“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.”
“That’s what we’re waiting to hear.”
“I first met Vander Defoe at a transportation seminar in Krakow. He was already something of an inventor, and fairly well known to the scientific community. He was middle-aged, just married for the second time, and obviously anxious to try something new—not only with women but with his career as well. We became close friends, and I told him of my ideas for a transvection machine. They were all theory at that point, but Vander was quite excited. Before long we’d formed a corporation, and leased laboratory space at the Kansas Research Center.”
“You honestly believed in the transvection machine?” Crader asked him.
“I believed in it as a theoretical possibility. I’ll admit I was somewhat taken aback by Vander’s enthusiasm for the project. We had long discussions about it, and I certainly told him it would never work in outer space. It was around this time that we split up. I was suspicious of his intentions, I’ll admit, but when he performed the first experiments for government witnesses I was the first to praise him. It wasn’t till afterward that I had my suspicions.”
“Gretel Defoe said you were a fraud,” Jazine reminded him.
The bearded man shifted
uncomfortably in his form-fit chair. “I said I was suspicious. But I never did anything wrong. Those damned magic tricks were all his doing. There’s no law against pursuing a theory, no matter how farfetched. I enjoyed talking about it with him, arguing with him.”
“It was a dreamworld for you,” Crader said simply.
“No, no! It was more than that. It might have worked.”
“But Defoe couldn’t wait. He made it work.”
Ganger nodded. “I was out of it by that time, as I’ve said. I suppose I knew it was a fraud, but I kept hoping at times that he’d actually done it. I really cursed him when he pulled off that trick with the Chinese girl. That was taking too big a risk.”
“And Gretel Defoe?”
“We turned to each other. Vander had the transvection machine. She and I had nothing.”
“But she knew it was a fraud.”
“Yes. She knew.”
“Why should she protect a man who wanted to divorce her?”
“He wanted a divorce because she was a drug addict, because she’d taken a variety of lovers.”
“Including yourself.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Including myself. Not at first, but later.”
“Who told Gretel the transvection machine was a fraud?”
“I don’t know.”
Crader leaned forward above his desk, pressing the attack. “Isn’t it true, Ganger, that you told her about it? That you kept her from agreeing to the divorce? That you both protected Defoe because you were blackmailing him?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“We think you’d better. You’re in deep trouble, Ganger. Even if we can’t link you directly with Defoe’s death, we can make a pretty good case linking you with the murder of Nurse Simmons. At the very least we could have you exiled to Venus for the rest of your natural life.”
“I had nothing to do with the nurse getting killed!”
“Then why were you at the hospital, dressed as a doctor?”
He looked around, perhaps seeking some method of escape. Crader braced himself for sudden movement, but after a moment Ganger relaxed. “Gretel asked me to go there,” he said quietly.
“For what purpose?”
“There were some things missing from Defoe’s clothing when it was returned to her. She thought they might be keeping them in the emergency room.”
“What sort of things?”
“Some letters she’d written him.”
“Blackmail letters?”
“I suppose so.”
“You know so, don’t you?”
Ganger was approaching the crumbling point. He twisted in his chair, stood up, walked a few feet in a circle, and then sat down again. “She sent him two speedletters several months ago, just after he joined the cabinet. She demanded ten thousand dollars a month from him, or she threatened to tell the world the transvection machine was a fraud.”
“I see. Go on.”
He twisted his hands in his lap. “Well, even the suggestion of such a thing would have ruined Vander, because once scientists became suspicious they could easily examine the machines and discover the secret compartments. Vander’s whole scheme depended upon his remaining completely above suspicion.”
“So he paid her the money?”
Ganger nodded. “He sent a computerized bank transfer from his account to hers, each month, for ten thousand dollars.”
Jazine gave a low whistle. “But that’s more than he made as a cabinet member.”
“You forget the money Congress appropriated to develop the transvection machine. His company was getting that, and he was pocketing most of it, since very little real work was ever done on the machine. Maybe you remember that Congress specifically excluded him from the conflict-of-interest laws because he was the only person who could develop the invention.”
“But it’s fantastic,” Jazine argued. “Congress would have been investigating him within a year.”
“Probably. But other government frauds, on greater or lesser scales, have gone unnoticed for several years. And as I already told you, he was prepared to flee the country as an exile as soon as the truth came out. Meanwhile, it was worth ten thousand dollars a month to him, and many times that amount, to keep Gretel quiet as long as possible.”
“What did she do with all that money?” Jazine asked. “She hardly needed that much to keep her in men and laudanum tablets.”
Ganger shot him a glance, perhaps weighing how much he knew. “She gave me none of it, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“But she sent you for those letters. How did she know he carried them with him?”
“She knew he’d never leave them in his office, the way the government spies on its own people these days. The same went for his apartment. He might simply have destroyed them, but she couldn’t take the chance they were still around waiting to be found. So she sent me to the hospital.”
“Why did you agree to go, if you were getting no money out of it?”
Ganger shrugged his shoulders. “The transvection machine was mine originally. Frankly, I expected the government to come to me for help on it, now that Vander was dead. Once they discovered it was a fraud, there’d be no chance of that. So it was in my interests to keep the truth a secret.”
“All that money from the government contract—a nice motive for killing Vander Defoe.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Did Gretel?”
He hesitated. “She talked about it—the very afternoon of his death. But I wouldn’t go along with it.”
Crader had come alert. “Did she know about the operation in advance?”
Ganger nodded. “Tromp called her from the New White House when they rushed Vander to the hospital.”
“And what did she do?”
“Nothing. Thought about it, I suppose. I left her shortly after that.”
“You were not together at the time of Defoe’s death?”
“No.”
“So either of you might have killed him.”
“I didn’t, and I’m sure she didn’t, either.”
Crader cleared his throat. It had been a long night, but there were still questions to be asked. “Those letters wouldn’t have remained in the emergency ward. Isn’t it far more likely that you went to the hospital thinking that Nurse Simmons had them?”
“I …”
“And confronted her in the operating room and killed her?”
His hands flew up, protectively. “No! She was dead before I got there! That’s why I went to the lunchroom, to hide! There were police all over the place.”
“But you were going to see her?”
“Gretel wanted me to! She thought the nurse had the letters.”
“Why?”
“She thought the nurse must have killed him, and that was the only motive we could think of.”
“That Nurse Simmons killed him to get those letters and blackmail you two? Blackmail the blackmailers? A pretty farfetched motive for murder.”
“She wanted me to see.”
“All right,” Crader said with a sigh. “But I think we can assume Defoe destroyed the letters.”
Ganger got to his feet once more. “Can I go now?”
Carl Crader motioned to Jazine. “Not quite yet. We’re holding you until a decision is made in Washington. You could be charged with fraud, if nothing else.”
“You don’t want it to get out about the transvection machine!”
“I’m afraid it’s out already,” Crader told him. “An organization called HAND knows the whole story. In fact, they’re the ones who told me.”
Arrangements were made to house Hubert Ganger in a detention cell at the federal internment center on Ellis Island, at least overnight until word came from Washington. It was 4:00 A.M. by the time the details had been attended to, and Crader saw no point in making the journey back home. Not wanting to awaken his wife, he left her a message on the videophone holding line and settled down in his office. Jazine helped
him arrange the emergency bed that slid out from the wall of his inner office.
“I haven’t used this in two years,” Crader complained. “I’m getting too damn old for this all-night business.”
“Come on up to my place, chief. The bed’s a cycled job, a lot more comfortable than this spring thing.”
But Crader shook his head. “Take me too long to get there. I have to reach President McCurdy first thing in the morning and break the news to him.”
“Did HAND really tell you about the transvection machine?”
“In a sense. When they introduced me to the Chinese girl, Gloria Chang, they said she was the reason they didn’t need to kill Ganger. Later, they gave me a message for the president—telling him Gloria was on their side, working with them. They assumed the USAC knew the machine was a fake, you see. I’d just left them and returned to my hotel when I thought I saw Gloria coming out of my room. She was dressed differently and didn’t seem to know me, and the more I thought about it the more I suspected twins. When Mike Sabin came up with the news that Gloria was the transvected girl, it all fit together. Twins meant a trick, a fraud, and that in turn explained why HAND didn’t need to kill Ganger to stop the machine. They knew now there was no machine to stop.”
“How will they use their knowledge?”
“I wish to hell I knew, Earl. All I can tell you is they mean business. They’ve got money behind them and they plan to destroy our computerized society as we know it.”
“Where’s the money coming from?”
“One more mystery. Until recently they were just a disorganized band of revolutionaries. Now they’ve got a name and a purpose.”
“Russo-Chinese?”
“Somehow I doubt it. They talk as much against them as against the USAC.”
“You think HAND is responsible for killing Bonnie Simmons?”
“That depends on how much we believe Ganger’s story. Right now I don’t know. There are a few other possibilities.”
“Like what, chief?”
Crader smiled and began to undress. “Go home, Earl. You’ve probably got a girl waiting up for you.”
“Not tonight,” Earl said with a grin.
The Transvection Machine Page 14