The Teleportation Accident

heat of your scepticism be so great that you were converted instantaneously into gamma rays?

‘Perhaps they’re all swimming in the lake,’ his father said. ‘Hello?’ he shouted after that. ‘Is anyone here?’

They heard a noise behind them and they turned. An old man in dungarees stood there with a carrot in his hand as thin as a chisel. ‘You looking for Yoakum and the others?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘They’re gone.’ He bit the end off the carrot. ‘Hope you haven’t come far.’

‘What happened?’

‘No gossip behind other people’s backs,’ said the old man. ‘That’s a rule here.’ He looked around. ‘But I guess the rules don’t mean much any more. Well, the long and the short of it is, Yoakum was having relations with other men’s wives. Three of them at least. All came to light at once. No violence here, that’s another rule, so we just sent him away with his things. Week later, police came up here from Temecula and said they’d had a report we’d been keeping women and girls chained to trees and suchlike. Must have been Yoakum. They didn’t find anything — nothing to find — but they started clearing us all off. Said we didn’t have a right to farm this land. They never liked us down in town.’

‘We were coming to live here,’ Bailey’s father said.

‘You the ones been writing to Yoakum? In the special code?’

‘Yes.’

‘He talked about you. He couldn’t make head nor tail of that code most of the time, but he knew you were coming. Well, you can hang around here as long as you like. Can have your pick of the cabins. But the police ought to be back before long. They know I’m still here and they want me gone.’

‘In that case, we won’t stay. There’s another community like this in Ohio. Not as big as this one, but we can go there. Thank you for your help.’

So Bailey and his father had got back on their bicycles and gone back down to the road at the foot of the wooded slope. Then the rain had started and they’d found shelter in the Ford. ‘What are we going to do now?’ Bailey asked again.

‘We’ll go to the colony in Ohio, as I told the man. We’ll find our sanctuary there instead.’

‘How long will it take us to get there?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll have to take all the same precautions, of course. Remember that man we saw in San Jacinto: there’s no reason to think They’ve relaxed Their vigilance. What fallacy would that be?’

For Bailey not to answer his father’s question with the correct subheading from The Complete Taxonomy of Anthropic Cognitive Unsoundness was physically uncomfortable. But instead he said, ‘That’ll take years.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I don’t want to do that, Dad. I want a life. I want to go to college.’

‘That’s not possible just now.’

‘I’m not going to Ohio with you.’

‘What else do you suggest we do? Take the train back to Boston? I haven’t protected you all this time so that They can do to you what They did to your mother.’

Thunder so loud that Bailey could almost see ripples in the air. ‘What did They do to her?’

‘You know it’s best not to dwell on that, son.’

‘You think she was a human sacrifice. You think They drained her blood in that chapel because she was going to leave Their religion.’

‘It’s best not to dwell on that.’

‘You’ve never said it right out, but that’s what you’ve always wanted me to think. But it might have been anything. It might have been an accident. Or she might have taken her own life.’

‘There’s no evidence for that,’ said his father.

‘Or you might have murdered her yourself.’

‘I know you’re disappointed about Tiny Lustre, son — I am too — but it isn’t rational to let your anger get the better of you.’

‘Is it rational to care more about your mother than about some woman in Mongolia? Is it rational to mourn your own mother’s death when so many others just like her die every hour of the day?’

‘As you know, I address this question at length in the third chapter of the Taxonomy, and it is my conclusion that—’

‘What about your father?’ said Bailey. ‘Is it rational to mourn your own father’s death? Or doesn’t it mean anything at all if he’s found dead in a car by the side of the road?’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Professor Bailey,’ said Clarendon. ‘My father is still alive. I thought we were talking about the Teleportation Accident.’

‘Yes. As I was saying. The Teleportation Accident was an act of human sacrifice. Just like the Aztecs used to practise. And Lucy’s grandparents on Hispaniola. And the Court of Miracles in Paris. And the Esoteric Order of Dagon in Innsmouth. Except that Lavicini made it work. He understood what violence can do. And if he’d been born in this century, he would have understood, as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus, that “gravitational force” and “electric charge” and “Planck’s constant” and even “causation” are just the same as Dagon and Tezcatlipoca and Yahweh and Ryujin — patterns that men think they’ve seen, when the real pattern is far, far too complex for them to see, like a child with a crayon finding funny shapes in a logarithmic table. He was a brilliant man. And at the moment all those people died, he gained the power to appear and disappear anywhere he liked, as the devil himself can, according to the Bible. He was able to shift his own spatial coordinates so that he wasn’t crushed under the Theatre des Encornets. My Teleportation Device will do the same with any object. You are giving far more help to the State Department now, Clarendon, and more to your country, than you ever could have with your phasmatometer. I had thought of using Lucy tonight but then you saw me with her and you might have caused difficulties when she was found.’

‘You don’t look very well, Professor Bailey. I think we should go back downstairs.’

‘There is void in things,’ Bailey said. He heard the squeak of a green wheelbarrow. ‘Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. There is void in things. Lucretius says so and I’ve seen it.’ He reached out.

‘What the devil are you doing, son?’

‘There is void in things!’ he began to shout. ‘There is void in things! There is void in things!’ To do it sitting side by side like this was awkward, and the Ford’s suspension wasn’t built for any kind of tumult inside the vehicle, and his father was trying to peel his fingers away from his throat, and Clarendon was batting impotently at his face like a moth trapped between the sashes of a window, but Bailey kept up a steady asphyxiant pressure, feeling the hyoid bone break obediently under his left thumb — and after that it was only seven or eight more seconds until the other man went limp and the struggle was over. Bailey sat back and rested for a while, watching a last bead of sweat run most of the way down his father’s ruddy forehead before it paused at the hummock of a swollen vein. Then he took his toy steam engine out of his pocket and drove it again and again into Clarendon’s torso until at last it broke through the physicist’s ribcage. He reached into the tunnel he had made, used a sort of brisk corkscrew motion to wrench Clarendon’s heart out of its cavity, and bit deeply into it, leaning forward over the warm corpse so that blood didn’t drip on to his trousers. To distract himself from the taste, he thought of Lucretius. ‘For it is clear that nothing could be crushed in without void, or broken or cleft in twain by cutting, nor admit moisture nor likewise spreading cold or piercing flame, whereby all things are brought to their end. And the more each thing keeps void within it, the more it is assailed to the heart by these thing and begins to totter.’

When he had finished, he spat out a last oyster of gristle on to the dashboard and wiped his mouth and glasses with Clarendon’s handkerchief. Then he got out of the car, descended the utility staircase, and went back to his laboratory to take some readings from the ultramigration accumulator. Tomorrow, he would ask Adele to run some more tests on the Teleportation Device. He already knew they would be successful. He’d seen it in his father’s eyes.

7. LOS ANGELES, 1940