The Transvection Machine Read Free Page B

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
    “T HERE’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 been 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