The Teleportation Accident

by Beauman, Ned

  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?

  Some time after Adele left, Bailey decided to go for a stroll. Fresh air kept him alert. But on his way out of the Obediah Laboratories he was dismayed to see Rupert Rackenham standing there in just the same place beside a cypress tree. The Englishman had a cigarette in his mouth and he’d flicked butts in every direction as if sowing a field.

  ‘Professor Bailey—’

  ‘Have you been here all this time?’

  ‘Yes. I really am sorry to pester you like this but, between you and me, I’ve already spent the fee for this article so you’d be doing me an incomparable favour if you could spare so much as a minute and a half to discuss your work.’

  ‘Mr Rackenham, if you weren’t a friend of Adele’s I would telephone the security guard at Throop Hall and report you for trespassing.’

  ‘Don’t treat the gentleman that way, Franklin. You always were a well-mannered child.’

  Bailey turned, and there was Lucy. For a moment he thought she was another one of these alarmingly vivid recollections that had been invading him all day, except that his recollection of Lucy wouldn’t have had a walking stick, and she wouldn’t have had those spotty subsident jowls, and she wouldn’t have been able to respond when Rackenham said, ‘Are you a friend of Professor Bailey, madame?’

  ‘Since he was born.’

  ‘I don’t know this woman,’ Bailey said.

  ‘Franklin!’ said Lucy.

  Rackenham raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t mean to be impertinent, Professor Bailey, but she does seem to know your name.’

  ‘Anyone could find out my name.’ Last year the State Department had offered to help tighten security on campus to protect the highly classified endeavours of Bailey and Clarendon and their colleagues, but Millikan had refused, saying he didn’t want the Institute to feel like a military base. At the time, Bailey had been relieved, but he realised now how absurd it was that nothing really stood between him and the rest of the world but Mrs Stiles at Throop Hall. Bailey had always done his best to keep his Teleportation Device a secret, but on his long pilgrimage with his father he’d come to realise that secrecy, like kinetic energy, was continuously dissipated – so that a secret kept for ever was not just improbable, like a teleportation device, but inconceivable, like a perpetual motion machine.

  ‘Have you been here all evening, madame, like I have?’ said Rackenham.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘They said he won’t see me. But I have to see him. So I waited. I was watching you waiting too.’

  ‘You must be hungry. I certainly am. Perhaps you’d allow me to buy you a spot of supper somewhere near by? You needn’t worry,’ Rackenham added with a smile, ‘I haven’t any caddish intentions. But we could talk a bit about the disobliging Professor Bailey.’

  ‘You have no right!’ said Bailey.

  ‘To do what?’ said Rackenham.

  The last thing Bailey wanted to do was invite Lucy into his laboratory, but he didn’t have a choice if he was going to get her away from Rackenham. ‘Lucy, come inside.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ said Rackenham.

  ‘Come inside,’ Bailey repeated. He took Lucy’s arm and pulled her into the Obediah Laboratories almost faster than she could go with the stick. Then he locked the door behind them. Neither of them spoke until they were back in room 11, when Bailey said, ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘My granddaughter, she lives in Pasadena,’ said Lucy, panting a little. ‘I came out to live with her last year after I retired. O
ne day I saw you in the street. I knew it was you. Don’t know how I knew – thirty years gone by at least – but I knew it was you. My little Franklin. But I didn’t want to stop you right away. Too nervous. So I got in a taxicab and I followed you. Found out you’re at the Institute. Found out you’re calling yourself Bailey now.’

  ‘My name is Franklin Bailey and it always has been.’

  ‘What did your daddy tell you about your mama, Franklin? I always used to wonder what he told you. You remember when she passed on it was right around when she’d had that ruckus with your grandma about your confirmation. Did he tell you your grandma and grandpa did something to her? Did he tell you he had to take you away in case they did something to you too?’

  The lock on the door of the chapel. The carvings on the altar like gutters on an operating table. The chalice that was polished almost too clean. ‘You are a senile old woman.’

  ‘He did, didn’t he? Franklin, don’t you want to know what really happened to your mama?’

  ‘Nobody knows what happened. She disappeared and she was never found.’

  ‘She was found, child. She hadn’t been found by the time your daddy took you away. He only waited a day. She was found after that. But you were already gone, so you never knew.’

  ‘No more of this gibberish, please.’ She was going to tell him that his father had murdered his mother. She was going to tell him that his father had run away because otherwise he knew he’d be caught. She was going to tell him that it was the police that he and his father had been fleeing, not the agents of the Phenscots and the Catholic Church. She was a liar. He knew she was a liar. He knew. He knew. He didn’t know. He’d never known. He thought of Lucretius. ‘These men, exiled from their country and banished far from the sight of men, stained with some foul crime, beset with every kind of care, live on all the same, and, in spite of all, to whatever place they come in their misery, they make sacrifice to the dead, and slaughter black cattle and despatch offerings to the gods of the dead.’

  Lucy smiled sadly. ‘Franklin, your mama fell down an elevator shaft.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She was in a hotel and she didn’t have her eyeglasses and the grille opened when it shouldn’t have and she just stepped right into the elevator shaft. Broke her pretty neck. They didn’t notice her down there for a day and a half. Your daddy just jumped to conclusions.’

  ‘Do you still worship the gods of the dead, Lucy?’ said Bailey.

  ‘Are you listening to me, child?’

  ‘Do you still worship the gods of the dead? The gods those priests taught your grandparents about on the island where your people come from?’

  ‘I’m a good Catholic now, Franklin.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Bailey. ‘Your grandparents were wrong – there are no gods of the dead – but they still understood more than you could possibly know.’

  ‘Professor Bailey?’

  He looked up. Clarendon stood at the doorway of room 11. When had the Obediah Laboratories turned into Union Station? And then for the first time he wondered whether all this had really happened in just one day – whether, in fact, it wasn’t a week ago that he’d seen the Ford on the roof of Dabney Hall, and two weeks ago that he’d watched Adele in her rehearsal – whether he’d just let the transitions drop from his memory like a cutter down in Studio City. He found it hard to be certain. How was it possible for a person to be in one place, and then in another place, or to be in one time, and then in another time, without ever seeming to traverse the distances between them? ‘Yes, Dr Clarendon?’ he said.

  ‘I thought we might have that talk now about the trouble I’ve been having with the phasmatometer. But, uh, I see you’re busy,’ said Clarendon, obviously puzzled by the presence of an elderly black woman in Bailey’s laboratory.

  ‘No, I’m not busy. This lady is just lost. Why don’t you go back to your lab and I’ll come by in a few minutes?’

  ‘All right.’ Clarendon nodded to Lucy and then left.

  ‘Who is that man, Franklin?’ said Lucy.

  ‘A colleague.’

  ‘There’s something about him puts a frost on my bones.’

  ‘He’s not very genial, no.’

  ‘I don’t know if you should be on your own with him, child.’

  Bailey wondered if Lucy had heard rumours about the deaths at CalTech. ‘I’ve been on my own with him a hundred times. He’s harmless. Now, it’s time for you to leave. You’d better go out by the back entrance. I don’t want you ever to come back here and I don’t want you to say one word to that Englishman.’

  ‘Franklin, please . . .’

  ‘I don’t know you. You didn’t know my parents. You have probably come here to cheat some money out of me and you are trespassing just as much as Rackenham.’ Then he turned his back on her and started fiddling with the controls of the ultramigration accumulator. He would stay like this for ever if he had to, but after a short while he heard her give a long sigh and then depart, cumbersome as black cattle.

  When the ultramigration accumulator was at full power, Bailey put his toy steam engine into his pocket and went upstairs to Clarendon’s laboratory, where the other physicist was in the process of disassembling his phasmatometer. ‘As you can see, I’ve added this extra pair of valve coils,’ he said when Bailey came in, as if they were already in the middle of conversation. ‘I think that might be causing the trouble. What do you think?’

  ‘Actually, Dr Clarendon, there’s something I’d like to show you in Dabney Hall. I believe it has some bearing on your difficulty.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ll explain on the way. Then we can have a closer look at your valve coils when we get back.’

  ‘If you really think so,’ said Clarendon, and reluctantly put down his screwdriver. Together they left the Obediah Laboratories. This time, to Clarendon’s relief, there was no sign of Rackenham, Lucy or any other pursuer.

  ‘Do you know anything about Adriano Lavicini?’ said Bailey as they walked.

  ‘A little. I read that novel about him.’

  ‘The Sorceror of Venice. Yes. Then you remember that Rackenham proposes that the destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets was the result of the sabotage of the Teleportation Device by a stagehand. That hypothesis is implausible, most obviously because it gives no explanation for the unusual phenomena reported by members of the audience. The fall in temperature. The disagreeable smell. The tentacles. I’ve done a lot of research into Lavicini, and I believe I know what caused the Teleportation Accident. The truth is, it wasn’t an accident at all. The destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets was the express purpose of the Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place.’ They were at the main entrance of Dabney Hall now, and Clarendon made as if to go inside, but Bailey shook his head and led him around the corner to the utility staircase.

  ‘Why would Lavicini want all those people to die?’ said Clarendon. ‘And what has this got to do with the valve coils?’

  ‘You remember, of course, that the basis of my teleportation research is to delete a particle’s physical coordinates and replace them with new ones. Well, I once said to Adele, my assistant, “What’s the one thing in the world that can uproot almost anything?” She’s a very good assistant but she can be sentimental, and I could tell from the vapid expression on her face that the answer she had in mind was love, or something of that sort. That’s what it would be in the motion pictures. But it’s not love. Love does nothing. Love is only a type of anthropic cognitive unsoundness. What uproots things is violence. You must already understand that, Dr Clarendon. After all, a ghost could only be possible if a violent death caused some localised distortion to the physical laws of the universe. And it does. Unfortunately, not in the way you think. There is no such thing as a ghost. No one will ever build a working phasmatometer. All your research has been futile. If you were a better physicist perhaps you might not have wasted so many years.’
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  Clarendon looked taken aback. ‘But, Professor Bailey, I always had the impression . . .’

  ‘It was not the right time to break it to you. If you gave up your research, the State Department would have had no one at CalTech to bother but me, and that might have been inconvenient. Now, Lavicini knew no more of physics than Lucretius. But, like Lovecraft, he came to the truth by other means. This was Paris in the age of the Court of Miracles. And Lavicini’s temperament was an empiricist’s, not an artist’s. He’d worked as an inventor at the Venetian Arsenal. Theatre was just a diversion. He wanted to build a real teleportation device, just as much as I do. And he succeeded. Did you know that in 1684, five years after Lavicini was supposed to have been killed in the Teleportation Accident, he was reported to have been seen back in Venice?’ By now they were at the top of the utility staircase. Clarendon followed Bailey out on to the roof, where the Model T Ford was still parked at the edge. Beyond that, you could see the whole distribution of CalTech’s buildings, like the parts of the phasmatometer laid carefully out across Clarendon’s table.

  ‘What are we doing up here?’ said Clarendon.

  Bailey opened the driver’s side door of the car. ‘Get inside,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Get inside. You’ll see why.’

  Clarendon did as he was told. Bailey shut the door after him, then went around to the other side of the car and got into the passenger’s seat.

  ‘Hurry up and shut the door,’ his father said.

  The noise of the rain on the roof of the car was so loud that Bailey had to raise his voice to speak to his father. ‘I didn’t know they had storms like this in California.’

  ‘They have tornadoes here sometimes, son. Hail. Mudslides. It’s not all sunshine.’