The Teleportation Accident

‘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 Theatre 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 Theatre 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.’

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.’

The rain had started all at once, as if some part of the sky’s masonry had suddenly collapsed, and they’d been caught outside with no shelter near by except a few inadequate trees. Then his father had spotted the Model T Ford parked a short way up the slope, and they’d dropped their bicycles and sprinted over, gambling that they would find its doors unlocked.

‘What if the man who owns the car comes back?’ said Bailey. There was a folded roadmap of southern California at his feet and he saw guiltily that the water dripping off him had already soaked it through. He could smell that a big dog sometimes travelled in this car.

‘He won’t come back. You can’t drive in this rain.’

‘Do you remember that Model T we saw on the roof in that town in South Carolina that time? What was it called?’

‘Scarborough. I remember.’

He heard thunder, not far off. ‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’

That morning, beneath one of those glassy March skies with a few grey stormclouds like the smears of soot on the inside of a blown light bulb, they had finally arrived at Tiny Lustre. Five years it had taken them to bicycle from Boston to California; five years of doubling back and turning aside and looping around and hiding out; five years as a mad doodle on a map of the continent, a housefly exploring a sunlit ballroom, a western vector so faint it might as well have been a statistical accident; five years avoiding the agents of the Phenscots and the Catholic Church, and the bustles in which those agents might lurk; five years of hotels and flat tyres and De Rerum Natura; five years to get to this freethinkers’ colony not far from Temecula where they could hide in safety until the despotism of religion had been overthrown. Every few months his father had sent coded letters to Tiny Lustre to update its leaders on the progress of their clinamen, but of course he couldn’t ever reveal their current location in case the letters were intercepted and the code was broken, so he had received no news in return.

The colony was approached by a dirt road winding up through the pines. As they came near they had got down off their bicycles as they always did, and Bailey had realised almost with disbelief that this might be the last time they would perform this little ritual. Tiny Lustre was intended to be self-sufficient, so among the log cabins there were goat pens and chicken coops and vegetable patches. But all that seemed to be in a state of some neglect, and they couldn’t see a single human being. At the far end of the colony there was a big meeting hall with cracked clerestory windows, and they wondered if everyone might be assembled in there, but when they pushed open the door they saw only two tiny white rodents skittering away like backgammon dice between the benches. If he were a Pentecostal Christian, Bailey thought, he would probably assume that the Rapture had come. Except that the men and women of Tiny Lustre were all atheists. Could atheists have a sort of Rapture, too? Could the sheer