The Transvection Machine (17 page)

“That’s why you were trying to blackmail her?”

He sighed and stared down at his coffee. “I don’t expect you to believe this, but there was no blackmail involved. Bonnie was meeting me quite willingly yesterday when you happened to catch us together.”

“Then why did you slug me?”

“I told you—I was startled. I thought you were a mugger.”

“Or a detective hired by your wife?”

He shrugged. “That too.”

“You hadn’t offered to cover up Bonnie’s delay in pressing the alarm button?”

“All I can say is that I wasn’t forcing her to come with me. I loved her, and I think she was beginning to love me.”

“And you have no idea who killed her? It couldn’t have been a rejected suitor?”

“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Your face was pretty white when you came through that operating room door,” Jazine reminded him.

“Naturally it was! I knew the room hadn’t been used since Defoe’s death. I couldn’t imagine who’d be ringing the alarm button.”

“But you always seem to be first on the scene, don’t you?”

“My office is just below the operating room, by the stairs. If the floor nurse is away from her video monitoring console, which she usually is, then I’m the closest one if the alarm sounds.”

“Did you see anyone go up those stairs before the killing?”

“No. My back is to the hall when I’m at my desk, and of course there are other ways of getting up there.”

“But you’ll admit that Bonnie’s killer must have been someone from the hospital?”

“Not at all. In fact, it’s more likely that someone from outside the hospital would have looked for her, and found her, in that operating room. Everyone from the hospital knew she didn’t work in there any longer, and that the room was not in use.”

“Any idea what she was doing there?”

“None. Maybe the killer lured her. I don’t know.”

Jazine pressed the coffee dispenser in the center of the table and waited while his warming-cup filled. “Did she have any ideas about Defoe’s death?”

“Nothing she didn’t tell you. She had pretty much decided the machine wasn’t to blame.”

Jazine was sipping his coffee, letting his eyes roam about the big, sterile lunchroom, when his gaze settled on a familiar figure just coming in the door. He could hardly believe it, but there was no mistaking the slim man with the close-cropped blond hair and beard. It was Hubert Ganger, wearing a green hospital smock over his street clothes.

“Excuse me,” Jazine said, and left the table with a rush.

Ganger turned and saw him coming. He sprinted for the door, but Jazine was on top of him, grabbing him around the middle and wrestling him to the floor amidst a clatter of toppling trays. A nurse screamed and two doctors tried to separate them, but Jazine clung to his prey. “Let me go!” Ganger gasped out.

Jazine got one hand free and showed his identification. “CBI—this man is my prisoner.” Then, to Ganger, he said, “Come on. There’s somebody in New York who wants to see you.”

Carl Crader had already gone home for the day to the suburban apartment he shared with his wife. Their three children were grown and married, scattered in various locations around the world, and Jazine knew that Crader liked to spend as much time as possible with his wife. But when he learned that Ganger had been taken into custody and flown to New York, he made immediate arrangements to return to the office by rocketcopter.

The old World Trade Center buildings took on a special life of their own at night, towering above everything on the south end of Manhattan, glowing with lights like a beacon for atomic liners. Though the CIB offices were mainly empty, Judy had come back to work from her nearby apartment, and Mike Sabin had flown in with Jazine and their prisoner. Sitting in Carl Crader’s office, awaiting his arrival, Jazine felt again the magic of the place at night.

“Great view with all the lights,” he said. To the west, beyond the towers of New Jersey City, the flares of the mail rockets curved in gentle arcs toward the earth.

“It’s something at night,” Judy conceded. “By day it’s only towers and people and machines. After dark it comes alive. It becomes a
thing
—all one, connected in its parts.”

“Rocketcopter coming in,” Mike Sabin called from the other window. “It must be the chief.”

Carl Crader descended the spiral staircase, looking tired but alert. He glanced at the chair where Hubert Ganger sat, and then asked Jazine, “Where did you find him?”

“Salk Memorial. I tackled him in the lunchroom. He was sneaking around in a doctor’s smock.”

Carl Crader nodded, showing no surprise on his wrinkled face. “Suppose you tell us about it, Ganger.”

“I have nothing to tell. This man arrested me without cause, and I intend to press charges for false arrest and abduction.”

“Please—you’re wasting time. Shortly before Earl recognized you at the hospital, a girl was murdered there. Her name was Bonnie Simmons and she was the nurse who handled Vander Defoe’s ill-fated operation. If you were involved in Defoe’s death, that would give you an excellent reason for returning to the hospital to kill Nurse Simmons.”

“I never even met the girl!”

“People often kill strangers. Mrs. Defoe met her, apparently, after her husband’s death.”

“Then ask Mrs. Defoe! Don’t ask me!”

“What were you doing there?” Crader pressed.

“I’m damned if I have to tell you! It was personal business.”

“Did it concern the transvection machine?” Jazine interrupted. “I’ve suspected for some time, chief, that Ganger might have used it to transvect himself into that operating room and kill Defoe. Maybe he had some secret apparatus there which had to be removed. Maybe Bonnie Simmons caught him at it and he killed her.”

Hubert Ganger looked scornful. “And then remained at the hospital a couple of hours till you caught me, wise guy? Not a chance! Besides, I thought we went over all this at my apartment the other day. The transvection machine isn’t magic—it needs two terminals. In order for me to have rigged something in that operating room, I’d have had to know about the surgery days in advance.”

Carl Crader cleared his throat. “I’m willing to accept the fact that the transvection machine wasn’t used to kill Vander Defoe. But I’m not willing to accept the fact that it isn’t magic. In fact, magic is just what it is, Ganger, and you know it. The transvection machine never existed. It’s been a gigantic fraud from beginning to end.”

Earl Jazine opened his mouth and stared at Crader in disbelief.

H
E WOULD RATHER HAVE
had the confrontation come at a more suitable hour—perhaps ten in the morning, when he had his wits about him. But those things couldn’t be planned, and now, facing Ganger across his desk at an hour approaching midnight, he knew it was the right moment. “Do you want to tell us about it?” he asked the bearded man.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ganger replied, but there were drops of moisture on his forehead. “Defoe took over my invention. I don’t know what he might have done with it.”

“But you know there never was an invention—only a fraud of an especially clever sort. You knew Vander Defoe couldn’t make the transvection machine work, so he must have been continuing the fraud.”

“There were tests,” Ganger insisted. “Objects and animals and even a girl …”

“Clever magic tricks, of a type that’s all but disappeared from our entertainment media. Even government officials as high up as Tromp and the president believed in the transvection machine, because they’d never been exposed to the type of trickery Defoe used. Let me take the example of the Rhesus monkey, since the same technique would have been used on earlier transvectings of inanimate objects. The monkey was identified by a serial number tattooed on one ear, and was well known to Professor Van Dyke at the laboratory here.”

“I read about that,” Jazine remembered.

Crader nodded. “Vander Defoe and Professor Van Dyke loaded the monkey in a carrying case and Defoe flew with it to Boston. It would have been a simple matter for him to substitute monkeys—to have the same tattooed number on both—a simple matter for a good magician anyway.”

“Who said Defoe was a good magician?” Ganger wanted to know.

“I’ll get to that in a moment. First let me describe the monkey trick and how it was done. You see, the table-top model of the transvection machine is simply a vaultlike container mounted on a large metal box. The box is the secret of it, not the wires and computer terminal and photoelectric cells which are just so much window-dressing. Professor Van Dyke’s Rhesus monkey was hidden inside that metal box, given a timed sleeping injection so it wouldn’t raise a fuss, and then Defoe flew to Boston with the substitute monkey in his carrying case. Once it was in the case, Professor Van Dyke couldn’t have seen the monkey very well. The substitution would have been easy. In Boston, at the moment he placed the false monkey into his transvection machine, Defoe simply sent a radio signal to the New York machine. The monkey wasn’t moved from Boston to New York—only put to sleep and hidden in the bottom of the machine. The radio signal aroused the sleeping Rhesus and raised him into the vaultlike interior through a false floor panel. Professor Van Dyke had his monkey back, apparently transvected from Boston to New York. The earlier transvection of the cigar box worked in much the same manner.”

“You think you can prove this?” Ganger demanded. “It’s all surmise, the worst sort of conjecture!”

“Oh, it’s more than that,” Crader told him. “I think even Defoe’s wife knew about it. After she’d taken narcotics she spoke to Earl here about some fraud—the biggest fraud she ever knew. She said you were a fraud, Ganger, and of course what she meant was that the transvection machine was a fraud. You or Defoe—or both of you—had let her in on the secret. And then there was Defoe himself. You knew him so well you probably weren’t aware of it, but he had a distinct mannerism that came over in his video appearances. He liked to run coins through his fingers, palming them, multiplying them, doing unconscious magic tricks with them. Vander Defoe was an amateur magician—an almost forgotten art in the middle of the twenty-first century.”

“All right,” Ganger conceded, “so he did a little magic. But that monkey trick wouldn’t have worked with the girl. For one thing the transvection machine was full size, without any bottom compartment. And human beings don’t look quite so much alike as monkeys.”

Carl Crader smiled. “They do if they’re twins.”

“
Twins!
”

“That’s right. It was a stunt used by some magicians in the last century, and I even believe Chinese girls were used at that time too. The girl who was transvected is named Gloria Chang. She was born in San Francisco twenty-four years ago of Chinese-American parents, but was raised and educated back in China. I fed her name into my intelligence computer and came up with a fact that the video newsmagazines missed at the time of the transvecting. There were two Chang girls born twenty-four years ago in San Francisco—twin girls, in fact. The other was named Genet Chang. I submit that Vander Defoe’s full-sized transvection machine was simply a magician’s trick cabinet, with a false back concealing space enough for a slim girl to hide herself. I imagine the wall of photoelectric cells conceals this space quite nicely. One Chang sister entered the transvection machine in Washington, and the other sister stepped out of the one in Calcutta.”

“And they believed it?” Jazine marveled. “Why didn’t anyone tumble to the truth?”

Carl Crader cleared his throat. This was the most difficult part. This was the part that was not so much factual as psychological. “They believed it, Earl, because they believed in the
machine
! How many times in this case have you and I come up against the same sort of belief? I can sit here at my desk and order a printout of a person’s entire life history in seconds. Men and women—people like Vander Defoe himself—submit to surgery by computerized machine. There are automated factories and computerized airbuses. The stock exchange and the Internal Revenue Service run by computer. Our music is composed by machine and our weather is controlled automatically. We live in a society where no one ever questions the power of the machine. And so no one really questioned Vander Defoe. Oh, there were some like Professor Van Dyke who started out by scoffing at it. But they were won over by the demonstrations—and won over without ever fully understanding how the transvection was accomplished.”

“But what was he trying to do?” Jazine asked.

“The same thing as any con man, I suppose. Money, power. Of course he didn’t know that the government would become interested in the device for interplanetary travel, or that he’d be appointed to a cabinet post. But he was hardly in a position to turn it down and admit his fraud. He left himself an out on the Venus experiments, because even he professed doubt about them. He could always say that the transvection machine would only work on Earth.”

“He could only continue his experiments for a certain length of time, though, chief. Sooner or later people would have wanted to use the thing. Sooner or later scientists would have demanded details of how it worked.”

“And by that time Vander Defoe would have been wealthy enough to leave the country and spend the rest of his life in happy exile. The government budget for development of the transvection machine is millions of dollars this year. Even a small part of that in a single twelve-month period would last Vander Defoe for life.”

Ganger spoke up again. “Remember me? I was forced out of the company when Defoe took over. Part of those millions could have been mine. Are you saying that I would have allowed Defoe to become a cabinet member and the toast of Washington without revealing his fraud?”

“You would have allowed it if it was to your advantage—if you were being paid enough to keep quiet. Then the cards would all be in your hand. Profit without risk. When Defoe was discovered, you’d be in the clear.”

Hubert Ganger glanced from Crader to Jazine, and then to Judy. He seemed to be weighing the verdict of some unofficial jury. Finally he said, “All right, I’ll tell you what I know.”