The Transvection Machine (21 page)

“Smoke bombs,” Crader breathed. “You think of everything.”

“Get out of my way. I’m going now.” Frost motioned with the two pistols in his grip. He turned to fire a final laser blast at a row of computers as yet untouched by the blaze, and in that instant, still shielded by Crader’s bulk, Maarten Tromp moved.

He dove down and scooped up the fallen laser gun then came up behind Crader. Frost could have killed them both with a single laser blast, but he hesitated. Maarten Tromp pointed the laser at him and squeezed the trigger.

And nothing happened.

“Damn you, Crader!” Tromp screamed. “You gave me an empty gun!”

Crader turned to face him. It was time now—not the best possible time, but time nevertheless. “Of course I gave you an empty gun, Maarten. I couldn’t take a chance on you killing me like you killed Vander Defoe and Bonnie Simmons.”

“You don’t know,” Maarten Tromp said. “You don’t know a thing.”

“I know about the transvection machine, Maarten, and that’s really all I have to know. Because that was your motive. The transvection machine was your baby. It was you who witnessed Vander Defoe’s tests, you who convinced President McCurdy to back it. With the machine revealed as a fraud, you knew your position as special assistant to the president was doomed. Even if McCurdy wanted to keep you, the public outcry would be too great. You knew that, and so you killed Vander Defoe, hoping that with him dead, the transvection machine would pass into a sort of limbo, with the truth forever buried.”

“That’s quite a theory,” Maarten Tromp said, trying to rub the smoke from his eyes. “But there are a few things wrong with it. I was with the president and the White House physician at the time Vander died. In fact, I was never out of their sight from the time he was stricken. And I had no knowledge the transvection machine was a fake until you called me from New York.”

Crader could hear the voices of the rescue team now, moving closer through the haze of fire and smoke bomb. They would reach them soon and it would be over. He’d half turned so he could see the weapons in Frost’s hands, but the younger man was only standing there, listening.

“Let’s start with that last part,” Crader said, trying to keep from taking deep breaths of the increasingly smoky air. “The transvection machine, from start to finish, was nothing but a series of illusions, magic tricks like those practiced by stage magicians a hundred years ago. I suppose one of the things that put me onto it was viewing a copy of the video cassette you had in your office:
Stage Illusions of Twentieth Century Magicians
. In fact, there was actually a trick shown using a Chinese girl who vanishes from one cabinet and reappears in another. No one in your position could have watched that cassette without being reminded of the transvection machine and the test with the Chinese girl.”

“You’re guessing now,” Tromp said.

“Am I? Is this guesswork? You were present at the supposed transvecting of Gloria Chang from Washington to Calcutta, and it was your report of it that sold the president on the invention. And yet, when I described my meeting with Gloria Chang to you and the president, you professed never to have heard of her before. I could understand the president forgetting the name, as I did myself, after merely hearing it on the news, but you were there in person, Maarten. You met the girl, and with your reputation for never forgetting a name you certainly wouldn’t have forgotten hers.”

“I …”

“You lied about not knowing her, Maarten, because you knew what Axman’s message to the president must mean. You knew that HAND had learned the truth about the transvection machine. Your job—your entire political future, in fact—depended upon keeping this truth from President McCurdy at any cost. Funny thing—I considered the possibility that McCurdy had ordered you to kill Vander Defoe. But I never thought that you were acting on your own, to protect your position.”

“All right,” Maarten Tromp said, breathing hard. “I suspected that the transvection machine was a fake and Vander Defoe was a fraud. But I couldn’t have killed him. I was at the New White House all the time. What better alibi could I have than the president of the United States?”

“You killed him, Maarten, with a massive injection of a drug called heparin, which prevents coagulation of the blood. I saw it in your office medicine cabinet when we were treating Earl’s injuries, but it didn’t register on me right away. Heparin was popular with twentieth-century doctors for the treatment of thrombosis, but it’s rarely used today because the effects of a given dosage are so unpredictable and an overdose can prove fatal. You injected the drug with an anesthesia gun—the same weapon, oddly enough, that Frost here chose for his assassination attempt. Vander Defoe never felt a thing, and went calmly to his death at Salk Memorial. You see, our mistake was in assuming that the computerized operation was somehow rigged. Once I decided this wasn’t possible, I considered the only other possibility—that the patient had been rigged. That’s when I remembered your bottle of heparin. It was a spur-of-the-moment crime, of course, but when Defoe was stricken you saw your chance and took it. I assume you obtained both the drug and the anesthesia gun from Colonel Phley’s fully stocked office while he was doing the blood test on Defoe. And you were able to inject Defoe with the drug without either of them realizing what was happening. But you really should have returned the heparin afterward, instead of simply hiding it in your medicine cabinet.”

“You think they wouldn’t have recognized the effects of heparin at the hospital?”

“Oh, they recognized them, all right. Bonnie Simmons’s first thought was that Vander Defoe was a secret hemophiliac—a bleeder. Earl mentioned that to you, Maarten, and that’s when you decided she was getting too close to the truth. You could pretty much count on Ganger keeping quiet about the transvection machine, but the thought of Nurse Simmons and her hemophilia theory really sent you into a panic. It would have been too easy to trace the injection back to the White House and maybe even to you. So you went to Salk Memorial, sought her out, and killed her.”

“Guessing again,” Maarten Tromp said. The sound of explosions had ceased now, and there were only the shouts of men seeking them through the smoke.

“Not entirely, Maarten, Bonnie Simmons was killed in the operating room where she usually worked, but she was there only by chance. Everyone at the hospital knew she’d been relieved of her operating room duties, and that the room was not in use. The fact that the killer found her there was pure luck, and implied he was someone from outside the hospital. There was also a crude attempt to make it seem the surgical computer had killed her, even though the machine was disconnected from its power source. Again, that indicated the killer was an outsider. When I remembered what Earl told you about her hemophilia theory, I knew you had a motive. You see, I think Nurse Simmons was beginning to realize that the slashing effect of the computerized scalpel was
caused
by the sudden spurt of blood, rather than the other way around. The arm was thrown off program in reaction to the blood hitting it, as soon as the first vein was cut. After that, the scalpel simply added to the damage.”

“What about the doctor who examined Defoe and pronounced him dead? Wouldn’t he have noticed something?”

“Doctor Groton had his own reasons for remaining silent. He may have suspected Bonnie Simmons waited longer than she admitted before pushing the alarm button. And even if he suspected heparin he might have thought Defoe got it by accident in the hospital, when he received the spinal anesthetic in preparation for the operation. Groton was covering up, all right, but he was covering up for Salk Memorial and its staff. He didn’t want the death of a cabinet member laid at their door.”

Maarten Tromp moistened his lips. “The president will never buy that, Crader. He’ll stick by me.”

“Will he? Even after I tell him about you and Mrs. Defoe?”

He seemed to go to pieces then, as if this were the final blow. “What about her? What did that bitch tell you?”

“She didn’t have to tell me anything, Maarten. I found out that you called her with the news of Defoe’s seizure, before his operation. But Gretel Defoe had taken a new apartment, and even her husband didn’t know where she was living. If you could call her, that told me you were more than just casual friends. We know she had two lovers—Ganger and Axman. It’s logical you were a third one. That would also explain your first suspicions about the transvection machine—suspicions that probably made you seek out that video cassette on stage magic. Gretel Defoe dropped some hints about the machine to Axman, and that led him to Gloria Chang and her twin sister. Gretel even spoke of a giant fraud to Earl Jazine. It’s logical she also mentioned it to you, in one of her drugged stupors. That was all the hint you needed.”

Maarten Tromp turned to Frost, who still covered them with the guns. “Frost, listen to me—we’re in this together! We’re both his enemies! Kill him and we’re both free!”

“Kill him?” Euler Frost repeated.

Tromp nodded. “He could have died in the fighting. You can escape in the smoke and I’ll stay here. No one will ever know.”

“It won’t work, Maarten,” Crader told him. “We have Hubert Ganger, and he’s talking. The transvection machine story is on the video news. You know it’s all over for you. That’s why you came with us this morning, to escape the president’s wrath for a while, till you had time to think.”

“We’ll hire Ganger, put him on the government payroll!”

“Too late for that, Maarten. Too late for everything.”

But Tromp shook his head. “Not too late. Damn it, Frost—if you won’t kill him, give me the gun and I will!”

He took a step forward, reaching for the weapon in Euler Frost’s left hand. Without changing expression Frost turned slightly and fired the laser pistol directly at his chest. Maarten Tromp screamed and staggered and went down.

“You didn’t have to kill him,” Carl Crader said, gasping now for breath as the smoke intensified.

“He didn’t deserve to live,” Frost answered simply. “No more than that man I killed on Venus.”

“That’s twice you’ve saved my life. I found the explosive wafer where you said.”

Frost nodded. He’d replaced the laser pistol in his belt. “I don’t approve of killing the innocents—only the guilty. I have to be going now. The voices are very close.”

Crader sighed. “You’re going on with this foolishness, this destruction of the machines?”

“Yes. We have to.”

“You won’t have many men after today.”

“We may have more, Crader, a great many more. The people are coming back to life on this Earth. The computer has had its day.”

“But what about our better life? It
is
better, you know, better than a couple of hundred years ago.”

“The better life is a fraud too, just like the transvection machine. Ask Gretel Defoe about the better life. Or Maarten Tromp.” He kicked at the body by his feet. “Are they creatures of the better life? Are they your computerized society?”

“Frost …”

But then another voice reached them, from quite close. It was Earl Jazine. “Chief, is that you? Are you all right?”

“In here, Earl!” he called out.

Euler Frost hesitated, still holding his stunner, and then retreated silently into the smoke. Jazine came in holding a portable smoke-defuser in one hand and his laser pistol in the other. “I heard voices, chief. Are there any of them still here?”

Crader hesitated. “No, there’re all gone, Earl. Except for a couple we managed to stun.”

“Is this Tromp?”

“He’s dead. He caught a laser in the chest. I’ll tell you about it.”

Jazine played the defuser toward the ceiling, driving the smoke outside. “We captured Axman and two others, but there’s no sign of Frost.”

“He was here,” Crader said. “But he got away.”

“The president’s going to be sorry about Tromp.”

“Maybe not as sorry as you’d think, after we talk to him.”

They stepped outside, through the broken glass. The air was clearing now, and Crader could see more rocketcopters coming in for landing. They walked across the lawn to meet them.

“There was a lot of damage,” Jazine said. “Some of the computers are wrecked.”

“It’s only the beginning,” Crader told him. “There’ll be more.”

“And we’ll be fighting them, chief?”

“Fighting them?” Crader repeated, staring back at the smoke-blackened building. “Yes, I suppose so, Earl. But I almost think if I were a little bit younger I might be joining them.”

Turn the page to continue reading from the Carl Crader Mysteries

T
HE CIRCUITS SPUN OFF
in a dozen directions from the core unit, reminding Earl Jazine of an intricately filigreed spider’s web caught in the early morning sunshine. At another time he might have thought the sight pretty, but cramped as he was within the bowels of the FRIDAY-404 election computer there was little space or time for such aesthetic delights.

“All right,” he said into his wrist intercom, “start the power.”

There was a gentle hum in the wires about him, and his induction meters told him that all power was flowing smoothly. The core unit brightened and began to transmit. Jazine waited another five minutes and then squeezed backwards out of the machine.