George Washington Smith wanted power.
Not just a little power; George wanted vast quantities, unlimited quantities. And he wanted it to be available for free and for everyone.
George cut his reading teeth on Wells and Verne in the early 1930s while his parents argued and despaired over how to pay bills. He worked any odd jobs he could to earn the nickels and dimes he needed for the newsstand pulps whose covers promised marvels, miracles, disasters and scantily-clad damsels who could not be rescued without the aid of technologies extant only in the minds of authors and their loyal readers.
While Europe began to shudder from the reverberations of rifle rounds and shells, George studied astronomy, chemistry, and every other hard science disclipline available in class and at the library.
When a fiesty America stepped into the war through an invitation delivered at Pearl Harbor, George, a high school junior, dreamed of inventions that would remove the need for such conflicts.
Against his mother’s wishes, his father volunteered for military service, and stationed was overseas as a medical aide. While he never saw action directly, his letters home were full of brutal descriptions of the results of combat. His mother se
George was proud that his father was serving his country, and planned to follow suit on his seventeenth birthday, but his mother talked him into attending college first. “The universities are empty right now,” she told him. “You’ll be able to have your professors to yourself. Think of how much you’ll learn. And besides,” she added, “I can’t bear to lose both of my men.”
“The war will be over soon, young George reassured her, “and Dad will be back home.” Weeping inexplicably, his mother would remain silent.
So George continued his education. He studied engineering and a budding new science called molecular physics, determined to make real the visions, both others’ and his own, he’d already lived with for so many years. Just before his final finals, the Bomb fell; the war was over. Mankind had entered the Atomic Age.
George waited for his father to come home. But his mother had known better since the day he’d left. The senior Mr. Smith had survived the war; he had his discharge papers. On his way home from the base, the train he took overturned in a freak accident. When Mr. Smith finally did return, it was in a coffin. Without benefit of military pension.
George now had a weary, faded, middle-aged mother to support, but he was still hopeful. The government had poured enormous resources into developing powerful weapons that could kill millions in a second. If that same energy and talent could be redirected toward pacific channels, then man could truly enter a golden age of peace and prosperity.
He applied for a position in a government research lab. At the interview, he was blatant. He didn’t care about weapons research. He was going to find a new power source and make the world a better place. The personnel director was not impressed with George’s altruism. But George’s grades in college had been excellent, and he was willing to take the salary offered. The personnel director had a slot to fill, and among the former rank and file who now occupied the unemployment lines, few had the validation of a diploma with the correct words calligraphed neatly across the middle to assume the position open. The personnel director smiled politely before incanting the magical phrase, “You’re hired.”
The pay was sufficient for George and his mother to live modestly, and George went to work in a laboratory that was heaven to him. If he needed a compressor, he merely had to mention it in passing, and the next day it appeared. If he wanted a dozen new capacitors each the size of a large dog, he barely had to breathe the words and they were his.
Carrying forward Tesla’s work on stationary waves and resonance, within a year he had discovered a way to effectively vibrate the lab and all of its contents into rubble. Even though he protested that he was onto something grand, he was rudely dismissed by the same personnel director who now uttered the curse, “Too bad you didn’t want to work in Defense. They like explosions over there. But their quota is full just now. You’re fired.”
George realized that in government work, success was measured in units of how many could be harmed, injured or destroyed. So he looked to the private sector.
He found a job in a large corporation that catered to the energy market. His pay was not much better than it had been in government work, but there were vague promises of bonuses down the road, and of course advances in the corporate structure guaranteed improvements in pay and prestige.
“I’m more interested in helping mankind,” George told the recruiter, who smiled and nodded with polite disinterest.
In the new lab, he was just another cog in a large wheel, and as a junior scientist among too many senior scientists, all of whom were older, wiser, and more experienced, at least in the ways of corporate politics, management of budget requests and looking smart to their superiors. George lost a bit of confidence, but he held on tightly to his dream.
Evenings over frugal dinners, George’s mother wondered out loud why George didn’t pursue relations with the fairer sex. “My work comes first. Maybe later…” George would reassure her. Staring at her plate, his mother would remain silent.
But women had always been a mystery to him, though he didn’t admit it, even to himself. He liked the solid, unchanging principles contained within atoms, molecules and matter. Their constancy reassured him.
Even when his project needs were cut from the budget, he still managed to keep his work going. When his peers laughed at his lack of social skills and inability to articulate around a pretty secretary, he ignored them and concentrated on his theorems and calculations. When he was passed over for promotions and raises that went to others less brilliant in their work but more skilled at saying the right things to the right people, he merely increased his workload, sincerely expecting that all would come out well if he could accomplish his dream.
George Washington Smith had a firm grasp of the workings of the physical universe, but he knew little of the men who owned it.
In 1957, George finally fully reached the ultimate theoretical reconstruction of Nicola Tesla’s work, only fifteen brief years after the man’s departure from earthly planes. He waited until he was sure of his results — and equally sure that nothing would be vibrated or otherwise destroyed out of planning.
He approached his boss. “Brilliant work,” the man told him. “I’ll take all of your papers and research and ensure that they are properly taken care of.” Satisfied his life’s mission had been accomplished while he was still young enough to have a life after genius, he was cooperative and patient. However, after several months went by with no word on how this great accomplishment would be implemented in society, he approached his boss again.
“You signed a contract at the start of your employment,” he was told. “We own you. We own your work. We own your discoveries. You don’t tell us what to do, we tell you.”
I don’t mind that,” George said back. “My work was for the good of mankind, not my own personal glory.”
By the time George got a brief interview with the Chairman of the Board, he’d become known within the rank and file as “Mr. No Personal Glory.”
The Chairman laughed at him.
“Think about it,” he told George. “A world where nobody had to pay for their electricity or gas. Where they could just stick a pole in the ground and get all the power they wanted free of charge. Think of all the employees who’d be unemployed. Think of all the power stations that would be wasted real estate. Think of the loss of profits to our shareholders! Life would be turned upside down, our economy would crash, society would be devastated.”
“Why am I working for you then?” George asked.
“We keep people like you around on the off chance that you’ll discover something useful.”
“Useful? You mean profitable?” George was shocked at his own boldness, but he truly wanted to understand.
The Chairman laughed again. “Geniuses like you are a dime a dozen. You only look at things. I have the power of vision to see society as a living, breathing organism, a creature that must be nurtured, controlled, directed, protected from itself. Now get out of here before I fire you. I’m a busy man.”
George went home and thought about it. His mother was ill, and he had to think of her well-being first. His insurance policy was necessary, as was his static salary. But George had learned a new concept in the conservation of energy from the Chairman of the Board.
Two months later, his mother died.
The day after, George resigned.
For the next forty years, George worked on his own. He scratched out a frugal living through the occasional odd patent or commissioned activity, pouring his meager resources back into what equipment and books he could afford, often skipping meals to secure his more pressing wants. He still hungered for large labs and unlimited resources, but never again did he seriously consider re-entering the world of stockholders and quarterly dividends.
Along the way, his fascination began to diverge from the physical world into realms of philosophy, mysticism and metaphysics. He explored every religion he could uncover, from the ancient Vedas of the Hindus to monographs by the Rosicrucians. He studied Crowley’s volumes on Magick, read every conspiracy theory ever published, and spoke with spiritualists. Once, in a seance, he even tried to contact the departed spirit of his hero Tesla.
His attempts to measure thought and the soul by scientific yardsticks were infinitely more frustrating than his work with electricity, and he yearned for his early innocence. But through years of study, he began to understand better both himself and the “living breathing organism” of society — not as something that required control, direction and protection, but as an entity that needed a simple kick in the butt to keep it moving in spite of the industrial powers that ruled over their puppet governments.
It wasn’t until George was on his death bed that the fruit of over sixty years of research finally ripened.
His landlady, trying to collect his overdue rent, found him pale, emaciated and alone. But his eyes gleamed joyously from their sunken sockets in the dimly-lit room as he tried to explain to her that the exploration of mental pursuits combined with his understanding of physics were the supreme payoff. “The will,” he told her, “is the ultimate generator. The soul is the only true capacitor. All the rest; ohms, resistors, transistors, inductors, are mere mockeries of pure thought. The spirit created, the spirit will conquer!”
The landlady was frightened, his talk of ohms and the spirit sounded to her like the prattling of a dying man. She was only partly correct. As she reached for the phone to call for an ambulance, George breathed his final breath and shuffled off his mortal coil. And as he did so, the lamp beside his bed began to glow with a soft but brilliant luminescence. Then the other lights in the building came on. The street lamps nearby gradually increased their incandescence, and within moments, the gentle radiance had spread across the United States, then the northern hemisphere. Moments after that, the entire planet was alight and awash with a glowing glory that could be seen from Jupiter.
George had finally found a way to turn on the lights for everyone in the world. For free. And the world was a better place for it.
It took a second genius to figure out how to turn them off again, but that’s another story.
