The Eyes of America

                                  by Geoffrey A. Landis

It was an enlightened year, a young century from which to spring forward into the
future, a year in which people pushed the new boundaries of freedom.

It was an era of marvels, and who knew what could or could not be done? Men had
sent their signals by etheric wave across the English Channel, and the mighty
Niagara had been tamed and harnessed to the yoke of man. Locomotive rails
tunneled across and under the great Rocky Mountains, and America, the stripling
giant, had beaten the tired empire of Spain to the ground in a war of only three
months. Men now talked of airships that would fly to the moon, and of telephones
to breach the vapory wall between worlds.

It was 1904. Who knew what marvels would be next?

                                        ·····


The room was smoke-filled, but that was no surprise; the rooms where real decision
making occurred were always smoke-filled.
"Damn Democrats," Horovitz said. "They're going to ruin everything we fought for."

"Indeed," Hanna said. Marcus Hanna, the Ohio senator, was the chairman of the
Republican party, but Horovitz was its invisible leader. "You are only stating the
obvious. But who have we got?"

"Damn that communist, that anarchist, that swine," Horovitz said. "Why'd he have
to shoot Teddy? Couldn't he have shot McKinley? Damn it to hell, we need Teddy
now, more than ever."

Levi Horovitz—Leggy, to his friends, of which he had few, at least inside
politics—was short and rotund. He was rarely seen in public, and never without a
soggy cigar clamped in his teeth. For nearly twenty years, Horovitz had been the
hidden power behind the Republican party—since 1884, when, with the aid of a
handful of carefully paid newsmen, he had orchestrated his candidate Jimmy Blaine
into the Republican nomination over the incumbent Chester Arthur.

Horovitz was bitterly aware that he would never serve in office himself. He could
never get elected, not in this century, not in the next. Not a Jew. Not even in
America, the most enlightened country in the world. But he had adapted, and
presidents and generals danced to his orders.

"Roosevelt's not much good to us now, six feet under," Hanna said. In Hanna's
private opinion, Roosevelt had never been any good for the Republicans; the
damned cowboy had been unsafe and erratic. But there was no percentage in talking
against a war hero, especially a dead one; Hanna had learned that lesson well.
"Better come up with somebody else."

"Damn that anarchist," Horovitz muttered again. "Damn him to hell."

"That's redundant; he's there already," Hanna said. "Now, who have you got?"

"Damn that Bryan, too."
"Bryan's got the masses behind him," Hanna observed.

"Swine." Horovitz spit out his cigar and ground it under his foot. "They're all a bunch
of swine."

That was the problem facing the Republicans, all right. With Theodore Roosevelt
dead, shot by a drug-crazed anarchist, who did they have? William Jennings Bryan
was mobilizing the country yokels with his damned populist talk. The man was
tireless, crossing and recrossing the country by rail, stopping at every cow-flop town
on the tracks, talking about American imperialism as if it were a bad thing, asking the
people whether they had ever seen the "full dinner pail" that McKinley had promised
them. With his high-flown diction and rash promises, Bryan was raising their
expectations—and harvesting their votes. He could motivate the rabble, old Bryan
could; Horovitz would give him that. What a silver-tongued peacock he was at
oration, with his talk of America "crucified upon a cross of gold" and his avowal of
"plowshares of peace!"

If only the man had been a Republican, a true patriot, instead of a Democrat—one
step away from being a communist. Or worse.

"Here's my thought," Hanna said. "We run John Hay."

"Against William Jennings Bryan?" Horovitz dismissed him with a wave, and pulled a
crumpled new cigar from his vest pocket. "You're joking. Bryan would crumple him
up like a page from last year's Sears & Roebuck catalog and wipe his ass with the
man."

"Henderson, then?"

"Wouldn't stand a chance. None of those old guys can stand against Bryan. We need
somebody new."

"Then who?"

"The boy genius," Horovitz said. "The hero of America, the maestro of electricity."
At Hanna's blank look, he said, "The wizard of Menlo Park."

"You mean"—Hanna gasped—"Edison?"

Horovitz pulled a newspaper from his valise and dropped it onto the desk. The
headline said, EDISON ANNOUNCES REST, HE IS TIRED OUT AND WILL STOP INVENTING FOR
A WHILE. "He's not tinkering," Horovitz said. "He might as well run for president."

"But—the man has no knowledge of politics."

Horovitz lit his cigar, drew deeply, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and smiled. "So much
the better."

                                        ·····


"No," Edison said, "I have too much work to do. Wouldn't think of it."
He was no longer any sort of boy genius, not at fifty-five years of age, but his eyes
had the restless, playful energy of a boy, darting away as if he were already bored
with the conversation and itching to go outside to play. His suit was a stylishly cut
gabardine, but wrinkled as if he had slept in it, and his tie was carelessly knotted and
slightly askew.

Horovitz persisted.

"No," Edison said, "I have no interest in politics. Gentlemen, I am duly flattered, but I
do believe that you are importuning the wrong man." He stood up and turned to the
window, his back to Horovitz, pointedly gazing out across the East River.

It was intended as a gesture to dismiss Horovitz from his East Side office. Yet
Horovitz persisted.

"Are you deranged," Edison said, "or just deaf?" He turned back to Horovitz, his
eyes blazing with irritation. "No, confound it, no, and again no! Why me?"

The question was exactly the opening that Horovitz was waiting for.

"Mr. Bryan is kind-hearted, Mr. Edison, but he is a man stuck deeply into the mire of
the past," he said. "He will lead us down from the heights we have scaled, and, in
the name of his working man, will take us back into darkness. He is a fool, a fool
who believes with utter sincerity that he is guided by God, and he will be the ruin of
America."

Horovitz was careful, telling Thomas Alva Edison just exactly what he wanted to
hear. He worked words as carefully as playing a fish, in a net of flattery and sense in
equal proportions.

"It is a century of science, Mr. Edison," he concluded. "And if we cannot get
leadership from a man of science, a man of your standing, what hope do we have?
We come to you with our hats in our hands. So tell us, where is your equal? Is there
another man of your caliber and perseverance? Give me but the name of this man,
and we shall go on our knees and beg him to serve as candidate. No one but a man
of science can help us. Join us, Mr. Edison. Lead us. Tell us how to steer America.
You are our only hope."

Edison slowly nodded. "A century of science. Yes, that it is. That, it most certainly
is."

                                        ·····


"I love elections," said Samuel Clemens. "It is the great American spectacle,
featuring bloviating and drum-beating unmatched in the world, and it is always a thrill
to see whether the hypocrites will beat the fools, or vice versa."
Sam Clemens was in the barber shop. He was, as ever, resplendent in a white linen
suit. For the new century, he had decided that he would wear only white; it made
him look distinguished and dazzled the crowds, and Sam was a showman, every
Missouri inch of him.

"Quiet down a bit now, please, Mr. Twain," one of the men said. "We're listening to
Mr. Edison talk."

Sam wasn't in the barbershop for a haircut—he was cultivating the lion's mane look
that year—but had come to watch the men play checkers, listen to the election talk,
and maybe join in and pontificate a bit about current events. Or perhaps he might
pick up some gossip or some good lines he could use in an article or a speech. But
this time he was being upstaged, and upstaged by a doll, at that.

A talking doll. Sam had an Edison phonograph, of course; who hadn't? They were all
the rage. But this doll was a little Edison himself, a foot and a half tall, and spoke
with Edison's blunt, homespun voice. "I mean to put America to work," the tiny
Edison said. "Nothing great is accomplished without honest sweat, and I say America
is great because we ain't afraid of work."

"Well, well," Samuel Clemens said to it. "Truth, many folk as I know would sweat
and toil and try just about anything to avoid honest work. I allow as the folk Mr.
Edison knows must be a different kind of people entirely."

"We shall enter the glorious future," the Edison doll recited, "standing tall and
proud."

"Well, bully," Sam told it. "That's a fair promise, I'd say, about as honest as I've ever
heard from a politician." For a moment the men in the barbershop looked at him and
not the talking Edison, and Sam went on, "We will enter the future, indeed. I reckon
that will happen no matter which buffoon is elected. And glorious? Sure. 'Course,
you can call a pig glorious, if you like."

To tell the truth, Sam didn't know what to make of Edison. He certainly admired him
as an inventor, of course; Sam considered himself an inventor, but Edison was, no
doubt about it, the top dog. But what in blazes was the man thinking of, running for
president, and as a Republican, no less? Sam purely hated Republicans. Republican
imperialism and jingoism, in his opinion, were likely to be the ruin of America. Was
Edison too blind to know that only fools, charlatans, and con men ever ran for public
office? Not that Sam necessarily minded a good confidence man; some of them
were plain music to hear talk, and anyway, who else would he play pool with? But
Edison?

He had to go see that Edison, he did. Give him a good talking to, let him know how
he was being used.

He wondered if Edison played pool.

                                         ·····


William Jennings Bryan was working like a mule; crisscrossing the country by rail,
making fifteen and even twenty railroad-stop speeches a day, every day, save only
Sunday, the sabbath, when he restricted himself to one speech, after church. To
keep up his strength, he was eating six meals a day, and his campaign crew gave
him a rubdown after each speech in a hopeless attempt to keep him fresh and
vigorous.
Still, the Edison dolls were bringing the Republican campaign into every salon,
barbershop, and cafe in America. After some desperate seeking, Bryan's campaign
found that the Victor grapho-phone company would make a talking machine small
enough to hide inside a William Jennings Bryan doll, using a Victrola circular-platter
instead of an Edison cylinder. The Edison company sued, but while the lawyers
talked, the Bryan dolls battled the Edison dolls for the ears of America.

For that summer, the great American entertainment was to stage debates between
the two dolls. The Bryan doll explained that the issue was the principles of
democracy and rights for the working man against the plundering plutocracy and
imperialism of the Republican party. The Edison doll talked about the future, the
wonderful role America would have in bringing the engines of enlightenment to the
world, as earlier electricity had distributed light. (Neither doll talked about real issues,
as far as Sam Clemens could see.)

The talking cylinders were selling like blazes. "No band of train robbers ever planned
a robbery upon a train more deliberately or with less conscience," the tiny Bryan
squeaked forth, "than the robbery the plutocrats plan upon this great nation."
"Innovation, confound it, innovation and pure honest sweat are what build American
fortunes, and that is open to Americans of all cities," the miniature Edison
responded.

Edison set his team in the laboratory twenty-four hours a day trying to find ways to
make reproductions of cylinders quickly and cheaply; inventing new materials to
take the place of the fragile wax. As fast as he could innovate, the Victor
talking-machine company matched Edison's cylinders with new grapho-phone disks
of Bryan's speeches, and there was a new speech for sale for the dolls to talk every
week.

                                          ·····


"Edison is beating me," Bryan said, "with light." He was standing in the small office of
the private railway car the campaign had hired. A pile of newspapers lay piled at the
foot of the plumply cushioned armchair from which he had just arisen; he had
scanned each one rapidly and discarded it. "It is not enough that the plutocrats are
spending every dollar that they have stolen from the honest workingmen, but now
Edison has started promising to bring electrification to every farmhouse in the
country. The farmers are buying his electrical-miracle talk wholesale. He cannot do
it, of course, but ever I fail to convince them."
"Then promise electricity as well," said Calhoun, his closest campaign adviser. Bryan
was famed as a campaigner who revealed his strategies to no one, but Cal, who had
no ambitions of his own but to be secretary to the great man, was one of the few
that Bryan would trust to reveal his doubts to. "Just think what a benefit it would be
for the common man, no longer to live under the tyranny of the sun!"

"I will not disparage the sun, which is God's gift," Bryan said curtly. "And, further,
though all my advisers tell me to, I will cozen my people with no lies. The cost of the
copper alone would bankrupt the nation, unless we are to implement a new tax, and
that I will not do. I shall and will promise nothing that cannot be delivered."

"There is a man," Calvin said, "who has said—well, I don't know myself, but he has
said that he can send power without wires. He can control the lightning."

"Who is this?" Bryan said.

"His name is Nikola Tesla."

"And the problem?"

"Well," Cal hesitated. "I've heard people say he's mad."

                                          ·····
Nikola Tesla was Edison's greatest rival—in the field of electrical inventing, his most
vexing and only rival. Where Edison had electrified New York with direct-current
electricity, Tesla's alternating current, backed by Mr. Westinghouse, was electrifying
the nation.
If the mad Serb said he could command the powers of lightning, it was no more or
less a marvel, in its way, than Herr Daimler's pneumatic-tired gasoline automobile.

Tesla had agreed to meet Bryan at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where he kept
his room. Bryan had engaged a small private meeting room, decorated with a
cabbage-rose wallpaper and an elaborate marble-topped table with an ormolu clock
featuring the metaphorical figures of Time and the Lovers.

"I can create, or I can destroy," Tesla said. He was impeccably dressed, in a dark
suit whose shirt bore detachable cuffs and an elaborately knotted silk cravat of the
palest blue. "I can make the Earth sing like a bell. I can excite the powers of
resonance, and like that"—he snapped his fingers—"I could destroy buildings, cities,
whole continents." His stare was piercing, almost frightening in its intensity, like that
of a preacher in the throes of the rapture. "I could split the Earth itself in two.
Electricity? I can call forth the lightning from the deep blue sky and stand untouched
in the electrical fires. God? You talk of God? I will show you God, the God of
lightning. Give me only my dynamo, and I hold the powers of God in the palm of my
hand."

"Your talk is blasphemous," Bryan said calmly. "If you wish to continue in this
fashion, please absent yourself from my presence. And furthermore, I have no
interest in your engines of destruction. America is no imperial war power; we are a
power of peace, not a sower of human discord."

Tesla was momentarily taken aback. "And what, then, do you want of me?"

"You seek backing. I am told that you want financial backers for your idea to create
electrical power and send it through the ether across the Earth. Is this true?"

Tesla nodded. "Resonance," he said. "Resonance is the secret; nothing works
without resonance."

"I think that without wires, there can be no meters, and without meters, the
electricity would be free to all," Bryan said. "And so, with no promise of fat
remuneration, none of the plutocrats will finance your scheme."

"All too true, I have found," Tesla said ruefully. "I must admit it."

"Help me win this election." Bryan's eyes blazed with the strength of his sincerity.
"Help me win, and I promise you, your electrical broadcast towers will be built."

"Sir, I am yours." Tesla bowed. "If invention is your requirement, you may have no
fear of Edison, for in that respect I am his master. Only tell me what I must do, and I
shall be at your most dedicated service."

                                         ·····


"Tesla? A fraud and a confidence man," Edison said. He was dapper in a
hundred-dollar silk suit now, sitting behind a marble-topped mahogany desk. His tie
was still askew, probably from his having taken a nap on the desktop earlier.
Horovitz looked unconvinced. Edison was proving to be harder to manage than even
Roosevelt had been; he had too many of his own ideas, some of them tending
disastrously toward progressivism. But a victory by the populist Bryan would be far
worse of a disaster.

Edison said, "Forget about Tesla. He will promise them the sky, anything, but he will
take their money and deliver nothing but dreams and spun-sugar. Believe me, I
know; he worked for me, and he was nothing but trouble. Scientific research
requires discipline and methodical experimentation. There is no place in electricity for
a man with no discipline. Toys, that's what he makes, gee-gaws to impress the
masses. He is no inventor. And as for his vaunted etheric power beams—I say bah,
and double-bah, and bah again. A fraud and a connivance. It will be like his
alternating-cycle electrical tension; something that will kill people who use it, mark
me well. It will kill people."

Tesla's joining the Bryan campaign as the candidate's "electrical advisor" was in all of
the news, and the excited journalists clearly hoped to pump up the rivalry between
Tesla and Edison, harking back to the glorious days of the war between Edison's
direct-current and Tesla's alternating electrical current. Perhaps Edison would
electrocute somebody, as he had in the earlier war of the currents?

This worried Horovitz: Tesla had won that battle, or at least his patron Mr.
Westinghouse had, and he wondered what new tricks Mr. Tesla might have in store.
Tesla was just exactly what Horovitz feared: an upstart immigrant, and one who
indubitably held the views of anarchists and Fabians. Horovitz kept his own origins
quiet, most particularly his arrival in America in the arms of immigrant parents and
the fact that he had never spoken a word of English until he was nearly six. He was
an American, damn them, fully an equal of Pierpont Morgan and Andrew Carnegie;
he had nothing in common with the dirty, starving immigrants in their
consumption-riddled tenements.

But Edison didn't seem to be worried about Tesla. Horovitz relaxed slightly and
turned his mind to the question of how he would run Edison. The man was a bull
moose quite as headstrong as Roosevelt had been, and it would take some
connivance to get him into line.

                                        ·····


Fifty miles away, Samuel Clemens and Sarah Bernhardt were also discussing Tesla.
Sam had had no luck getting in to see Mr. Edison. When he had come for an
interview, a man named Horovitz had quizzed him for nearly half an hour, asking
him detailed questions about the Philippines and the Standard Oil Trust. These were
issues about which he had quite definite opinions, and he'd given the man quite an
earful, he had, quite pleased to show off his detailed command of current
events—but after all his talking, rather than showing him to Edison, the man had
taken him to see a receptionist, who told him that Mr. Edison was busy and could
receive no visitors this month, or next, or, for that matter, the following year.

But it was a rip-snorting campaign, no denying that, and Sam was enjoying it hugely.
On Sunday, Bryan's campaign had projected an enormous optical show to the
curious viewers in Madison Garden, powered by calcium lights. In the middle of the
city, a three-story-high projection of Bryan had towered over the bustling city, the
projector operator deftly switching the glass slides to make the candidate wave to
the crowd. It was, perhaps, not enough to beat Edison's continuous showing of
kinetoscopic images in hired dance halls, showing off the inventor along with fanciful
images of the wonders of electricity as a taste of what was to come, but it
demonstrated that Bryan wasn't out of the great game yet.

When the newspapers had announced Tesla's joining up with Bryan, Clemens had
brightened up. When he had been in New York, young Tesla had been a quite friend
of his, and it would be a gay thing now to go meet the mad Serb and see what his
views were on the election.

Sarah Bernhardt, the celebrated French actress, also knew Tesla. Sam had met with
her on the train up from New York City, and as she was also heading for Tesla's
Long Island laboratory, when she hired an electric brougham for the ride from the
station, she invited him to share the ride. They spent the short trip discussing their
acquaintance Nikola Tesla and the political campaign. Now they were in the vestibule
of the Tesla's laboratory building. A dozen pigeons scattered from the stoop and
fluttered around their heads as they entered the vestibule.

"Mad as a hatter, n'est pas?" Samuel Clemens said, nodding toward the door, a
completely unprepossessing wooden door with a simple brass plate reading NIKOLA
TESLA, ELECTRICAL LABORATORY . "But for all that, a most entertaining fellow. Wonder
how in the world he gets along with that prig Bryan?"

"He's not really mad," Sarah Bernhardt said, in her elegant French accent. "Eccentric,
of course, but not mad. It's just that his enthusiasms are more intense than other
people's. He gets an idea, and he just can't get it out of his head; he has to go to his
lab and do it. He told me that often while he's working on one idea, he has another
idea, and another and another, and they come so fast and thick, in swarms like
mosquitoes, that he cannot work on them fast enough."

But then Sarah Bernhardt herself was somebody who was at the edge of madness,
Sam thought. Her eccentricity was more than just the whimsy of a diva. She always
insisted on her own private railway car, and one reason for this was so that she
could take with her the coffin that she would sleep in when she had her headaches.
Some people said that she took her paramours in the coffin as well, but perhaps
that was only a scurrilous rumor about the flamboyant diva. And as for her
relationship with Tesla—"We are friends, nothing more," she haughtily said when the
representatives of the Hearst papers pressed her for more details. "He amuses
me."

Sam, who had always wondered a bit over Tesla's views on women, expected that
this was exactly it, that regardless of what Bernhardt might have wanted from him,
their relationship was likely to be no more than just words. Sam had touched his
arm once, and Tesla had jerked away in horror. Tesla had a fear of being touched.

Sam Clemens wasn't at all sure of Tesla's sanity himself. He had seen Tesla in his
laboratory once charge himself up to ten million volts of electrical pressure, shooting
lightning bolts out of his fingers to burn holes through sheets of plywood. It had
looked like great fun to Sam, and he had begged Tesla to let him try it, but Tesla had
solemnly demurred, telling him it was too dangerous for a man untrained in
electricity.
"Is he as eccentric as he used to be, or has he calmed down a bit, I wonder?" Sam
asked, and rang the bell.

Mr. Czito, Nikola Tesla's assistant, opened the door, and after greeting them,
ushered them into the laboratory. It was a cavernous, dimly-lit space, a building
hollowed out to be just a shell, with the bare girders and a ceiling a hundred feet
overhead, filled with dynamos and transformers and switching gear and elaborately
wound copper coils.

Nikola Tesla turned to meet them. He was thinner than Sam Clemens had
remembered him. He'd always been slender, but now he was almost frighteningly
gaunt. "Living on bread and water, but without the bread," as they'd have put it in
the mining camps. "Straight up and down like six o'clock." He's still handsome
enough to set a few pulses to fluttering, though, Sam thought, and snuck a glance
over at Sarah Bernhardt.

"Ah, Mr. Twain," Tesla said, and smiled. "So glad you could come."

"Sam, please," Clemens responded.

"And the divine Mademoiselle Bernhardt." Tesla bowed deeply and said a few words
of welcome to her in a cascading waterfall of French too fluent for Sam to follow.
Turning to them both, he said, "A pleasure; indeed, a pleasure and an honor both for
me to be visited by luminaries of the page and the stage. I must tell you that my
laboratory is off limits to journalists, but for you, Mr. Twain, I make an exception."

"Good to see you too, Nick," Sam said. It was his ritual; if Tesla would insist on
calling him Mr. Twain, by damn he would call him Nick. "I'm just my lovable own self
today. I'm not in the reporting racket any more these days; no money in it."

"And Miss Bernhardt?"

"Why, I am here to see you, Mr. Tesla, and enjoy the exquisite pleasure of your
company and conversation." She smiled at him. She wore only the simplest of her
costumes today, with a plain silver necklace and no earrings; clearly dressing to
please Tesla, who detested earrings and elaborate women's dress.

Tesla seemed for a moment to be taken aback, but then he bowed again and said,
"Enchanted, as always."

"So, Nick, what do you think of Mr. Bryan?" Sam asked as they walked into the
laboratory. "A real firecracker, would you say?"

"I would say," Tesla said, stopping for a moment to consider his words, "he has a
poetic soul."

"A poet?" Sam laughed. "Now, I expect you're spinning me a bit of a stretcher
there."

"A man of peace." Then Tesla shook his head. "But no science." He looked across at
Clemens. "And you? What do you think of Mr. Bryan?"

"Well," said Sam, "you may know, I don't have much regard for politicians. The
Almighty made tadpoles, and he made politicians, and as they're both slimy and
pretty-near brainless, you can't much tell the one from the other. 'Cept that one day
a tadpole might grow into a noble frog, and a politician don't grow into nothing." He
paused and pretended to ponder for a moment. "Still, Mr. Bryan hasn't lied to me
yet, and it does 'pear that he supports the little man against the robbers, thieves,
and bandits running the country right at this moment, so I guess I like him as much
as I like any of the bunch. Which is not to say I'd stop watching my wallet if I knew
he was in the room."

"Still the cynic, Mr. Twain."

Sam nodded. "I'd hate to disappoint my audience."

"Would you like to see the lab?"

"I'm here, ain't I?" Sam said.

"Oh, please," Miss Bernhardt said. "I would be delighted."

Tesla smiled. "One moment." He reached into the darkness and pulled three
switches in quick succession. With a barely perceptible hum, a glow arose,
emanating from long tubes of glass all about the laboratory. Some glowed pale
white, others purple, or pink. A few were twisted into fanciful spirals and curlicues.
Tesla picked one up from a benchtop and held it in the air. As he raised it, the pink
light inside brightened and flowed around the place where his hand gripped it.

Tesla was showing off, Sam knew. Unlike Edison's lamps, Tesla's needed no wires.
Sam had seen Tesla's rarefied gas lamps before, but he enjoyed watching Miss
Bernhardt's expression of delight. The Tesla luminescent lamps really were quite
something, he thought, with gay colors far more congenial than the harsh yellow
light of Edison bulbs. He wondered if you could twist the tube into any shape you
desired. Could a glassblower make one that would spell out words? That would
really be some feat; you could make a sign in luminous color, bright red or glowing
purple: "Eat at Joe's" or "Vote for Bryan."

And that was the hitch, Clemens thought. That would be just exactly the thing that
they would do. It would spoil the magic. Better not bring the idea up.

Tesla handed him a tiny lamp, barely larger than a match head. Clemens turned it
over in his hand. "Cunningly enough made," he said, "but what's it for?"

Tesla smiled. "Isn't it enough just to be what it is? But watch."

On a sheet of pine, a hundred and twenty of the tiny lamps had been mounted in a
rectangular grid. Tesla turned a transformer dial, and every other one of the tiny
bulbs glowed to life, a deep blood red. "Observe," Tesla commanded. He turned the
bulbs down, then rotated another rheostat, and the other half of the bulbs glowed to
light in emerald green.

"Very pretty," Sam commented.

"Wait." Tesla turned both rheostats together, and now the sheet glowed, not a
greenish-red, nor some reddish-green, but instead a lemony yellow.

"Huh." Sam Clemens moved forward to examine it. Seen from close up, the
individual lights were clearly still red and green, but moving back away from them,
the light seemed to blur into yellow. "Now, doesn't that just beat all," he said.

"Keep watching." Tesla moved to a bank of sliding switches and played his slender
fingers over them like an organ. The colored lights danced, and shapes of red and
yellow appeared, curves and then an expanding square, and then dancing diagonal
stripes. The red faded and green took its place. The effect was strangely hypnotic. A
point of light expanded into a diamond shape, with another in the center, and
another, each one growing to the edge of the rectangle and fading away.

"Ah," Sarah said. "You have made a symphony, a symphony made of light."

In answer, Tesla's fingers danced even more swiftly, and the lights responded to his
touch with a paroxysm of color, pulsating shapes changing color in almost sensuous
waves. At last he turned to them and bowed. "Do you like it?"

"Ah, it is magnificent," Sarah gushed. "Truly, the work of an artist, an outpouring
from the soul of a poet of the electrical force."

Sam said, "Are you done? Can I try it now?"

With quite a bit of experimenting, Sam discovered, he could write letters in colored
light. With great effort, he slowly spelled out S-A-M, Tesla and Sarah Bernhardt
shouting out each letter as he formed it on the grid.

"I don't think that the typesetting boys have much to worry about yet," he said with
a smile. "But it's a gimcrack toy. Reckon you could sell it? I bet Wall Street could use
it to flash out stock prices."

"Where the man of electricity sees electrical light, the man of letters finds letters,"
observed Tesla. "And Mademoiselle, voulez vous? What will the woman of the stage
see?"

With a little coaxing, Sarah Bernhardt was persuaded to try it, and she came up with
a stick figure of a man. With great concentration, she made one hand wave up and
down, as Tesla and Clemens laughed in glee, and then, to everybody's amazement,
even her own, she made it totter off the side of the rectangle.

"I think that the lady has you beat, Mr. Twain," Tesla announced. "For a picture, you
know, beats a thousand words."

"I don't think it has the jump on Edison's kinetoscope for entertainment," Clemens
said, "but it's a crackerjack diversion." He realized the moment he said it that he
shouldn't have brought up Edison.

But Tesla waved off the reference to his rival. "Edison won't be inventing much any
more, I don't think."

"Oh? Why?"

"Why, he'll be too busy being president to invent!" At Clemens' shocked look, Tesla
continued, "Ah, Mr. Twain, I spend perhaps too much time in the laboratory, but I
don't entirely miss what it is the newspapers say. Within a week, Mr. Edison's
kinetoscopes will be in every dance hall and Sunday school in America, and Mr.
Edison will address each voter in person. Without a miracle, Mr. Bryan is unlikely to
win."

"And what exactly kind of miracle does Mr. Bryan need, then?" Sam asked. He was
playing with Tesla's device, concentrating on making a picture to beat Miss
Bernhardt's.
"Something to upstage Mr. Edison's kinetoscope."

Sam Clemens had the knack of it now. On the screen of lights, he had drawn a
cartoon of a face. The eyes grew from dots to little squares, and then they grew
eyebrows, and the mouth opened in an "O." "You should do something with this,
Nick," Sam said, amusing himself by making the mouth of the little face open and
shut in time with his words. "Play around a bit, I bet you could make something of
it."

                                      ·····


The campaign stop was a real jamboree. There was a mounted parade of Civil War
veterans in full uniform on horseback, and at least five brass bands, followed by
fifteen carriages—mayors and minor politicians, Sam Clemens guessed, people who
hoped something of the pomp of the occasion might rub off on them. Several
hundred people in full top hats and brass-buttoned jackets marched on foot, each
waving (somewhat incongruously) a palm-frond fan. These were followed by a choir
of women standing on a flatbed truck decorated with red, white, and blue silk and
drawn by four sweating plow horses in flower-bedecked harness. Bryan pumped
every outstretched hand thrust at him, what seemed like unending millions of them,
trying to conserve his voice, which was on the verge of breaking.
"There is no greater entertainment in the world than a political campaign," Sam
remarked to Miss Bernhardt, who was in his company again that day. Nikola Tesla
had promised them something special, and he wondered what it would be. Drums
rang out and trombones blared in five different tunes, with horses snorting and
whinnying with no regard to the rhythm or tune. He couldn't even hear the women
singers—the Morristown Presbyterian Choir, according to the sign—except for a
stray note on occasions when the trombones paused.

They stood on the reviewing stand along with a half-dozen other notables. Miss
Bernhardt was basking in her element, wearing an outrageous purple dress and an
elaborate hat with at least three feet of magenta ostrich plume on it, waving to the
crowd and smiling. Sam enjoyed the attention as well, in an absent fashion, but
would have rathered that they got on with the show, whatever it was. He was in his
trademark white linen suit, with a white panama hat and a diamond-studded
bolo-tie, a gift from an admirer in Nevada.

Nikola Tesla had escorted them to the stand. He had stood with them for a moment
to survey the crowd dispassionately, surrounded by pigeons, but then vanished
along with Mr. Czito, promising only that they should have a surprise if they stayed
to sunset.

It was nearly sunset now, as best Sam could tell, the day being rather overcast, and
Mr. Bryan was still shaking hands, working his way slowly toward them. At last he
reached the platform and climbed the wooden steps to the podium, shaking hands
on the way with each of the dignitaries on the platform. "Mr. Mark Twain," he said.
"A pleasure. I'm a great admirer of your work, a great admirer. I'm glad to see you
joining us doing the great work of God."

"I'd be pleased for you to call me Samuel, Mr. Bryan," Sam said. "By God, it's an
honor to meet a politician who isn't a skunk and a god-damned liar. Give 'em hell."

Bryan's brow furrowed a moment as if he'd been gravely insulted, and he seemed
about to say something, but then he reconsidered, replying only, "I see you live up
to your reputation." He turned to kiss Miss Bernhardt's hand. "A pleasure to meet
you, Madam. Enchanté."

Behind them, something odd was going on. A wooden scaffolding was being erected
with cranes and pulleys, and strings of Tesla lamps were being stretched along the
beams, a thousand of them or more. As the crowd began to notice something was
going on, a murmur went through them. Sam could hear a steam engine chuff to life
somewhere in the distance. The pulleys had now raised an entire curtain of Tesla
lamps, filling out a rectangle fifty feet high.

In front of William Jennings Bryan, Mr. Czito had set up some sort of contraption of
lenses and a spinning disk. An Edison kinetoscopic camera? No, the device had no
reels of kinetoscopic film, but instead a spaghetti tangle of electrical wiring snaked
away toward the electrical screen that rose behind the candidate. This was
something stranger.

The crowd was chanting now, "Bryan! Bryan! Bryan!" The candidate raised his hand,
and the chant intensified.

Bryan began to speak, and his voice, louder than a mountain, boomed out across
the square like the voice of God. By gum, Sam thought, damned if Tesla hasn't
found a way to electrically magnify the human voice. The crowd subsided into a
moment of awed silence.

But the electrical voice magnification was the least of Tesla's surprises. Behind the
candidate, the giant matrix of Tesla lamps dawned into fluorescence. Ten thousand
tiny electrical lamps glowed, and waves of color rippled across the screen. The
crowd gasped with one voice, thinking that this was itself an electrical miracle, but in
a moment the swirling colors settled down, and a fuzzy shape was visible in the
patterns of dark and light made by the glowing lamps.

It was impossible to make out at first. The eye had no standards by which to
measure such an image; nothing like it had ever been seen in the world. Was that a
face? Yes, a face, definitely a face. The face of William Jennings Bryan! The murmur
of the crowd grew to a rumble, and then a roar of delight. Yes, yes, now it was clear
indeed, clear as any picture; it was a picture painted from ten thousand points of
light! It was the candidate, and it moved! The electrically magnified voice spoke, and
the lips on the picture of light moved with it, almost as if the image itself spoke!

"Does this contraption work?" the voice said. "By Goodness, I can hear myself! Mr.
Tesla, you are indeed a genius."

Not great first words for such a marvelous occasion, Sam thought. Mr. Bryan has
missed a chance; he should have had something prepared, like perhaps, "What hath
God wrought?" But the crowd laughed and roared its approval, and Bryan continued
stolidly on.

"Ladies of the choir and gentlemen of the band, veterans of the war and people of
the great State of New Jersey," the magnified voice said, and above him, the
portrait of light moved and spoke. "I come to you a humble supplicant, asking for
only one thing, one small thing. Give me but your vote, your one vote, and we shall
bring this nation to the greatness which God above in his infinite wisdom has
decreed and intended."
And every single eye was transfixed, every living brain mesmerized, by the flickering
illusion of life.

                                         ·····


Tesla's moving images were instantly the talk of the nation. "An artwork of light
unprecedented in history," the Herald said. "Mr. Tesla states that soon he will be able
to beam these images across the ether," the story continued. "These broadcast
images, which he names tele-videon, or 'distance sight'—"
Horovitz threw down the newspaper. "If Tesla can beam these images on electrical
waves, Bryan will campaign in towns where he's never even been," Horovitz
declared. "That will beat the talking dolls and even the kinetoscope to hell and gone.
He'll outcampaign us ten to one. A hundred to one! How many of these tele-videon
screens can he make?"

"Surely each tele-videon screen is expensive," Hanna said, waving his cigar
dismissively. "I hear tell each of those rarefied-gas lamps costs ten cents. How
many are there in a screen, ten thousand? That would mean a tele-videon screen
must cost a thousand dollars! At that price, they won't afford very many."

"Don't put it beyond Mr. Westinghouse," Horovitz said. "It's no secret that he's
backing Tesla. And he's a cunning one, no naif to manufacturing. If anybody will find
a way to lower the cost, Westinghouse will."

And, indeed, in factories in the Lower East Side, Westinghouse was putting women
to work manufacturing the miniature Tesla lamps, and next to them children worked
with nimble fingers to string them together into the screens. The idea of
broadcasting tele-videon images using Marconi telegraphy was crazy, one of Tesla's
endless supply of utopian speculations, but Westinghouse had long ago decided to
ignore Tesla's more speculative flights of fancy. He had a better idea anyway; one
that would work. America was crisscrossed with telegraph lines, and they could send
the tele-videon signals across the telegraph lines to every city and every village,
every railroad stop in America.

Campaigning in Wisconsin, Thomas Edison found out about it with the morning
newspapers. Edison was surprised, but nobody could get one up on Edison, not for
long. He sent a long telegram to his West Orange laboratory, with a series of
investigations that he wanted done on cathode-ray phosphors, and followed it up by
cutting short his upcoming campaign stops and, within the week, headed back for
West Orange laboratory to work. He normally slept for two, sometimes even three
hours a day, but when he was challenged, and his gumption was up, he didn't waste
time sleeping. On the train east, he studied the tele-videon fiercely and pondered
hard on the workings of it. Before long, he had set his ideas in order for how he
would improve on it. If his ideas bore out, he could use his fluoroscope technology
together with electron beams to make an Edison-effect ray-tube. It would have far
better definition than Tesla's flickering lamps; anybody who saw the new Edison
images would laugh at Tesla's crude dot pictures.

He would have the first patents drawn up in a day or so, and then they would be
ready. Yes, if Tesla wanted an invention fight, he'd find a fight on his hands, all right.

                                         ·····
"We're watching your ratings, sir, and it doesn't look so good."
"Ratings, young man?" William Jennings Bryan said to the assistant. "I don't believe I
follow."

"How people rate the show."

Bryan cocked his head and frowned. "I daresay some people consider politics to be
a show, but I assure you, young man, a showman I have never been. If it is a show,
then what I show is only the truth."

Sunday was his day for relaxing, but although he was nominally resting in his private
railroad car, that only meant that the cameras and the press weren't in with him
right at the moment. Bryan knew well enough that, for a serious campaigner, there
would be no real relaxing until after November. This young man should have
respected his privacy, but the tele-videon crew had been conferring in their
equipment room all day, and he had been expecting somebody to barge in sooner
or later. He put down his pen and turned the full force of his attention to the young
man.

"That's the problem in a nutshell, sir," the young man said. "You're no showman.
We've been doing the tele-videon show for a week now …" Seeing Bryan's wince, he
paused for a second, but went on: "Sorry, sir, but that's what the staff call it. A
show. We're watching the ratings. You see, sir, that first time, the novelty of the
tele-videon holds them, but when it wears off, your speech … Well, it's not a show,
that's it. It's—"

"Boring," Bryan said.

"Well, yes, sir. Boring."

"My speeches are too long."

The young man was apparently oblivious to the hint of sarcasm in Bryan's affectless
delivery and nodded enthusiastically in agreement. "Gaseous." He flinched at Bryan's
suddenly darkened expression, but he didn't back off. "That's the word we hear.
Gaseous."

Bryan sighed. "And you want?"

"Not such a long sermon, sir. Couldn't you do, maybe, some shorter bits, something
that people can bite off more easily?"

"I will think on it."

"Sir, if—"

Bryan raised his hand. "Enough. I will think on it, I said, and so I will do. Enough.
Leave me."

When the young man left, Bryan scowled. So they thought him gaseous, did they?
What did they desire, real political reform, or did they want just appearances?

Ah, that was the question, wasn't it, what the people wanted. He knew what they
needed: reform, breaking the railroad monopolies, a turning away from the
poisoning tentacles of imperialism, and a turning toward God. But what they
wanted? He had once thought that a leader should shape the wills of the people, but
long years in politics made him doubt his own vision.

But then Reverend Conroy came in, and Bryan stood up and smiled, a genuine smile.
"Reverend Conroy, do come in. I am quite pleased to see you."

The reverend took off his hat. "Thank you kindly. Your offer was a most kind one, a
very generous offering of your time."

Bryan laughed. "Why, I should say the same to you. It's not so often that a man of
the cloth gives up his pulpit, and I am quite cognizant of the honor, I assure you."

"I have heard you talk and do believe you to be a man of God."

"I do my best, Reverend Conroy."

"And that is more than most people, I assure you. My flock will be happy to hear
from you, if only as a respite from hearing me drone on. May I ask, have you a title
for the sermon you will be giving? No politics in it, I do hope?"

"Indeed you may ask. I will talk on the subject of the Menace of Evolution."

"You'll be taking on monkey-ism!" Conroy's face broke out into a huge grin. "Ah,
I've heard tell that you are a fighter, and I'm pleased as a bear with a watermelon to
hear you'll wrestle them atheists head-on!" He pumped Bryan's hand. "I'm looking
forward to it, I tell you, looking forward to it."

"And I as well," Bryan said. "After a week surrounded by sycophants, office-seekers,
and the jackals of the press, it will be a joy to spend a few hours among simple
pious Christians, a joy indeed."

                                       ·····


Bryan's sermon was a wonderful success. He had kept the audience spellbound,
alternately making them angry and then releasing their anger with laughter, for
nearly two hours. So the tele-videon crew thought people wanted short sound bites,
did they? But these were his people, the simple and believing farmers and workers of
America, not the atheists and agnostics who ran politics.
Afterward, they hadn't wanted to leave, coming forward in a huge press to shake his
hand, tell him how they liked his sermon, even coming to offer money for the
campaign against Darwinism, which he diverted to the church offering box. One
earnest young man with a waxed handlebar mustache had even wanted to debate
him, and he had put that man in his place with half a dozen well-chosen sentences,
skewering his poorly thought-out Darwinism and sending up peals of laughter from
the crowd. Finally Reverend Conroy had managed to take him away to his private
office for a moment of relaxation.

"That was a fine talking, Mr. Bryan," the Reverend said. "Indeed, about the finest I've
ever heard."

"Thank you most kindly."

"I was wondering …" The Reverend hesitated.
"Please, do speak freely."

"Well, it occurs to me that you have used this new tele-videon to bring your political
message to the people. Could you not use the same invention to bring the word of
God? The people are starving for the Gospel, and I thought …"

Bryan raised his hand. "The tele-videon is a wonderful device, no mistaking, but it is
not mine to do with as I wish. Were I to use it on my own behalf, it would be
misdirection of campaign money, and dishonesty of any sort, no matter how well
intentioned, is something I will have no truck with."

"Perhaps … we could pay for the use of the equipment? Lease it, as it were?"

Bryan laughed. "Have you any idea how expensive it is? Why, it would cost over fifty
dollars an hour to lease the tele-videon alone—not even counting the money to
lease telegraph wires and halls to show the image."

"Fifty dollars …" Reverend Conway mused. "Why, that's not so much. Ten thousand
people could watch a sermon. Fifty thousand! If each of ten thousand people were
to be asked to contribute but a dime, and if only one in ten did so, why, we would
cover our costs and even have money extra."

Bryan laughed. "Ah, you are, I think, a plutocrat in disguise! I accept your bargain. If
you arrange it, I shall speak, and from the contributions, what is left over after
paying the lease we shall split evenly, half for your church and half for my
campaign."

Reverend Conway stood up and stretched out his hand. "Sir, it is done."

                                        ·····


Nikola Tesla introduced Sam Clemens to Bryan's campaign staff, and particularly to
the tele-videon electrical crew. Then he and Mr. Czita headed back to his Long Island
laboratory to work on perfecting his atmospheric radiations of electrical tension.
Miss Bernhardt had gone back with him. Sam was vaguely annoyed by that; since
first Clara and then Livy had left him three years ago, he had not realized how much
he had missed the comfort of feminine company. And it was not the crude physical
pleasures of intimate interplay that he missed, but simply the gentle companionship.
He had enjoyed Miss Bernhardt's company more than he'd thought possible.

He wondered what Miss Bernhardt got from the companionship of Tesla. Certainly
not the human commerce of wit and passion that passed as the ordinary stuff of
social intercourse; Tesla was a man of titanic passions, but his passions were of an
ethereal nature wholly disconnected from ordinary corporeal lust.

But meanwhile, Clemens stayed on, interested in seeing the campaign from an
insider's perch. He enjoyed the good fellowship of the tele-videon electrical crew,
somewhat less refined company than that of Miss Bernhardt, but in their way
enjoyable. The crew were a congenial bunch, most of them awkward boys barely
older than puppies, all elbows and thumbs until they had their hands buried inside an
electrical dynamo. All of them were fascinated by electricity and mechanisms, and all
of them had dreams of riches as inventors and industrialists in the new century. The
interior of the tele-videon electrical shack was supposed to be a secret, and
definitely off-limits to passersby, but Sam ignored the posted signs and spent half his
time in the electrical shack, looking on with curiosity as the boys showed off their
expertise with the tele-videon and entertaining them with stories of Tesla. Sam had
been a bit of an inventor a few years back, and he told them the story of the
typesetting machine, spinning the yarn out and discovering that he could milk it for
laughs, although at the time it had meant years of work wasted, ending in
frustration and bankruptcy.

The other half of his time he spent with the campaign's hangers-on (of which there
were many) in his well-practiced role of the celebrated man of letters, accepting with
smooth grace offers of an occasional glass of whisky or a good cigar.

The campaign was settled into the Hotel Gloriana now. The tele-videon shack was
set up, along with its steam-powered electrical dynamo, in a vacant lot next door,
but right at the moment the electrical boys were taking a break and had gone into
town, and so he was sitting in the lobby, a place of antimacassar-clad flowered
armchairs and elegant pink decorations that felt like being in a birthday cake.

He still didn't know what to make of Bryan. For a week now, the man had given his
daily evangelistic speech over the tele-videon, and at the end of it had emphasized
how the listeners should give money so that they could continue God's work.

God's work! Sam snorted. This tele-videon evangelism was the greatest flim-flam
operation he'd ever seen worked; the people watching were completely
mesmerized by the moving lights, and every time Bryan said that they needed to
give money, cheques and pledges and ragged silver coins flowed in like a dam had
burst. Bryan was no deliberate Chicago con man; he seemed completely sincere.
But the daily evangelism was changing him. He was suddenly making far more
money from his religious donors than he'd ever made from political donations. His
political speeches were now more directly religious in tone, and in the latest one he
had actually called for constitutional amendments, one to ban alcohol and another to
forbid the teaching of Darwinism.

And now he was coming over here, drifting though the cloud of sycophants. Sam cut
the end off of a cigar to prepare himself for the great man, struck a match and
puffed it to life, and put it down.

"So, Mr. Clemens," Bryan said. "What do you think of my speech? Any words of
wisdom?"

Sam shook his head. "Mr. Bryan. Quite a show you give, but I must allow as I'm too
much of a reprobate to change entirely to your point of view."

"Nonsense, Mr. Clemens."

"If you ask me …"

"Do speak, Mr. Clemens."

"Ask me, I think you should back off a little bit on the constitutional amendment
talk."

Bryan laughed. "Certainly, with your well-known love of whisky, you would."

"Not just that one; I don't think much of the amendment to ban Darwinism, either."
"Atheists should be allowed to teach evolutionism to their heart's content, Mr.
Clemens, but not in publicly funded schools. You are an intelligent man. Surely you
are not descended from a monkey?"

Clemens took a draw from his cigar. "Hear my friends talk, I expect I am. Some
people are nearer to monkeys than others, but seems to me, when we talk about
being descended from monkeys, it's the monkeys ought to be offended."

"Mr. Clemens, I don't know whether to be outraged or amused. Are you secretly an
atheist? I don't believe as I've heard you speak on your beliefs. What exactly is your
stand?"

Clemens puffed again, to give him a pause before speaking. "Well, you know, Mr.
Bryan, in my opinion you have your two kinds of opinions. You have your public
opinions, that you talk about in the papers, and then you have your private opinions,
that you don't spread about."

"No, Mr. Clemens, I think not. If I believe something, I tell everybody and keep
nothing back. You are intimating, I think, that you believe all men to be liars."

"Not exactly liars. No sir, I wouldn't say that. Perhaps a little less private in some of
their opinions than others, maybe."

"And tell me, then, these private opinions of yours. In the great war between God
and Satan, where do you stand?"

Twain puffed at his cigar and looked at Bryan, in his vested wool suit, with his
gold-chained watch, with his round and open face. The man was dressed like a
politician, but he was a farmer, you could see that. To hell with it, Sam thought.

"You ask for truth, Mr. Bryan? I will tell you, then. I believe I just might take my
stand with Mr. Satan."

"There are some matters too serious for humor, Mr. Clemens, and I believe this is
one of them."

"Well, Mr. Bryan. Seems to me that religions write their books denouncing Mr.
Satan, and say the most injurious things 'bout him, but we never hear his side."

"Quite to the contrary, Mr. Clemens. We hear Satan's voice every day. It is God's
voice that is small, and we must be silent to listen."

"Bosh. The world's full of bible thumpers, and you're just another one of them, a
little more successful than most. Can't cross the street some days without some
revival preacher going on and on with smug and vaporous pieties. Can't hear
yourself think. Satan? I am personally going to undertake his rehabilitation. He's
been given a bum rap, I think, and I'm quite looking forward to meeting him myself
to get his side of the story."

"I think you—"

"And as for preachers," Clemens continued, ignoring Bryan, "my experience is that
they are for the main part con men. Slick talkers who extract money from people by
promising paradise in the sky. I don't have much use for them."

"Mr. Clemens," Bryan said coldly, "I believe you have just called me a con man."
Sam nodded slowly. "Reckon maybe I did."

"Mr. Clemens, I and my campaign have showed you hospitality. I don't believe that I
am expected to tolerate insults. Please absent yourself. My assistants will be
instructed that you are no longer a person who is desired in my presence, now or in
the future."

Sam nodded. "You asked for my private opinions. You got 'em. Can't say you
weren't warned. Oh, and about Darwin. I expect that I lean a little his way, too."

                                        ·····


The Edison campaign was foundering.
In only two weeks, Edison's laboratory had brought out fluorovision tubes to
compete with the Tesla tele-videon. Now the two campaigns competed fiercely over
which one could lease more telegraph wires to bring campaign speeches to the
boroughs, engaging in a competition much to the profit of the telegraph companies.

But the political maps meticulously kept by Mr. Horovitz were pierced by an
unhealthy infusion of red pins, the color of Bryan's Democrats, expanding slowly but
inexorably from the heartland outward.

From the Alleghenies to the Rocky Mountains, farmers and working men were
listening to Bryan. It was not Bryan's campaign speeches that were winning him
converts, but his rapidly expanding tele-videon ministry. Bryan had somehow tapped
directly into the American heart. He would tell his listeners about the healing power
of Jesus and lead the faithful in prayer, and the next day a hundred newspapers
reported how blind men began to see. He would lead the faithful in song, and if the
papers were to be credited, the deathly sick would sit up from their deathbeds and
join the singing. And when Bryan said that they needed money, across America the
faithful opened their hearts and their wallets, sending money to Bryan by the barrel,
by the ox-cart, by the freight load.

Edison's sermons, about how he would reform government by bringing in scientific
management, went almost unheard.

Yet when Sam Clemens came (walking right past the receptionist who but a month
ago had told him that Edison would never be available to see him), Edison was
remarkably cheerful. "Mr. Mark Twain!" he said in a loud voice. "I am a great admirer
of yours!"

"Thank you," Clemens said.

Edison turned his head. "Could you talk a little more distinctly? I have to admit, I
have a slight difficulty in hearing."

Clemens cleared his throat and said more loudly, "I said, thank you."

"Ah, that's what I expected you'd say. Say, the way I heard things, you and Miss
Bernhardt were the ones worked out inventing this tele-videon thing. Any truth to
that rumor?"

"Maybe a tiny bit of truth, Mr. Edison," Clemens said. "Not so much."
"Truth, you say? Ah—that's a wonderful bit of inventing. Took me almost a week to
match it. If you ever need a job, come up to my factory, I'll have Charles fix you up
with a job. Tell him I sent you."

"I'm not in the inventing business these days," Clemens said. "I confess Nikola did
the electrical part."

"Eh? Nikola? Ah, my erstwhile employee. Well, he's a tinkerer, reckon I have to give
him that, but not much of a practical man." Edison's manner changed abruptly to
business. "So, Mr. Twain, what is your purpose in coming to visit? I'm a busy man, I
must say."

"Well, Mr. Edison, I'm here on business," Sam said. "Got something to sell, what
turns out to be just exactly what I figure you need."

"And what, exactly, is this I need?"

"You have an invention, I see, but you don't rightly know just what to do with it, I
reckon," he said. "The tele-what-is-it, that is."

"The fluorovision."

"That's the whatsit. You can send moving pictures out over the wires to everybody
from Petunia Flats to East Hell, but you can't find anything to get them to watch."

Edison waved his hands. "My corporation is making films right now. Let Bryan use
his tele-videon for superstition. The Edison fluorovision will bring education to the
masses."

"And will this win the campaign for you, Mr. Edison?"

"No," Edison said emphatically. "No, that it will not."

"You need an entertainer. A performer. A showman."

Edison seemed about to object, but then paused a moment and said, "Perhaps I do.
And you propose?"

"The best." Samuel Clemens smiled and bowed. "Myself, of course."

"And?"

"I will thrill the masses and bring laughter and music and culture to the people. And
make them watch and listen … and, in so doing, put them in a mood to hear your
message."

"And you call this?"

Samuel Clemens smiled. "I will call it The Mark Twain Variety Hour."

                                         ·····


"And that's the story, every word of it unvarnished truth," Mark Twain said. "Or
anyway, that's the way I heard it told, and now I'm telling you."
The live audience howled its laughter, and Clemens bowed and smiled. He dropped
out of his Mark Twain voice and turned to the camera.

"This wraps up today's Variety Hour," he said in his finest lecturing voice. "Turn to us
next week, same time, same place, when we will bring you the celebrated
vaudevillians Fields and Weber. Let me assure you, they're the funniest things on
four legs. And we'll have the famous soliloquy from Shakespeare's masterpiece
"Hamlet," acted out by the magnificent Mam'selle Bernhardt of Paris. We'll have the
musical genius John Philip Sousa, and, last and, well, least," he paused for the laugh,
"yours truly just perhaps might be convinced to read you a new story from
Calaveras county.

"This will be a show you won't want to miss, gentlemen and ladies. Until then, try
Cleveland Soap, it keeps you clean. And finally, tell all your friends: A vote for Edison
is a vote for America."

The camera came in for its final close-up, and he gave it his famous wink and a smile
and then signaled with his hands for the cut. Immediately his crew rushed in with a
glass of whisky and a cigar, and he dropped into his easy chair.

"How'd I do?"

"You were great, Mr. Twain!" the camera boy said. "The best ever!"

It was an unnecessary question. He knew the show had done well today. He had put
in two of Edison's messages and had managed to mention Cleveland Soap five
times and Lydia Pinkham's Elixir for Ladies six times. Each mention was a hundred
dollars in his pocket.

He was flush, he was in his stride, and he loved every minute of it. With the new
televideon broadcasting, Samuel Clemens had found his element and was on top of
the world. Did Mr. Bryan think he could hold them with his tele-evangelism? He
would give Mr. Bryan a lesson on how to grab an audience, that he would, that he
would indeed.

                                         ·····


Horovitz leaned forward and shut off the televideon. (It was an Edison fluorovision,
of course, not the crude Tesla tele-videon, but the word televideon had somehow
stuck.)
Mr. Westinghouse promised that within the year, he would have his improved
televideons in the home of every man with ten dollars in his pocket—and now that
Westinghouse was making a profit on them, he made sure that the programs sent
out over the telegraph wires were compatible with both.

For all his hard work, the election was going to be too close to call, Horovitz knew,
but already he was thinking far beyond that. Forget the election-- it didn't even
matter any more, he reckoned. It was going to be the man on the televideon, not
the president, who would be the real leader of this coming generation.

It was time to leave politics. He was tired of it anyway. Twain's variety show proved
that people would watch, and Horovitz thought that this was just the beginning.
Over the years, he had learned how to tell people what they wanted. If they would
watch Mr. Twain tell jokes, would not people watch, say, a game of baseball on the
televideon? Or perhaps football? Wrestling? Which one would play better on the
screen? Could he dramatize some of the penny-dreadful novels, perhaps some
western gunfighter stories? The eyes of America were eagerly waiting.

Ah, the twentieth century! So many possibilities! He leaned back and lit his cigar.
Barely three years old, and already it was turning out to be a doozy. He could hardly
wait to find out what would come next.
                                                  The End
© 2003 Geoffrey A. Landis and SCIFI.COM
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/landis2/