With the era ending, I thought it was time to hang up my lab coat - but to me that requires one last bit of lab-coat praxis. Of course, Tesla wasn't nearly mad enough for my tastes; just because some of the wilder claims he made later in life are a bit over the top doesn't stop him from having a place in the annals of so-called "legitimate" science.

The Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), on the other hand, never did anything to gain the respect of the ivory tower. This praxis is based on one of his experiments.

Central to Reich's work was the idea of "orgone." Originally conceived of as a sort of emotional energy, extending the Freudian concept of libido, orgone was supposed to be a more concrete, measurable concept. The word is deliberately made to sound related to "orgasm," because, like Freud, Reich regarded sexual development and sexual tension as a driving force behind much of human psychology. His early work was similar to Freudian psychoanalysis.

Reich moved his practice to Berlin in 1930, and three years later wrote a book describing fascism as a symptom of sexual repression. This was his first step toward being too extreme for his associates; the Communist Party of Germany expelled him from their ranks, and his work was censored under the Nazi regime. Reich was also ejected from the International Psychological Association for his political activism, and found himself unable to continue his work in any one place for long without being persecuted both for his ever-changing but always extreme political views and his increasingly pseudoscientific theories. Eventually he settled in America, where he was investigated by the FBI, for being an immigrant with a history of communist activities.

Over time, Reich was beginning to hypothesize that orgone was an energy that pervaded the entire world, not just something he could measure in humans. The manipulation of orgone energy would thus have effects not only on human emotions, but on the physical world. Orgone, he said, was a blue-colored energy which opposed entropy and was responsible for ordering matter into structured forms; in fact in the 1930s he claimed his experiments with it had created microbial life in the laboratory. He later claimed various medical benefits to orgone-based therapies which were never accepted by legitimate scientists. In 1954, the FDA was granted an injunction to stop items relating to orgone therapy from being transported across state lines on the grounds that they were quack medical devices; two years later, Reich was arrested for violating the injunction. The FDA raided his laboratory and burned most of his notebooks. He was still in prison for the violation when his heart failed during his sleep and he died.



One useful effect of orgone theory is the ability to control the weather through the means of a device known as a "cloudbuster" (sometimes abbreviated CLB). A cloudbuster consists of a quantity of water, ideally flowing water, which acts to pull orgone to it, along with an array of one or more straight metal tubes to direct this effect. One end of the tubes must be in contact with the water, while the other end points at some target. Orgone is drawn toward the cloudbuster from the direction of the target. The device takes its name from its effects on weather patterns - allegedly, pointing one at an overcast sky causes holes to form in the overcast, while pointing it next to a cloud causes the cloud to grow. Clouds so manipulated are more inclined to rain. Pointing the device directly at a cloud will typically make the cloud drop its moisture as rain but then shrink.

Naturally, I had to do this. My cloudbuster is a simple model, consisting of a two-foot length of copper tube with one end in a bottle of water, held in place by plumber's putty. Any serious cloudbuster hobbyist would, I'm sure, tell you that with only one tube and a small one at that, plus no way to keep the water moving, my version isn't particularly potent. Reich is known to have experimented with larger arrays of tubes, and pumps to keep the water circulating, and many cloudbusters are designed to be more easily aimed precisely at clouds.

Nonetheless, I attempted to use mine twice - and both times, I was successful in getting the intended result.

The first time, I decided to help North Carolina break its drought by calling up a rainstorm. I pointed my cloudbuster at a spot next to a suitable dark cloud. Within an hour the cloud was larger and more menacing, and within two hours it had begun to rain - and the rain continued off and on all day and through the night, not stopping more than briefly until the next morning.

When I traveled back to Minnesota for Journey to the End of the Night, I brought the device with me, so I could keep it from raining on our event. This proved to be a very interesting experience, as getting on a bus while carrying a cloudbuster seems to be a guaranteed way of provoking a strange look or even a suspicious question from a bus driver. ("Is that a bomb?" "No ma'am, it's a bottle of water." "Oh, OK.")

When Tac Haberdash and I arrived at Oliver X's house for brunch, it was raining. I set up my cloudbuster on the back deck, pointed a little bit north so as to affect the area where Journey would take place. By the end of brunch, the rain had miraculously stopped - and while it did pour briefly once more that day, I was able to point my gadget out the west-facing window of my kitchen and thus end the rain in time for the event. Journey was saved; nobody got wet except by entering the pool or the hot tub at the after-party.