Tesla - Jason Walker (readict books txt) 📗

Darren knew that he couldn’t stay in the silo forever, and wearing gloves on his hands for every minute that he was in there was starting to bother him. He had to, though, because he didn’t want to leave any fingerprints on the material that he touched. And he was moving through a lot of what was there.

He also knew that he couldn’t read through every file, no matter how much he wanted too because time was running out.

In the end, Darren decided to take the pocket notebook that had the date of birth written onto the front page alongside Nikola Tesla’s handwritten name. There was something about that specific notebook that really resonated with him. Maybe it was reading about how low life had become for Nikola Tesla after Morgan had burned his laboratory down in 1895. It inspired him in many ways.

In addition to the notebook, he also had two dozen rolls of used film, which he would have to have developed by somebody that he could trust—someone who wouldn’t screw up the development of the negatives. Unfortunately, he couldn’t take pictures of everything, but he was thankful to have brought his own thick notebook, in which he wrote down many things based on the files that he had read. One of the most recent of Tesla’s writings he’d read concerned his theories regarding teleportation. It explained that Einstein had been contracted by the US government to come up with some kind of teleportation pad that objects could be sent from and received on. That contract had been given shortly after the Philadelphia experiment concluded.

And Darren had seen teleportation actually take place right outside the barracks that he had been assigned to when he was on the base of Diego Garcia, which meant that they no longer needed to use teleportation pads. Those secret space program mercenaries that were called KRUGER had that very technology built into their body armour. It had been an impressive sight to witness.

Eventually, Mathews knew that he was going to have to start wrapping things up. His mind was filled to the point of nearly bursting, so he decided to explore the facility a little bit more. He looked over at his rucksack and pulled out his empty day patrol bag that was in the bottom of the main compartment. Rather than carry his bag everywhere, he’d take just the essentials to help him on his underground patrol. Things like the battery-operated lantern, extra batteries kept in a copper container to protect them from being drained, his gun, his first aid kit, and his camera—that was all he needed.

This time, Darren wanted to venture below level three where he’d left the body bag and its contents. He came to a fire door and touched the handle. There was no shock of electricity, which he thought might occur. Then, he proceeded to push down on the handle and opened the door.

He walked into a hallway, which had many doors, and some of them had windows on them that weren’t blocked out. Darren stood on the tips of his toes, peering into the darkened rooms. The flashlight did little to help, as it mostly reflected back at him by the glass.

For a moment as he started to walk away from one of the doors, he thought he heard a noise inside the room he’d just looked at. He thought that there might have been movement behind one of them . . . but that was crazy. Right? Clearly, this silo hadn’t been in use for years. Decades, even.

There wasn’t anything that could survive that long without food or water. Nothing on earth, at least.

Darren backed away from the door some more. He walked on and looked in every room he could. Most appeared to be empty. At the end of the hallway was another set of stairs with a fire door. He tried the door and it opened. After it was shut behind him he looked below with his flashlight. It was dark, and he was already many levels below level three. He took a few more deep breaths and then got on with it. He began descending the stairs to what he believed might be the bottom level of the silo.

When he got down to the next floor, he didn’t hear anything. There were fewer offices down here, and he continued forward through the eerie darkness.

He wasn’t one to spook easily. He’d always had a strong constitution, and that had only become truer as he underwent training over the years. He thought of the job that the American soldiers who went down into the hand-dug tunnels after the Vietcong during the Vietnam war. That must have been terrifying to be moving through such a confined space as that. He had lots of space around him, but he was so far down and was totally on his own with no backup to come to his aid.

But the dark and the silence was starting to get to him.

He needed a distraction.

That distraction came in the form of water filling up a great deal of the compartment where they’d once kept the actual missile. Groundwater had seeped in and begun to form an underground well.

He grabbed up a loose piece of cement and chucked it into the water.

Nothing.

No movement.

Darren figured it was probably safe, so long as he didn’t try to drink it. The birdbaths worked fine the first few days, but he was itching for something more.

Quickly, Darren stripped down to his shorts with the light from the battery-operated lantern still working well for him. He walked over to the metal ladder that was bolted into the cement wall and tested it to see if it would still hold someone’s weight. It didn’t budge an inch, so he began using it to climb down into the water below at the very bottom of the silo. The water was deep enough that he couldn’t touch the bottom.

At first, it was exactly what Darren needed. He had always loved the water, and there was nothing better to clear the head than a bath. But a cold one like this moved his testicles from his groin up to his armpits, so he didn’t want to be in the water for very long.

He stepped off the bottom step and submerged his entire body, but he kept his eyes closed. It didn’t take long for those thoughts to change about this being a good idea. A few moments under the water and he came back up the ladder. As he started to climb up, he heard a sound but he wasn’t sure if it was caused by the excess water that was dripping off his body into the water beneath him. The silence in the facility was generally deafening.

After getting back to where he had taken off his clothing, he picked up his flashlight and cast the beam of light down at the water to see if he could illuminate any objects lying beneath the surface. It was a good thing he hadn’t jumped into the water because he did see some rectangular metal shapes down there. Suddenly, off in the distance, he heard something. It was just a soft tone that repeated itself. He came to the conclusion that it was water dripping down into the basin. It was easily explainable, but it still made Darren’s heart beat faster. Being alone in the dark a hundred meters below the surface was having an effect on his mind.

Upon changing back into his clothes and doing up his boots, Darren came to the conclusion that being so deep in the silo didn’t seem like a good idea anymore. He put on his daypack and walked back down the corridor and back to the staircase.

It wasn’t until he was halfway back to level seven that Darren realized a fog was starting to clear from his mind. He was able to look at things more rationally now, thanks to the adrenaline that was pumping through his body. He could think again and thought he might start packing up once he got back to the top level.

When Mathews reached the top level, he went into the room where he had his personal belongings and changed into a new pair of socks and some clean underwear while still using his lantern to light up his immediate surroundings. When he was ready, he reached into the top of the bag and opened up the zipper, revealing his headlamp, which he then removed and fit onto his forehead.

As Darren settled back onto his inflated mattress, he picked up another file and opened it up. Getting some more work done seemed preferable to sleeping.

On the first page of the CIA file, he read a summary that explained that many scientists who questioned the bigger ideas of life were coming out with huge ideas. One of those was Nikola Tesla’s dynamic theory of gravity, which he’d presented to the world in 1899. But there were others too. People like Faraday were commonly associated with scientific discovery. Darren continued reading the grand summary and learned that in 1875, Tesla had decided he wanted to make a flying device. It was what originally motivated him to enter the field of engineering. Interesting, Darren thought as he turned the page. By 1911, however, Tesla was working with conducting anti-gravity research based on his original theory. He was open about this study and even went on record with the press about it. That took some brass balls, considering how narrow-minded people could be!

His personal writings that were in his notebooks were different, though. Darren saw a man being attacked and manipulated from all sides. It was through these personal entries that Darren learned Tesla was suspicious of Werner Von Braun. Tesla had documented many of their conversations with each other: they spoke of ways to cancel gravity, and elements that might be used in the process of such an encounter.

These discussions were covered in great detail. They focused on using Beryllium peroxide, thorium peroxide, and mercury as the key components in the studies.

The CIA file, however, surprised Darren most of all, as it revealed that Tesla had worked on the Statue of Liberty at a time when the United States feared there were a number of spies plotting the collapse of the country through a clandestine spy ring that was already in the country. According to what was in the rest of the file, the Statue of Liberty had actually been designed for the ruler of Egypt. It was meant to be an Arabic woman, holding a torch at the southern opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt. But after construction was started, it was revealed that the ruler couldn’t afford it.

Not wanting to waste his work, Frederic Aguste Bartholdi had to come up with another idea. That’s why he redid the face and offered it to the Americans, so long as they agreed to build the base for it.

The money for said project was raised by donations that Mr Eiffel brought in.

That paper led into another, which covered Frederic Aguste Bartholdi in more detail. It was revealed that he’d been the head of the Grand Orient Temple Mason.