The Transvection Machine by Edward D. Hoch Read Free Book Online Page B

sky, and he had named his son after a crater of the Moon. But Winnipeg in the third decade of the century was a sprawling metropolitan area of some two million people, capital of the fifty-fifth state, center for the computerized mineral exploration of all the states in the far north. “The machines,” his father told him. “Beware of the machines. Someday they will make slaves of us all.”
    He remembered those words when his father died. He was fourteen at the time, and he’d been helping his mother at the little Indian school in the valley. One of the children, a boy named Running, came to them with the terrible news. A rocketcopter from Winnipeg had circled the reservation, using its computerized survey gear to search for hidden mineral deposits. When it landed for a closer look, Euler’s father had gone over to the copter, ordering them off the land. He feared, with good reason, that a mineral discovery in the area would mean the end of the tribe—as it had for every other tribe in the north.
    There had been a scuffle—the details were vague at this point—and the elder Frost had fallen into the copter’s rocket blast. He was already dead by the time Euler and his mother reached the scene. That was it. That was all. There had not even been an investigation by the government.
    It was on the day of his father’s funeral that fourteen-year-old Euler Frost crystalized his hatred for the machines. They had, in a very real sense, caused the death of his father and his way of life. It was not just the single computerized survey machine on board that rocketcopter—it was all machines, everywhere. The machines in the great towers of Winnipeg that his father had warned him against, the machines in New York and Washington and London and Moscow. Even the machines that were colonizing the new worlds of Venus and the Moon.
    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