The Transvection Machine Read online

  The Transvection Machine

  A Carl Crader Mystery

  Edward D. Hoch

  FOR

  BARBARA DEBEER

  AND

  NANCY SCHICK

  —A CONTINENT APART

  Contents

  1 VANDER DeFOE

  2 GRETEL DeFOE

  3 VANDER DeFOE

  4 CARL CRADER

  5 EARL JAZINE

  6 EULER FROST

  7 CARL CRADER

  8 EARL JAZINE

  9 GRETEL DeFOE

  10 CARL CRADER

  11 EARL JAZINE

  12 CARL CRADER

  13 EARL JAZINE

  14 EULER FROST

  15 BONNIE SIMMONS

  16 EARL JAZINE

  17 CARL CRADER

  18 EULER FROST

  19 GRETEL DeFOE

  20 CARL CRADER

  Preview: The Fellowship of the Hand

  1 VANDER DeFOE

  HE HAD ONLY JUST reached his desk in the Cabinet Wing of the New White House when Maarten Tromp bustled in, carrying the Monday morning Space Dispatches, an expression of presidential consternation mirrored in his face.

  “Vander, the president is quite displeased today.” When Maarten Tromp made an appearance it usually meant the president was displeased, because his job as special assistant was to keep the world and Washington and especially the New White House running smoothly. If there was no crisis, Defoe rarely saw Maarten Tromp. He was likely to be off playing aqua-golf with the speaker of the house, or spending a quiet weekend overseas with his latest London mistress.

  Vander Defoe, used to it all after only five months on the job, sighed and asked, “What is it this time, Maarten?”

  “More trouble on Venus. A man named Euler Frost, an exile, has escaped from the maximum security prison there. They think he may be headed back to Earth.”

  Defoe blinked and thought about it. “But how does this concern me? The secretary of extra-terrestrial defense can hardly bother himself with the doings of one man, even if that man is a dangerous criminal.”

  “Frost has ties to the Russo-Chinese,” Tromp explained patiently. “And to a revolutionary group here on Earth. He was exiled to the Venus Colony ten years ago, and we don’t want him back now.”

  “He should be easy enough to keep out,” Defoe replied. “There’s only one ship a week from Venus to Earth.”

  Maarten Tromp drew himself up, seeming to grow taller as he took on the authority for his next pronouncement. In that moment, Defoe could almost believe that he really was a direct descendant of Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp, a seventeenth-century Dutch admiral who sailed with a broom at his masthead in token of his ability to sweep the seas. Both the insolence and the fatuousness of the act were in keeping with the Tromp that Vander Defoe knew so well.

  “You’ve forgotten the transvection machine,” Maarten Tromp announced.

  Defoe glanced down nervously at his hands, playing with the coins he always carried, making them multiply or disappear for his own amusement. He had indeed forgotten the transvection machine, the invention that had brought him from a tiny laboratory at the Kansas Research Center to his present position as secretary of extra-terrestrial defense. “Of course I haven’t forgotten it,” he grumbled defensively. “But the model on Venus is for test purposes only. You know it hasn’t been used to transvect a human being as yet.”

  “But this man Frost could use it if he had to, couldn’t he? You told the president it was almost operational.”

  Vander Defoe breathed a long sigh, deciding that life in the middle of the twenty-first century had problems all its own. “By almost operational, I simply meant that it was functional. I did not mean to imply the use of the word in its military sense—that is, on active service. The transvection machine on Earth has been used for a few experiments, but we have not yet transvected anything across outer space. As you’ll remember, a human being thus far has been transvected only a distance of 8,084 miles—from Washington to Calcutta—and even that was on an experimental basis. Millions more need to be spent before the transvection machine is in regular use.”

  “But could he use the machine to escape?”

  Defoe shook his head. “No. Tell the president there is no danger. First of all, our machine on Venus is not in the hands of the Russo-Chinese. I hardly think they would risk an extra-terrestrial incident simply to get one of their friends back to earth.”

  That seemed to satisfy Tromp for the moment. He shuffled his feet uncertainly. “Very well, Vander. I knew you’d have an answer for him. I wasn’t really worried, but you know how I’ve backed you up through all this. It was I who got the president’s ear about the transvection machine in the first place, after I witnessed the test with the girl, and I who arranged for a test machine to be placed on Venus for your experiments. And you have the transvection machine to thank for your position in the president’s cabinet.”

  “I know, I know,” Defoe replied with a tired voice. He was bored with the constant homage to Tromp’s position at the president’s ear.

  Maarten Tromp started for the door. He paused with his hand on the push-plate and said, almost as an afterthought, “Maybe we can get together for a game of aqua-golf some weekend, Vander.”

  “That would be fine, Maarten.”

  “I’m shooting in the low hundreds now, you know. Beat the secretary of state last weekend.”

  “Good for you.”

  The door closed behind Tromp, and Vander Defoe sat for a long time in his chair, staring at the glowing radiant ceiling of his office. There was much to be done, and he knew he should be summoning secretaries and aides, but just then the powers of a presidential cabinet member seemed very far away indeed. He got up from his desk and walked to the wall, where a ten-color map of the USAC was prominently displayed. The United States of America and Canada—sixty-one states—comprised everything north of Mexico, with the exception of the tiny independent nation of French Canada. It was a vast land, almost as vast as Russo-China, and he was perhaps one of the twenty most important men in this land.

  He’d come a long way from Kansas to Washington, a long way in a very short time. He wondered if he could ever go back. And wondering, felt the first faint cramps in his lower abdomen.

  2 GRETEL DeFOE

  SHE ROLLED OVER ON the wide white bed, propped herself up on one elbow, and studied the naked man kneeling above her. Hubert Ganger was far from being the greatest lover she’d known in her thirty-one years, but he would do. His slim body was still firm, without any of the middleaged flab men past forty so often acquired, and with his close-cropped blond hair and beard he looked no older than her own age. Best of all, he knew how to please a woman—something so many twenty-first-century lovers had forgotten. Yes, she decided, he would do. He could be trained.

  “How was that?” he asked, with a scientist’s critical eye toward his performance.

  She smiled and allowed her eyes to close, purring softly. “Very good, Hubert. Now we’ll try it again, and I’m sure it will be perfect.”

  “Again?” He frowned uncertainly. “I don’t know if I …”

  She rolled off the bed and padded softly across the thick carpet to the closetier. In a moment she returned with the electric lance. “Here,” she told him, holding it out. “Put this on.”

  “My God! I didn’t think anyone used these outside of male whorehouses!”

  She smiled at his naiveté. He had so much to learn. In a way she pitied the former wife she’d never met. The poor girl must have had a boring marriage. “In fact, my dear Hubert, these are used in all the most sophisticated circles. Let me take my laudanum tablet and we can begin again.”

  She swallowed the tablet
with half a glass of water, watching with some amusement while he strapped on the electric lance. Then, stretching out on the bed once more, she allowed the drug to work its wonders. First, as always, came the agreeable, pleasant sensation about the region of her stomach, followed by a feeling of gay good humor. She was serene, she was assured, she was relaxed.

  “Now!” she commanded the waiting man. “Now, now!”

  Her mouth was dry, and warm. Her skin shimmered as if efflorescent, as if about to burst into a thousand blossoms. She was riding the crest of a great wave, feeling the fullness of supreme bliss. He was bringing her to a completeness, a passion, she’d rarely known before. In that instant all the nights of her life seemed to telescope into one. She remembered the first boy in high school, and the male prostitute in New York, remembered her wedding night with Vander, and the first affair afterwards. She remembered Hubert, and the other two, and all the ones between, remembered them now in a single blinding orgasm that made her cry out in pain and fury and delight.

  Later, when the tide of the drug had subsided and a bit of reason had returned, Gretel looked at him over the dull landscape of the sheets and said, “I do love a man with a beard.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Now suppose we talk about killing my husband.”

  Gretel had met Vander Defoe when she was just out of college, at an age when the glamour of being a scientist’s wife was still capable of making a profound impression on her unworldly self. Defoe was twenty years older than she and perhaps a half-century wiser, but each of them seemed to fill a need in the other. For Gretel it was the exposure to a world of science and invention, the knowledge that she was sharing her bed and body with a man who had visited the Venus Colony last year, had dined with the president last month, had sipped cocktails with a Nobel Prize winner just last night. For Vander it was, perhaps, the eternal attraction of a young and vigorous female—someone to rescue him from the deepening depressions of middle age. His first wife had died in a freak accident on the sea-rail to Jamaica, and he was ready to marry again. More than ready, he needed to marry again.

  There was no problem about children, because she fully shared Vander’s support of government child clinics. Their life during those first few years had been all she’d dreamed it would be. Once, on vacation, he’d taken her to the Moon Colony for a week, as guests of the technician general at the laboratories there. She’d talked about it for a month on her return, filling endless boring luncheons with descriptions of the bleak lunar landscape and all that was being done by the USAC technicians to improve it.

  And then there had been Hubert Ganger and his ideas for a transvection machine. Ganger and Defoe met at a seminar in Krakow on the subject of improved transportation methods, and they became immediate friends. Vander Defoe liked the theory behind the transvection machine—the idea of transporting objects and animals, and ultimately humans, through the air at the speed of light. It was a theory, he’d told Gretel, that could revolutionize transportation. It could even revolutionize warfare.

  Defoe and Ganger had formed a corporation together, working out of leased space at the Kansas Research Center, and gone to work on the practicality of the invention. With colonies on the Moon and Venus, the government was especially interested in whether humans could be transvected not only between points on Earth, but through outer space as well. Defoe maintained they could be, while Ganger felt that his system was still theoretical, especially regarding outer space.

  She still remembered the arguments they had over coffee, far into the night, with Ganger maintaining that the individual atoms of matter in outer space were too distant from each other for transvection to work there. “Your transvected object would simply disintegrate when it reached the limits of the atmosphere,” he argued.

  But Vander Defoe was firm in his beliefs. It was about the time of their split that Ganger was drawn to Gretel, perhaps because both of them were having increasing difficulty in living with the political aspirations of Defoe. His conferences with government officials, his journeys across the world—all the glamorous activities which had first attracted Gretel to him—were now beginning to pain her immeasurably.

  She sought solace first in a variety of drugs, settling finally for the exquisite pleasures of a Japanese brand of homogenized laudanum tablets. Then there was an increasing variety of lovers, many of them friends and business associates of Vander Defoe. At last he’d had enough of it, and he ordered her from the house, in much the same way he’d ordered Hubert Ganger from the business they’d formed together.

  Ganger used to tell Gretel, on those first early evenings of mutual sympathy, that Defoe would be helpless without him, that he could never build even a single transvection machine without Ganger’s help. But Defoe had the laugh on both of them. Within a year, the transvection machine had been built and tested. A cigar box was transvected between rooms in a laboratory, a monkey was transvected from Boston to New York, and finally a young Chinese girl was transvected from Washington to Calcutta—a distance of over 8,000 miles. More than that, Vander Defoe had persuaded the government to let him place a machine in the USAC Venus Colony for experimental purposes. That was when the president had stepped into the picture, and offered Vander a newly created cabinet position as secretary of extraterrestrial defense.

  The move was more political than practical on the president’s part. Video newsmagazines had been full of details about the Russo-Chinese Venus Colony, which was larger and more successful than the USAC one. There were men and women living on Venus so long now that they’d taken out the newly ordained Venusian citizenship. And with no real ties to Earth, these people were being attracted to the Russo-Chinese Colony in increasing numbers, forming themselves into a force that might someday attack the USAC Venus Colony, if not the USAC itself. The president needed a dramatic move, a ploy to take the spotlight away from the Russo-Chinese successes, at least momentarily. He found what he wanted in the Department of Extra-Terrestrial Defense, with the newsworthy Vander Defoe as its secretary.

  And so Defoe moved into a plush office at the New White House, and Gretel moved into a Georgetown apartment and filed for divorce. It was Hubert Ganger, though, who kept her from taking the final step toward freedom. He argued, in their newly found complicity, that Vander could be milked dry of the money he so rightly owed them both. And Ganger did more than argue—he supplied her with the weapon to use against her husband, the weak spot in his armor that even she had never suspected till then.

  Gretel and Hubert Ganger did not become lovers at once. She had other men in her life, the highly placed officials whom she’d first met through her husband. But as her frustrations led her deeper into a dependency on laudanum, they led her also into the affair with Hubert Ganger. She’d known from the first that he would be a responsive lover, and she felt increasingly certain that he could be trained to perfection. With Hubert she could have the glamour of the scientific world that had first attracted her to Vander, and she could have much more besides.

  But the game of bleeding poor Vander of his cash was tiring now. She wanted something more, something like the freedom to marry Hubert and travel far away. She dreamed sometimes of a honeymoon by sea-rail, visiting all the remote island resorts one only read about. The casinos of the Canary Islands, the hunting preserves of Monrovia, the great sun mirrors of Easter Island. That was the life she wanted, and she could have it. She could have all of Vander’s money.

  But not by divorcing him.

  “Killing your husband?” Hubert Ganger repeated. “You mean Vander?”

  “He’s the only husband I have at the moment.”

  “But darling, we don’t kill the goose who’s laying the golden eggs.”

  “We do if it’ll get us all the eggs at one time. The government would have to hire you to finish work on the transvection machine, and you would get all that money, instead of Vander.”

  But Ganger shook his head. “I want to ruin him, not murder him.”

&n
bsp; “Haven’t you ruined him enough already?”

  “Not publicly. He still has his government position.”

  She smiled up at him, understanding the hatred if not the logic. “But don’t you see? …”

  The buzzing of the vision-phone interrupted her and she rolled over on the bed to answer it, flipping off the vision switch first so she wouldn’t be seen naked. “Hello?” she said, keeping her voice low and uncommitted.

  She listened to the voice on the other end, saying nothing until a final, “Thank you for calling.”

  “Who was that?” Ganger asked.

  She reached for another laudanum tablet, and then thought better of it. “Maarten Tromp, at the New White House. It seems that dear Vander has just been stricken with an attack of appendicitis. They’re rushing him to Salk Memorial by rocketcopter, and he’ll have a preprogrammed operation within the hour.”

  3 VANDER DeFOE

  THE NURSE WAS YOUNG and blond and quite pretty, and her name was Bonnie Simmons—a good old-fashioned twentieth-century sort of name. She looked down at him on the operating table and checked the record sheet projected on the wall over his head. “Your name is Defoe, like in Robinson Crusoe?” she asked.

  He had to smile at that, even through the gray cloud of anesthesia. “I didn’t think anyone read Defoe these days. He’s not exactly teleprinter entertainment.”

  “We read his Journal of the Plague Year in medical school,” she told him with a trace of pride.

  “Things have changed since my days.” He glanced up apprehensively, seeing the great stainless steel machine that was moving along an overhead track to position itself above his naked abdomen.

  Nurse Simmons adjusted the focus of the record projector, checking over the coded details of his life and health. “Tell me, Mr. Defoe—or should I say Secretary Defoe—just when did the pains commence?”

  He took a deep breath, fighting back the anesthetic. “This morning, about six or seven hours ago. There were just cramps at first, and a sort of general pain. I vomited once, about noon. Then, about an hour ago, the pain localized down here, on the right side. That’s when I phoned the White House physician, Colonel Phley. He did a fast blood count and found an increase in white cells.”