The Teleportation Accident

‘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 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