Pure Spite

Episode 5

About half the cops left the area. The others stayed and freed Mycroft. He was in pretty bad shape but very mad.

He said, "I want him prosecuted for this! He shot me."

I said, "He snuck onto my property and was told not to."

Mycroft said, "That does not give you the right to shoot me."

"Now you are shot, and if you had stayed off the property, this would not have happened," I said, "You have a big nose, buddy. You should have kept to your property. You were shot in my house. I told you I had a gun, but you had to know my secret. Now it is too late. The Monster has recked ruin on the whole world."

Mycroft said, "You're mad! There is no way you have affected the whole world. You have megalomania see."

I just smiled and laughed evilly.

The cop pointed his gun at me and said, "You caused all this. You are coming with us. As for you, Mycroft, this is your fault. You were in his house. You want to file a complaint, come on down. Otherwise, stay off his property."

I said, "Oh, Mycroft, I will warn you once there are traps that work without power in the house. I would stay out."

"Mantraps are illegal," Mycroft said.

I said, "They are not deadly. Just very painful. If you find the ones that shoot long needles, they are coated with ghost chiles juice. Let me know if they burn."

"Let's get a move on. It takes an hour to walk to the station," one of the cops said.

As we walked down the streets, the people would come out of their houses.

They would say, "Help us! What has happened? When will services be restored?"

At the last question, I would laugh and say, "Years!"

You see, it was one of those chicken-egg problems. To wind good coils, you needed a motor to turn the coil well. To have a good electric motor, you needed electric generators. For good radio coils, you need a motor, and there are none.

Only this was not the big problem. The records of the banks were all backed up to other computers. So, anything that used a coil, like the head of a disk drive, exploded. Most likely destroying the disk they read. The data was gone. Everybody lost all the money in computers. Banks would not accept a statement. They were not verifiable and could be manipulated. Many businesses were closed instantly.

There was another problem, the planes. The high-flying planes were safe. The low flying planes to about two hundred feet. The coils all burned, and so did they. Many were killed.

There was a big crowd at the police station. I was walked up in handcuffs. Inside it was pandemonium. People shouting, people crying, and people demanding. The SWAT team brought me forward.

The desk sergeant said. "What?"

"We need to lock this guy up," the SWAT officer said.

The sergeant said, "We are a little busy right now. Come back in a week or two."

"Oh, you'll want to make room for him. He caused it," the SWAT guy said.

"Him? This is a Commie attack! The invasion force has been spotted and is coming ashore at any time."

I started to laugh.

"Shut up, you," one of the SWAT guys said, "This is not funny."

I laughed louder.

"Asshole," he said and lunged at me.

He grabbed me, and the others pulled him off.

"Kill me. That will fix it."

I laughed again, and the desk sergeant gave me the eye.

I looked at him and said, "Yeah, I did it. I released the Monster. The Electron Age is over. The masses will never be quilled. It's done, finished, the fat lady sang."

The desk sergeant looked at me and said, "Put him in the interrogation room."

After a while, a police officer in a suit came into the room. There were two other uniformed cops. He read me my rights.

"Fool, the United States does not exist right now. You have no authority. I protest. Release me now!"

"Oh, I'll release you and follow you with a loudspeaker saying you caused it."

I laughed and said, "Only one problem, there are no working loudspeakers. What are you charging me with?"

He glared at me and said, "For starters, Murder one, the was a plane at the airport taking off. It crashed into a huge fireball. 187 people on board. All dead. What did you do? How far did it reach?"

I said, "I released the Monster. Tesla's Monster. It went around the world in less than a second. It ate every coil on the surface of the planet. They are all gone."

The detective said, "What the Hell is that supposed to mean?"

"You simpleton, bring me, someone who understands math, electronics, or knows of Tesla's Colorado spring experiments," I said, "and bring me some water if you can."

I got some water. In two and a half hours, some young punk appeared.

"Okay, gramps, what did you do," he said?

"I ain't talking to you punk, snake your tongue up my rear hole and tickle my tummy from the inside."

When I came back around, they were just staring at me.

The detective said, "Any more stupid answers? Tell this guy what you did."

I said, "I released Tesla's Monster."

He got a nasty look on his face and said, "What are you talking about?"

"I rang the planet at a thousand times the power of Tesla's Colorado Spring project."

He sneered and said, "Oh yeah, Tesla had a fifty-foot diameter coil. I think I would have noticed a huge coil."

"Mine was sixty foot, and it used much heavier wire. It was built into the mansion. I imagine when the monster was released, it vaporized the roof."

The kid looked at me and said, "How many times did you ring the planet?"

"Oh, ten times or so. Each back wave amplified the signal many times. I figure the power wave was 5.6 times ten to the sixteenth watts. Tesla's Monsters were only in the hundreds of kilowatts, maybe a megawatt. It flashed along the surface of the planet at the speed of light. Any coil in the field loaded the power of the wave and melted. I ended the Electron Age."

The kid shook his head, got up, and left the room.

In the hallway, the Police Captain said, "What did he do? How do we fix it?"

The kid said, "You want it straight, he stopped electricity. The devices that we used to manipulate power are gone. To fix it is quite simple, replace all the coils. That will take twenty years or so if everybody cooperates."

The gunfire and explosions in the background did not signal cooperation.