The Transvection Machine (19 page)

Axman looked puzzled. “What was that?”

“You said when we were in Washington you’d tell me more about where the money came from.”

“So I did, didn’t I?” He thought about it, and then asked, “Do you want to come with me now?”

“Where to?”

“I’m going to meet the person you’re so interested in. The one with the money.”

“Count me in.”

Graham Axman smiled. “We have one other little task too. Or I should say two little tasks.”

“What are they?”

“First, we give the video news an anonymous tip that the transvection machine is a fraud. That’s all they’ll need to run the story to earth.”

Frost nodded agreement. “That’ll be one more machine gone from the world. And it’ll be a bit embarrassing to President McCurdy. Then what?”

“This is the really clever part. Once the news breaks, the president is certain to summon Carl Crader to the New White House for a meeting. We wait till the meeting is taking place, and then we take care of them both.”

Frost remembered what Gloria had told him. “With the explosive wafer Genet hid in Crader’s flightcase?”

“Ah—so you know!”

“I know.”

“You admit it’s the perfect plan? One signal from my high frequency transmitter and the flightcase explodes—right in the president’s office.”

“How do you know he’ll have it with him?”

“Crader never travels without it. He’s always shown carrying it on the video news.”

“Is it necessary to kill the president to achieve our goals?”

“We think so. McCurdy and the men around him, especially Maarten Tromp, are dedicated to the preservation of a computer technology. Chances are our wafer bomb would kill Tromp, too, and that would be all to the good.”

Frost said no more. He could see the man was beyond the point of weighing his actions. They went out to Axman’s electric car and headed across town, bound for some unidentified meeting place. The Sunday streets were not particularly crowded, but they drove slowly, as if watching for something. At last Axman pulled in at one of the domed vision-phone stations.

“This is as good a place as any to call from,” he told Frost.

“Call who?”

“The video news, about the transvection machine. We want it to break tomorrow, about the time we’re hitting the Federal Medical Center, and it’ll probably take them that long to check out the story.”

Frost nodded. “I’ll wait here.”

Axman felt in his pocket. “Give me your handkerchief to hold over the video lens. Sometimes in these public booths the off switch doesn’t work.”

Frost handed it over and watched while Axman entered a booth. Then he slid out of the car and walked quickly to a booth on the other side. He only had a minute, and he didn’t even know the number he wanted.

The operator came on the screen, a handsome black girl with large eyes. “Can I help you with your call, sir?”

“I want Carl Crader, at the office of the Computer Investigation Bureau in New York.”

“I doubt if he’ll be there on a Sunday, sir.”

“I’ll leave a message on the tape.”

“Yes sir.”

The screen went blank for a moment and Frost twisted around in the booth, trying to locate Axman. There was no sign of him yet. Then the screen lit again and he was staring into Carl Crader’s unshaven face.

“Crader.”

The older man peered at his vision-phone screen. “Is that you, Frost?”

“I didn’t think you’d be in on a Sunday.”

“Been here all night. What? …”

“Don’t talk—just listen! There’s an explosive wafer hidden in your flightcase.”

“In my…”

He saw Axman leaving the booth on the other side of the car, and his hand came down hard on the button, breaking the connection. He stepped out of the booth and stood by the car, taking a deep breath.

“What are you doing?” Axman inquired.

“Just breathing the air. On a Sunday it’s not half bad.”

Axman nodded. “Get in the car. I don’t want to be around in case they put a reverse tracer on the call.”

“You got the video news? What did you tell them?”

“That the transvection machine was a fake. That the Chang girl was twins. That they should check the machine for a hidden compartment.”

“Think they believed you?”

“They’ll believe me when they’ve had time to check it out. And that’s all I want.”

They drove out the Chesapeake Beltway, going faster now. Moving silently along the studded highway, the little electric car seemed to take on a life of its own.

“How far is it?” Frost asked after a time.

“Not far.”

Presently they turned off, moving down the ramp to a part of the city Frost did not know. Axman parked the car and they got out.

Glancing up at the towering apartments, Frost asked, “This it?”

“We’re meeting near here. Come on.”

They went into a little private park where a musically activated fountain was playing its waters gently to an old twentieth-century ballad. They sat at a free-form table surrounded by plastic bushes and waited. “Isn’t this awfully public?” Frost asked.

“Polarized roof. It lets in the daylight, but keeps out prying eyes. And this place is never used on Sundays. The kids are all inside scanning.” He grunted at the thought. “Remember when kids used to play outdoors? They did once, you know, before the machines.”

Presently a door in the side wall opened and a woman came out, walking purposefully toward their table. She was about thirty, and still quite handsome. Axman rose and greeted her with a kiss. “This is Euler Frost,” he told the woman. “Citizen of Venus. You know about him. Euler, this is one of the chief patrons of HAND—Mrs. Gretel Defoe.”

“I
DO LOVE A
man with a beard,” she told Axman, after they’d kissed, echoing the words she’d spoken once to Hubert Ganger. Then she turned her attention to the man at his side. Euler Frost was handsome and obviously sure of himself.

His deep-set eyes were almost a match for Axman’s, though they lacked his demonic fire.

“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Defoe,” he said quietly.

“You may call me Gretel. Everyone does.” She eyed him up and down with interest. “I understand you tried to kill my husband.”

“I …” Frost began, obviously unsure of himself.

She chuckled at his embarrassment. “Never fear—I had much the same idea myself. In fact, if you’d succeeded, it would have saved someone else the trouble.”

“Did you kill him?” he asked.

“No, but I would like to think that all of the money I’ve given to HAND was somehow responsible for his death.”

Axman slipped his arm easily around her waist. They seemed a pair, somehow, and she could see by Frost’s eyes that he knew they were lovers. “Gretel has done a great deal for HAND,” Axman told him. “For several months she has been blackmailing her husband with the knowledge that the transvection machine is a fraud. In fact, it was the hints she gave me that led us to the Chang sisters and the full truth. Each month, Gretel has been giving us the ten thousand dollars blackmail she received from her husband.”

“We appreciate that,” Frost told her. “But then it’s too bad he died.”

“Not at all,” she answered with a smile. “As I said, I had the idea of killing him myself. You see, with Vander out of the way, the government will be forced to hire Hubert Ganger to continue experiments on the machine. He’s the only other one who knows how it works.” She smiled slightly. “Or how it doesn’t work.”

Axman frowned at her words. “But … but you never told me you were planning anything like that!”

“Did I need to? Hubert and I will have all the money from the government contract—enough to run away, far away, as Vander was planning to do.”

“Ganger is your lover too?”

“Did you think a woman like me could be satisfied with but one man, Graham? At times I think I must take all the males of creation as my lovers.” She turned her gaze toward Euler Frost as she spoke.

“But what about HAND?”

“Oh, I will still be generous to you, as I have been in the past, Graham.”

He seemed pale as he said, “The government won’t be hiring Ganger.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because they’ll know by tomorrow that the transvection machine is a fraud.”

She heard the words and for an instant did not understand them. “What do you mean? Hubert will never tell them.”

Axman licked his dry lips. “I’ve told the video news, Gretel. It’ll be all over the world by tomorrow.”

“You told …” She still couldn’t understand his words clearly. “But they won’t believe you! They believe in the transvection machine! Everyone believes in it.”

“They won’t, Gretel, when they know where to look for the hidden compartments. By tomorrow they’ll have checked it out.”

“Why … you … damned … fool!”

“Gretel, how was I to know about you and Ganger?”

The fury was mounting within her until she could no longer contain it. She lashed out with her palm, striking him with a sharp crack across his bearded cheek. “Do you know what you’ve done to me, you bastard? All that money …”

“But HAND can go on without it now! Tomorrow morning we hit the Federal Medical Center. After that there’ll be money from everywhere. We’ll be famous!”

“Do you think I give a damn about HAND?” she shouted at him. Then she turned and ran from them, stumbling blindly against the stands of green plastic bushes that circled the fountain. When she reached the door she slammed it shut behind her.

Bastards! All bastards! Now Ganger would never get the government job. In fact, they’d probably come after him, try to hang Vander’s sins around his neck—and hers. In the end they would have to flee into exile anyway, but without the money they might have had, without even the hundred thousand dollars she’d given Axman for HAND. It was all gone now, because that bearded bastard had called the video news.

She reached her apartment and slid the door shut after her. Perhaps it was partly her fault after all, dropping hints to Axman and others about the transvection machine. It had been a game, and such a pleasing game, while it lasted. And all that money! Money enough so that she could give it away, scatter it to the winds, because she thought there’d always be more.

She tried to reach Hubert Ganger on the vision-phone, but there was no answer, no message awaiting her call. She wondered where he was, and what he’d been doing since he went to the hospital to question that nurse. Reading the videonews hourly printout the previous evening, she’d cursed him as a fool for having to kill the nurse. Simmons—Bonnie Simmons—that had been the girl’s name. Cute looking girl. Probably Vander hadn’t told her anything at all. But why had Hubert killed her, then?

Was it possible that Hubert had murdered Vander for her after all, despite his denials? She went back to the vision-phone and tried his apartment again, but there was still no answer. Frustrated, lonely, wanting someone to talk with, to love with, she prowled the rooms like a caged tigress.

Finally she reached the bathroom, where she knew she’d been headed all along. Her hands trembled as she ejected a laudanum tablet into her palm. Yes, this would give her some relief, somehow. She took another, and then another.

All that money …

She collapsed on the bed, drifting helplessly through a world both familiar and strange. At one point, after several hours, she roused herself and sought out the electric lance, but even this brought her no pleasure now. She found the bottle of laudanum tablets again and swallowed more, losing count of the number she’d taken.

The room was spinning around, and her mouth was fuzzy with fur. Her skin bristled and her body shot up through a great wave, bursting with the blossoms of a thousand sunflowers seeking their creator. It was further than she’d ever gone before, and she wondered if the wave would bring her down again.

Presently the darkness came, and then the light. It was morning, of some day, some week, and feeling the fire in her stomach she knew with some primitive sort of earth-knowledge that she was dying. Dying and living, living and dying. Both together and separate.

She could view it all as a stranger now, circling above the wave, waiting to be plucked to the clouds. And thinking, remembering, she knew there was an act she must perform before death overtook her. One last act to avenge herself on that bastard Axman.

She rolled over on the bed, struggling to right herself, fighting through the hazy web of nothingness. Federal Medical Center. Yes.

With her last bit of strength she reached for the vision-phone, wondering if she still had time, wondering what day it was, what life it was.

“W
HAT IN HELL IS
it?” Earl Jazine asked, staring at the sliver-thin piece of white plastic that Crader held between his thumb and forefinger. “If you were a priest I’d swear it was a communion wafer.”

“It is a wafer of sorts,” Crader explained. “An explosive wafer, of a type used by space engineers. It makes a very effective weapon for terrorists, since it can be easily hidden almost anywhere and set off by radio waves from hundreds of miles away.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“Euler Frost called me yesterday and said it was hidden in my flightcase. I found it behind the inner lining.”

Jazine whistled softly. “How’d it get there?”

“I suppose Gloria Chang’s twin sister put it there. Remember, I told you I saw her coming out of my room on Plenish, but I couldn’t figure what she’d been up to.”

“If HAND planted it on you, why should Frost warn you about it?”

Crader nibbled at his bottom lip, thinking about it. “I’m not really certain, unless he’s had a falling-out with HAND over some of their methods.”

Jazine reached out his hand and gently took the explosive wafer. “Is it still activated?”

“No, we bombarded it with gamma-five rays. It’s just a piece of plastic now.”

They were in the rocketcopter, headed for a presidential meeting postponed from the previous day. When Maarten Tromp had informed Crader that President McCurdy was spending the weekend at his Caribbean retreat, it was thought best not to disturb him with news of the transvection machine.