I stood in my corner, mute, trapped.
"I have an ocean in my apt. Maybe you'd like to try it? I used to love to swim in the ocean when I was a boy."
My feet moved without my willing them. An ocean in his apt? My feet wanted to know about this.
I entered his apt, and even my feet were too surprised to go on.
He had the biggest apt I'd ever seen. It spanned three quarters of the length of the bat-house, and was five storeys high. The spots where he'd dissolved the foam walls away with solvent were rough and uneven, and rings of foam encircled each of the missing storeys above. I couldn't imagine getting that much solvent: it was more tightly controlled than plutonium, the subject of countless action-adventure vids.
At one end of the apt stood a collection of tall, spiny apparatus, humming with electricity and sparking. They were remarkable, but their impact was lost in what lay at the other end.
The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla had an ocean in his apt. It was a clear aquarium tank, fifteen meters long and nearly seventeen high, and eight meters deep. It was dominated by a massive, baroque coral reef, like a melting castle with misshapen brains growing out of it.
Schools of fish — bright as jellybeans — darted through the ocean's depths, swimming in and out of the softly waving plants. A thousand neon tetra, a flock of living quicksilver sewing needles, turned 90 degrees in perfect unison, then did it again, and again, and again, describing a neat, angular box in the water.
"Isn't it beautiful? I'm using it in one of my experiments, but I also find it very calming."
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