The Teleportation Accident (34 page)

‘Come on, Franklin.’

They went back into their room.

‘I told you not an hour ago that there was something wrong about that fellow. You shouldn’t have gone in there.’

‘But he’s not a detective or anything, Dad.’

‘That may seem so obvious now that you feel as if you knew it at the time you made the decision. But you didn’t. What fallacy is that?’

‘Retrospective Reassurance.’

‘Exactly right.’

Bailey’s father never punished him, because for the last five years it had been his responsibility to train his son to behave rationally in every circumstance, and he believed that the failure of a pupil was by definition just as much the failure of a teacher. However, he didn’t speak to his son for the rest of the evening, except to report that the dentist had been too busy to see him that afternoon so he would have to try again tomorrow. The next morning, Bailey went with him to the dentist and waited in an armchair while his father had his tooth pulled. They left Sheboygan Falls straight afterwards, his father’s mouth still stuffed with bloody cotton, and Bailey never saw the Englishman again . . .

The ultramigration accumulator was already warming up, so he must have come into his laboratory and turned it on. He couldn’t even remember how he’d disengaged himself from Rackenham. It was possible, he thought calmly, that he was having some sort of dissociative episode, and that he ought to go home before it got any worse. Where did it come from, this compulsion to tumble always back into the past? But the latest phase of his experiments was reaching its conclusion, and something about the sight of the Ford on the roof had made him determined to see it through as soon as he could. He set to work. After about an hour, Adele came in.

‘How was your rehearsal, my dear?’

She grimaced. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘I saw a few scenes and I was very impressed.’

‘Back in Berlin, people used to say Egon had quite a bit of talent and he might do something important one day, except you couldn’t ever tell him so because his head would get so big. I don’t know what they’d make of
The Snowflake
.’

‘Speaking of Berlin, I met a fellow just now who said he was an old friend of yours.’

‘Oh, you mean Rupert?’

‘That’s right. Rupert Rackenham. How did you guess?’

‘I ran into him just now on my way here.’

‘He’s still out there loitering?’

‘I’m afraid so. All the same, it’s nice that you met him at last.’

‘Why do you say “at last”? Who is he?’

‘You remember. He wrote that book you liked.’

‘Book about what?’

‘Lavicini,’ said Adele.

‘Who’s Lavicini?’ said Bailey.

Someone shouldered past him on their way to the bar, and he spilled some of his grapefruit juice on the carpet, but he was so dismayed he hardly noticed. Could it be that teleportation had already been achieved in Germany and the news had not made its way to the United States? Could it be that some Italian engineer working for Siemens had beaten him to it? He hadn’t even meant to mention teleportation to this singular girl in the first place, and indeed he wasn’t at all sure what she was doing at an Athenaeum Club cocktail party – you could tell just by looking at her that she wasn’t one of the undergraduates’ girlfriends, and she had a German accent. But then Adele explained about the Teleportation Accident of 1679.

‘How do you know all this?’ he said when she’d finished.

‘A friend of mine published a novel about Lavicini. And I was in it. I was the ballerina who died, except I was really a princess.’

Straight away, with the irrefutable force of a religious revelation, Bailey was certain of two things. The first was that Lavicini’s story was the key that would unlock the final door in his teleportation research, the door on which he’d been knocking for so many years. And the second was that this girl – the ballerina, the princess, the herald – would have to become his assistant. She probably didn’t know anything about physics, but that didn’t matter. She seemed bright. She could learn.

Teleportation as a fantasy had come to Bailey when he was still travelling with his father. They couldn’t take trains or streetcars or steamboats because their faces might be recognised; they couldn’t hire an automobile because their licence plate might be tracked; and they couldn’t even take a direct route from east to west on their bicycles because their next stop might be anticipated. As the years wheeled on, Bailey began to wonder if they would ever get to California. And yet in his dreams he would look out of a window and he was already there. Lucretius made it seem as if anything was possible if you understood the nature of things. Couldn’t there be a machine that could hurl a body across a continent as a telephone could hurl a voice?

But Bailey hadn’t had his first revelation of how teleportation might actually work until he arrived alone in Los Angeles in 1915. Boston and Chicago and New York, the cities he’d seen with his father, were bodies with organs, but this territory, like space itself, was still just a giant bag of cytoplasm. It had almost unlimited capacity and its inhabitants were willing to drive almost unlimited distances. If you were trying to decide where to build a house or a restaurant or an ostrich farm, therefore, you had no substantive grounds on which to do so: here, location was a meaningless and arbitrary property. All spatial coordinates were equivalent. And that was how teleportation would function. A teleportation device would have to convince the object in the chamber that it just wouldn’t matter if it were somewhere else. (Only a few months before this party at the Athenaeum Club, he’d been driving back from Venice Beach when he’d got stuck in the most infernal traffic jam he’d ever encountered. There must have been an accident up ahead, because he didn’t see anyone make an inch of progress for twenty minutes or more. Horns quacked pointlessly. Bailey had been reminded of Lucretius: ‘All things are not held close pressed on every side by the nature of body; for there is void in things. For if there were not void, by no means could things move; for that which is the office of body, to offend and hinder, would at every moment be present to all things; nothing, therefore, could advance, since nothing could give the example of yielding place.’ And then he saw the driver of a dented green Chevrolet up ahead open his door, get out, and simply saunter off down the street, something in his bearing making it obvious that he did not intend to return. He was chased by curses, because if his car sat there driverless then the jam would take even longer to clear, but he never looked back. And all Bailey could think about was that this was teleportation. A particle’s spatial coordinates were the steel chassis in which that particle was trapped. To escape from them, the particle merely had to get out and walk.)

Bailey wasn’t, of course, the only physicist to be interested in teleportation. Over the years he’d met quite a few who’d read
The Disintegration Machine
by Arthur Conan Doyle when they were boys, or
The Man Without a Body
by Edward Page Mitchell (the author also of
The Clock that Went Backward
), and had never forgotten about it. But he knew they would never get anywhere, because they hadn’t thought about it hard enough. They didn’t seem to realise, for instance, that when an object departed the teleportation device, it couldn’t just leave a vacuum behind, and when it arrived at its new destination, it couldn’t just displace the matter that was already there. The laws of physics wouldn’t allow that. Teleportation would have to be an exchange. If you set the device correctly, a human body would be swapped for a volume of air of exactly the same shape. But if you were off by a few feet, the subject might find himself embedded part of the way into a wall, like that horse thrown through the window of the bar in Scarborough, and in the chamber of the teleportation device you would find a sort of bas-relief. Indeed, if you teleported a naked corpse right into a block of marble, you could produce a sculpture accurate to every pimple.

The Monday after he met Adele at the party at the Athenaeum Club, Bailey sent for a copy of
The Sorceror of Venice
, and when he’d finished it he went to the Los Angeles Public Library to find out everything else he could about Lavicini. Each new detail made him more certain that the secret of teleportation was here. So when that same week a soft-spoken man from the State Department came to tell him that on the orders of Cordell Hull he was now to direct his scientific work according to the recent discoveries of an obscure author from Rhode Island called H.P. Lovecraft, Bailey was not nearly as surprised as the man seemed to expect him to be. When he looked over the State Department summaries of Lovecraft’s stories, what he heard was a chord of recognition. Lovecraft understood everything. Bailey quoted Lucretius to the man: ‘ “For even as children tremble and fear everything in blinding darkness, so we sometimes dread in the light things that are no more to be feared than what children shudder at in the dark and imagine will come to pass. This terror then, this darkness of the mind, must needs be scattered not by the rays and the gleaming shafts of the day, but by the outer view and the inner law of nature.” ’ The man nodded and then told Bailey that there was only one small obstacle remaining: it had been impossible to obtain a proper security clearance for Bailey because for some reason State Department investigators had not been able to find any trace of his existence before 1915, when Bailey had enrolled at what was then called the Throop College of Technology. Presumably, the man said, there was a simple explanation? But Bailey just stared in silence at the man until at last he coughed and got up to leave. The question of a security clearance was never brought up again, although he was told that he was now so valuable to the American government that he could no longer be permitted to travel on aeroplanes.

From then on, the State Department sent Bailey every new story that Lovecraft published, and also typed extracts from his letters, which they often intercepted and steamed open. He soon began to feel that in other circumstances he could have been good friends with Lovecraft. To learn that Lovecraft, too, had read Lucretius in his youth did not surprise him: even Lovecraft’s dread gods were sternly materialist, and it took a Lucretian belief in the illimitable reach of empirical enquiry to write that ‘the sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ Bailey thought Lovecraft would have taken some pleasure in
The Complete Taxonomy of Anthropic Cognitive Unsoundness
.

Then again, Lovecraft did seem to have a malign obsession with Negroes and Jews, which would have been forbidden by Bailey’s father’s book. ‘Either stow ’em out of sight,’ he wrote to one friend, ‘or kill ’em off.’ This was tiresome reading, and yet Lovecraft was hardly alone. A great many of the Americans Bailey most admired were, or had been, preoccupied with the precarious future of the noble white race. Robert Millikan, the founder of CalTech. William Cowper Brann, the martyred editor of the freethinker magazine
The Iconocolast
. Edward Alsworth Ross, the sociologist who blamed the replacement of private cabs by public streetcars for the high rates of miscegenation in the urban United States. And Henry Ford, famously. Well, perhaps the other races really were inferior and dangerous. Perhaps they weren’t. Bailey didn’t know; it didn’t interest him . . .

‘Did you have a nice time at the party last night?’ said Adele.

For a moment he thought she must be talking about the Athenaeum Club in ’35. But of course she meant the party last night at the Muttons’ house in Pacific Palisades. Loeser had pestered him for months to go to one, and he still wasn’t sure why. But that first time, he’d been surprised to find quite a few German and Austrian scientists present who didn’t yet have tenured jobs in this country, and some of them knew rumours about the latest incremental advances in particle physics that hadn’t even quite reached CalTech. Also, the hosts seemed delighted by his presence in a way that was unfamiliar to him (once, Dolores Mutton had gone so far as to invite him to join her and a few other guests for a swim in the moonlight, but he’d had to decline because at forty-one he’d still never even learned to tread water). So he’d voluntarily gone back three or four times since. ‘Oh, not too bad,’ he said. It was nearly seven o’clock, and the ultramigration accumulator had finished a cycle. ‘Why don’t you go home, Adele? You must be tired after all those rehearsals.’

‘Not really,’ said his assistant.

‘I insist. You won’t miss anything. I won’t be doing any more experiments today.’

This wasn’t true. There were some experiments that, for various reasons, could not be performed in Adele’s presence. Which was a pity, since Bailey liked to have her with him whenever he could. His instinct about her at that party four years ago had been more correct than he ever could have hoped. He didn’t know why, but whenever it was Adele who operated the Teleportation Device, the prototype seemed to perform a great deal better. Perhaps in a field as mercurial as teleportation, a lack of formal scientific training was an advantage. And she worked so hard. Her only disagreeable quirk was that every so often he would notice her gazing at him for so long that he began to think he must have something in his teeth. Most likely she was just lost in thought. It had not escaped his notice that quite a lot of men on campus were erotically infatuated with the girl. Loeser, for instance, could hardly have been more blatant about it, and neither could Slate. Bailey himself had never taken any interest in sex, even as a young man. Most of what he knew about it came from Lucretius, who did not make it sound at all appealing. ‘When the lovers embrace and taste the flower of their years, they closely press and cause pain to the body, and often fasten their teeth on the lips, and dash mouth against mouth in kissing; yet all for naught, since they cannot tear off aught thence, nor enter in and pass away, merging the whole body in the other’s frame; for at times they seem to strive and struggle to do it. They yearn to find out what in truth they desire to attain, nor can they discover what device may conquer their disease; in such deep doubt they waste beneath their secret wound.’ Why on earth would anyone want to put themselves through that?