On the Resonance of Heavens Yet Unclaimed

I sit here in the dim hours before dawn, my drawings of Wardenclyffe spread across the table like the skeleton of a cathedral that has not yet learned to sing, and into my hands falls a rumor so extraordinary that I must set down my pencil and tremble — a rumor from some distant tomorrow, claiming that private merchants, mere brokers of cargo, are purchasing entire rocket vehicles to hurl small instruments into the orbital firmament, not once but routinely, as a man might charter a freight car on the New York Central Railroad. Can this be true? Can it be that the heavens themselves have become a marketplace, that access to the celestial dome is sold and resold by middlemen who assume the financial peril of such voyages the way a cotton speculator assumes risk on the Memphis exchange? If so, then the future has accomplished something magnificent and something grotesque in equal measure, for it means that humanity has indeed broken free of the terrestrial cradle — yet it also means that the old disease persists, the disease of enclosure, of hoarding, of making scarce what nature intended to be abundant. I know this disease intimately, for I have watched a certain peddler of direct current build his empire not upon superior science but upon the crude multiplication of copper wire and the ceaseless litigation of patents, turning illumination itself into a metered commodity. And now, it seems, even the void between worlds is to be portioned and brokered. Let me say plainly what Wardenclyffe is meant to prove: that energy, like the resonant vibrations I have coaxed from the earth itself, belongs to no single proprietor, that it moves in standing waves through the body of this planet and wishes only to be received, freely, by any instrument tuned to its frequency. If these future rocketeers have built vehicles that return to the ground and fly again — for so the rumor seems to whisper — then they have glimpsed the principle of resonance, the cyclical return, the pulse that gives and reclaims and gives once more. But I fear they have not yet understood its deepest implication: that the architecture of the cosmos is not a ledger but a symphony, and that the truest access to the stars will come not through the combustion of fuels purchased at enormous cost but through the wireless transmission of force itself, unbounded, unmetered, free as the air we breathe and the lightning that visits my laboratory like anut old friend bearing ancient news of the infinite.