The Transvection Machine (5 page)

“We have everything standing by, of course, in the event a surgeon must be called to take over for the machine.”

The machine. Now he let his eyes travel to the place he’d avoided till this moment. It was a great stainless steel tank, hanging from a track above the operating table. Three tubular arms jutted from it, reaching down toward the surface of the table. To Jazine, who had seen all manner of mechanized progress, it was something oddly obscene—a relic of an age when naked savages worshiped at the altar of the tree-god.

“That’s quite a gadget,” he told her. “Show me just how it works.”

“Sure.” She flicked a couple of switches on the table, raising it a bit, and then turned to him. “Could you lie on it a moment? The sighting lamps won’t operate unless there’s a form of some sort on the table.”

“Is the tape still in there?”

“The machine is programmed as it was yesterday, but don’t worry—I won’t start it. Unless you’d like your appendix removed while you’re here?”

“No thanks.” He boosted himself onto the sterile table and stared up at the stainless steel tank, knowing how Vander Defoe must have felt the previous afternoon.

Nurse Simmons flicked another switch, and a row of narrow lamps glowed across the belly of the tank. “These are the sighting lamps. They operate much like photoelectric cells, lining up the machine and compensating for your individual measurements. Another of the preliminaries is a scanner to locate the source of the trouble. We can pretty well pinpoint an appendix this way, but the operation could still be prolonged if the first incision misses its mark.”

“Is that what happened with Defoe?”

She was frowning at the smooth steel wall of the machine. “No, nothing like that. It was very odd, actually. The green light went out, as I’ve said, and I double-checked the serial number. He wanted a screen so he wouldn’t have to see it. …”

“He was conscious?”

“The doctor in the emergency room had administered a spinal. That’s common for this type of operation. He was a bit foggy, but he could talk. Anyway, this first arm, with the laser scalpel, came down for the incision. I saw at once that something was wrong. There was too much blood. The clamps weren’t able to hold it back.”

“What did you do then?”

“I turned off the machine at once, and rang the emergency bell. He was hemorrhaging badly, and by the time anyone got here it was too late to save him.”

“About how long was that before help arrived?”

“It seemed like an hour, but it must have been no more than a minute or two. Doctor Groton from downstairs was the first to arrive. His office is right below here.”

“And Defoe bled to death in that time?”

Bonnie Simmons nodded. “It just seemed to drain out of him. I think he must have been a hemophiliac, though there was no mention of it on his records.”

“He actually died from loss of blood?”

“Well, a massive blood loss like that quickly sends the patient into deep shock. In a man of Secretary Defoe’s age, the shock was obviously enough to kill him.”

“Look, I’m no doctor, but if a patient suffered from hemophilia, wouldn’t the mere injection of the anesthetic be enough to start bleeding, even with this painless method they use nowadays?”

She shook her head. “Patients with hemophilia have normal platelets, and therefore do not bleed from a tiny cut. Uncontrollable hemorrhaging only occurs when a large blood vessel or artery is cut. Actually, the condition can be easily controlled with drugs these days, so major surgery is possible.”

“But your theory is that Vander Defoe was a
secret
hemophiliac, and the computer did not kill him?”

“The computer couldn’t have killed him, unless it was programmed to do so.”

Earl Jazine slid off the operating table. He’d lain there much too long already. “Start the tape. I want to see what happens.”

“It won’t work without someone on the table. But I can assure you it’s the correct tape.” She showed him the glowing serial number on the readout, and he checked it himself against the book. There seemed no possibility of error. Next he checked the three arms of the machine, making certain that all necessary sutures and clamps were in place.

“What would happen,” he asked slowly, “if someone touched or pushed these arms during surgery?” He tapped lightly on the extended metal tentacles.

“No one would do anything like that. I wouldn’t let them. Those arms are highly sensitive.”

“What if you accidentally hit against them?”

“Well, I didn’t!” she told him with a touch of indignation, and he wondered if he had ruined his chances for later. “It would throw the machine off program and be very dangerous.”

He studied the hard rubber fingers that protruded from the ends of two of the arms. “And no one else entered this room during the preparations or the operation itself?”

“Certainly not!”

“Can you describe what the machine did at the very moment of incision, when the hemorrhaging started?”

“It all happened so fast. … The arm jerked back and forth, cutting him up … and there was blood everywhere.” She’d lost some of her composure now, and her blond head sank to her arms for a moment. Then it came back up, and there was something like anger in her expression. “You think I did it, don’t you? It’s so damned important to protect the computer that you’re going to say I did it!”

“Not at all,” he insisted. “I’m just trying to get at the truth.”

“But you do believe there’s no way for a computer to make an error!”

“If the computer killed him, it was programmed to do so. You’re the one who told me it was a foolproof system. Of course I believe that computers can’t make errors on their own. But humans can program them to make errors. The taped operation in the master computer at the Federal Medical Center may have been altered to do just what it did—kill Vander Defoe.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I’ll admit it’s highly unlikely. It would presuppose someone with knowledge that he was going to have the operation, at least several hours in advance—and that someone would need access to the master computer. I think we can rule it out as a possibility, but I’d better take that taped program along anyway.”

She slid the reel out of the machine’s transcribing device and handed it to him. “Will you be wanting me for anything else, Mr. Jazine?”

The line was a perfect opening for him, but it was spoken in such a frosty voice that he knew his chances at the moment were nil. Perhaps the next time they met would be better. By then maybe he’d know she really hadn’t been responsible for what happened. At the moment, he wasn’t absolutely certain. “No, not now. Thank you, Bonnie.”

He left her alone in the operating room and went downstairs to the office of Dr. Groton, the house physician who’d signed the death certificate. He was a nervous little man whose office reminded Jazine a bit of Maarten Tromp’s. There was the same wall screen for video, but here the shelves of cassettes were filled with medical titles such as
Deep Space Surgery in a Zero Gravity Condition
,
Genitourinary Surgery and the Adrenal Glands
,
First Aid in Surgical Emergencies
, and
Medical Problems of the Venus Colony
.

Dr. Groton smiled up at Earl Jazine, but did not rise from behind his desk. “Have you completed your investigation?” he asked, pleasantly.

“For the moment. I just have one question for you, doctor.”

“And that is? …”

“Exactly what cause of death did you list on the certificate?”

“In layman’s terms, it was shock caused by a sudden hemorrhage. Does that satisfy you, or do you want the exact wording?”

“That’s good enough for now.” He cleared his throat, studying the little doctor. “I understand you were the first on the scene after Nurse Simmons pressed the alarm button.”

“I was closest to the operating room. I did what I could, but he was already gone. Even the electro-heart machine couldn’t revive him.”

“Isn’t that unusual? I thought victims of shock could generally be saved by prompt treatment.”

He hesitated. “Well, usually they can be.”

“But Vander Defoe wasn’t saved.”

“Well, no. … We didn’t realize at first the extent of the bleeding. He was pretty well cut up by the machine.”

“By the machine? There’s no chance he was suffering from hemophilia?”

Dr. Groton’s lips tightened. “None whatsoever. That’s merely a theory Nurse Simmons advanced. We don’t make mistakes like that here.”

“Was he tested for hemophilia?”

“Not here, but the New White House physician had made a blood test earlier in the day, you’ll remember. Certainly he would have discovered any evidence of a blood disorder such as hemophilia.”

“I suppose so,” Jazine admitted. “And that brings us back to the computer.”

“It does indeed.”

“I assume you think the computer was responsible?”

Dr. Groton shrugged. “Either that or human error. Nurse Simmons is very young, after all.”

“So young that I’m surprised she was entrusted with even routine surgery on someone as important as a cabinet member.”

“But Mr. Jazine, you don’t understand! It was the
machine
that was entrusted! The machine has replaced the surgeon. Someday perhaps the machine will replace us all.”

“Yes,” Jazine said. Groton had become red in the face, and there was nothing to be gained by continued questioning. It was already obvious that the staff of Salk Memorial was not about to accept any portion of the blame for what had happened. The surgical computer was foolproof and faultless, but if it came down to a choice between Salk Memorial and the Federal Medical Center’s computer, it was the machine that would have to be blamed. “Thank you for your time, doctor,” Jazine said, getting to his feet.

“You’ve completed your investigation?”

“No, I’ve only begun. But I’ve finished up here for the moment.”

“Anything else we can do. …”

“I’ll be back,” Jazine assured him.

He took a computerized airbus across Washington to the sprawling grounds of the Federal Medical Center. It was quite a different place from the busy hospital world of Salk Memorial. Here, in an atmosphere more like an insurance office than a medical facility, white-coated men worked over reels of computer tape rather than human patients, and the flashing of colored lights was more likely to indicate a terminal malfunction than a medical emergency. It was, by any standards, the largest and most complex computer installation in the country—serving more than ten thousand hospitals and medical research centers.

Even the man in charge, Professor Ainsworth, was a different breed. His interest in human life seemed almost secondary. He spoke always of the machines—the endless banks of blinking computers performing their daily tasks. “Analysis of new drugs, registration of doctors and nurses, even the diagnosis of illness—all tasks for our machines, Mr. Jazine.”

“Very interesting.”

“One hundred years ago, local law enforcement agencies sent fingerprints to the FBI for identification. In much the same manner, hospitals and individual doctors today send medical fingerprints—virus samples, blood tests, symptoms, even hologram portraits of the patients themselves—to us for evaluation. The difference is that while the FBI sometimes took days or weeks to run a fingerprint check, our computers can respond almost instantly to any point in the USAC—or abroad, for that matter.”

“I’m mainly interested in the computerized operations,” Jazine told him.

“Ah, yes. Most successful. We do several hundred each week, all programmed in advance by some of the most skillful surgeons who ever lived.”

“You even perform computer surgery on cabinet members?”

“I’ll admit that yesterday’s affair was a bit unusual, but after all, the operation was the most routine sort of abdominal surgery. Vander Defoe was the first cabinet member to have computer surgery, but the governor of Oregon had the identical operation last year, performed by computer.”

Earl Jazine produced the tape he’d taken from the machine at Salk Memorial. “Can you get a readout on this and tell me if it’s authentic?”

“In a matter of seconds.” He was gone for no more than five minutes, and when he returned he nodded slightly. “The tape checks out. It’s an exact duplicate of the master tape we have here of Dr. Ralph Cozzens—one of the finest abdominal men who ever lived.”

“Just what procedure would have been followed yesterday?” Jazine wanted to know. “How many people here would have touched the master tape?”

“That’s simple. No one! We’re completely automated here. The telephoned request from Salk Memorial gained direct access to the master computer. The desired tape of Dr. Cozzen’s appendix removal was chosen and transmitted over the telephone line automatically.”

“I see.”

Professor Ainsworth leaned back in his chair, casually stroking the tips of his moustache. “It’s hard to believe now that people once talked on telephones, isn’t it? Now people use vision-phones and only machines still talk to each other on telephones. The modern world!”

“Frankly, professor, do you have complete faith in your computer? Is there anything that could have gone wrong with the system and caused Vander Defoe’s death?”

“Do I have
faith
in the computer? Is that what you’re asking me, young man? My God, if we can’t trust the computer, what
can
we trust? The day the machine is proven capable of error, that day our entire civilization will collapse!”

Earl Jazine left the Federal Medical Center with the distinct impression that Professor Ainsworth himself might be something of a machine.

“Chief, this is Earl, in Washington.” The vision-phone cleared and he saw Carl Crader at his desk in the World Trade Center. “Yes, Earl. How did you make out?”

“All dead ends, chief. The hospital denies responsibility and the Federal Medical Center says the computer couldn’t go wrong. There’s an outside possibility that the nurse made an error, but she’s not about to admit it.”

“You think it looks like an accident?”

Jazine shook his head. “I think it looks like murder, chief, but I’m damned if I can see how it was done.”