“All right,” Maarten Tromp said, breathing hard. “I suspected that the transvection machine was a fake and Vander Defoe was a fraud. But I couldn’t have killed him. I was at the New White House all the time. What better alibi could I have than the president of the United States?”
“You killed him, Maarten, with a massive injection of a drug called heparin, which prevents coagulation of the blood. I saw it in your office medicine cabinet when we were treating Earl’s injuries, but it didn’t register on me right away. Heparin was popular with twentieth-century doctors for the treatment of thrombosis, but it’s rarely used today because the effects of a given dosage are so unpredictable and an overdose can prove fatal. You injected the drug with an anesthesia gun—the same weapon, oddly enough, that Frost here chose for his assassination attempt. Vander Defoe never felt a thing, and went calmly to his death at Salk Memorial. You see, our mistake was in assuming that the computerized operation was somehow rigged. Once I decided this wasn’t possible, I considered the only other possibility—that the patient had been rigged. That’s when I remembered your bottle of heparin. It was a spur-of-the-moment crime, of course, but when Defoe was stricken you saw your chance and took it. I assume you obtained both the drug and the anesthesia gun from Colonel Phley’s fully stocked office while he was doing the blood test on Defoe. And you were able to inject Defoe with the drug without either of them realizing what was happening. But you really should have returned the heparin afterward, instead of simply hiding it in your medicine cabinet.”
“You think they wouldn’t have recognized the effects of heparin at the hospital?”
“Oh, they recognized them, all right. Bonnie Simmons’s first thought was that Vander Defoe was a secret hemophiliac—a bleeder. Earl mentioned that to you, Maarten, and that’s when you decided she was getting too close to the truth. You could pretty much count on Ganger keeping quiet about the transvection machine, but the thought of Nurse Simmons and her hemophilia theory really sent you into a panic. It would have been too easy to trace the injection back to the White House and maybe even to you. So you went to Salk Memorial, sought her out, and killed her.”
“Guessing again,” Maarten Tromp said. The sound of explosions had ceased now, and there were only the shouts of men seeking them through the smoke.
“Not entirely, Maarten, Bonnie Simmons was killed in the operating room where she usually worked, but she was there only by chance. Everyone at the hospital knew she’d been relieved of her operating room duties, and that the room was not in use. The fact that the killer found her there was pure luck, and implied he was someone from outside the hospital. There was also a crude attempt to make it seem the surgical computer had killed her, even though the machine was disconnected from its power source. Again, that indicated the killer was an outsider. When I remembered what Earl told you about her hemophilia theory, I knew you had a motive. You see, I think Nurse Simmons was beginning to realize that the slashing effect of the computerized scalpel was caused by the sudden spurt of blood, rather than the other way around. The arm was thrown off program in reaction to the blood hitting it, as soon as the first vein was cut. After that, the scalpel simply added to the damage.”
“What about the doctor who examined Defoe and pronounced him dead? Wouldn’t he have noticed something?”
“Doctor Groton had his own reasons for remaining silent. He may have suspected Bonnie Simmons waited longer than she admitted before pushing the alarm button. And even if he suspected heparin he might have thought Defoe got it by accident in the hospital, when he received the spinal anesthetic in preparation for the operation. Groton was covering up, all right, but he was covering up for Salk Memorial and its staff. He didn’t want the death of a cabinet member laid at their door.”
Maarten Tromp moistened his lips. “The president will never buy that, Crader. He’ll stick by me.”
“Will he? Even after I tell him about you and Mrs. Defoe?”
He seemed to go to pieces then, as if this were the final blow. “What about her? What did that bitch tell you?”
“She didn’t have to tell me anything, Maarten. I found out that you called her with the news of Defoe’s seizure, before his operation. But Gretel Defoe had taken a new apartment, and even her husband didn’t know where she was living. If you could call her, that told me you were more than just casual friends. We know she had two lovers—Ganger and Axman. It’s logical you were a third one. That would also explain your first suspicions about the transvection machine—suspicions that probably made you seek out that video cassette on stage magic. Gretel Defoe dropped some hints about the machine to Axman, and that led him to Gloria Chang and her twin sister. Gretel even spoke of a giant fraud to Earl Jazine. It’s logical she also mentioned it to you, in one of her drugged stupors. That was all the hint you needed.”
Maarten Tromp turned to Frost, who still covered them with the guns. “Frost, listen to me—we’re in this together! We’re both his enemies! Kill him and we’re both free!”
“Kill him?” Euler Frost repeated.
Tromp nodded. “He could have died in the fighting. You can escape in the smoke and I’ll stay here. No one will ever know.”
“It won’t work, Maarten,” Crader told him. “We have Hubert Ganger, and he’s talking. The transvection machine story is on the video news. You know it’s all over for you. That’s why you came with us this morning, to escape the president’s wrath for a while, till you had time to think.”
“We’ll hire Ganger, put him on the government payroll!”
“Too late for that, Maarten. Too late for everything.”
But Tromp shook his head. “Not too late. Damn it, Frost—if you won’t kill him, give me the gun and I will!”
He took a step forward, reaching for the weapon in Euler Frost’s left hand. Without changing expression Frost turned slightly and fired the laser pistol directly at his chest. Maarten Tromp screamed and staggered and went down.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Carl Crader said, gasping now for breath as the smoke intensified.
“He didn’t deserve to live,” Frost answered simply. “No more than that man I killed on Venus.”
“That’s twice you’ve saved my life. I found the explosive wafer where you said.”
Frost nodded. He’d replaced the laser pistol in his belt. “I don’t approve of killing the innocents—only the guilty. I have to be going now. The voices are very close.”
Crader sighed. “You’re going on with this foolishness, this destruction of the machines?”
“Yes. We have to.”
“You won’t have many men after today.”
“We may have more, Crader, a great many more. The people are coming back to life on this Earth. The computer has had its day.”
“But what about our better life? It is better, you know, better than a couple of hundred years ago.”
“The better life is a fraud too, just like the transvection machine. Ask Gretel Defoe about the better life. Or Maarten Tromp.” He kicked at the body by his feet. “Are they creatures of the better life? Are they your computerized society?”
“Frost …”
But then another voice reached them, from quite close. It was Earl Jazine. “Chief, is that you? Are you all right?”
“In here, Earl!” he called out.
Euler Frost hesitated, still holding his stunner, and then retreated silently into the smoke. Jazine came in holding a portable smoke-defuser in one hand and his laser pistol in the other. “I heard voices, chief. Are there any of them still here?”
Crader hesitated. “No, there’re all gone, Earl. Except for a couple we managed to stun.”
“Is this Tromp?”
“He’s dead. He caught a laser in the chest. I’ll tell you about it.”
Jazine played the defuser toward the ceiling, driving the smoke outside. “We captured Axman and two others, but there’s no sign of Frost.”
“He was here,” Crader said. “But he g
ot away.”
“The president’s going to be sorry about Tromp.”
“Maybe not as sorry as you’d think, after we talk to him.”
They stepped outside, through the broken glass. The air was clearing now, and Crader could see more rocketcopters coming in for landing. They walked across the lawn to meet them.
“There was a lot of damage,” Jazine said. “Some of the computers are wrecked.”
“It’s only the beginning,” Crader told him. “There’ll be more.”
“And we’ll be fighting them, chief?”
“Fighting them?” Crader repeated, staring back at the smoke-blackened building. “Yes, I suppose so, Earl. But I almost think if I were a little bit younger I might be joining them.”
Turn the page to continue reading from the Carl Crader Mysteries
1 EARL JAZINE
THE CIRCUITS SPUN OFF in a dozen directions from the core unit, reminding Earl Jazine of an intricately filigreed spider’s web caught in the early morning sunshine. At another time he might have thought the sight pretty, but cramped as he was within the bowels of the FRIDAY-404 election computer there was little space or time for such aesthetic delights.
“All right,” he said into his wrist intercom, “start the power.”
There was a gentle hum in the wires about him, and his induction meters told him that all power was flowing smoothly. The core unit brightened and began to transmit. Jazine waited another five minutes and then squeezed backwards out of the machine.
“Find anything?” Rogers asked.
“Just that I need to lose weight if I’m going to stay in this line of work.” Jazine wiped the sweat from his hands. “The unit seems to be functioning perfectly. What you’ve got is a job for an electronics technician, not the Computer Cops.” He almost winced when he said the name, knowing how his boss Carl Crader hated it. But that was what the newsmen had dubbed the bureau, for better or worse, and Jazine admitted he found it a handy tag when describing his job.
“You don’t seem to understand the problem,” Harry Rogers said. He was young, just out of space college, and with all the assurance of youth. Jazine, at thirty-one, felt like an old man next to his boyish freshness.
“Is that so? Suppose you tell me again.”
“Well, sir, I was running a check on this unit for the November election and I ran into some preprogramming. That’s illegal, of course, so I reported it immediately to Washington. I guess they figured it was a job for the Computer Cops.”
“Sure,” Jazine agreed. Whenever somebody tampered with a stock market computer, or programmed surgery, or just the computerized parking meter at the jetport, it was a job for the Computer Cops. He was used to it by now, and sometimes the assignments were even interesting. This wasn’t one of the times. “Well, I’ll climb back inside and you do a read-out. I’ll see if we’re getting any feed off another system.”
“How could we get feed off another system?” the young man argued. “This is a closed circuit, regulated by the election laws!”
“Well, let’s just see now.”
There were certain advantages to computerized election returns, not the least of which was that the irregular vote-counting methods of the twentieth century were completely eliminated. Every voting machine in the United States of America and Canada was tied into the system, which enabled Washington and every home in the USAC to watch the actual tabulation as each vote was cast. There was a central FRIDAY-404 computer serving every 10,000 individual voting machines, and as the data came into it by microwave relay it was coded and transmitted to the skysphere satellite and then on to Washington. There television and teleprinters took over the task of transmitting the running totals into every American home.
The first presidential election to be fully computerized, back in 2032, had caused an uproar by showing Thurgood leading Stokes through most of the balloting. Then, as the votes from the West Coast and the ocean states drifted in, the tide suddenly turned. The next day Thurgood supporters were blaming their man’s defeat on the computerized results—claiming overconfident Thurgood supporters stayed home late in the day, while the trailing Stokes mustered his western people to win a victory in the final minutes of polling there.
But such a thing had never happened again, and the seesawing election battles of recent years had become more exciting than an antelope race. The incumbent, President McCurdy, had won reelection in a contest that saw the lead change twenty-two times in the course of the day. No one could complain that the new system failed to bring out the vote. Fully ten million more citizens were casting their ballots these days.
Of course the system meant one more job for the Computer Cops, who inherited the policing of elections from the Justice Department. An independent department situated in New York and reporting directly to the President, the Computer Investigation Bureau was responsible for the fairness of elections and the accuracy of the FRIDAY-404 system. With any voting machine, the easiest method of falsifying the returns was to cast a number of fraudulent ballots in advance, registering them on the machine before the actual vote began. Theoretically, the same thing could be done with the FRIDAY-404 through pre-programming, which was why young Rogers had been checking it out five weeks before the election. What he’d found had brought Earl Jazine to the scene.
“Power on,” Jazine said into his wrist intercom. “One more time.” He watched the central core for a moment and then said, “Now do a printout.”
When the computer had shut itself off automatically, he squeezed himself out again and took the sheet of printout symbols from the teleprinter.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
JASONBLUNTOOOOOO36455OOO
STANLEYAMBROSEOO4539OOOO
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Jazine frowned at the sheet of paper. “Give me a clear,” he said.
Rogers pressed another button and the teleprinter chattered some brief symbols.
JASON BLUNT 36455
STANLEY AMBROSE 45390
“Who the hell are Blunt and Ambrose?”
“It seems to be the results of some election. Maybe a local one from last year.”
Jazine shook his head. “The figures couldn’t stay in the machine this long, not after it was cleared.”
“So who would feed them in now, a month before election? And with those names! Who are they?”
“Neither one is running for president, I can tell you that,” Jazine said. “Let me take this back to New York and see what the boss thinks.”
“You agree with me finally that something’s wrong here?”
Jazine studied the printout again. “I agree that something’s not right. That’s about as much commitment as you’ll get out of me for now.”
The Computer Investigation Bureau was located on the top floor of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Taken over by the federal government some fifty years earlier, the twin-towered giant had long since ceased to be the world’s tallest building—an honor it had held, actually, for only a few seasons. But for CIB purposes it was still the perfect headquarters, centrally located in the heart of the computerized business community, and with a flat roof for quick rocketcopter flights anywhere in the country. Best of all, it was far enough from the bureaucratic jungle of Washington to maintain some sort of independence.
Earl Jazine waved to Judy, Carl Crader’s tall blond secretary, as he hurried through the air door into the director’s private office. Crader was thirty years older than Earl, with streaks of gray hair and a developing paunch that he tried to hide. In many ways he was the most powerful and respected head of a government bureau in a hundred years—since the peak of J. Edgar Hoover’s popularity.
“Back so soon?” he greeted Jazine, glancing up from his perennially cluttered desk. “Anything doing on that trouble report?”
“Something doing, all right, chief, but I don’t know what.” He produced the printout from the election computer and passed it acr
oss the desk.
Carl Crader glanced at the names and numbers. “Who are Blunt and Ambrose?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. Their names are pre-programmed into that FRIDAY-404 unit. It was causing the trouble Rogers reported.”
Crader frowned and scratched his head. “Any ideas?”
“I already checked last year’s campaigns in every state. No one named Blunt or Ambrose ran for anything. There’s a Stanley Ambrose who used to be head of the Venus Colony, but he’s not in politics.”
“Where does that leave us?” Crader asked. He was always anxious to collect his subordinates’ opinions before committing his own thoughts on a subject.
Jazine hesitated, and then plunged on. “What about HAND, chief?”
“HAND—Humans Against Neuter Domination. I’d almost forgotten about them.”
But Jazine knew he hadn’t forgotten. None of them had forgotten. Less than a year earlier the revolutionary group known as HAND had struck its first blow against the machine civilization by blowing up the Federal Medical Center in Washington. HAND’S former leader, Graham Axman, was safely behind bars as a result of that episode, but many of his followers remained at large, including a youthful escaped exile from the Venus Colony named Euler Frost.
“Wouldn’t it be a natural move for HAND to try sabotaging the election computer, chief?”
“But with pre-programming instead of bombs?” Crader was doubtful.
“Sure! Bombs would just destroy it. Something like this pre-programming, if it went undetected till election day, could undermine the people’s faith in our entire system. They might even start wondering if President McCurdy was really elected last time.”
“Maybe,” Crader mused. “Just maybe.”
“So what do we do about it?”
Carl Crader activated the desk terminal of his memory bank. “Let’s see what the files tell us about the FRIDAY-404.” In a moment he had a lengthy printout, which he quickly skimmed. “Lawrence Friday, that’s the name I wanted! He developed the entire FRIDAY line. If anyone can tell you about it, he can. Why not call on him and see if he’ll shed any light on the matter? Perhaps there’s some simple explanation to the whole thing—one that doesn’t involve HAND and plots to fix the presidential election.”
The Transvection Machine Page 17