The Flight of the Horse

by Larry Niven

  Jerryberry inserted his C. B. A. credit card, then waited while Kjerulf dialed.

  They were in a concrete building. Beyond large square windows a sunlit sea of blue water heaved and splashed, almost at floor level. Men looked around curiously, recognized Nils Kjerulf, and turned back to their work.

  "Lake Michigan. And out there-" Kjerulf pointed. Jerryberry saw a tremendous white mass, a flattened dome, very regular. A great softly rounded island. "-is the United Air Lines velocity damper. All of the dampers look about like that, but they float in different lakes or oceans. Aeroflot uses the Caspian Sea. The T.W.A. damper is in the Gulf of Mexico."

  "Just what is it?"

  "Essentially it's a hell of a lot of soft iron surrounded by a hell of a lot more foam plastic, enough to float it, plus a displacement-booth receiver feeding into the iron. Look, see it surge?"

  The island rose several feet, slowly, then fell back as slowly.

  Ripples moved outward and became waves as they reached the station.

  "That must have been a big load. Now, here's how it works. You know that the rotation of the Earth puts a limit on how far you can send a load. If you were to shift from here to Rio de Janeiro, say, you'd flick in moving up and sideways-mainly up, because Rio and L.A. are almost the same distance from the equator.

  "But with the long-distance booths, the receiver picks up the kinetic energy and shunts it to the United Air Lines velocity damper.

  That big mass of iron surges up or down or sideways until the water stops it-or someone flicks in from Rio and the damping body stops cold."

  Jerryberry thought about it. "What about conservation of rotation?

  It sounds like you're slowing down the Earth."

  "We are. There's nothing sacred about conservation of rotation, except that the energy has to go somewhere. There are pumps to send water through the damper bodies if they get too hot."

  Jerryberry pulled out the Minox. "Mind if I take some pictures?"

  "No, go ahead."

  The Minox was a movie camera, but it would not have the resolution of a press camera. No matter. If he had the time he could comeback. . .

  not that he thought he would. He took shots of the men at work in the station, of Nils Kjerulf with his back to the windows. He shot almost a minute of the great white island itself. He was hoping it would surge; and presently it did, sinking sideways, surging up again. Waves beat at the station. A jet of white steam sprayed from the top of the great white mass.

  "Good," he said briskly to himself. He folded the spidery tripod legs and dropped the camera in his pocket. He turned to Kjerulf, who had been watching the proceedings with some amusement. "Mr. Kjerulf, can you tell me anything about traffic control? Is there any?"

  "How do you mean? Customs?"

  "Not exactly.. . but tell me about customs."

  "The customs terminal in Los Angeles is at T.W.A. You haven't been out of the country recently? No? Well, any big-city airport has a customs terminal. In a small country there's likely to be just one. If you dial a number outside the country, any country, you wind up in somebody's customs terminal. The booths there don't have dials, you see. You have to cross the customs line to dial out."

  "Clever. Are there any restrictions on traffic within the United States?"

  "No, you just drop your chocolate dollars in and dial. Unless it's a police matter. If the police know that someone's trying to leave the city they may set up a watch in the terminals. We can put a delay on the terminals to give a detective time to look at a passenger's face and see if he's who they want."

  "But nothing to stop passengers from coming in."

  "No, except that it's possible to Kjerulf trailed off oddly, then finished, "...turn off any booth by remote control, from the nearest JumpShift maintenance system. What are you thinking of, the mall riot?"

  There was no more to say. He left Nils Kjerulf in the United terminal in Los Angeles. He dialed for customs.

  For several minutes Jerryberry watched them flicking in. There were two types:

  The tourists came in couples, sometimes with a child or two. They flicked in looking interested and harried and a little frightened. Their clothing was outlandish and extraordinary. Before they left the booths, they would look about them mistrustfully. Sometimes they formed larger groups.

  The businessmen traveled alone. They wore conservative or old-fashioned clothing and carried one suitcase: large or small, but one.

  They were older than the tourists. They moved with authority, walking straight out of the booths the moment they appeared.

  At the barner: four men in identical dark suits with shield-shaped shoulder patches. Jerryberry was on the wrong side of the barrier to command their attention. He was thinking of dialing himself to Mexico and back when one of them noticed him and pegged him as a newstaper.

  His name was Gregory Scheffer. Small and round and middle-aged, he perched on the wooden barner and clasped one knee in both hands. "Sure, I can talk awhile. This isn't one of the busy days. The only time these booths really get a workout is Christmas and New Year and Bastille Day and like that. Look around you," he said, waving a pudgy hand expansively.

  "About four times as many incoming as there was six months ago. I used to want to search every bag that came through, just to be doing something.

  If we keep getting more and more of them this way, we'll need twice as many customs people next year."

  "Why do you suppose-"

  "Did you know that the long-distance booths have been operating for two solid years? It's only in the last six months or so that we've started to get so many passengers. They had to get used to traveling again. Look around you; look at all this space. It used to be full before JumpShift came along. People have got out of the habit of traveling, that's all there is to it. For twenty solid years. They have to get back into it."

  "Guess so." Jerryberry tried to remember why he was here. "Mr.

  Scheffer-"

  "Greg."

  "Jerryberry. Customs' main job is to stop smuggling, isn't it?"

  "Well. . . it used to be. Now we only slow it down, and not very damn much. Nobody in his right mind would smuggle anything through customs. There are safer ways."

  "Oh?"

  "Diamonds, for instance. Diamonds are practically indestructible.

  You could rig a cargo booth in Kansas to receive from. . . oh, there's a point in the South Pacific to match anyplace in the United States: same longitude, opposite latitude. You don't need a velocity damper if you put the boat in the right place. Diamonds? You could ship in Swiss watches that way. Though that's pretty finicky. You'd want to pad them."

  "Good grief. You could smuggle anything you pleased, anywhere."

  "Just about. You don't need the ocean trick. Say you rig a booth a mile south of the Canadian border, and another booth a mile north. That's not much of a jump. You can flick further than that just in L.A. I think we're obsolete," said Scheffer. "I think smuggling laws are obsolete. You won't publish this?"

  "I won't use your name."

  "I guess that's okay."

  "Can you get me over to the incoming booths? I want to take some pictures."

  "What for?"

  "I'm not sure yet."

  "Let's see some ID." Gregory Scheffer didn't trust evasive answers.

  The incoming booths were in his jurisdiction. He studied the C.B.A. card for a few seconds and suddenly said, "Jansen! Mall riot!"

  "Right!"

  "What was it like?"

  Jerryberry invested half a minute telling him. "So now I'm trying to find out how it got started. If there were some way to stop all of those people from pouring in like that-"

  "You won't find it here. Look, a dozen passengers and we're almost busy. A thousand people suddenly pour through those booths, and what would we do? Hide under something, that's what we'd do."

  "I still want to see the incoming booths."

  Scheffer thought it over, shrugged, and let him through. He
stood at Jerryberry's shoulder while Jerryberry used his eye and his camera.

  The booth was just like a street-corner booth, except for the blank metal face where a dial would be. "I don't know what's underneath,"

  Scheffer told him. "For all of me, it's just like any other booth. How much work would it be to leave off the dial?"

  Which made sense. But it was no help at all.

  - 6 -

  They tape the Tonight Show at two in the afternoon.

  Twenty minutes into it, the first guest is lolling at his ease, just rapping, talking off the top of his head, ignoring the probable hundred million eyes behind the cameras. This is a valuable knack, and rare. Tonight's first guest is a series hero in a science-fiction tapezine.

  He is saying, "Have you ever seen a red tide? It's thick down at Hermosa Beach. I was there this weekend. In the daytime it's just dirty water, muddy-looking, and it smells. But at night..."

  This enthusiasm that can reach through a teevee screen to touch fifty million minds, this enthusiasm is in no way artificial. He means it. He only expresses it better than most men. He leans forward in his chair; his eyes blaze; there is harsh tension in his voice. "The breakers glow like churning blue fire! Those plankton are fluorescent. And they're all through the wet sand. Walk across it, it flashes blue light under your feet! Kick it, scuff your feet through it, it lights up. Throw a handful of sand, it flashes where it hits! This light isn't just on the surface. Stamp your foot, you can see the structure of the sand by the way it flares. You've got to see it to believe it," he says.

  They will run the tape starting at eight thirty tonight.

  - 7 -

  Standard booths: how standardized?

  Who makes them besides JumpShaft? Monopoly? How extensive? Skip spaceflight?

  Space exploration depended utterly on teleportation. But the subject was likely to be very technical and not very useful. He could gain time by skipping it entirely. Jerryberry considered, then turned the question mark into an exclamation point.

  His twelve hours had become nine.

  Of the half-dozen key clubs to which he belonged, the Cave des Roys was the quietest. A place of stone and wood, a good place to sit and think. The wall behind the bar was several hundred wine bottles in a cement matrix. Jerryberry looked into the strange lights in the glass, sipped occasionally at a silver fizz, and jotted down whatever occurred to him.

  Sociology. What has teleportation done to society?

  Cars.

  Oil companies. Oil stocks. See back issues Wall Street Journal.

  Watts riot? Chicago riot? He crossed that last one out. The Chicago riot had been political, hadn't it? Then he couldn't remember any other riots. They were too far in the past. He wrote: Riot control. Police procedure.

  Crime? The crime rate should have soared after displacement booths provided the instant getaway. Had it?

  Sooner or later he was going to have to drop in at police headquarters. He'd hate that, but he might learn something. Likewise the library, for several hours of dull research. Then?

  He certainly wasn't going to persuade everybody to give up displacement booths:

  He wrote: OBJECTIVE: Demonstrate that displacement booths imply instant riot. It's a social problem. Solve it on that basis. For the sake of honesty he added, Get 'em off my back. CROWDS. In minutes the mall had become a milling mass of men. But he'd seen crowds form almost as fast.

  It might happen regularly in certain places. After a moment's thought he wrote. Tahiti. Jerusalem. Mecca. Easter Island. Stonehenge. Olduvai Gorge.

  He stood up. Start with the phone calls.

  "Doctor Robin Whyte," Jerryberry said to the phone screen.

  "Please."

  The receptionist at Seven Sixes was no sex symbol. She was old enough to be Jerryberry's aunt, and handsome rather than beautiful. She heard him out with a noncommittal dignity that, he sensed, could turn glacial in an instant.

  "Barry Jerome Jansen," he said carefully.

  He waited on hold, watching dark-red patterns flow upward in the phone screen.

  Key clubs were neither new nor rare. Some were small and local; others were chains, existing in a dozen or a hundred locations. Everyone belonged to a club; most people belonged to several.

  But Seven Sixes was something else. Its telephone number was known universally. Its membership, large in absolute terms, was small for an organization so worldwide. It included presidents, kings, winners of various brands of Nobel prize. Its location was-unknown. Somewhere in Earth's temperate zones. Jerryberry had never heard of its displacement booth number being leaked to anyone.

  It took a special kind of gall for one of Jerryberry's social standing to dial 666-6666. He had learned that gall in journalism class.

  Go to the source- no matter how highly placed; be polite, be prepared to wait, but keep trying, and never, never worry about wasting the great man's time.

  Funny: They still called it journalism, though newspapers had died.

  And the Constitution that had protected newspapers still protected "the press." For a while. But laws could change.

  The screen cleared.

  Robin Whyte the physicist had been a mature man of formidable reputation back when JumpShift first demonstrated teleportation. Today, twenty-five years later, he was the last living member of the team that had formed JumpShift. His scalp was pink and bare. His face was round and soft, almost without wrinkles, but slack, as if the muscles were tired.

  He looked like somebody's favorite grandfather.

  He looked Jerryberry Jansen up and down very thoroughly. He said,

  "I wanted to see what you looked like." He reached for the cutoff switch.

  "I didn't do it," Jerryberry said quickly.

  Whyte stopped with his finger on the cutoff. "No?"

  "I am not responsible for the mall riot. I hope to prove it."

  The old man thought it over. "And you propose to involve me? How?"

  Jerryberry took a chance. "I think I can demonstrate that displacement booths and the mall riot are intimately connected. My problem is that I don't know enough about displacement-booth technology."

  "And you want my help?"

  "You invented the displacement booths practically single-handed,"

  Jerryberry said straight-faced. "Instant riots, instant getaways, instant smuggling. Are you going to just walk away from the problem?"

  Robin Whyte laughed in a high-pitched voice, his head thrown way back, his teeth white and perfect and clearly false. Jerryberry waited, wondering if it would work.

  "All right," Whyte said. "Come on over. Wait a minute, what am I thinking? You can't come to Seven Sixes. I'll meet you somewhere.

  L'Orangerie, New York City. At the bar."

  The screen cleared before Jerryberry could answer. That was quick, he thought. And, Move, idiot. Get there before he changes his mind.

  In New York it was just approaching cocktail hour. L'Orangerie was polished wood and dim lighting and chafing dishes of Swedish meatballs on toothpicks. Jerryberry captured a few to go with his drink. He had not had lunch yet.

  Robin Whyte wore a long-sleeved gray one-piece with a collar that draped into a short cape, and the cape was all the shifting rainbow colors of an oil film. The height of fashion, except that it should have been skin-tight. It was loose all over, bagging where Whyte bagged, and it looked very comfortable. Whyte sipped at a glass of milk.

  "One by one I give up my sins," he said. "Drinking was the last, and I haven't really turned loose of it yet. But almost. That's why your reverse salesmanship hooked me in. I'll talk to anyone. What do I call you?"

  "Barry Jerome Jansen."

  "Let me put it this way. I'm Robbie. What do I call you?"

  "Oh. Jerryberry."

  Whyte laughed. "I can't call anyone Jerryberry. Make it Barry."

  "God bless you, sir."

  "What do you want to know?"

  "How big is JumpShift?"

  "Ooohhh, pretty big. W
hat's your standard of measurement?"

  Jerryberry, who had wondered if he was being laughed at, stopped wondering. "How many kinds of booth do you make?"

  "Hard to say. Three, for general use. Maybe a dozen more for the space industry. Those are still experimental. We lose money on the space industry. We'd make it back if we could start producing drop-ships in quantity. We've got a ship on the drawing boards that would transmit itself to any drop-ship receiver."

  Jerryberry prompted him. "And three for general use, you said."

  "Yes. We've made over three hundred million passenger booths in the past twenty years. Then there's a general-use cargo booth. The third model is a tremendous portable booth for shipping really big, fragile cargoes. Like a prefab house or a rocket booster or a live sperm whale.

  You can set the thing in place almost anywhere, using three strap-on helicopter setups. I didn't believe it when I saw it." Whyte sipped at his milk. "You've got to remember that I'm not in the business anymore.

  I'm still chairman of the board, but a bunch of younger people give most of the orders, and I hardly ever get into the factories."

  "Does JumpShift have a monopoly on displacement booths?"

  He saw the Newstaper! reaction, a tightening at Whyte's eyes and lips. "Wrong word," Jerryberry said quickly. "Sony. What I meant was, who makes displacement booths? I'm sure you make most of the passenger booths in the United States."

  "All of them. It's not a question of monopoly. Anyone could make his own booths. Any community could. But it would be hideously expensive.

  The cost doesn't drop until you're making millions of them. So suppose. .

  . Chile, for instance. Chile has less than a million passenger booths, all JumpShift model. Suppose they had gone ahead and made their own.

  They'd have only their own network, unless they built a direct copy of some other model. All the booths in a network have to have the same volume."

  "Naturally."

  "In practice there are about ten• networks worldwide. The U.S.S.R.

  network is the biggest by far. I think the smallest is Brazil-"

  "What happens to the air in a receiver?"