The Transvection Machine

by Edward D. Hoch

  Nurse Simmons nodded in agreement. “That usually confirms a diagnosis of appendicitis. Too bad your parents didn’t have it removed at birth. Most people do now, you know.”

  “They didn’t fifty-one years ago, I can tell you that!” He tried to move, tried to comfort himself, but it was impossible. “In an age when you can cure cancer with a simple injection, I’d think you could do something about my appendicitis.”

  She smiled down tolerantly. “We are doing something about it, Secretary Defoe. We’re going to operate by preprogrammed tape. You’ve probably read about it. We use the system quite frequently these days for routine surgery, and especially for appendicitis—the commonest of all conditions requiring abdominal surgery.”

  “You mean you and that … that machine are going to operate on me, without even a surgeon? I am a member of the president’s cabinet, after all!”

  Again the tolerant smile. “Mister Secretary, I’m well aware of your position. I’m aware also that you are the inventor, or coinventor, of the transvection machine. Surely one as machine-oriented as yourself should not fear the blandishments of a computer-controlled surgery machine. As a matter of fact, your operation will be performed by Dr. Ralph Cozzens—one of the finest abdominal surgeons who ever lived.”

  “Who ever lived? But he is no longer living, is he?”

  Bonnie Simmons made some slight adjustments above his head, lining up a series of sighting lamps until they formed a straight line down the center of his body. “Dr. Cozzens died in 2043, but he left behind a wealth of taped material,” she explained. “Complete operations, programmed onto tape for use by future generations. As long as the surgical technique remains the same, Dr. Cozzens and other fine surgeons will go on operating, even though they have been dead for ten or twenty or thirty years.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous to have only a nurse in charge?” Despite the anesthetic, his wits were clearing. He felt as if his head and arms and chest were floating clear, somehow detached from the rest of his body. It was a not unpleasant feeling, reminding him of the time in his youth when he’d received a spinal anesthetic for an operation on a broken leg that had failed to mend properly. He supposed they’d given him a spinal this time too, though the anesthesia guns they used these days were so painless as to be completely unnoticed.

  “I resent that only a nurse remark,” she told him. “I took a special ten-week course in the surgery machine, and I hold an operating certificate for it. But it really will be Dr. Cozzens who cuts into your abdomen, you know. Every move will be his.”

  “Where is this master computer with the preprogrammed operation?”

  “It’s located across town, actually, at the Federal Medical Center. But it could just as well be a thousand miles away. We use standard telephone lines for transmission.”

  “And if the line goes dead in the midst of the operation?”

  “Oh, we have a fail-safe mechanism. The entire operation must be received on our machine’s own tape before it begins cutting. That’s what’s happening now. See that glowing green light?” She patted the stainless steel monster above his head as if it were a living creature, a pet to be fed and watered and loved. “The actual operation might last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or two, but all the programmed information is fed into our baby here in a matter of minutes. As soon as the green light goes out, we’ll be ready to begin.”

  “Just how does? …”

  “Well, the trickiest thing about it, from the machine’s point of view, is the fact that the appendix is an extremely mobile organ, and can be found in any one of eight or nine different positions within the abdomen. But once it’s located, the rest is easy. This laser scalpel arm here will make the initial incision—either a McBurney or a Right Rectus—about two to four inches long. The diseased appendix is then delivered into the wound, its base is securely tied off, and the organ is cut across and removed. The abdominal wall is then closed with plastic stitches. As I say, it can be over in a few minutes with luck—if your appendix is where it’s supposed to be.”

  At that moment the green light blinked out, and Nurse Simmons let out her breath. “Does that mean it’s ready?” Vander Defoe asked.

  “It’s ready. Just a double-check to see it’s the correct tape. Yes, we’re ready to begin now.”

  He saw the machine begin to move above him, saw the sighting lamps contract like some living weapon stalking its prey. “I … I can’t…”

  “Do you want a general?” she asked suddenly. “You really don’t need to be unconscious. It’ll be over before you know it.”

  “I just don’t want to look at that damned thing coming down on me!”

  “Oh, very well! I’ll put up a screen.” She pulled a pale green curtain across his middle, effectively blocking out the operating area. “There! How’s that?”

  “Better,” he mumbled.

  “Now just let your mind go blank. Don’t think of a thing. Or think of the weather. Think of your wife. Think of …”

  His wife. Gretel. Gretel in bed. Living, thrashing about like some tormented tidal wave. Gretel the untamable. Gretel the machine, with a soul like the stainless steel monster above his head. He wondered if she had initiated her current lover, whoever he might be, into the boundless joys of the electric lance. Surgery by machine, and sex by machine. Was there really much difference? Ah, Gretel.

  Ah …

  “My God! You’re hemorrhaging! Something’s wrong!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t try to move!” She was pressing buttons, frantically trying to reverse the machine.

  “What is it? What’s the matter? I don’t feel …”

  “I don’t know,” she gasped out, fully panicked now.

  “I don’t think I can …”

  That was the last he heard, as a great wave seemed to sweep over him. He was suddenly far away from here, far away from the automated operating room in a Washington hospital in the middle of the twenty-first century. He was in a field, a field full of daisies, and his mother was calling to him, calling from far away.

  I’m coming, he thought. Yes, I’m coming.

  Ah. Yes.

  4 CARL CRADER

  “THERE’S NO GETTING AROUND it, chief. Vander Defoe was murdered, and he was murdered by a computer.”

  Carl Crader stared across the wide desk at his assistant director. Earl Jazine was young, full of a cool brash confidence in his own judgment that Crader couldn’t help but admire. He’d probably been like Jazine once himself in younger days, when the brash-ness of his manner had won him an audience with the president, and led to the establishment of the Computer Investigation Bureau. In those days of feuding government agencies and overlapping areas of responsibility, the birth of CIB as an independent agency reporting directly to the president had been a coup that made Carl Crader, in the words of one video, newsmagazine, “the most powerful law enforcement official since J. Edgar Hoover.”

  As he approached his sixty-first birthday, there were days—more and more of them lately—when Carl Crader did not feel especially powerful. This was definitely one of them. The news of Vander Defoe’s death on the operating table at Salk Memorial Hospital had hit the New York headquarters of CIB like a bomb. First Maarten Tromp had been on the direct line, and then the president himself had come on the vision-phone, summoning Crader and Jazine to Washington by rocketcopter.

  Now, staring across the desk at Jazine, Carl Crader had to admit it was their baby. “Murder or not, the computer certainly malfunctioned. It malfunctioned in such a way as to cause the death of a member of the president’s cabinet.”

  Jazine grinned. “So he calls in the Computer Cops.”

  Crader made a face. Jazine liked the term with which the world press had christened them some years earlier, but there was something about it which set Crader’s teeth on edge. “Computer Cops” sounded too much like one of those weekly video series which had been so popular in the primitive days of television. But they’d bee
n saddled with it, much as Hoover himself had been saddled with “G-men” a century earlier.

  “We’ll go to Washington,” Crader said with a sigh. “What choice do we have?”

  “None.”

  In actuality, it was one of the wonders of the twenty-first century that the headquarters of the Computer Investigation Bureau was not located in Washington. Only some fast talk by Crader, picturing New York as the computer center of the world, had convinced that earlier president of the need for locating CIB there. He had a field force of ninety-five investigators and technicians under him now, all specialists trained in the highly sophisticated science of investigating computer crimes. They had long ago outgrown their original quarters, and now occupied plushly efficient offices on the entire top floor of the old World Trade Center—a twin-towered goliath that had once been the tallest building in the world.

  The World Trade Center had been born in controversy during the late 1960s. The workers on the project were responsible in large part for the bloody “hard-hat riots” of the period, and its great size had even interfered with television reception for a time. Ironically, its status as the world’s tallest building had lasted but a few short years, when it was easily topped by an even taller Chicago structure. The building had fallen into disrepute during the trade scandals of the 1990s, and had finally been taken over by the federal government early in the twenty-first century. Although its flat-topped style of architecture had long ago faded from public favor, it was perfect for Carl Crader’s needs. One flight up from the CIB headquarters was the largest rocketcopter port on Manhattan Island, and Washington was less than a half-hour away.

  Crader buzzed his secretary, Judy, and told her they were going to the New White House for a meeting with the president. She pouted a bit, as she always did at being left out of a trip, but finally appeared with his conference recorder.

  “Have a good trip, sir,” she said.

  “Thanks, Judy. We should be back by four.” She was a tall, sensuous girl with long hair that usually sported one of the newer shades of blond coloring. Government employees were forbidden to wear body stockings on duty, but she still managed to look quite sexy in an old-fashioned miniskirt.

  “Say hello to the president for me,” she told Earl Jazine with a wink. They’d become more than friendly since Crader had used them together on an investigation last year, but he was not one to check into the private lives of his employees.

  “I’ll do that,” Earl said, starting up the spiral stairway to the rocketcopter port.

  Crader hefted his flightcase in one hand and followed along. On the flight deck, holding his topcoat against the wind, he could look through the haze to the distant towers of New Jersey. Far to the west, almost out of sight, he saw the flashes of mail rockets taking off from Nixon International Airport. Below, in the harbor, atomic liners glided toward the ocean. Watching them, marveling at their sleek beauty, he felt a moment’s sorrow at their passing. The sea-rails had all but replaced them now, and another of man’s dreams of progress was vanishing, just as the two-tracked train had vanished by the end of the last century.

  The pilot nodded as they climbed in and let the seat arms close about them. “Good day for a flight,” he said. “It’s sunny and seventy degrees in Washington.”

  “Great!” Crader agreed. It was late October, but still beautiful weather. That, he supposed, was one more thing for which they could thank the machines. The use of giant sun mirrors, combined with selective cloud seeding and humidity control, had shortened winter in the northeast to a few short weeks of January and February. Barely ten inches of snow fell all year, except at the ski resorts in the mountains where snow-making had been refined to a fine art.

  The rocketcopter rose straight up, like a shot, away from the roof of the World Trade Center, and they were on their way. Jazine passed him a few reports on other matters—a computerized credit fraud they’d uncovered in California, some further troubles with thefts from computerized cargo at Nixon International Airport, even a report that Chicago high-school students had discovered a method of cheating on their computerized final exams.

  “What about the SEXCO unit?” Crader asked, remembering one of their recent investigations. SEXCO was the Stock Exchange Computer, linking Wall Street with brokerage firms and individual clients around the world.

  “No trouble with that, chief. All quiet on Wall Street.”

  “You seem to have everything pretty much under control.”

  Earl Jazine leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “No worries, except for this Defoe thing.”

  Crader thought of something. “Did you take care of the race track people?”

  “Not yet, but that’ll be easy.” One of the tracks in the New York area had reported some tampering with their totalizator, with the result that bets on certain horses were paid off at extremely high odds. “Somebody’s crossed a couple of circuits, that’s all. I’ll take a run out there tomorrow, if Harry doesn’t find anything.”

  Crader nodded. “Keep on top of it.”

  The pilot dipped the rocketcopter on an angle and pointed toward the ground. “Did you ever see a traffic jam like that one?”

  Below them, stretching perhaps fifty miles along the twenty-four-lane Jersey Turnpike, thousands of electric autos crept and crawled like tiny ants. Somewhere, perhaps back in Trenton, a master traffic computer had blown out, creating chaos.

  “The age of the machine,” Earl Jazine observed, letting his eyelids drift shut.

  “The age of the computer,” Crader corrected.

  “Don’t you think things were a lot simpler a hundred years ago, when all they had to worry about was air pollution?”

  “The man who died yesterday—Vander Defoe—had an answer for all this. His transvection machine.”

  Jazine opened his eyes. “Does it really work?”

  “You saw the tests on video news. A girl was transvected all the way to India. And they’ve done it with animals too.”

  “What’s this word ‘transvection?’ I’m not up on the new science.”

  Carl Crader smiled. “The science is new, but the name is very old. Transvection simply means the act of transporting through the air, especially of a witch by the devil. In simple words, a witch riding a broomstick is being transvected.”

  “I see. If saints do it, they call it levitation, but with witches it’s transvection.”

  “Something like that, I suppose. Most authorities today believe that the witches of the Middle Ages never did fly, of course, with or without broomsticks. They believe the whole thing was a dream or an illusion, perhaps even a drug-induced illusion. Early in our own century, when drugs like LSD were still popular, there were reports of men and women who thought they could fly.”

  “But how did an idea like transvection ever survive into the twenty-first century?”

  “It survived under names like ‘teleportation,’ or ‘astral projection.’ But while all those concepts are purely mystical in nature, Vander Defoe’s transvection machine is firmly rooted in science. His thesis is simple—if a body is made up of atoms, and these atoms have spaces between them, then the body can be broken down into those separate atoms, transported to any point at the speed of light, and reassembled—just like radio waves or television waves are transported and, in a sense, reassembled.”

  “And will it work between planets?”

  Crader shrugged. “That point is open to dispute. Some claim that atoms of matter cannot travel independently through the near vacuum of outer space and still reassemble themselves at their destination. Defoe was experimenting on that very problem when he was killed.”

  “It’s still hard to believe.”

  “Would nineteenth-century man have believed a landing on the moon? Would twentieth-century man have believed a colony on Venus? Or the past experiments in synthesizing new microorganisms and egg cells capable of living on the frigid surface of Mars?”

  “It’s all beyond me, anyway,” Jazine
said. “I’m a technician, not a scientist.” He glanced out at the waters of Chesapeake Bay. “Say, are we being transvected right now?”

  “Not unless our pilot is a devil,” Crader said.

  The pilot, whose name was Sonny, glanced back over his shoulder. “First time I’ve been called that.” After a moment he cut the rockets and started down. “New White House straight ahead. This is the best time I’ve made all month—just twenty-three minutes!”

  Andrew Jackson McCurdy was the fifty-second president of the United States, the fifth president of the USAC, and the third president to reside in the New White House on the eastern edge of Washington. In a time of youthful world leaders, he was fairly old for a president—almost fifty—and his hair was streaked with a rarely seen gray. Political reporters accused him of cultivating a father image, a throwback to twentieth-century politics, but McCurdy insisted he was only being honest with the public. Wigs and hair coloring were not for him, nor were the male cosmetics used by so many political figures.

  He was a tall, handsome man, with a powerful handshake and a booming voice that sounded just right coming from a video screen. To have Andrew Jackson McCurdy’s face covering the entire wall of one’s living room as he boomed out a campaign speech was experience enough to sway even the most unconvinced voter. Although his New Federalist party had been out of office when the CIB was established, he both admired and trusted Carl Crader. When McCurdy took office there was speculation that Crader might be replaced by a New Federalist, but he had weathered the initial storm to gain the new president’s confidence. Now there was talk of his becoming a twenty-first-century J. Edgar Hoover, capable of serving any administration.

  “Good to see you, Carl,” President McCurdy greeted him, shaking his hand. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”