The Transvection Machine (12 page)

“You know a great deal,” Crader told him. “But of course you followed me from Baltimore.”

“Of course,” Axman admitted. “I was leaving on a journey to Plenish myself, and when I recognized you at the sea-rail port I made arrangements to travel with you. Naturally you must realize that your face is not exactly unknown among my people.”

“And your people are HAND?”

“Just how much do you know about HAND, Mr. Crader?”

“
Humans Against Neuter Domination
. A ten-year-old revolutionary group getting a sudden new surge of life from somewhere. And you, Graham Axman, are in charge of the American section of the group.”

“Very good,” Axman said with a smile. “But I must correct just one word. We are not revolutionary in the sense that we revolt against people. Our revolution is only against machines—you might call it an industrial revolution in reverse. We do not want to harm people.”

“Not even people like Vander Defoe?”

Axman shrugged his shoulders. “Some, like Defoe, are special cases. They would invent machines where there are already too many. What good would the transvection machine do, except to transport people more swiftly to where they are not wanted in the first place?”

“The only ones who don’t want them on Venus are the Russo-Chinese, who fear competition with their own colony.”

“Ah, but that is not true, Mr. Crader. There are a good many people on Earth and Venus—good people, patriotic people, who do not necessarily wish to see us carry the troubles of this planet into outer space.”

Crader was growing tired of the dialogue. He wanted to get to the point. “Did you kill Vander Defoe?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did any member of HAND kill him? Did a man named Euler Frost kill him?”

“That is a question you will have to ask Mr. Frost directly. Since I assume you came all this way to find him, it’s only fair that you two should meet.”

The words made Crader perk up. Whatever the reason for their kidnaping him, it seemed they did not mean to simply kill him. Was it to be more in the nature of an educational session, or had they already made some demands on Washington to insure his release? The destruction of Defoe’s transvection machine in return for Carl Crader’s life? He wondered what sort of a bargain
that
would seem to the people in Washington.

“I’d be happy to meet anyone,” Crader said, “but of course you must realize that while I’m a prisoner I in no way represent the government of the United States of America and Canada. I have no bargaining position.”

Axman eyed him speculatively. “That’s understood,” he said at last. “Come along now.”

As Crader had suspected, the seaman was waiting outside the door, although there was no weapon visible. He brought up the rear as Axman led the way onto the deck and along portside to the gangplank. It was a cloudless morning, with more of the island’s vaunted perfect climate, and a number of tourists were sunning themselves on the dock. Crader considered a break for freedom, which would not have been difficult, but the prospect of meeting Frost and learning something more about Vander Defoe’s death had piqued his curiosity. He walked along between the two men, not sure where they were taking him.

Presently Axman turned in at one of the houses along the north shore of the island. The house must have been equipped with a proximity device, because they were still several feet from the door when it slid open to reveal a slender Chinese girl wearing a long dragon-print gown. Axman said something to her that Crader could not understand and she went off to the back of the house.

Soon a handsome young man joined them. He also wore an Oriental costume, but with his deep-set eyes he looked more like Graham Axman than some Russo-Chinese agent. He was younger, and better-looking than Axman, but there was something of the same dedication about his expression. Crader recognized him at once from the hologram he’d seen in Tromp’s office.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Frost,” he said. “How was life on Venus?”

Euler Frost smiled. “A pleasant place to visit, but I hated living there. You would be Carl Crader of the CIB, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Mr. Crader has some questions about our organization and its activities,” Axman said. “I thought he’d best talk to you.”

Euler Frost sat on a low cushionlike chair that brought him almost to the floor. “You haven’t come all this way to deport me back to Venus, have you?”

“Illegal entry belongs to another agency of the government,” Crader assured him. “I’m investigating the death of Vander Defoe.”

“Really?” Frost let his right hand dangle along the floor, and almost at once a large white cat darted from somewhere to playfully intercept it.

“You arrived from Venus just five days before he died, and you left Baltimore by sea-rail the day after he died. It seems worth an explanation.”

“I see.” Frost brought his hand up, but the cat jumped after it. He glanced toward the doorway where Axman and the guard still stood. “I think I can take care of this, Graham,” he said. “Mr. Crader and I are going to have a little talk.”

Axman nodded. “I’ll be having breakfast in the garden.” The seaman went with him, and Crader was left alone with Frost.

“Now, then,” the man from Venus said. “Just what did you want to know?”

“The president has reason to suspect you may be implicated in the death of Vander Defoe. Your travel schedule would tend to confirm it.”

Crader was becoming aware of the extreme pallor of the man’s skin, the result of ten years on sunless Venus. There were some things even the vitamin lamps couldn’t replace. Or perhaps they simply didn’t have vitamin lamps in the Free Zone or the prison where Frost had spent his last several months.

The man stared at him for a moment, seeming to read his thoughts, and answered, “If you’d spent ten years as an exile on Venus, never seeing the sun, going for nearly two months at a time without even daylight, maybe you’d have acted the same way. I spent a few days in Washington just getting reacquainted with Earth, and then I came here.”

“And are you a member of HAND?”

“Yes.”

Carl Crader simply shook his head. “What do you hope to accomplish? This business about the destruction of machines is pretty fantastic, after all.”

Euler Frost leaned back in his chair, one hand continuing to play absently with the purring white cat. “Let me tell you a little bit about my life, Mr. Crader, and then you can decide how fantastic it is. My father, a missionary in one of the Canadian states, was killed by the blast from a rocketcopter’s engines while trying to prevent a computerized mineral survey which would have taken reservation land away from the Indians. A girl I knew and probably loved on Venus was killed by a stunner fired at close range. Her only crime was that she wanted to live free, and that a friend of hers had tried to attack the transvection machine.”

“So you came back to Earth and killed Vander Defoe in revenge.”

Frost ignored his words and kept on. “Do you realize what we’ve become here on Earth, what the computers have done to us? Nearly a hundred years ago a man named Lewis Mumford wrote a two-volume work called
The Myth Of The Machine
. Mumford was not a radical nor a bomb-throwing revolutionary. In fact, he was a highly respected man of seventy-five when the book appeared. In it he decries the worship of the god of technology, and he points out the dangers of the megamachine—which he symbolized at the time as the Kremlin and the Pentagon. The megamachine required, he said, a permanent state of war in order to exist, and that is very nearly what we have had during this past century. The machine—more specifically the computer and its automated accessories—has become everything. Manual work has been turned into machine work, machine work into paper work, paper work into electronic simulation of work, divorced from any organic functions or human purposes, just as Mumford predicted.”

“I see you’ve read a great deal on Venus,” Crader observed.

“Not on Venus. Mumford is banned from government libraries, as are Thoreau and Bazak—the twenty-first-century economic philosopher. Didn’t it ever strike you as odd that the USAC libraries carry books by Marx and not by Thoreau? The reason is simple—it is Thoreau and not Marx who is the enemy of the megamachine.”

Carl Crader moved uneasily. “Thoreau was banned because he inspired revolution among the young. But he’s banned only from government libraries, not from bookstores.”

“Thoreau inspired civil disobedience, not revolution,” Frost corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“Some people didn’t seem to think so. The revolution of 1981 was put down only with great loss of life.”

“And after it was over, had the leaders learned anything? You know they hadn’t. Life went on as before, and the machine progressed as before. The monitoring universal eye, the servo-mechanical man, biological control, even the machines of sex! They not only killed God, but they killed Man as well.”

“It’s not all that bad,” Crader said, but his mouth was dry. Some of Frost’s words were hitting home. He wondered if the man’s views were really that much different from his own.

“Of course it’s not that bad, to someone who’s lived through its gradual stages. The Vietnam War of the last century wasn’t that bad either, because it came in slow stages. Only someone outside, seeing the whole thing from an objective point of view, could really see what a total disaster it was.”

“And HAND proposes to change all this?”

“We propose a beginning. There hasn’t even been that for fifty years. John Glenn, an early spaceman, put it best: ‘
Let man take over.
’ Let man take over from the machine. Let hands do honest work again. Human progress is not mere speed and mass production. Somewhere, sometime, it was thought that automation would mean a better product. But all it really meant was the same product—or an inferior product—sold at a larger profit. The computer today rules our lives, makes our decisions, does our work. Culture has become a farce, with machines even producing some of the books we read and the music we hear.”

“All right,” Crader granted. “I agree with many of the things you’re saying.” He remembered conversations like this he’d had with Earl Jazine, probing, pondering, but never reaching a decision. It always came back, finally, to the fact that the machine was his life. The Computer Investigation Bureau was dedicated to protecting machine just as much as man.

“You agree, and yet you do your job.”

“Yes.”

Frost sighed and reached for a glass of liquid on the table beside him. “Palm wine,” he explained. “Distilled automatically from palm-tree sap. Want a glass?”

“No, thank you.”

“I’ve told you about HAND. What else do you want to know?”

“Where does the money come from?” He waved his hand around. “Who’s supporting all this?”

“I don’t know. I doubt if even Axman knows the answer to that one.”

“Doesn’t it bother you sometimes? Suppose you’re secretly being financed by the Russo-Chinese?”

Frost gave a snort. “Not a chance! I lived in the Free Zone of Venus with some Russo-Chinese. The girl I mentioned was one of them. They were people just like us, and they talked about their government the same way we do. HAND is just as much of a threat to the Russo-Chinese as it is to the USAC. Any other questions?”

“One other,” Crader said. “Did you kill Vander Defoe?”

Euler Frost smiled. “The machine killed Vander Defoe.”

“That isn’t possible.”

“No, of course not! The machine can do no wrong!”

“If Defoe was murdered, human hands guided that machine, either directly or indirectly. You know that as well as I do. The tape for that operation has been used dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times without mishap. It couldn’t have gone wrong then.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“That somehow you killed him. You killed him because your father died and your girl died. You killed him because he was the developer of the transvection machine.”

“All right,” he said with a shrug. “I killed him. For all those reasons.”

“Did you?”

Euler Frost leaned forward suddenly, his face intense. “Wouldn’t it be worth one man’s life to avoid the world we’re headed for? A world which will be fit only for machines to live in?”

“I don’t know,” Carl Crader told him, feeling suddenly old. Perhaps these were young men’s problems, worrying about a world he’d never live to see. Or perhaps that was the trouble with everything to begin with—nations ruled by men and women too old to worry any more about the next generation.

“I killed a man once,” Frost confided. “One of the garrison troops on Venus.”

“I know. I saw it in your file.”

“It wasn’t hard at all, and I never felt the least regret afterwards. It was something I had to do.”

“Yes,” Crader said. “I can understand, even if I can’t condone.”

“Last Friday I tried to kill Vander Defoe,” Frost said, speaking softly. “I’d been back from Venus only two days, but I knew it was something I had to do. I waited outside the New White House with a painless anesthesia gun loaded with poison. But it was raining, and some secretary came up to walk with him, and so I couldn’t do it.”

Crader felt that he was very close. “And then on Monday?”

“On Monday, nothing. I didn’t kill him.”

Crader sighed in frustration. “Then why did you leave the city the following day?”

“Because I heard he was dead. There was no longer any reason to stay.”

“All right.” There seemed nothing more to say. “What about me? Why was I kidnaped like this?”

“That’s something you’ll have to ask Graham. Suppose we join them in the garden?”

Graham Axman was just completing his breakfast with the burly seaman and the slender Chinese girl. He didn’t immediately offer to introduce either one, but he waved Crader to a foam-form chair. “Join us, join us! You must be hungry.”

Crader nodded. “I could use some juice and eggs.”

“You two manage to convince each other of anything?” Axman inquired.

“We talked,” Frost told him. “I think Mr. Crader understands our position.”

“What I don’t understand is my position,” Crader said, sipping the juice a brown-skinned servant had placed before him. “Am I to be released now, or perhaps dumped into the Indian Ocean with a weight around my ankles?”