The Transvection Machine (3 page)

Now, staring across the desk at Jazine, Carl Crader had to admit it was their baby. “Murder or not, the computer certainly malfunctioned. It malfunctioned in such a way as to cause the death of a member of the president’s cabinet.”

Jazine grinned. “So he calls in the Computer Cops.”

Crader made a face. Jazine liked the term with which the world press had christened them some years earlier, but there was something about it which set Crader’s teeth on edge. “Computer Cops” sounded too much like one of those weekly video series which had been so popular in the primitive days of television. But they’d been saddled with it, much as Hoover himself had been saddled with “G-men” a century earlier.

“We’ll go to Washington,” Crader said with a sigh. “What choice do we have?”

“None.”

In actuality, it was one of the wonders of the twenty-first century that the headquarters of the Computer Investigation Bureau was not located in Washington. Only some fast talk by Crader, picturing New York as the computer center of the world, had convinced that earlier president of the need for locating CIB there. He had a field force of ninety-five investigators and technicians under him now, all specialists trained in the highly sophisticated science of investigating computer crimes. They had long ago outgrown their original quarters, and now occupied plushly efficient offices on the entire top floor of the old World Trade Center—a twin-towered goliath that had once been the tallest building in the world.

The World Trade Center had been born in controversy during the late 1960s. The workers on the project were responsible in large part for the bloody “hard-hat riots” of the period, and its great size had even interfered with television reception for a time. Ironically, its status as the world’s tallest building had lasted but a few short years, when it was easily topped by an even taller Chicago structure. The building had fallen into disrepute during the trade scandals of the 1990s, and had finally been taken over by the federal government early in the twenty-first century. Although its flat-topped style of architecture had long ago faded from public favor, it was perfect for Carl Crader’s needs. One flight up from the CIB headquarters was the largest rocketcopter port on Manhattan Island, and Washington was less than a half-hour away.

Crader buzzed his secretary, Judy, and told her they were going to the New White House for a meeting with the president. She pouted a bit, as she always did at being left out of a trip, but finally appeared with his conference recorder.

“Have a good trip, sir,” she said.

“Thanks, Judy. We should be back by four.” She was a tall, sensuous girl with long hair that usually sported one of the newer shades of blond coloring. Government employees were forbidden to wear body stockings on duty, but she still managed to look quite sexy in an old-fashioned miniskirt.

“Say hello to the president for me,” she told Earl Jazine with a wink. They’d become more than friendly since Crader had used them together on an investigation last year, but he was not one to check into the private lives of his employees.

“I’ll do that,” Earl said, starting up the spiral stairway to the rocketcopter port.

Crader hefted his flightcase in one hand and followed along. On the flight deck, holding his topcoat against the wind, he could look through the haze to the distant towers of New Jersey. Far to the west, almost out of sight, he saw the flashes of mail rockets taking off from Nixon International Airport. Below, in the harbor, atomic liners glided toward the ocean. Watching them, marveling at their sleek beauty, he felt a moment’s sorrow at their passing. The sea-rails had all but replaced them now, and another of man’s dreams of progress was vanishing, just as the two-tracked train had vanished by the end of the last century.

The pilot nodded as they climbed in and let the seat arms close about them. “Good day for a flight,” he said. “It’s sunny and seventy degrees in Washington.”

“Great!” Crader agreed. It was late October, but still beautiful weather. That, he supposed, was one more thing for which they could thank the machines. The use of giant sun mirrors, combined with selective cloud seeding and humidity control, had shortened winter in the northeast to a few short weeks of January and February. Barely ten inches of snow fell all year, except at the ski resorts in the mountains where snow-making had been refined to a fine art.

The rocketcopter rose straight up, like a shot, away from the roof of the World Trade Center, and they were on their way. Jazine passed him a few reports on other matters—a computerized credit fraud they’d uncovered in California, some further troubles with thefts from computerized cargo at Nixon International Airport, even a report that Chicago high-school students had discovered a method of cheating on their computerized final exams.

“What about the SEXCO unit?” Crader asked, remembering one of their recent investigations. SEXCO was the Stock Exchange Computer, linking Wall Street with brokerage firms and individual clients around the world.

“No trouble with that, chief. All quiet on Wall Street.”

“You seem to have everything pretty much under control.”

Earl Jazine leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “No worries, except for this Defoe thing.”

Crader thought of something. “Did you take care of the race track people?”

“Not yet, but that’ll be easy.” One of the tracks in the New York area had reported some tampering with their totalizator, with the result that bets on certain horses were paid off at extremely high odds. “Somebody’s crossed a couple of circuits, that’s all. I’ll take a run out there tomorrow, if Harry doesn’t find anything.”

Crader nodded. “Keep on top of it.”

The pilot dipped the rocketcopter on an angle and pointed toward the ground. “Did you ever see a traffic jam like that one?”

Below them, stretching perhaps fifty miles along the twenty-four-lane Jersey Turnpike, thousands of electric autos crept and crawled like tiny ants. Somewhere, perhaps back in Trenton, a master traffic computer had blown out, creating chaos.

“The age of the machine,” Earl Jazine observed, letting his eyelids drift shut.

“The age of the computer,” Crader corrected.

“Don’t you think things were a lot simpler a hundred years ago, when all they had to worry about was air pollution?”

“The man who died yesterday—Vander Defoe—had an answer for all this. His transvection machine.”

Jazine opened his eyes. “Does it really work?”

“You saw the tests on video news. A girl was transvected all the way to India. And they’ve done it with animals too.”

“What’s this word ‘transvection?’ I’m not up on the new science.”

Carl Crader smiled. “The science is new, but the name is very old. Transvection simply means the act of transporting through the air, especially of a witch by the devil. In simple words, a witch riding a broomstick is being transvected.”

“I see. If saints do it, they call it levitation, but with witches it’s transvection.”

“Something like that, I suppose. Most authorities today believe that the witches of the Middle Ages never did fly, of course, with or without broomsticks. They believe the whole thing was a dream or an illusion, perhaps even a drug-induced illusion. Early in our own century, when drugs like LSD were still popular, there were reports of men and women who thought they could fly.”

“But how did an idea like transvection ever survive into the twenty-first century?”

“It survived under names like ‘teleportation,’ or ‘astral projection.’ But while all those concepts are purely mystical in nature, Vander Defoe’s transvection machine is firmly rooted in science. His thesis is simple—if a body is made up of atoms, and these atoms have spaces between them, then the body can be broken down into those separate atoms, transported to any point at the speed of light, and reassembled—just like radio waves or television waves are transported and, in a sense, reassembled.”

“And will it work between planets?”

Crader shrugged. “That point is open to dispute. Some claim that atoms of matter cannot travel independently through the near vacuum of outer space and still reassemble themselves at their destination. Defoe was experimenting on that very problem when he was killed.”

“It’s still hard to believe.”

“Would nineteenth-century man have believed a landing on the moon? Would twentieth-century man have believed a colony on Venus? Or the past experiments in synthesizing new microorganisms and egg cells capable of living on the frigid surface of Mars?”

“It’s all beyond me, anyway,” Jazine said. “I’m a technician, not a scientist.” He glanced out at the waters of Chesapeake Bay. “Say, are we being transvected right now?”

“Not unless our pilot is a devil,” Crader said.

The pilot, whose name was Sonny, glanced back over his shoulder. “First time I’ve been called that.” After a moment he cut the rockets and started down. “New White House straight ahead. This is the best time I’ve made all month—just twenty-three minutes!”

Andrew Jackson McCurdy was the fifty-second president of the United States, the fifth president of the USAC, and the third president to reside in the New White House on the eastern edge of Washington. In a time of youthful world leaders, he was fairly old for a president—almost fifty—and his hair was streaked with a rarely seen gray. Political reporters accused him of cultivating a father image, a throwback to twentieth-century politics, but McCurdy insisted he was only being honest with the public. Wigs and hair coloring were not for him, nor were the male cosmetics used by so many political figures.

He was a tall, handsome man, with a powerful handshake and a booming voice that sounded just right coming from a video screen. To have Andrew Jackson McCurdy’s face covering the entire wall of one’s living room as he boomed out a campaign speech was experience enough to sway even the most unconvinced voter. Although his New Federalist party had been out of office when the CIB was established, he both admired and trusted Carl Crader. When McCurdy took office there was speculation that Crader might be replaced by a New Federalist, but he had weathered the initial storm to gain the new president’s confidence. Now there was talk of his becoming a twenty-first-century J. Edgar Hoover, capable of serving any administration.

“Good to see you, Carl,” President McCurdy greeted him, shaking his hand. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”

“Anything my bureau can do to help,” Crader assured him.

Their meeting was taking place in the presidential lounge, a sort of sitting room off the main executive office. Only Maarten Tromp was with the president, and he seemed more than usually nervous. Crader had never particularly liked the man, but in the messy world of Washington politics, one never let his true feelings surface. Tromp was the president’s special assistant, a man with great power in his own right, and he had to be respected for that if for nothing else. Crader had to admit that he was a good politician—shrewd, intelligent, calculating. And he never forgot anybody’s name.

“Is it possible Vander was murdered?” the president asked, leaning back in his leather armchair. “Is such a thing
possible
?”

“There have been a few cases of computerized murder in the past,” Crader admitted, “but none like this. A man in Denver was crushed to death by a construction robot a few years ago, and the technician who programmed the robot was convicted of the murder.”

Earl Jazine, who’d been silent till now, interrupted at this point. “I agree that the surgical computer is probably responsible. But there was a human in the operating room with Defoe when it happened, wasn’t there?”

Maarten Tromp nodded, licking his dry lips. “Nurse Simmons, a trained medical technician. The machines are never allowed to operate without a human’s presence.”

“And yet Nurse Simmons could do nothing to save Secretary Defoe?”

“Her story is that the computerized operation went wrong, that it somehow caused massive hemorrhaging which could not be controlled.” Tromp looked away, showing some emotion for the first time. “Defoe was dead within sixty seconds.”

“Can anyone bleed to death that quickly?” Jazine wondered.

“Gentlemen,” the president interrupted, “I know you’re anxious to get on with the investigation, but I must ask to be excused from any discussion of the more technical details. There are other matters commanding my attention this morning, and I have a luncheon meeting with the governor of New Brunswick.” Though he spoke pleasantly enough, Crader knew his remarks were something of a rebuke to Jazine and Tromp. Presidents only concerned themselves with the main issue.

“Any hint of a foreign plot, sir?” Crader asked. “Something tied in with the Venus situation?”

“That’s always a possibility, considering Vander Defoe’s position. He was about to begin experiments with the transvection machine on Venus, and it’s possible the Russo-Chinese wanted that to fail. If the transvection machine could be made to work across outer space, the USAC could quite possibly colonize the remainder of the planet before the Russo-Chinese expanded their own holdings.”

“There is one thing,” Tromp suggested. “When I spoke to Vander yesterday morning, before his seizure, I told him of a man named Euler Frost who had escaped from the maximum security prison on Venus. There was some fear he might have used the transvection machine to reach Earth, but Vander assured me the machine was not that far along in development.”

The president turned to his special assistant with an inquiring look, waiting for more. McCurdy did not like to be interrupted without good cause. “What about it?” he asked finally, a trace of annoyance creeping into his voice. “This man, this Frost, could hardly have reached Earth already. He couldn’t be linked with Defoe’s death in any way, could he?”

“That’s just the point, sir—he could! An investigation of the escape now indicates it took place sometime over a week ago. The shuttle rocket from Venus takes only eight days at this time of year, so Frost could be here on Earth right now!”

The president turned once more to Crader. “I’ll expect your bureau to follow this up, Carl. If Defoe was killed, for a personal or political reason, I want his killer brought to justice. I’ve already ordered the Federal Medical Center to suspend all use of computerized operations pending the outcome of your investigation. I want results—and I want them fast!”