Free One Year After: A Novel by William R. Forstchen Page B

the sale had never happened after the war started, and the hundreds of boxes of donations were all but forgotten in the basement. It took the Paul and Becka prowling around the damp, moldy basement for yet more curios and things interesting to read to find the treasure: a complete set of the Journal of the AIEE —the American Institute of Electrical Engineers—dating all the way back to 1884.
    Nearly anyone else in the world would have consigned the moldy, sneeze-inducing magazines to the kindling pile, but fortunately, not those two. Months earlier, they had burst into John’s office—unlike most in the town, they still called him “Doc” out of memory of his days as their history professor—and tossed a dusty, brittle magazine on his desk without preamble or explanation.
    “Doc, this is a gold mine!” Paul cried. “They even got the first edition here from 1884! And check this out—articles actually written by Tesla, Nikola Tesla himself!”
    It had been a quiet, snowy day when they arrived, and he had indeed been in a mellow mood after a romantic night with Makala in front of the fireplace and no new crisis to deal with, so he was initially in an indulgent frame of mind. Hardly a day passed without someone presenting a harebrained idea to solve the town’s problems with everything from cold fusion machines to perpetual motion. When Mabel’s husband, George, first walked in with plans for how to run a car off charcoal fumes, he thought the man crazy, but a year later, half a dozen such vehicles were chugging around the community.
    As a professor, John had always turned to Paul when it came to the inevitable computer glitches in his classroom, and Becka could always track down some obscure journal via interlibrary loan for an article he was writing, so of course he would listen to them. Within minutes after they dumped the journal on his desk, he was as excited as they were. They brought in a box of the journals and spent a delightful afternoon poring over them. Beyond being the onetime head of this town, he was a historian, and the journals were a remarkable glimpse into a most remarkable time in global history where the world was coming out of the darkness and into the future brilliance of electrical power … and in so doing would set itself up for the greatest disaster in human history since the great plagues of the fourteenth century.
    The monthly journals dated all the way back to the first days of the electrical industry. The infamous “current wars”—the conflict between Edison on one side supporting the use of direct current and Tesla and Westinghouse on the other pushing for alternating current—had been fought out for years on the pages of the magazine. Historically, that was interesting enough, but far more important were the details of the genesis of the modern electrical current grid from generating station to transformers to household appliances with detailed plans and patents set out for everything.
    It was a time of excitement and new inventions nearly every month. It was also a time of bitter infighting, turf wars, patent arguments, claim jumping on who invented what first, character assassinations, and outright thievery and sabotage.
    Becka’s librarian skills came to the fore as she laboriously indexed and cross indexed the material they had uncovered. That was an essential step since the magazines had been printed on cheap, wood-pulp-based paper, and many were as brittle as glass, about to disintegrate if handled more than a few times. The secrets of the past could literally disintegrate in a reader’s hands, and she therefore became their guardian, ensuring the magazines were not pawed over in a frivolous manner. What she was protecting covered the development of the entire industry, from just a few years after the first commercial incandescent lightbulbs and power plants went online up until the 1960s when the AIEE had merged with another organization to include advanced