The Teleportation Accident

by Ned Beauman

  The sky was overcast that day and through the window of the hotel room Bailey could see crows flying high up in it like punctuation lost on a blank page. He waited fifteen minutes, then went out into the corridor and knocked on the door of the Englishman’s room. When Renshaw opened it he said, ‘I sure am sorry to bother you, sir, but I was wondering if I might borrow a pencil sharpener. I can’t find mine.’

  Renshaw looked pleased. ‘Certainly. Come inside and I’ll look for one.’

  For the first few years that he had travelled with his father, Bailey had been very afraid of their pursuers. But lately he had thought more and more about what it might actually be like to meet one of these dark entities. And this was the first chance he had ever had. He knew he ought to feel frightened but he didn’t.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, my boy?’ said the Englishman. ‘It might take me a moment or two to find.’ He started rummaging around in a suitcase. ‘Where are you and your father from?’

  ‘Philadelphia.’

  ‘That’s a long way to come on a bicycle.’

  ‘He took me out of school for a year so I could see a little of our country.’

  ‘A magnificent notion. I come from London, but I’ve been all over this continent. Always something new to see. Mostly travel by motor car myself.’

  ‘You’re an archaeologist, you said, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you go around looking for bones?’

  ‘Sometimes. But these days I’m more of an educator. Science isn’t any use, you know, if we scientists keep it all to ourselves.’

  ‘So you give lectures?’

  ‘Not often. I’ve found that the general mass of the American public is seldom prepared for the latest discoveries. I prefer to arrange meetings with interested individuals with progressive sensibilities. They, in turn, can use their influence to sow the seeds of this new knowledge.’

  ‘What knowledge is that?’

  Renshaw smiled. Somehow he had still not located the pencil sharpener. ‘Oh, I’m not sure a lad of your age would be far enough ahead in your education.’

  Bailey gave the invited response. ‘I’ll bet I am far enough ahead, sir.’

  ‘Are you quite certain?’ said Renshaw almost coquettishly.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In that case, my boy, have you ever heard of the Troodonians?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I should have been surprised if you had. Come and assist me with this.’ Another of his cases was almost as big as a tenement stove, and Bailey had to help Renshaw lift it on to the bed. Then Renshaw snapped open four heavy brass catches to bisect the case vertically, and Bailey saw that the left side held the top half of a skeleton and the right side held the bottom half, each bone pulled snugly against the thick black velvet lining by leather loops, so that the case could be used as a sort of display cabinet when it was swung all the way open. Most of the skeleton looked unmistakably humanoid — the feet and the ribs and pelvis — but the skull looked more like a bird’s or a lizard’s. Also, it had a tail, and only four long digits on each hand.

  ‘What is this?’ said Bailey.

  ‘I expect you’ve been told that the Red Indians were the first civilisation to inhabit North America,’ said Renshaw. ‘Well, they weren’t. The Troodonians were far more advanced. While the Red Indians were still living in caves and eating worms, the Troodonians were herding livestock and trading goods.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘They evolved from dinosaurs, my boy. So they had scaly skin and serrated teeth. They laid eggs, and had no mammary glands, because they fed their young on regurgitated food. They worshipped a benevolent creator and lived according to his wishes. Their language would probably have sounded like birdsong, but they were also strongly telepathic, so they communicated mostly by thought. Unfortunately, although they were a cunning, acquisitive race, they were also a peaceful one. There is no such thing as a Troodonian weapon. So when the Red Indians decided to take over the Troodonians’ lands, they met with very little resistance. In the end, almost the whole race was destroyed, and all we have left now are disjected remains. Some biologists do argue that a few surviving Troodonians might have undergone some sort of evolutionary reversion to a more primitive lizard form — small, quadripedal and robust — but I don’t find that theory very credible.’

  ‘Did you dig this one up yourself?’

  ‘One of my colleagues found it in Arizona.’

  ‘And you carry it around to show to people?’

  ‘Not just to show, my boy. That would be selfish.’ Renshaw explained that he placed discreet advertisements in small regional newspapers announcing an archaeological breakthrough of epochal magnitude, with an address to which interested parties could write for more information. He then toured the homes of the respondents with a Troodonian skeleton, and once he’d found a good home for that skeleton with a keen gentleman scholar, he telegraphed to his colleague in Arizona to despatch a replacement by rail so that he could continue his trip. And since his purpose was primarily educational, he practically gave away each skeleton, asking only enough in return to help cover some of the costs of the excavations. Never more than a thousand dollars. In fact, he could tell that Bailey and his father were both of a cultured, enquiring temperament. Perhaps they might be interested in a purchase themselves? You couldn’t take a Troodonian skeleton on a bicycle, of course, but they could send it back to Philadelphia to await them on their return. And it was at this point that Bailey finally realised what Renshaw really was.

  According to his father, the confidence man wasn’t quite the most contemptible type of human being on the planet. That was the confidence man’s victim. But the confidence man himself was still pretty bad. Ever since they left Boston, Bailey’s father had been working on his manuscript, The Complete Taxonomy of Anthropic Cognitive Unsoundness. The epigraph was from Lucretius: ‘Just as in a building, if the first ruler is awry, and if the square is wrong and out of the straight lines, if the level sags a whit in any place, it must needs be that the whole structure will be made faulty and crooked, so that some parts seem already to long to fall, or do fall, all betrayed by the first wrong measurements; even so then your reasoning of things must be awry and false, which all springs from false senses.’ And the introduction promised that any man who trained himself rigorously using the book would be invulnerable to the predations of confidence men, hotdog vendors, sales clerks, politicians, moralists, aesthetes, beggars, cheap newspapers, sentimental novels, tearful women, and, above all, priests.

  ‘Where is your father at present?’ said Renshaw. ‘Is he next door?’

  ‘He’s at the dentist,’ said Bailey. ‘I don’t know when he’ll be back.’

  ‘I see.’ Renshaw coughed and turned back to the skeleton. ‘You know, my boy, the Troodonians had internal genitalia. Everything would have been tucked up inside a little vent called a cloaca.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Whereas mammals like you and me are lucky enough to have been given external genitalia.’ He put a hand on Bailey’s thigh, its fingers quivering as it rested there like the legs of a nervous animal. ‘Everything is … everything is just …’ He didn’t seem to be able to finish his sentence. ‘Perhaps you might like to…’

  There was a hammering at the door. ‘Franklin?’ his father shouted. The door was on a latch so Bailey had to get up and run over to open it from the inside. ‘I knew I could hear you,’ his father said, glaring at the Englishman. ‘What are you doing in here?’

  ‘Your son came to borrow a pencil sharpener.’

  ‘He’s got a pencil sharpener.’

  ‘I couldn’t find it, Dad.’

  ‘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 se
em 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.