He worked through November and into the first week of December with the pretense of a man whose private work had been interrupted by a matter of routine. He was, outwardly, unchanged. He appeared at his bench at ten-thirty each morning. He ate his lunch from his tin. He supervised the arc-lamp division. He had, in the course of the autumn, redesigned twenty-four standard dynamos of Edison's, each with an efficiency gain of between eight and twelve percent, each with a new armature of his own specification, each of which would in the coming year save the Edison Electric Light Company approximately ninety thousand dollars a year in fuel.
Edison had, in mid-October, over a cigar outside the shop's side door, said — in the careless way he said things — "Tesla. The twenty-four machines. Finish them before the new year and there's fifty thousand dollars in it for you."
Tesla, who had been calibrating his Aperture at the time and whose attention was therefore entirely elsewhere, had said, "Yes, Mr. Edison. I will finish them."
Edison had said, "Good man," and had walked on.
The sum was preposterous. Tesla had not calculated it. He had been quoted the sum, he had noted it in passing as he noted a train timetable, and he had continued with his work. Fifty thousand American dollars was a fortune. It was ten years of his wage at the rate the Machine Works was paying him.
He did not, in October, think about the fifty thousand. He thought about the Aperture.
In late October Henrik had stepped off the plate and Tesla had dismantled the apparatus and had made his decisions about the river, and in November he had worked in the shop with a quietness of body that was matched by a quietness of mind. He had, for the first time since he was five years old, no private apparatus in the course of construction. He had let it go. He had surprised himself, in the letting go, by feeling not bereavement but relief — the relief of a man who has carried a large stone for a long time and has set it down, briefly, on a wall, and straightened his back.
He finished the twenty-four dynamos on the third of December.
On the morning of the fourth he went to Edison's office to collect.
Edison was in his office. Insull was with him. Batchelor was not in the country — Batchelor had returned to Paris in October on company business. Insull was small and precise behind a high desk. Edison sat in his shirt sleeves in a battered chair with his feet on a footstool.
"Mr. Edison," Tesla said, "I have finished the twenty-four standard machines. They are in the shop, tested, signed off by Mr. Dean. I am here for the bonus you offered."
Edison looked at him for two seconds.
Edison laughed.
It was a short, flat, surprised laugh — the laugh of a man who has been asked a question he does not believe the questioner has actually asked.
"Tesla," he said, "you don't understand American humor."
Tesla looked at Edison.
Tesla looked at Insull, who was studying his blotter.
Tesla looked at Edison again.
He understood, in that moment, several things at once.
The first was that the fifty thousand dollars had never existed. It had been a remark. It had been a gust of air. It had been a man with a cigar saying a large number in a tone that, to an American, meant everything and nothing, and that, to a Serb from Smiljan who took what was said seriously, had meant fifty thousand dollars.
The second was that Edison had known all along that Tesla would take the fifty thousand seriously. Edison had known, and had enjoyed knowing. The remark had been, as Edison had known it would be, the carrot that kept the horse on a twelve-percent improvement for six weeks straight.
The third was that Edison was not an evil man. Edison was a shopkeeper. Edison was a man who had come up in a country that was not Tesla's country and who had acquired, in the coming up, a set of habits that Tesla would not, if he lived to be a hundred, acquire. Edison would, with this same easiness, refuse to pay a widow her husband's pension next year. Edison would, in three years, electrocute an elephant for a propaganda film. Edison was not going to become a different man.
The fourth thing Tesla understood was that he had crossed the Atlantic to work for this.
The fourth thing stopped him the way a horse is stopped by a low-slung wire.
"Mr. Edison," he said, "I — "
"I'll raise you ten dollars a week, Tesla. Thirty-five a week. That's a damned generous offer. Take it and go back to your bench."
Tesla did not take it.
He stood in the office for another perhaps eight seconds. Then he inclined his head in the half-bow he had been taught as a schoolboy in Rakovac, and he said, in the English that had come to him with the patient cadence of the Mark Twain he had read in Gospić, "Mr. Edison, I believe I will not."
Edison's laugh came back, different now.
"Tesla. Don't be a fool. Where are you going to go? To Westinghouse in Pittsburgh? Westinghouse is a crank. To Brown in Paris? Batchelor won't take you back. You're my man."
"I am not, Mr. Edison. I was never."
He turned. He walked out of the office. He walked down the iron staircase. He walked across the shop floor. He crossed to his bench, and he packed the three items he kept there — the tin pail his landlady sent the dinners in, the mechanical pencil a student friend in Graz had given him in 1878, and the small folded sheet of paper on which he kept the measurements of the Aperture he had dismantled. He put them in his coat pocket. He put on his hat.
On his way out he stopped at the night-watchman's stool. Henrik was not on duty — it was two in the afternoon — but Tesla wrote a short note on the back of a receipt and folded it and left it under Henrik's tin cup.
The note said: Henrik. I am leaving the company. I am not leaving the city. I will see you in a fortnight at the corner of Orchard and Houston at five in the afternoon on a Sunday. I would like to hear how Erzsi has recovered from her surgery.
He went out into the grey December street. He walked south. The river was at the end of the street. Gulls were on the river. He felt, as he walked, the strangest sensation of rising — as if, having stood up from a chair, he had continued to rise, so that he was looking down at the pavement of Goerck Street from a height of perhaps three feet and moving south above it. The feeling was not unpleasant. It was the feeling of a man who has been at the end of a tether for eight months and whose tether has been cut.
That night he wrote, in the same small diary he had kept in the room in Gospić in 1873, across the facing pages of the fourth and fifth of December, the single line that the world would in time read in the Tesla Museum at Belgrade:
He did not write, Because he made me see, in that office, that I had crossed an ocean for a man who is small.
He did not write, Because I have a larger thing to build and he will not see it and he will, if I stay, be in the way of it.
He did not write, Because I have chosen, twice now, not to open the door at scale, and I need to be free of men who would, by a single careless remark, undo the second choosing.
He wrote Good by.
He underlined it.
He blew out the candle.
He slept the sleep of a man who has been relieved of a burden he had not, until that afternoon, allowed himself to name.