The Transvection Machine

by Edward D. Hoch

  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 w
ho 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.”

  “But these are not crimes against the planet,” Folger pointed out. “They are not crimes that soil the land, like pollution, nor rip it apart, like war.”

  “Those need people,” Fergana agreed. “Great masses of people, arriving as fast as the transvection machine could bring them.”

  Euler Frost nodded. It was Manitoba all over again. The rocketcopter had been the forerunner of a tide of industrial might geared to the rape of the land and the expulsion of the Indian. His father had died fighting against it. Now this transvection machine could do the same to the yet-unsoiled lands of Venus. “We can fight it,” he said quietly. “Destroy it.”

  “But how?”

  “You could guide us through the sentry posts,” Frost told Folger. “It would be simple after that.”

  “Yes …”

  They thought about it, making their plans, acting first only like children plotting some elaborate charade. In those early days it was doubtful if any of them except Frost really wanted to risk the freedom they’d so carefully won by launching an attack on a machine. “The thing might not even work,” someone argued. “Let’s wait till they test it before we think about destroying it.”

  But Frost had too many memories of the machines of Earth. “Once they know it works on Venus, they’ll send a dozen of them up here—a hundred! It’ll be too late to destroy it then.”

  The Bull nodded in agreement, but he said nothing. Finally it was decided they would wait until Folger’s next foray for food, in hopes he could learn more information.

  But that night, late, Frost was awakened by Fergana at his side. “Euler, I can’t find the Bull! I think he’s gone alone to wreck the transvection machine!”

  He was wide awake. “Let’s get Folger.”

  The three of them searched quickly beneath the dome, but there were not that many places in which a person could hide. “His pressure suit’s gone,” Folger said at last. “I guess you’re right, Fergana.”

  “How does he hope to do it?” she asked, more of herself than the others. “He doesn’t know how to get by the sentry posts.”

  Frost placed a gentle arm on her shoulders. “I think somehow he’s doing it for you, Fergana. He wants to show you something.”

  She looked up at him, and there were tears in her eyes.

  They did not have long to wait before the Bull’s fate became clear to them. A party of USAC troops surrounded the dome at morning, flashing their lights like a dozen rising suns, and Frost gazed out through the plastic walls at the unfamiliar sight of laser guns and stunners. “We call upon you to surrender!” a voice boomed out through an amplified suit speaker. “In the name of the government of the United States and Canada, we demand your surrender!”

  Folger cursed and scurried about for a weapon. He returned in a moment with two empty air tanks—slim metal cylinders that fit well into the hand and could pack a wallop if used against someone’s head. “Think we’ll get close enough to use these?” Frost asked him.

  “We’ll see.”

  “You are surrounded!” the voice boomed again. “Come out!”

  Before Frost knew what was happening, Fergana was through the air lock and out there with them. He never knew whether she intended to surrender or was simply driven by rage at the apparent fate of the Bull. All he knew was that she was running—running toward the nearest of the garrison troops. In her pressure suit, all sex was anonymous. The soldier must have seen only an enemy running toward him. He turned and fired his stunner, at a range of five feet.

  The weapons were not meant to kill, but at that range, in the thick atmosphere of Venus, the effect was deadly. Fergana was hurled back onto the rocks, where she crumpled like a broken toy. Frost knew before he reached her that she was dead. He turned, facing the man with the stunner, realizing that he was alone. Fergana was gone and the others, still struggling with their pressure suits, were useless. In that moment it was him against the enemy. While the soldier recocked the stunner for another shot, Frost leaped at him, bringing the empty air tank down on the man with a fury close to insanity.

  It was like his father all over again, and he knew he would have killed the copter pilot if he had been there that day too. It was a time when words ran out, when cold fury took possession of a man and he could only strike out and batter the enemy.

  The man went down before his blows, the pressure suit ripping with a great gasp of air. Frost staggered to his feet and turned to face the others, still clutching his weapon. The blasts from two stunners hit him almost simultaneously, toppling him backward into a great black void.

  Fergana and the soldier were the only ones who died that day on Venus. The Bull had been captured at the initial sentry port, and had admitted under psycho-questioning that the others were living in the mountain colony. He had been returned with the other Russo-Chinese to their own colony for punishment.

  Frost had awakened two days later in the USAC Colony hospital, still suffering from the impact of the stunners. He didn’t see Folger or the others again, though he heard later that Folger was being returned to a prison on Earth. Frost wondered about this and thought it odd, especially when he was tried and convicted of killing the soldier, and sentenced to an indeterminate term in the maximum security prison on Venus.

  The prison itself was something of a wonder to behold. It was, in essence, a series of simple cells constructed beneath a small dome, and set perhaps a mile away from the main domes of the colony. There were no guards at the prison, since its air lock was guarded by electronic proximity devices like the colony’s own sentry posts. Escape was impossible without sounding
the alarm, and even then it would be impossible to leave the dome without a pressure suit. A single video camera monitored the exercise area, but it was a simple matter to avoid its gaze.

  Euler Frost was alone in the prison, though it had a capacity of two dozen men. He knew it had been used in the past, but quite often minor crimes were punished at the garrison lockup in the main colony, and the maximum security prison was used only for the most major of offenses. In a colony of twenty thousand inhabitants there were not many of these. Until now, there had been only two killings among the residents of the USAC Colony, both involving drinking and drugs on a Saturday night.

  And so Frost had the prison to himself, roaming the twenty-four empty cells at will, searching out hidden messages left scrawled on walls by earlier inmates. He was visited every two weeks by guards who left him a fortnight’s supply of food and drink and occasional beer, but otherwise he saw no living person during the months of his confinement. He could only stand by one of the plastic walls, as he often did, and stare across the plain at the distant domes of the colony.

  He thought often of Fergana, remembering how she’d looked in death, crumpled to the ground by a mortal blow. He thought of Folger too, and wondered why he’d been sent back to Earth. Perhaps he’d been ill, in need of treatment. Here, in the maximum security prison, Frost had no medical supplies for himself. If illness struck, he had to press a button that would inform guards and doctors of his plight, then wait while they made the journey out to his dome. He had never pressed the button, though he often considered doing so, especially in the lonesome nights when his only companion was a scrawled message beneath one of the bunks: There is no escape from the computer! He wondered if a prisoner or a guard had placed it there.