SON OF TESLA: Chapter 40

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JEM SLOWLY GOT OUT of the car and looked around. On the other side of the Kia, Petar did the same, then skipped around the front of the vehicle to get off the road. They were parked on the side of a quiet four-lane road at the edge of a long lawn that sloped gently downward to a square, white-roofed building.

A few feet from the road a wide, white pedestrian walkway ran parallel to the street, and about two dozen feet away, down the sloping lawn, grew two massive pinyon trees, their thick boughs bent with a heavy growth of clustered needles. It looked like a cross between an industrial block and a recreational park.

In the distance, Jem saw the peaks of the Rockies rising over a nestled bundle of buildings and homes that stretched like a doll's village in the middle distance. The sky was an irridescent blue that shimmered around a scattering of fluffy white clouds.

"This is your father's lab?" Jem asked, confused. He'd been expecting something different. Lightning maybe. A distinctive Tesla coil or two, tossing out showers of sparks. Farther down the lawn, an elderly lady with a poodle stopped to scoop something off the grass with a plastic bag.

"It was. At least, I think it was," Petar added after a moment. "See, in 1900, the year after I was born, the lab was torn down and sold as raw materials to pay off some of the debts my father had accrued. At the time, it didn't seem particularly important to mark the spot, and it's only recently that anybody's had any real interest in where it was located."

"Well why are we here if the lab's gone?"

"When they tore it down, they only took down the surface building. That was where he was doing most of his wireless power transmission experiments. It was a beautiful cover – a fifty-foot-high Tesla coil, high-voltage sparks lighting up the night sky, a razor-wire fence around the entire property with massive signs saying 'Keep Out.'

"A lot of that work led to amazing developments, but the whole time, the real work was going on underground. How did my father manage to lose all of his investors' money in just nine months' time? Easy: He funneled most of it into a state-of-the-art underground lab. It was completely off his books. All the journals and diaries that mentioned it – and the work he did there – were kept in the lab itself. You only knew about it if you already knew about it."

"So that's underneath us?" Jem's excitement had returned. The worries about his mother and sister seemed to have slid back under the plucky spirit that kept bubbling to the surface.

"That's what I'm hoping," Petar said slowly.

"You don't even know?" Jem exclaimed.

"Well, magnetic surveys have shown a dense magnetic field directly under this area – those are records available here on Earth. The field stretches for about four hundred feet square, which was, as far as I can tell, the general area of the underground lab. It makes sense that this is the right spot."

"So how do we get in?"

"That's the fun part," Petar smiled. "I hope you're not squeamish." As Jem watched, Petar glanced up and down the street to make sure nobody was coming, knelt at the edge of the road beside the Kia, and lifted a sewer grate out of its frame. It swung up with a rusty groan.

"You're kidding, right?" Jem said.

"I'd keep my mouth shut, if I were you," Petar said with a grin. "And watch for splashes." With that, he dropped out of sight into the sewer. A watery squelch resonated out of the hole.

Jem paused, looking around the street. This was crazy. Adventure, he wanted. As far as he knew, that didn't usually include splashing around in a city's toilet soup.

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