The Final Letter of Dr. Morris Stanley

(Reprinted by permission from Science Fact and Fiction Quarterly)

Dear Readers,

As a writer of hard science stories well known to you on these pages, you surely know by now that I do not dabble in fantasy, ghost tales nor any of that paranormal nonsense currently in vogue. So when some months ago I came into the possession of a small box of letters from my great aunt Abigail, and happened across one impossibly odd bit of correspondence, I tried for a good deal of time to figure if I was in some way able to spin a yarn from it. But in the end, I know my limits. I write of orbits and thrusts, nuts and bolts, and this was quite beyond that. Sure it has machines and scientists in it, but I could not begin to fashion a story from it that could ever exceed the original text. So with due respect to my dearly departed great aunt and the mysterious Dr. Stanley, whomever he might have been, I re-print this, his final letter, here in its entirety.

Within an envelope labeled "Please deliver to Miss Abigail Phelps, Number 21 Dorset Way, Bournemouth, England" was the following:

July 10, 1903.

Dearest Abigail and Whomever Else It Might Concern:

I write this from what is likely to be my final repose in a small cellar workspace beneath the apparatus storage facility of Nancy-Université. Alone now for what I realize is the first time in my life, there is in my mind a bewildering clarity and expansiveness to my thoughts. Perhaps this is the clarity that leads to brilliance in such minds as Poincaré or Tesla. If only I had time, this would be a line of investigation: whether the great minds of our time are perchance those few fortunate individuals to not be burdened by the debilitating effects of succubotic fiends. But I cannot digress, my time is short. They circle outside, awaiting a safe entry. If fortune be on my side, I will have been long dead by then. The constant exposure to the emanations of the Crooke's Tubes has turned my skin a painful raw red, and my vision grows more blurred by the minute. I am quite simply being baked by an invisible heat, but it has afforded me these few moments of liberty with which to relate the events of the past few days. The dynamo powering the apparatus will no doubt run out of fuel soon, so I can only pray it last long enough to ensure my demise.

Where to begin? With the abominations themselves? Or instead, better perhaps detail the events in order of occurrence. To speak of the results without the background would lead you, with justification, to dismiss my writings as that of a fool or the hallucinations of a man whose brain has been boiled by the relentless fury of the Rayos-X. I am neither fool nor suffering dementia, and what I must relate is of such import as cannot be overstated and is very much real, although in what manner of the word real I mean cannot be easily formulated, as will be evident presently.

The entire tale first begins with my apprenticeship at the 5th Avenue workshop of the remarkable Mr. Nikolai Tesla in the year 1891. At the time he was immersed in the field of wireless transmissions of energy and it was then that the idea of observing the paths of energies through the trans-ether was broached. Mister Tesla was, however, a practical scientist, and did not so much care for observing phenomena as much as harnessing it. So the work of developing what came to be known as the Ether-Scopic Spectacles was entrusted to me, and soon he put it out of his mind entirely.

That is not to say that he had no hand in it, quite the contrary. For Mr. Tesla's initial insights into the problem were of such lucidity that the whole path of my endeavor was plainly laid out. Without his astute dissection of the electro-mechanical requirements the device would need to fulfill, I would likely have thrashed about for years and given up on the task. Even more important than his keen practical guidance at the outset was his offhand confidence that a solution was not only possible, but so lacking in challenge that a lowly apprentice such as I could carry it to completion. Buttressed by the knowledge that Tesla knew it could be done, I had no doubts that I would succeed. Even after the fire in 1895 forced him to release me and others from his employ, I soldiered on with the project for the next eight years on my own.