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 Vibe's eyes with a contemptuous twinkle which colleagues had learned meant he had what he wanted.

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It looks like Scarsdale Vibe was less interested in getting a price quote and simply needed to gauge the Professor's willingness to assent to the project. And if the Professor is stammering on about how much it will cost, he's obviously made the leap, in his mind, to help Scarsdale destroy Tesla. So I guess "Well, ring-tailed rutabagas" was an exclamation of surprise at how easily the Professor came around to becoming an accessory to evil.

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 "Well, ring-tailed rutabagas."

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Is this a bad statement to hear when negotiating a deal? If you were in a business meeting and you were all, "My price is one million dollars, sir!" Then the guy across the long table replied to you, "Well, ring-tailed rutabagas," would you be ecstatic or devastated?!
    I have a feeling the Professor shouldn't just feel devastated but scared at this response. I think maybe he's asked one too many questions and Scarsdale is beginning to get suspicious of him. If this were a mob movie from the 1980s, Scarsdale's next action would be to tear open the Professor's shirt to see if he's hiding a wire.

Fact Check: I don't think rutabagas have tails, ringed or not.

Double Fact Check: You might have realized that my fact check wasn't the best fact check because it began "I don't think." That indicates I didn't actually do any research and just trusted the facts that have piled up in my head over the last fifty years.

Triple Fact Check: I've never eaten a rutabaga, as far as I know.

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 "Hmm . . . well . . . as a figure to start from . . . if only for symmetry's sake . . . say about what Brother Tesla's getting from Mr. Morgan?"

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The Professor's ability to negotiate in this meeting makes perfect sense to me. Some people just don't understand business and they don't want to understand business. It's not some aspect of their lives they care enough about to have ever given it any thought. Some people just want to get on doing what they want to do. They want to follow their passion even if their passion isn't shared by anybody else. In certain instances, like with the Professor here, your passion is something valuable to somebody else. In other instances, like with me, nobody gives a shit about anything you write (except maybe three junior high school girls from Missouri). But it doesn't matter. People often say, "If I wasn't getting paid for this, I'd still do it!" But that's easy to say. Here's the better version: "I can't imagine ever getting paid for this but I still love doing it!"
    Anyway, I suck at business but I own my own business so that I have way more free time to do all the nonsense that actually makes my life interesting to me. And when people need to know how much I charge for something that I've never done before? I'm fucking stymied! I never know what to charge! Eventually I came down to a formula that seems to work but I'm probably shorting myself because everybody always agrees to my prices readily. Maybe I should change the formula and just add " + 20%" to the end of it. Even that increase would be far below the rate of inflation since I first started ten years ago!
    Damn, I really need to consult a business advisor!

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 "Come now, Professor," boomed Foley Walker, holding a hotel whiskey decanter as if he meant to drink from it, "to the nearest million or so, just a rough guess?"

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I've never been in a penthouse suite doing a major business deal so I don't know if it's common to have one side's muscle intimidate the other side into throwing out a price. I was in a meeting once for my business with a client and we were negotiating new prices based on increasing the amount of store cleanings they'd get each month. The owner of the stores wanted to increase to twice monthly one store that I cleaned monthly for $125. So I said nervously, not really having thought about it, "One hundred per visit, I guess?" He looked at me and said, "How about $120?" And I was all, "Sure. Thanks for looking out for me and probably realizing I would resent doing it for so much less and begin not doing as good a job as I'd previously been doing!"

So now you know how terrible I am at business. I'm so terrible that the person I'm negotiating against pities me and helps me fight for better pay.

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 "Cost? Oh, I couldn't really—that is, I shouldn't—"

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Is it "couldn't" or "shouldn't"? What's the confusion, old man?! Can you not conceive of the price or is the matter just too delicate a topic to broach? Are you afraid that if you estimate too high, Scarsdale will be offended and shoot you with his cane? Or do you fear lowballing yourself and being stuck in a contract with this evil monster which will cost you more than you're worth?!

I suppose I would also be super nervous and confused dealing with an evil super-villain in his evil penthouse lair with his evil goon standing nearby smoking way too many evil cigars.

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 "Tell me the details later. Now—how much do you reckon something like that would actually, um," lowering his voice, "cost?"

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"lowering his voice"
So the only part of this entire conversation that Scarsdale Vibe believes might constitute an indiscretion in polite conversation is the cost of it all? Or maybe he's just lowering his voice because he knows if the Professor estimates an exorbitant sum, Scarsdale's next words will be, "I guess I'll just have Tesla killed for twenty quid."

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 "Well in theory, I don't see any great obstacle. It's a simple phase inversion, though there may be non-linear phenomena of scale we cannot predict till we build a working Device—"

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"I don't see any great obstacle"
That's pretty much what I figured since I know so much about radio and I took calculus and physics in high school.
    Never mind what grade I got.

"It's a simple phase inversion"
I was going to brag some more about how I understand waves due to practically growing up on the beaches of Santa Cruz and seeing the phenomena of waves canceling each other out but then I thought about Star Trek and the transporters and I got super creeped out thinking about a Romulan device that could create a phase inversion transporter that would cancel out the person being beamed through space. I mean, in theory, that could work, right?!

"non-linear phenomena of scale"
I think this means once it's up and running, we could see unforeseen effects like giant earthquakes, random people's heads exploding, or Godzilla.

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 "Precisely why Pierpont's in on this. That and his arrangement with Edison—but there I go again spilling secrets. Bankrolling Tesla has given Morgan's access to all Tesla's engineering secrets. And he has operatives on the spot, ready day and night to rush us photographed copies of anything we need to know."

* * * * * * * * * *

A-ha! So J.P. Morgan's historical association with Nikola Tesla plays into Pynchon's tale! According to this fiction, Morgan wasn't interested in working with Tesla on a trans-Atlantic wireless system at all (or anything seven years before that, even, as he seems to be doing here in 1893, according to Scarsdale). He was simply infiltrating Tesla's camp to sabotage his work.
    I don't know if this is foreshadowing or some other literary motif but we'll see later that the working class plays the same game and are labeled socialists, communists, and anarchists for their efforts. How the world eventually comes to view you and your actions all depends on whether or not you own the media. And law enforcement. And politicians. One guy is just tweaking the rules because he's smart and good at money and rich and awesome. The other guy is a chowder-headed nitwit with a bomb who read one pamphlet on socialism, misunderstood it because he was poor and dumb, and became a terrorist who needs to be hanged as an example to all the other chowder-heads who dare to try to make the world a better place.

"he has operatives on the spot"
I should probably try to remember this when I get to the Nikola Tesla section. Maybe I can ferret out the characters who are obviously on Morgan's payroll!

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 "Hmm. It would help to see Dr. Tesla's drawings and calculations."

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Pynchon's fictional account of 1893 builds upon our modern love of conspiracy (and would you expect anything else from Pynchon?). Here Pynchon gives us exactly the sort of scene we imagine took place, one that takes place in fancy penthouses all over the country even today. Science and technology come up with an invention which will help people that corporations and industrialists can't earn money from. Not only will they be unable to earn money from it, it will cost them billions of dollars over time. Cars that run on water alone? Totally invented but squashed by fossil fuel companies! A cure for cancer? Anathema to pharmaceutical companies. Tesla's wireless and free world power system? Buried by the electrical cartel!

"Tesla"
Does anybody else get "Modern Day Cowboy" stuck in their head whenever they see the name Tesla? 

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 "Speak bluntly may I? Invent us a counter-transformer. Some piece of equipment that will detect one of these Tesla rigs in operation, and then broadcast something equal and opposite that'll nullify its effects."

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Here we see free market capitalism at work as it is expected to work by powerful and rich magnates. If somebody is free to improve society at the expense of the rich and powerful's wealth, then the rich and the powerful should be free to smash those people into little worthless smithereens. Scarsdale has no intention of "competing" in the "free market" of ideas. Tesla wants to build free power; Scarsdale wants to build a vault around the entire concept and sink it in the ocean.

"Speak bluntly may I?"
Imagine having to always couch your beliefs and declarations in metaphor, simile, and analogy because the earnest baring of your soul would be too horrific for those around you to stomach.
    I typed this meaning to criticize people like fictional character Scarsdale Vibe but have inadvertently hurt my own feelings.

"Invent us a counter-transformer"
Wait. I missed the part where Tesla was inventing Transformers in 1893. So basically Scarsdale wants the Professor to invent Decepticons.

"Some piece of equipment that will detect one of these Tesla rigs in operation, and then broadcast something equal and opposite that'll nullify its effects."
This isn't an outrageous theory at all. During the fledgling days of radio experimentation, transmissions had no way of going out without interfering with other radio transmissions in the area, resulting in garbled nonsense. This was about a decade or so later than 1893 so Scarsdale wouldn't be basing his idea on that. But the sense that if something can be transmitted, it is a thing that can be actively stopped is a reasonable one from a human perspective. Can you not smash a pipe pumping gas from one place to another to stop it from powering a distant apparatus? Could you not cut a wire to stop a telegraph transmission? Why not be able to detect and stop free power transmitted through the Aether then? And the best thing about making a "counter-transformer"? As the diabolical thwarter of some other scientist, you don't need to be nearly as imaginative or smart to build the thing that stops another thing!