On the 38th floor of the same building, the tall brown-skinned man with the deep blue eyes sat in council with an odd collection of geeks, labr rats, hackers, cross-eyed wirewrappers and other learned if eccentric people. A small Teslian coil demo unit sat on the table between them, sparking and writhing its tendrils of electromagnetic charges across the surface of a small blue sphere. From time to time someone would stick their index finger against the sphere and all the tendrils of charge would loop and curve until they all seemed to radiate from the fingerprint. When the finger was withdrawn, the coils of electic charge would go back to appearing random.

The blue-eyed man was frustrated and was showing it in spite of his training; his jaw muscles were tense (which made he well-formed cheekbones stand out even more) and his nostrils flared.

"We don't know how it's being done, and in fact we don't even know that it is being "done" and isn't just a natural byproduct of some aspect of planetary proximity...", a tall bearded fellow with extraordinarily white skin and extraordinarily thin arms was intoning. " I would rather believe that the Teslian discharges that are now being reported from the poles down to the equator are...y'know...some sort of phase interference between two fields brought ino proximity...something like that..."

The thick dark summer night outside their desperate meeting was not quiet, despite the fact that it was four in the morning. Beyond the glow of streetlights and advertisements splashing into the night sky, beyond the streak of gray hinting at a late-summer dawning, the bizarre tendrils of energy added a degree of light to the night sky that made the night seem bizarre and unsettling. In the shadowed streets of the city, usually abandoned except for an occassional taxi, scores of people strolled in the streets, solving their fears and insomnia by taking to the sidewalks, surporsed to find many of their kind already there. Above them, more intensely than ever, the coils and streeaks of electric charge wrapped across the sky, over, and over.