The Teleportation Accident

soda fountain.’

An obscene pink light began to strobe.

‘I was not! How did you know?’ Adele still held the magnesium over her head and her elbows were starting to quiver.

‘Don’t worry yourself about that. Grandmas always find these things out. Now, here’s your Ma coming back from town.’

The strobe shut off and a long blast of dry ice befogged the stage as Dr Pelton’s wife Martha entered on a conveyer belt. She wore wooden conquistador armour.

‘Ma!’ screeched Adele.

‘Hello, little one.’

‘Isn’t it chilly today, Ma?’

‘It sure is, little one, but nothing more warms me up faster than coming back to this wonderful cosy house.’ Many more lights came on, revealing the rest of the set, which was mostly composed of ladders, pulleys, dustbins, and broken mirrors.

‘Oh, Ma,’ said Adele, flinging out her arms as if crucified as Dr Pelton scraped a steel protractor across the strings of his piano, ‘isn’t Christmas just the loveliest time of year?’

There had been some concern among the faculty that The Snowflake by J.F. McGnawn, Dr Millikan’s choice for this year’s California Institute of Technology Christmas play, might not be quite compatible with Egon Loeser’s particular style of direction. Neo-Expressionism was apparently the term, and if you wanted to be equitable about last year’s inaugural Gorge Auditorium production of The Little Match Girl, you might say that it had provoked a quantity of bracing debate. Nonetheless, the university’s president had his heart set on The Snowflake, and Loeser was still the only real theatre man with any connection to the faculty, so the two of them had reportedly made the bargain that if Millikan could have the play he wanted, then Loeser could direct it, not to mention write the music and design the costumes, without any interference at all.

Bailey, who sat at the very back of the auditorium, had slipped into this morning’s dress rehearsal to see how his young assistant was getting on. When the Players were most of the way through their second run-through of the first scene, he decided he’d watched as much as loyalty to Adele demanded, so he got up and went back out into the December sunshine. The light in Los Angeles was not by any means a hibernant beast but sometimes just for a few days in winter it did get fat and furry and slow.

Bailey was walking towards the Obediah Laboratories when he noticed a small crowd of students gathered near the Dabney Hall of the Humanities. They were staring up at something on the roof. He looked up himself, and what he saw ripped away his breath. There was an old black Model T Ford up there, parked as if it were about to drive suicidally off the edge.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘how did that get up there?’

‘I don’t know, son,’ his father said.

As was their deferential habit when they came to an unfamiliar place, they had got down off their bicycles to wheel them on foot. The ground here was sticky and there was a sweet smell in the air, like walking under a mulberry tree in late summer, except there were no trees by the side of the road. He must have been twelve or thirteen by then and they had already been through so many small towns on their way to Tiny Lustre that Bailey had gone from treating each one like an exciting new frontier to treating each one like some friend of your uncle’s to whom you might be introduced at a family function — you knew that you were probably never going to see them again and that they were therefore not worth any investment of your finite curiosity. This particular town was called Scarborough, and they only had to walk a short distance further up Main Street before they saw that something ghastly had happened here.

Splintered wood and broken glass and torn awnings; human shapes lying on porches, unmoving, covered by sheets, or in one case not even a sheet but an old patchwork quilt; a horse thrown head first through the window of a saloon, its back legs still weakly kicking like a dog in a dream; an overturned cart with blood and hair stuck to one of its wheels; from all directions, the sound of whimpering or crying; and that insistent sickly odour, getting stronger and stronger as they walked. At the north end of the town was some sort of factory, and up there the disarray was at its worst, with nurses and firemen and policemen running back and forth among gawpers like themselves. Bailey thought at first that a tornado must have scrambled the town, but then his father stopped a man in a butcher’s apron to ask what had happened, and they found out about the accident.

The factory was the Scarborough Ginger Ale Company bottling plant, the town’s biggest employer, and beyond it was a branch of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. About an hour ago, a circus train from the Mockton- Piney Circus, heading east towards Florence, had made an emergency stop to check an overheated axle bearing on one of the flatcars. The driver of an empty Atlantic Coast Line train behind it had missed the signal posted by the brakeman — he must have been drunk or asleep, but no one would ever know now because he was dead — and had sped straight into the back of the circus train. The caboose and the rear four sleeping cars had all been pulverised, and the car that held the circus’s elderly performing elephant had snapped off its couplings and rolled south down the incline into one of the Scarborough Ginger Ale Company’s half-a-million-gallon steel storage tanks. The tank had burst and sent a mighty wave of ginger syrup rushing like an apocalypse down Main Street, high enough to sweep that Model T Ford on to the roof of that bank. So far they’d counted more than thirty dead and more than a hundred injured, too many to fit in the town’s hospital. As the man said this, Bailey caught sight of a headless body being taken out of the bottling plant in a green wheelbarrow, basted in its own gore, the tips of its fingers dragging on the ground. All Bailey could think about was that as they’d gone past Florence he’d been begging his father to let them take a train, just a slow, unpopular rural train, just once.

‘ “When many a great shipwreck has come to pass,” ’ said his father softly after the man in the butcher’s apron had moved on, “ ‘the great sea is wont to cast hither and thither benches, ribs, yards, prow, masts and swimming oars, so that along all the coasts of the lands floating stern-pieces are seen, giving warning to mortals.” Carry on, son, please.’

‘ “Even so,” ’ said Bailey, ‘ “if you suppose that the first-beginnings of a certain kind are limited, then scattered through all time they must needs be tossed hither and thither by the tides of matter, setting towards every side, so that never can they be driven together and come together in union, nor stay fixed in union, nor take increase and grow.” ’ His father had been teaching him Lucretius for two years now, and he knew most of the first two books of the Cyril Bailey translation of De Rerum Natura off by heart. Soon he would be ready for Walt Whitman and William James.

‘Exactly right.’

‘Those poor people,’ said Bailey.

‘Poor people?’ repeated his father, and straight away Bailey knew he’d made a mistake. He still made mistakes so often. ‘There was a much bigger train wreck in Washington just a few months ago. Are the men and women here worse off than the men and women there?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘Is there any reason why we should feel any more pity for the men and women here just because we happened to be near by when it happened?’

‘No.’

‘What fallacy would that be?’

‘Propinquitous Conceit.’

‘Exactly right. And what fallacy did the people of Scarborough commit?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, I expect most of them thought that just because something like this had never happened before, they didn’t need to worry that it would ever happen, and so they didn’t need to take precautions.’

‘Inductive Normalism.’

‘Exactly right.’

They watched the rescuers work for a few minutes longer. The activity was so disciplined and repetitive by now that it was almost as if this factory had been deliberately adapted for some new and unspeakable purpose — as if all these people would go home at five and come back tomorrow at nine and carry on working here until they retired.

‘Dad?’ Bailey said hesitantly.