Free The Transvection Machine by Edward D. Hoch

the machine. An electronic device would keep a prisoner from escaping, and a computer could check any credit card in a split second, so who needed the costly refinements of an earlier age?
    Frost went to the ticket counter at the other end of the terminal and presented his newly acquired space travel card to a yawning blond girl. She glanced at it casualty and fed it into the computer at her elbow. There’d be a moment’s delay while an Earth check was completed, he knew, and he passed the time by engaging her in casual conversation. Presently the computer began blinking and sputtering, reporting that the card was not delinquent, not reported stolen, not registered to an exile, not defaced, and fully authorized for government use. The blond girl nodded and stamped out a ticket. “Have a good flight,” she told him. “I miss the old Earth myself.”
    He gave her a grin and returned to the waiting room. The young man still slept in his chair, and Frost carefully worked just a corner of the card case back into his pocket. It might fall out, but he’d find it on the chair. Certainly it would never do to have him report a theft before blast-off time.
    Frost smiled to himself as he considered yet another imperfection of the machine. The space travel computer did not care that two flights were charged to the same travel card, as long as that card was in good standing. They could speculate all they wanted as to how he’d managed to get off the planet, but no one would realize the truth until the computer spewed out its monthly bills. Perhaps, he thought with a chuckle, they might even think he’d gone home via the transvection machine. Or else defected once more to the mountains or the Russo-Chinese Colony.
    Frost managed to doze a bit while waiting for blastoff. At seven-thirty he boarded the ship with the other passengers, receiving only a curt nod from the stewardess checking tickets. There would be no trouble with customs on the other end, either, since he was traveling on a government ticket. No trouble at all.
    By eight o’clock Euler Frost was on his way back to Earth.
    The man’s name was Graham Axman, and Frost hadn’t seen him since his arrest and exile ten years earlier. But Axman still occupied the same dingy office in a Washington slum, and he still looked much as Frost remembered him—with a small pointed beard and fiery eyes such as the devil himself might have envied.
    “It’s good to have you back, Euler,” he said, speaking in the same rasping voice Frost remembered so well. Axman had been his first contact with the revolutionary group a decade before, the man who’d picked him up one evening in Paris and taken him to that man-made island in the Indian Ocean. He’d been in the process of reporting to Axman back in Washington at the time of his arrest.
    “I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Earth,” Frost told him truthfully. “It looked awfully good coming in over the Pacific and the west coast.”
    “It is good,” Axman said. “We’re trying to keep it that way. How old are you now, Euler?”
    “Twenty-nine.”
    “Good! A good age! You have the wisdom of adulthood without the physical drawbacks of middle age.” Axman himself was barely past forty, and Frost wondered what his physical drawbacks might be. “No doubt you want to serve the organization once more?”
    “Of course. More than ever.”
    “Good, good! We have grown in this last decade. We have a name now, and members in fifty cities of the world.”
    “A name?”
    “A simple one, to be sure. We call ourselves HAND—Humans Against Neuter Domination. Man against machine.”
    “A good name,” Frost agreed.
    “A very good name.” Axman held out his own hands and turned them slowly over. “Hands built this world, made it what it is. Hands—and the ability to use them—are what make us superior to the apes. Are we to surrender all that to the machine—to a sexless, unfeeling monster of wires and