The Transvection Machine (6 page)

“We’re back to your murder by computer.”

“I know.”

“Any suspects?”

“I’m just remembering what Tromp mentioned about Defoe’s wife and his ex-partner. Might be something there.”

“Ganger? The man who helped invent the transvection machine?”

Jazine nodded. “That thing has been in the background all along—that transvection machine. Maybe we’ve been spending our time investigating the wrong machine, chief.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Earl?”

“I’ll let you know after I talk to Ganger and Mrs. Defoe.”

“All right,” Crader said with a sigh. “But go slow. Don’t rush into things.”

“Anything on that Frost angle—the man from Venus?”

“I’ve been checking on the group he was involved with. If he’s back on this planet, I think he’ll try to contact them.”

“What about his background? Does he look like an assassin?”

Crader bent his head and flipped through a file on the desk before him. Then he looked back up at the vision-phone. “No, Earl,” he said at last. “I just don’t see a man like Euler Frost as a political assassin, no matter what the president and Tromp would like us to think.”

H
E WAS BORN IN
a quiet Manitoba village, above the permafrost line, and for the first eight years of his life he saw only the most primitive forms of machine. His parents were medical missionaries laboring among one of the few remaining Indian tribes on the North American continent. Of necessity, their life imprisoned him in a culture and a milieu that were totally foreign to the pace and thrust of the twenty-first century. His boyhood was spent among the quiet people of the reservation, except for the annual trips south to Winnipeg, which began with his ninth birthday.

Euler Frost’s father was a good man, and often on the trips south he would point out the advances of civilization. His eyes were always on the sky, and he had named his son after a crater of the Moon. But Winnipeg in the third decade of the century was a sprawling metropolitan area of some two million people, capital of the fifty-fifth state, center for the computerized mineral exploration of all the states in the far north. “The machines,” his father told him. “Beware of the machines. Someday they will make slaves of us all.”

He remembered those words when his father died. He was fourteen at the time, and he’d been helping his mother at the little Indian school in the valley. One of the children, a boy named Running, came to them with the terrible news. A rocketcopter from Winnipeg had circled the reservation, using its computerized survey gear to search for hidden mineral deposits. When it landed for a closer look, Euler’s father had gone over to the copter, ordering them off the land. He feared, with good reason, that a mineral discovery in the area would mean the end of the tribe—as it had for every other tribe in the north.

There had been a scuffle—the details were vague at this point—and the elder Frost had fallen into the copter’s rocket blast. He was already dead by the time Euler and his mother reached the scene. That was it. That was all. There had not even been an investigation by the government.

It was on the day of his father’s funeral that fourteen-year-old Euler Frost crystalized his hatred for the machines. They had, in a very real sense, caused the death of his father and his way of life. It was not just the single computerized survey machine on board that rocketcopter—it was all machines, everywhere. The machines in the great towers of Winnipeg that his father had warned him against, the machines in New York and Washington and London and Moscow. Even the machines that were colonizing the new worlds of Venus and the Moon.

He’d left his mother there in the reservation school-house, and he had not seen her since. It was not that he lacked love for her, but perhaps rather that he loved her too much. He did not want her to witness the end that might be awaiting him, somewhere, someday.

Euler Frost had traveled to Europe when he was sixteen, and from Paris made his way by sea-rail to a certain man-made island in the Indian Ocean, accompanied by a man named Graham Axman. There were others, he’d quickly discovered, who felt as he did. Their organization was small to the point of practical nonexistence, but it was a beginning. They were acting, in various parts of the world, to bring about change. He read many old books, and studied with these others, and learned.

Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Euler Frost returned to New York. He was arrested two weeks later and charged with conspiracy. Since evidence of his membership in the organization was enough to convict him, the outcome of the brief trial was never in doubt. He was found guilty and sentenced to exile in the Venus Colony.

Colonization of the Moon had been a simple task compared with the problems that had to be overcome on Venus. True, the new spaceships could make the journey in eight days instead of several months, but there still remained the fantastic temperatures of five hundred to eight hundred degrees F, and pressure some fifteen or twenty times that of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The key to the successful colonization had been, ultimately, an observation made by an early Venus fly-by—the Mariner II probe back in 1962. This American effort, and later Russian ones, had discovered the existence of “cold spots” on the planet. True, their temperatures were only slightly below those of the rest of the planet, but the cold spots became a starting place for the would-be colonizers. By the use of the Earth’s climate-control machines, it became possible to lower the temperature of the cold spots to a level where man could live and work beneath Moon-style plastic domes. With more experience in climate control, and with rockets of greater thrust at their disposal, the Russo-Chinese were able to colonize a much larger area of the planet than could the USAC. Bitter rivalry was the result. And that was where things stood when young Euler Frost arrived on Venus.

He lived, at first, with the USAC colony of twenty thousand people beneath its main domes, never seeing the sun through the perpetual cloud cover of the planet. The rate of rotation was such that there were some fifty-eight Earth days of light—dim and dreary light—on Venus, followed by fifty-eight Earth days of darkness. The settlers from Earth learned to adjust to this, as to everything else, and they followed the standard twenty-four-hour day of Earth.

During those early years, some colonists believed that no life was possible outside of the domes because of the high atmospheric pressure that existed on the planet. But gradually, as Earth science learned more about Venus science—and about the amazing adaptability of the human body—it became obvious that some life could exist for brief periods outside the domes, if protected by pressure suits.

Knowing he could never return legally to Earth as an American citizen, Euler Frost had taken out citizenship on Venus. It was something that the government did not discourage, in its race to equal the size and scope of the Russo-Chinese colony, grown now to ninety thousand persons. The exiles to Venus, like the British exiles to Australia centuries earlier, would become the founders of a new nation, a new world, which would ultimately gain its independence from Earth.

But as the days of his exile lengthened into weeks and months and years, Euler Frost began to look around him. The new citizens of Venus, with no real ties to Earth except the weekly spaceship, and no ties to the USAC except the memory of their exile, were being drawn increasingly to the Russo-Chinese colony beyond the mountains. A young man named Folger—with whom Frost had grown friendly in his exile—suddenly disappeared from the dome one night. Though they were citizens of Venus, people like Folger and Frost were still technically under the control of the USAC garrison on the planet. Once they left the dome, the only place they could seek shelter was with the Russo-Chinese, and this was strictly forbidden.

Frost heard nothing more of Folger for many weeks, and it was assumed by some that he must have died in the Free Zone between the colonies. True, the atmosphere in the mountains of the Free Zone was a bit cooler and more conducive to life, but how long could anyone live there without food or water? Frost marveled at the logic of some of these people, who believed that a man like Folger would perish in the mountains rather than go over to the enemy camp. For himself, he never doubted that Folger had reached the Russo-Chinese domes, nor that he was living happily there.

It came as something of a surprise when he learned that both sides were wrong in their assumptions. Folger had not died in the mountains, but neither was he living happily in the Russo-Chinese Colony. The revelation came one night during the dark period, after the arc lights had been dimmed and the colony was asleep. Frost was awakened by a gentle shaking, and looked up to see Folger’s familiar freckled face glowing above him in the light from a wrist-lamp.

“Come on, boy,” Folger said. “I can get you out of here.”

“What? … What in hell are you doing back here? We thought you were dead, or with the Russo-Chinese.”

“Neither one, fortunately. I’m living in the Free Zone with a colony of defectors from both sides. We have food and a small dome that some of the Russo-Chinese erected. I came to get more food, and to bring you back with us.”

Until that moment, Frost had never seriously considered the possibility of leaving the great multi-domed colony. Despite the attraction of the Russo-Chinese venture, one did not easily give up the known for the unknown. But it took him only a few moments to decide. “I’m with you,” he said. “I’ll help with the food.”

It was nearly 8:00 in the dark morning before they reached the Free Zone Colony in the mountains. Their pressure suits were bulky and uncomfortable and Frost had never been outside the dome for such an extended period of time. He thought, in the moment that the alien dome came into view,
I have come a long way from the frosty fields of Manitoba. A very long way indeed.

He was an outsider now, an outsider on an alien world.

The colony in the Free Zone was small but well organized. There were sixteen people living beneath the dome, and Frost quickly discovered that the majority of them had come from the Russo-Chinese Colony. All was not the paradise there, it seemed, with food shortages, repression of dissent, internal bickering, and the ever-present computer to rule their lives. Though the people of the Russo-Chinese Colony were not technically exiles, they all knew that a return to Earth would be next to impossible for them—at least until they’d served out their five-year tours of duty. And so a few of their number had taken to the hills. Certainly the number was a few—eleven men and women from a colony of ninety thousand—but even this number had been a surprise to Frost and the other exiles.

Those from the USAC Colony, now including Frost and Folger, were all males, and so it was natural at his age that Frost should be attracted to a young Russo-Chinese beauty named Fergana. She seemed at first to be in the care of a towering Oriental called the Bull, but it soon developed that this was only the remains of a childhood friendship dating from her days on Earth. Fergana was a delicate Eurasian girl who’d grown up in the southern district of Uzbek SSR, not far from the former Russo-Chinese border. The Bull had taken and protected her after the death of her parents in a cyclone, and they had volunteered for the Venus Colony together. They had been disillusioned together too, when the authorities tried to place Fergana in a colonization clinic whose sole purpose was the production of babies for the new planet. The Bull had taken her and fled from the domed city into the mountains with the others.

The thing between Euler Frost and the girl Fergana quickly blossomed into a sort of love. There was little privacy in the mountain colony, and all tasks had to be shared, but they found a way of working together that seemed to matter to them both, and at night he took her into his bed. It was Folger who brought the news one dark morning that was to mean the end of their idyll.

“There’s something new happening at the USAC Colony,” he told them grimly. He’d been out on one of his food-gathering missions the night before, slipping through the electronic sentry posts that guarded the colony. It was not as difficult as it might have sounded, since Folger’s job at the colony had been the maintenance of the sentry system. He knew exactly how to disconnect and bypass its intricate proximity device by making use of a blind spot, and in fact had once shown the technique to Frost, who was always interested in ways to defeat the machine.

“What is it?” Frost asked him. “What have you learned?”

“They’re installing a new invention from Earth. It’s called a transvection machine, and the man who developed it has been made secretary of extra-terrestrial defense in the president’s cabinet.”

“What sort of machine is it?” Fergana wanted to know. “What does it do?” They’d learned long ago that all machines must have a purpose, and they almost feared to learn what this one was.

“It’s a device for transporting people between here and Earth at the speed of light. They step into the machine, the dials are set, and they are transvected through space to their goal—at a speed so fast they’re invisible. They emerge from a machine on the other end.”

“Fantastic! You mean to say such a thing works?”

“They’ve tested it on Earth. But they don’t know if it’s practical for outer space. The transvection might not work through the near vacuum of space. That’s why it’s here—to be tested.”

“And if it does work?”

Folger sighed. “If it does work, you can be certain the USAC will begin full-scale colonization of the planet. They won’t just be sending exiles and a garrison force. They’ll be out to equal and surpass the Russo-Chinese Colony. And you know what that will mean. People, machines, more domes, more Earth-things like crime and killing. Maybe even war between the two colonies.”

Frost pondered the words, and it seemed to him that what Folger said was true. An invention such as the transvection machine could mean the end of life as they knew it on Venus.

But it was the Bull who spoke first. “There is crime here already,” he said simply. “When you go out and rob for food, that is a crime. When we left our colonies to live here in the mountains together, we each committed a crime.”