The Teleportation Accident (30 page)

‘Couple of fellas came into the store yesterday,’ said Blimk after they’d sat down and ordered. Loeser had nearly asked for a starter of turtle soup but then he had thought of Urashima Taro. ‘Wanted to know what rent I paid, how long I’d been there. Asked them who they were and they said they were from the Traffic Commission, just wanted to check some facts. Can’t see what my rent’s got to do with the traffic. Didn’t know better, I’d be worried about Eminent Domain.’

‘What’s the Eminent Domain?’ said Loeser. It sounded like an old-fashioned euphemism for the afterlife.

‘When the government buys your property out from under you without asking, for a highway or a railroad or something. That’s how they got the Chinks out of Chinatown to build Union Station. I ever lost my store like that, think I’d just go back to Brooklyn and live with my sister. Not even worth relocating, amount I make. Can’t be Eminent Domain, though. I’m up in north Hollywood, and they already got a Union Station. Asked my landlord and he doesn’t know shit about it. Probably just want to put a tax on parking or something.’

‘Probably,’ said Loeser. And it wasn’t until their bowls of chop suey arrived, and Loeser unfolded his napkin on his lap, that he noticed the dragon embroidered on it in black thread, and was reminded by its shape of the map that Plumridge had drawn on one of Gorge’s napkins at that dinner in 1934: the network of elevated streetcar lines conjoining in Hollywood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Kings Road. He hadn’t heard anything of the plan since, and he’d assumed it had come to nothing. But just then, for the first time, he realised that Plumridge’s proposed terminal would occupy the very same block as Blimk’s bookshop.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Blimk. ‘Ain’t hungry now you’ve seen the food up close?’

The Gorge House

Gorge’s cigar gave off a smell like a village being razed by retreating infantry. ‘Sit down, Krauto,’ he said. ‘Got to CalTech?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘It seems that . . .’ The sentence was so absurd that Loeser almost couldn’t finish it. ‘It seems that Professor Bailey is trying to build a teleportation device.’

Gorge waved his hand impatiently. ‘Know that. Known that since thirty-six.’

‘Then why did you send me?’

‘Want to know if the fucking thing works, of course.’

‘Why?’ said Loeser. And then all at once it seemed obvious. ‘You think that if Bailey completes his Teleportation Device, it will replace the car. You want to destroy Bailey because you think Bailey will destroy your car polish business.’

‘Destroy Bailey? Never heard such horseshit! Say Bailey’s Teleport Gizmo is real. Say I destroy him. Next year, have to do the same thing to some other son of a bitch. Next year, dozen more. Invented one place, soon be invented everywhere – general rule. Can’t do a fucking thing about it.’

‘But what about your car polish business?’

‘1948: Teleport Gizmo in every house. Millions of ’em, all over the country. Think people won’t want their Teleport Gizmo shiny? Think people won’t want to buff ’em up every day? Sell just as many tins as before. Won’t cost me a dollar, the Teleport Gizmo.’

‘So you want to know if Bailey’s Teleportation Device is real’ – another sentence, this, that jammed its elbows in the doorframe until it could be dragged outside – ‘so that you can pre-emptively corner the market in teleportation device polish?’

‘Woodkin: mongoloid?’

‘On the contrary, sir, I believe Mr Loeser is of above average intelligence,’ said Woodkin.

‘Hard to believe. Listen here, Krauto. Remember Plumridge?’

‘Yes. He wanted to build an elevated streetcar network,’ said Loeser.

‘Can’t have it. Tell him, Woodkin.’

‘Colonel Gorge believes there are two reasons why an elevated streetcar network would be undesirable for Los Angeles,’ said Woodkin. ‘The first is that mass transit of any kind tends to promote authoritarian socialist leanings in its users, whereas drivers of automobiles tend to be committed free market capitalists. New York’s subway, which carries more passengers than all the other heavy rail systems in America combined, is only one example of how ubiquitous mass transit can pervert a city’s political tendencies. The Marxian uprising in this country, if it ever comes, will begin on a crowded commuter carriage. The second reason is that Colonel Gorge believes the wars of the future will be fought with weapons so mighty that at present we can hardly imagine them. Think of a bomb so big it could vaporise a whole town, perhaps by harnessing cosmic rays, or some other new spark from Vulcan’s forge. Drop that bomb in the centre of New York, and you would kill millions. Drop that bomb in the “centre” of Los Angeles, and you might only kill a few thousand. In any given urban area, high-capacity mass transit promotes concentration. Automobiles promote dispersion. If America is to win its next war, perhaps against Russia or China, without being crippled by a single surprise attack against its civilian population, it must spread its urban areas out as evenly as it can. Mr Plumridge may only be an Assistant Public Utility Liaison at the Traffic Commission, but that title belies his true significance. He has some very powerful interests behind him.’

‘If you hate his plan so much, why did you invite him to dinner?’ said Loeser.

‘Friends close, enemies so close you can see right down their throats,’ replied Gorge. ‘Saying goes.’

‘And what’s Bailey got to do with Plumridge?’

‘Teleport Gizmo works, no need for streetcars. Redundant. Bad for Plumridge, bad for Reds, good for America. Teleport Gizmo doesn’t work, have to save Los Angeles myself. No choice. But can’t just have Plumridge stomped. Same principle as Bailey: queue of other bastards behind him. Spend every cent I had, thought it would help, but no use with this kind of government horseshit. Delay it, best I can do. Piece of cake if I owned a newspaper, but don’t, and Harry Chandler hates my guts. Have to go straight to Norman Clowne.’

‘The Secretary of the Traffic Commission,’ interjected Woodkin.

‘Only bureaucrat powerful enough to sink these fucking streetcars for good. Says he’ll do it, Clowne. But wants my girl.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.

‘Wants to marry my daughter. Doesn’t deserve her. No other way, though.’

‘You’re going to hand over your daughter to Clowne in exchange for him sabotaging Plumridge’s elevated streetcar plan?’

‘Duty as a patriot,’ said Gorge. ‘Doesn’t mean I have to like it. Why I need to know if Bailey’s a shyster or not. Teleport Gizmo’s real, can tell Clowne to fuck himself. Teleport Gizmo’s a flop, have to start sewing Mildred’s trousseau.’ He leaned forward. ‘So?’

A line came into Loeser’s head from Lovecraft’s
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
, Blimk’s favourite of the late author’s stories and the only one that had ever been published in its own bound edition instead of in a monthly magazine: ‘I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach.’ That, really, was what got the narrator into trouble in the first place. Still, Loeser knew that a new public transport system, like an orthopaedic brace to correct the city’s bad posture, was the only thing that was ever going to make Los Angeles a tolerable place to live. He should just tell Gorge what Adele had told him: the Teleportation Device worked. Whether or not it really did, it would mean Plumridge could go ahead with his plan, without Gorge bothering to defeat it through Clowne.

But that would also mean that Blimk, Loeser’s only real friend here, would lose his shop and probably move back to Brooklyn. The streetcars might make Los Angeles tolerable for every other Berliner, but they would make it intolerable for Loeser.

Plus, Plumridge had seemed like a total prick at that dinner.

‘Well, Krauto?’ barked Gorge.

‘I’m sorry but I don’t know yet,’ said Loeser. ‘I went to Bailey’s lab and I met him and I met his assistant. But I didn’t see any of his experiments myself. So it’s still too early to say.’

Gorge leaned back. ‘Good. Hoped you’d say that. Don’t want you pretending you’re sure when you’re not. Come back when you’re absolutely fucking certain. Not one minute sooner. Daughter’s pussy at stake.’

The Loeser House

Clarendon began to unpack his heavy combination-lock briefcase full of phasmatometric apparatus. ‘Are your houseguest’s manifestations concentrated in any particular part of the residence?’ he said.

‘Not really,’ said Loeser, ‘although I mostly hear her in the bedroom.’

‘ “Her”?’

‘Oh, that’s a hunch of mine. Did you have any luck with Marsh last night?’

‘I haven’t yet made any precise kinetic measurements,’ said Clarendon, bending to plug part of his ghost hardware into the electrical socket by the door. ‘But the readings I took gave unmistakable signs of his presence.’

‘I’m still intrigued as to what the State Department has to do with your experiments. I shouldn’t think anyone can eavesdrop on us here. Well, except the spectre, of course.’

Clarendon looked up at him. ‘How fast is this house moving, Mr Loeser?’

Loeser glanced at the window and thought of the bungalow on Sunset Boulevard. ‘I’m not sure that it’s moving at all.’

‘Incorrect. Add together the rotation of the earth, the motion of the earth around the sun, the motion of the sun through our galaxy, the rotation of our galaxy, and the motion of our galaxy through the universe, and relative to a certain arbitrary framework this house is moving at nearly two million miles an hour, or five hundred miles a second. The reason we are not left behind in space is that fortunately we are all moving at the same speed. The most important gift your mother ever gave you was momentum. However, there can be no transfer of momentum between a fresh corpse and its affiliated ghost, otherwise all energy would eventually leak out of our plane of existence into the ghost’s plane of existence, which would in some novel sense violate the first law of thermodynamics. Therefore, in order to keep pace with the locus of its haunting, a ghost must have its own means of accelerating to two million miles an hour – and, indeed, maintaining that speed, if the substrate of the ghost’s plane is not frictionless – by drawing on some massive, perhaps infinite source of energy. My hope is that it will one day be possible to build a machine to trap this energy – something between a treadmill and a turbine, existing half on our plane and half on the ghost’s. The machine will exert friction on the ghost, but since the ghost cannot be slowed down, the ghost will continuously pass energy into the machine. Even if it is only possible to drain a tiny fraction of the ghost’s terajoules, I estimate that a few hundred ghosts would be enough to power the entire continental United States, leaving our annual production of oil, gas, and coal available to our armed forces, and our cities smogless. As you will no doubt already have noted, my calculations rely on the assumption that in the afterlife ghosts retain considerable mass. My evidence for this is that victims of decapitation carrying their own severed heads have been observed to complain about the weight.’

‘I see.’ Loeser’s main concern about the Eminent Domain was that he would arrive to find all his ex-girlfriends there and there wouldn’t be any drugs to get him through it. ‘Do you think everyone gets an afterlife, even if they don’t believe in it?’

‘God will allow no man to escape the reward or the punishment that he deserves,’ said Clarendon, putting an odd stress, Loeser thought, on the word ‘punishment’. ‘On earth as it is in heaven. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to concentrate for a few minutes while I calibrate the equipment.’

‘Take your time. Do you want a drink?’

‘No, thank you.’

Loeser made himself a whisky and soda. Outside a fire engine screamed down Palmetto Drive. He thought about Marsh. Was there really a laboratory ghost haunting the California Institute of Technology? And then he realised that Marsh wouldn’t quite be the only one of that species. The whole state of California was a laboratory, a room for testing new theories, measuring new forces, designing new gadgets. So Loeser himself – uneasy and pale, detached and misplaced, a spilt drop of something old and cold – what was he, while he lived here, but another laboratory ghost?

After a while, Clarendon frowned and said, ‘There’s no ghost here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘According to my readings, there is no ghost in this house.’

‘But I’ve been living with her for three years. I’m sure of it. Couldn’t your equipment be unreliable?’ Then the telephone rang. Loeser made an apologetic gesture and went to answer it. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s Adele.’

He switched to German. ‘Adele! I don’t remember giving you my telephone number.’

‘I got it from Mrs Jones at Throop Hall. Egon, I think I know who killed Marsh.’

‘I thought you were sure it was Slate.’

‘It wasn’t Slate. It can’t have been. There have been other murders.’

‘What?’

‘Last year, one of the cooks from the cafeteria. And the year before that, one of the gardeners. Hearts gone, same as Marsh. Millikan covered it up each time so there wouldn’t be a panic. But he couldn’t do that with Marsh because there were too many of us there when we found the body. And now the rumours have got out. I heard about it from Dick. When the cook was killed, Slate wasn’t even in California. He was visiting a sister in Alaska. He’d already been gone for a week and the corpse was only a few hours old when they found it.’