional character! Doyle was flattered into utter befuddlement.
Edison leaped to his feet with the spring of a teenager, shimmied up the rolling ladder bolted to his library stacks, pulled down a leather-bound volume of Holmes, and insisted Doyle sign the title page for him.
'Any more Holmes stories in the works?' Edison eagerly wanted to know. 'Surely our man's sharp enough to have found a way to survive that little problem at the waterfall.'
'There's been some talk about it,' said Doyle, hating to disappoint the great man. Innes stared at him as if he'd just spoken in tongues.
They chatted about Doyle's work habits, Edison keen on facts: How many hours a day did he write? (Six.) How many words did he produce a day? (Eight hundred to a thousand.)
Did he write by hand or with one of the new mechanical typewriters? (Fountain pen.) How many drafts of each book? (Three.) Then the conversation shifted to the mysterious origins of creativity in the mind. They agreed that the brain's relentless appetite for order resulted in the spontaneous development of organized ideas attempting to simplify the problems of daily living, be it a story that shed light on some troublesome aspect of human behavior or a machine that reduced the difficulty of essential physical labor.
'We're all detectives,' said Edison, 'wrestling with that question mark at the end of our existence. A large part of the universal appeal of your Mr. Holmes, I think.'
'But he's just a machine, really,' said Doyle modestly.
'Oh, but I disagree; with all apologies to Sherlock, and the prevailing medical wisdom, our brain is not a machine. When induced into the appropriate state of readiness, the brain, I believe, enters into contact with a field of pure ideas; not a physical place as we understand it, but not a purely theoretical one, either. A dimension of abstract thought that parallels our own, overlaying and informing our world in ways hard to imagine. We experience it directly only through the auspices of a properly prepared human mind. And drawing down the visions that we find while visiting this 'other place' is the source of all great human inspiration.'
'May I ask, sir, what you were doing with those balls and the steel bowl when we arrived?' said Doyle.
'I can see where our Mr. Holmes comes by his observational acuity,' said Edison with a smile. 'I discovered early in my life that the best ideas took shape in my mind when I passed through the dreamy borderland we cross on our way either into or falling out of sleep; I've come to believe this brief passage is when the brain reaches its optimum state of receptivity for making contact with this realm of pure reason. The difficulty comes in trying to maintain ourselves in that dreamy middle ground: We quickly fall either deeper into sleep or back toward wakefulness. So ...'
Edison picked up the bowl and the balls and sat down in his chair to demonstrate.
'Whenever I feel drowsy, I sit just so with my hand holding these over the bowl and let myself drift into that in-between territory. If I fall asleep, the balls drop from my hand and the clanging brings me back—I'm somewhat deaf, I need a good racket to do the job; I quickly pick the balls up and float away again. The more I practice, the longer I'm able to stay there. The thoughts come. Good things result. Any man can train himself to learn this technique, and I have found that with an hour or two spent in this productive state, I feel more rested than after a full eight hours in bed.'
'Why, this is very much like the meditative states attained by the yogis in the Far East,' said Presto.
'Is that a fact?' said Edison, who had not paid much attention to the other men beyond an occasional friendly glance. 'I'm very interested to know this; are you a Hindu yourself?'
'I am the Episcopalian son of an Irish-Catholic mother and a Muslim father who fled a Hindu culture to live in England,' said Presto with a bow.
'Well, America certainly sounds like the right place for you.'
With a glance at his pocket watch, Jack suggested they not take up too much of Mr. Edison's valuable time but should proceed with their reason for the visit. Edison, who seemed more grateful for the interruption than annoyed, marched them through the massive laboratories they'd glimpsed through the windows. Sixty full-time employees did the lab work, as teams assigned to various projects. Most of Edison's time was now taken up with administrative details, he explained grumpily; his investors insisted on it. Money drove everything now, not like the good old days in Menlo Park when energy was boundless and trust of one's fellows came unquestioned.
They left the main building, walked to a far corner of the quad, and entered a low oblong wooden shack fifty feet long, topped by a strange sloping hinged roof. Black tar paper covered the interior walls; black curtains draped a small raised platform at the far end. Doyle decided the hinging at the tops of the wall allowed the roof to slide open, for what reason he could not imagine. The men took seats on folding chairs before a square white screen hanging straight down from the ceiling, while Edison disappeared behind a black box of curtains at the back.
The room went dark and Doyle took advantage of the pause to lean over to Jack and ask, 'How did you come to know him?'
'Came to his door unannounced. Three years ago when I reenlisted,' said Jack. 'Identified myself, showed my credentials: agent to the Crown.'
'Why?'
'Mysteries I'd come across. Ideas. Questions I wanted to ask. He was surprisingly cooperative; he found me quite exotic. I lived on the grounds for two months. He told his people I was a visiting engineer. We shared a few ideas for applications of his new technologies....'
A rhythmic humming issuing from behind the curtain cut him off; moments later a narrow beam of light shot out of a peephole cut in its center, flooding the screen with a square of brightness painful to the eye.
Edison reappeared and stood beside them. Writhing black squiggles danced across the screen.
'Dust on the lens,' he explained. 'There is some extraneous footage attached to the front of the reel, Jack, but be patient; this does lead to the material you asked me to show you.'
The screen went dark again, and then suddenly two prizefighters appeared before them, circling around a roped-off ring, slapping punches at each other; there was no sound, the image leeched of color to a flat black and white and the figures moved with an almost comical jumpiness, but the spooky, larger-than-life spectacle appearing out of thin air astonished them.
'That's Gentleman Jim Corbett, world heavyweight champion,' said Edison, pointing to the larger of the men. 'Filmed in this same room a few months ago. His opponent's a local fellow we recruited from an obscurity—'
On the screen, Corbett floored the man with a single punch.
'—to which he quickly returned.'
The image changed to an exterior landscape; a train tunnel cut in the side of a mountain, tracks running from it directly at the screen. Moments later, a steaming locomotive charged out of the tunnel and hurtled toward them; the men yelled involuntarily. Innes dove out of his seat.
Edison guffawed and slapped his thigh. 'No matter how many times I see people react to that it still gives me
