A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist by Ron Miller

over each ear. Black arched brows shadow opaline eyes that flare like gas jets. A nose like an engineer’s triangle, a moustache drawn with a ruling pen and an imperial as sharply pointed and precise as the indicator on a galvanometer complete a list of features that are as rigid and uniform as though they had been ordered from a catalog. He wears an immaculately white laboratory smock, a high collar and black cravat.
    “Well, Professor Wittenoom!” he says in a tone that at first seems so friendly that it surprises the princess. But then she sees that it is unmatched by the cold light in his eyes. “You haven’t graced my laboratory with a visit in weeks. It’s pleasant to see you!”
    “Yes, good morning, Tudela,” replies the professor in an oddly reserved voice. “I’ve brought you some visitors.”
    “Well done!”
    “May I present the Princess Bronwyn, her, ah, man Mr.Mollockle, and the Baron Sluys Milnikov?”
    “Princess,” says the doctor, bowing formally and very nearly but not quite kissing her hand, she feels only his cool breath, and then shakes Milnikov’s hand vigorously. She notices that the doctor wears thin white gloves. “Baron. It’s a great pleasure meeting both of you. Princess Bronwyn? Tedeschiiy? You’d be the daughter of the late King of Tamlaght?”
    “I would.” Bronwyn replies, not doubting that the man knew exactly who she was.
    “You must be finding Londeac fascinating.”
    “Yes, I am,” she says, not really liking the self-assured and condescending assumption. “And, Baron, I’m forced to admit that I’ve been addicted to reading your published adventures. I hope there’re more to come?”
    “I hope so, too. I need the royalties.”
    “Professor Wittenoom, have you taken your guests to any of the biological departments? I’m certain that Biology, Comparative Anatomy or perhaps even the teratologists in Pathology would be fascinated by the princess’s man, here.”
    “Not yet. Those areas are a little out of my field.”
    “A pity. Tell me, Princess,” the doctor says abruptly, “what do you know of electricity?”
    “It may as well be nothing. You’d be safest assuming that, anyway.”
    “I applaud your candor. Perhaps you may already know that electricity vibrates? Or that many of its qualities depend upon the rate of that vibration?”
    “No, I didn’t know that exactly.”
    “Ordinary electricity,” he continues, as though she had not spoken, “like that supplied to homes for lighting . . . Oh, that’s right; forgive me, I forgot there’s no electrical supply in Tamlaght . . .”
    No you didn’t , thinks Bronwyn a little resentfully.
    “ . . . ordinary electricity vibrates at a rate of a few hundred times a second. However, my electricity vibrates at rates of scores of thousands of times each second. It’s an entirely new order of electric current.”
    “Yes, I can see that.”
    “It’s the low vibration rate of ordinary power that requires a power plant on nearly every street corner, it simply hasn’t the force to move through more than a few thousand feet of wire. My electricity will change all that. This device,” he says, gesturing toward a tall cylinder that rises from the floor in one of the few clear areas in the room, “is the latest generator of what I term ‘ultra-oscillating current.’”
    The cylinder indicated is perhaps two feet thick and slightly taller than the doctor. It is tightly wrapped with fine copper wire; on its summit is balanced a small polished brass sphere. Tudela gives an order to one of his assistants, who extinguishes the electric lighting and begins to draw shades over the tall windows. The laboratory is plunged into a gloomy twilight. Phthalocyanine flashes from humming devices elsewhere in the room glimmer like aurorae or will-o’-the-wisps.
    “Ordinary current passes directly through a human body, accounting for the terrible injuries it can cause, or even death. Ultra-oscillating current passes over