Switcheroo by Robert Lewis Clark

never said anything to her, but I think she sensed I did not
like this man.  It is silly to expect Mom to still be mourning my father four
years later.  At least they hadn’t moved in together.
    “Rust, this isn’t some kind of
macho stunt, is it?  Drew is very dear to me and I won’t have you bothering
him,” she said, sharply.
    I told her no, I just wanted to
ask him some questions about ORNL that involved a case. I would have to pretend
to be nice in the meeting, which probably wouldn’t be to hard since he was
actually a nice fellow.
    Mother picked up the phone,
called, and had it all arranged. I would go over after lunch.  Mother invited
me to eat with her. We went into the sun room and ate a quiet lunch. I was
supposed to be admiring her array of plants and flowers.  The chicken salad
sandwiches had the crust trimmed off.  I hugged Mom good-bye when we were done
and showed myself out, glancing at old photos of me and Mom and Dad along the
way.
    I walked out to the car parked in
mother’s circular drive and glanced over my shoulder.  The only thing keeping
the huge house from looking obscenely oversize were the giant oak trees in the
yard.
    I left with the weight of prior
disappointments working on my stomach; or maybe that was one too many chicken
salad sandwiches. I cranked the LeBaron and rolled away, under the canopy of
Oaks onto Cherokee Boulevard.
     
    I arrived at Lions Bend
subdivision and pulled into Drew Chandler’s drive around two p.m.  A large
Georgian colonial house, nowhere near the size of Mom’s, but still a big stack
of bricks. Himself a widower and a high-minded intellectual, Chandler answered
the door himself when I rang.  A skeleton of a man but dressed stylishly in an
L.L. Bean fashion.  He was about as dashing as a seventy-year old man could
be.  We had met a few times, but had never had what I would call a real
conversation.
    “Hello, Mr. Chandler.  Thanks for
seeing me on short notice,” I shook the man’s bony hand. It was like holding a
soft leather bag full of small sticks.
    “Please call me Drew,” he patted
me on the shoulder as he ushered me into a den with dark red walls and leather
furniture.  I took a seat.
    “Russell, your mother told me you
wanted to question me about a case. Am I a suspect?” He said, with a little
chuckle.  His voice had the smooth grit of finishing sandpaper.
    “You know, you can call me Rust,
everybody does.  Uh, I actually came across a reference to ORNL in one of my
cases.  I know you used to work in Oakridge and I was hoping you would give me
a starting point.  I also want your opinion on another matter involving this
case. You are the only real scientist I know,” I said, beginning to get a
little more comfortable with the old man, in spite of being disturbed by my
mother’s attraction to him.
    “What do you know about
teleportation? Is this something that can really happen?”  I started in the
middle to keep from playing all my cards at once.
    “Oh?” Mr. Chandler’s eyebrows
moved up his skull like white caterpillars. “Well, that’s really too wide open
a question, Rust. I can summarize some things for you, if you like?” he said.
    I nodded, leaning forward as he
kept talking.
    “You see, there are two types of
teleportation. One has been performed in a lab environment already, about
nineteen years ago.  These experiments, some of which were performed in our
labs in Oakridge, utilized protons. These protons were in groups of three. One
analyzed by the computer, one destroyed during the process and one teleported
down a wire to a nearby chamber. This first method is called quantum
teleportation. It’s interesting, but since the original subject is destroyed,
quantum teleportation cannot be used on a living thing.”
    “The second method is called hole
teleportation.  The hole method uses a theoretical device to make a tear or
hole in the space-time continuum. The object passes through the hole to come
out a