The Teleportation Accident (28 page)

His assistant, a girl with short black hair, had her back to them as she rattled the lock. ‘I think I’ve nearly got it, Professor,’ she said. Her voice was familiar from somewhere.

‘Well done, my dear.’

‘Egon, this is Professor Bailey, one of our most distinguished physicists,’ said Ziesel. ‘Professor Bailey, this is Egon Loeser, an old friend of mine from Berlin. He is very keen to meet you.’

Bailey smiled and shook Loeser’s hand. ‘And why is that?’

‘Well—’ Ziesel started to say.

Just then Bailey’s assistant cried, ‘There!’ as the lock finally submitted. But the steel cupboard door swung open with twice the force she must have been expecting, because there was a weight leaning against it from the inside. She tumbled backwards, and the weight tumbled down, and Loeser saw simultaneously that the girl was Adele and the weight was the man he’d dined with more than once at Gorge’s house. Marsh was dead, and Adele was here, and there was a great messy gash in his chest like an apricot with the stone gouged out, and she’d cut off her beautiful long hair, and the hole was so deep that part of his ribcage must have been demolished, and she looked almost like a grown-up now, and his mouth had drooled a rivulet of blood, and her skin was still as pale as a Berlin winter, and his eyes were wide and unblinking and dead and ghastly with terror, and her eyes were wide and unblinking and alive and gorgeous with shock, and someone shouted, ‘Dear God!’ and it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele.

She got unsteadily to her feet, and for a long moment all four of them stood there, silent, as if in a gallery, studying a sculpture they did not understand. Finally Bailey said, ‘Dieter, take Miss Hitler away’ – except it sounded like he’d mispronounced her name – ‘and tell Slate to go for help.’

‘I’ll go too,’ said Loeser. If everyone thought he wasn’t man enough to stay there with the body, then so be it. He couldn’t let Adele out of his sight. So they trooped upstairs, and Ziesel went to find Slate in Bailey’s laboratory, and Loeser went out into the sun with Adele.

‘When I was living in Hollywood,’ she was saying, ‘there was an accident right outside my apartment, I didn’t see it happen but I ran to my window, and some guy had gone through his windshield and into this parking meter and he was wrapped around it like he was hugging it, and then they pulled him off it and . . .’

‘Adele, it’s me. You can speak in German.’ She didn’t seem to hear him. Slate ran out of the Obediah Laboratories and on past them towards Throop Hall. His gait was lopsided, as if the lawn were sloping steeply under him. ‘There’s so much I want to ask you.’ Loeser himself had never seen a dead body before, but none of this felt real yet – they were all just theoretical particles on a blackboard.

‘Jesus, Egon, not now! Didn’t you see him? How could someone do that to Dr Marsh?’

‘I’ve been looking for you for five years.’

‘You shouldn’t even be here now. You’re nothing to do with CalTech. They’ll want to find out what happened and you’ll get in the way.’

‘But I’ve only just found you!’

Finally, irritably, Adele switched to German. ‘Listen, Egon, if you really want to talk, come back at eleven o’clock tonight. I’ll be in the laboratory.’ Three boys in baseball jackets walked past, laughing as they swapped impersonations of Slate’s stutter.

The Loeser House

‘
Hallo, hier ist Loeser?
’

‘Oh, Mr Loeser, it’s Dolores Mutton. Did you have a pleasant morning at CalTech today? It’s such an interesting institution.’

‘It was not a pleasant morning for anyone. How did you know I was at CalTech?’

‘A little bird told me. I was wondering if you might have been introduced to a particular member of the faculty – Professor Bailey? The physicist?’

‘Yes, I was, actually.’

‘My husband and I would be so keen to meet Professor Bailey. We’re told he’s a magnificent intellect. I know he’s not an exile, but we’d love to have him at one of our receptions. Perhaps you could bring him along next time?’

‘But I’ve only just met the man. We’re not friends.’

‘Still, we’d be so grateful.’

‘I really don’t know, Mrs Mutton. As I said, I’ve only just met the man.’ Loeser could smell his lamb chop beginning to char.

‘I see. Well, perhaps we’ll have a chance to discuss this further. Goodbye, Mr Loeser.’

The California Institute of Technology

At night the paths were lit by old-fashioned-looking streetlamps on tall black posts, and sometimes one of these was close enough to a cypress that from a certain angle the post could hardly be seen and the white bulb shone out through the crush of leaves like some hot lactescent fruit the tree had borne. Leaving his bicycle at Throop Hall again, Loeser wandered lost for a while until he found the entrance to the Obediah Laboratories. The door wasn’t locked. He was planning to go straight to room 11 to find Adele, but then something drew him to the basement. Until he went back to where Marsh’s body had been and confirmed that it had been taken away, part of him would feel as if it were still lying there.

At the bottom of the stairs, not far from the storage cupboards where the corpse had fallen, Loeser had the sense that he was not alone. ‘Hello?’ he said, wondering if he should turn back. What took place after that, he could only recall later as a sequence of terms in a geometric progression of sheer terror. First, the curl of light reflected off a glass-fronted firehose cabinet on the wall near by; second, the abrupt disappearance of that light; third, the snipping sound that made Loeser think of an insect with sharpened steel mandibles; fourth, the humanoid shape coming forward out of the gloom; fifth, the light shining from that shape’s eyes and casting jagged shadows across the ceiling; sixth, the claw that the shape had at the end of its left arm. Loeser raised a hand, half to block the glare and half to shield his face from attack. And then:

‘Mr Loeser, if I remember correctly?’

Loeser realised that the shape was not Marsh as a monstrous revenant but rather Dr Clarendon, the colleague of Ziesel’s that he’d met earlier. He was wearing a miner’s torch on a strap around his head and in one hand he held a big pair of wire cutters. ‘I’m sorry,’ Clarendon added, ‘is this too bright?’ He pulled off the miner’s torch and held it dangling in his other hand so that it poured out a more diffuse downward glow. Loeser looked past him and could see now that he’d apparently been installing some sort of machine, with a metal case and lots of dials and and switches and exposed wires, about the size of a radio set.

‘What are you doing down here?’ Loeser said, his heart still spinning in his chest like the rotor in a gyroscope.

‘An experiment,’ said Clarendon, as if nothing could be more natural. He had that odd conversational manner of some scientists and mathematicians that is so doggedly awkward that it sometimes seems to verge upon the flirtatious.

‘Why are you doing an experiment in the dark?’

‘We don’t know much about ghosts, Mr Loeser, but we know that they don’t care for the light.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you doing a seance?’

‘No. Seances are unscientific. I’m testing my phasmatometer. There aren’t many deaths on campus, so I don’t often have the opportunity. It may take me a few days to calibrate it, but if the phasmatometer is working properly, I will soon be taking precise measurements of the residual presence of Dr Marsh.’

‘To find out who murdered him?’

Clarendon raised an eyebrow as if he hadn’t even thought of that. ‘Not in particular. If any direct communication takes place, that will only be an accident. Still, I expect Dr Marsh will be very pleased to be the subject of such an important experiment – an apt conclusion to his career. Eventually I hope to refine the phasmatometer to the point where I can turn my work over to the State Department.’

‘What do they want with it?’

Clarendon replied with a shake of the head. ‘Anyone could be listening, Mr Loeser,’ he said softly.

Loeser wondered who could possibly be listening. He also wondered why the State Department should care about ghosts. Perhaps the hope was that, when a communist passed into the next world, whether he was a NKVD Colonel or a double agent from Michigan, he would switch his allegiance to a more godly nation, and the phasmatometer would allow him to be thoroughly debriefed. The defector might even be able to reduce his time in purgatory, like a plea bargain. Or if he were unwilling, you could set the machine to wallop the ghost with a Bible and then dunk his head in a bucket of holy water. ‘So it would work anywhere?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Because I happen to have a ghost in my house.’

‘Really? Well, if you wish, I could bring the phasmatometer and take some readings. Some fieldwork under less controlled circumstances might be a useful supplement to my experiment with Dr Marsh.’

Perhaps Clarendon could finally reveal what his ghost wanted, Loeser thought. ‘Can you come tomorrow evening? I live in Pasadena. Not far.’

‘Yes. Seven o’clock. Leave your address at Throop Hall.’

‘They already have it. Thank you, Dr Clarendon.’

Loeser went back up the stairs and turned right down the corridor towards where Bailey worked. On the way, he passed a room with its door ajar, lit only by the cellophane glow of the moon, and he felt himself horripilated by the strange tension, the negative hum, of a physics laboratory at night: all these machines – all these precise little lanterns whose job it was to shine into the cracks between atoms, between moments, between universes – caught, after hours, enjoying the dark; inert as anvils until you flipped just one switch and turned just one dial and then they’d probably slurp enough electricity to cut the power in Gorge’s mansion. Nonetheless, the bite of this atmosphere, even in aggregate with the scare he’d just got from Clarendon, could barely stand comparison with the cosmic intensity of finding himself, after all this time, alone in a room with Adele, who stood beside one of the larger instruments in room 11, making notes on a clipboard. ‘Back to work already?’ he said in German, trying to sound casual.

‘It takes my mind off things.’ She put down the clipboard and boosted herself up on to a table to sit down. ‘You didn’t say what you’re doing in Los Angeles.’

‘I was looking for you.’

‘But I’ve been here nearly four years.’

‘You’re not in the telephone book.’

‘I am. But I changed my name. I got bored with people asking me if I was related. I’m Adele Hister now. Did it really take you this long to hunt me down?’

‘I didn’t. Hunt you down, I mean. This was just chance. How did you end up here? You never even studied science.’

‘I got thrown out of my apartment in Hollywood so I moved in with my friend Dick. He’s the most darling queer boy from Wisconsin, and he’s a graduate student here. One day he took me to a party at the Athenaeum Club, as his “date”, and I met the Professor. We talked all evening. He was looking for an assistant – someone from outside the Institute. And I still don’t quite know why but he gave me the job.’

‘Even though you don’t know anything about physics?’

‘Dick gave me some lessons. It’s not so hard. And the Professor wanted a non-specialist. He says most of the students here have too many prejudices about reality.’

Loeser remembered his assignment from Gorge. ‘What is Bailey working on?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

He could tell she wanted to brag. She always did. ‘Adele. Come on. I’m your oldest friend in this country.’

‘Well, you musn’t say anything to anyone.’ She leaned forward. ‘The Professor is building a teleportation device.’

‘What? Like Lavicini?’

‘No, a real one, not a theatrical effect. You put an object in the chamber, you set the controls, it disappears, and it reappears somewhere else. He’s very close to completing a prototype.’

‘What sort of lunatic believes that teleportation can really happen?’

‘Jews call it
Kefitzat Haderech
. Muslims call it
Tay al-Ard
.’

‘But that’s mysticism. It can’t be scientifically possible.’

‘It is, Egon. It’s happened in this building. Of course, it’s difficult. I don’t think anyone but the Professor could have done it, not even Einstein. The point is, you can’t just delete the subject in one place and create a copy in another. If you did that to a human being, all you’d be doing is murdering someone and replacing them with a clone a few minutes old. That way, no one who believed in a soul – like my parents, for instance – would ever be willing to set foot in a teleportation device. So instead you have to move the object itself, really move it. But it can’t move through the intervening space. It has to be in one place, and then, snap! Suddenly in another. It has to change its position all at once. Well, what’s position, anyway? It’s not a function of space. There’s no more such a thing as space than there’s such a thing as the ether. Space is just objects, and position is a function of those objects. So if you can – the Professor always warns me against the Pathetic Fallacy, but it’s so hard to avoid sometimes – if you can make an object
forget
its old position, and then
persuade it
of its new position, then that’s teleportation. But how do you do that? Well, the Professor once said to me, “Adele, what’s the one thing in the world that can uproot almost anything?” ’