by Larry Niven
Whyte burst out laughing. "I knew that was coming! It never fails."
He sobered. "We tried a lot of things. It turns out the only practical solution is to send the air in the receiver back to the transmitter, which means that every transmitter has to be a receiver, too."
"Then you could get a free ride if you knew who was about to flick in from where, when."
"Of course you could, but would you want to bet on it?"
"I might, if I had something to smuggle past customs."
"How do you mean?"
"I'm just playing with ideas. The incoming booths at customs are incoming because there's no way to dial out-"
"I remember. Type I's with the dials removed."
"Okay. Say you wanted to smuggle something into the country. You flick to customs in Argentina. Then a friend flicks from California to Argentina, into your booth. You wind up in his booth, in California, and not behind the customs barrier."
"Brilliant," said Whyte. "Unfortunately there's a fail-safe to stop anyone from flicking into an occupied booth."
"Sorry," Whyte said, grinning. "What do you care? There are easier ways to smuggle. Too many. I'm not really sorry. I'm a laissez-faire man myself."
"I wondered if you could do something with dials to stop another mall riot."
Whyte thought about it. "Not by taking the dials off. If you wanted to stop a riot, you'd have to stop people from coming in. Counters on the booths, maybe."
"What was it like, Barry?"
"Crowded. Like a dam broke. The law did shut the booths down from outside, but not fast enough. Maybe that's the answer. Cut out the booths at the first sign of trouble."
"We'd get a lot of people mad at us."
"You would, wouldn't you?"
"Like the power brownouts in the seventies and eighties. Or like obscene telephone calls. You couldn't do anything about them, except get more and more uptight. . . readier to smash things. . . . That's why riots happen, Barry. People who are a little bit angry all the time."
"Oh?"
"All the riots I remember." Whyte smiled. "There haven't been any for a long time. Give JumpShift some credit for that. We stopped some of the things that kept everyone a little bit angry all the time. Smog.
Traffic jams. Slow mail. Slum landlords; you don't have to live near your job or your
welfare office or whatever. Job hunting. Crowding. Have you ever been in a traffic jam?"
"Maybe when! was a little boy."
"Friend of mine was a college professor for a while. His problem was he lived in the wrong place. Five days a week he would spend an hour driving to work-you don't believe me?-and an hour and a quarter driving home, because traffic was heavier then. Eventually he gave it up to be a writer."
"Gawd, I should hope so!"
"It wasn't even that rare," Whyte said seriously. "It was rough if you owned a car, and rougher if you didn't. JumpShift didn't cause riots; we cured them."
And he seemed to wait for Jerryberry' s agreement.
Silence stretched long enough to become embarrassing.. . yet the only thing Jerryberry might have said to break it was "But what about the mall riot?" He held his peace.
"Drain that thing," Whyte said abruptly. "I'll show you."
"Show me?"
"Finish that drink. We're going places." Whyte drank half a glass of milk in three gulps, his Adam's apple bobbing. He lowered the glass.
"Well?"
"Ready."
On Madison Avenue the sunset shadows ran almost horizontally along the glass faces of buildings. Robin Whyte stepped out of L'Orangerie and turned right. Four feet away, a displacement booth.
In the booth he blocked the hand Jerryberry would have used to insert his C.B.A. card. "My treat. This was my idea. . . . Anyway, some of these numbers are secret." He inserted his own card and dialed three numbers.
Twice they saw rows of long-distance booths. Then it was bright sunlight and sea breeze. Far out beyond a sandy beach and white waves, a great cylinder with a rounded top rose high out of the water. Orange letters on the curved metal flank read: "JUMPSHIP FRESHWATER TRANSPORT."
"I could take you out in a boat," said Whyte. "But it would be a waste of time. You wouldn't see much. Nothing but vacuum inside. You know how it works?"
"Sure."
"Teleportation was like laser technology. One big breakthrough and then a thousand ways to follow up on it. We spent twelve solid years building continuous teleport pumps for various municipalities to ship fresh water in various directions. When all the time the real problem was getting the fresh water, not moving it.
"Do you know how we developed this gimmick? My secretary dreamed it up one night at an office party. She was about half smashed, but she wrote it down, and the next morning we all took turns trying to read her handwriting. . . .Well, never mind. It's a simple idea. You build a tank more put the teleport pump in the top. You teleport the air out. When the air goes, the seawater boils. From then on you're teleporting cold water-vapor. It condenses wherever you ship it, and you get fresh water. Want to take pictures?"
"I do."
"Then let's look at the results," Whyte said, and dialed.
Now it was even brighter. The booth was backed up against a long wooden building. Far away was a white glare of salt flats, backed by blue ghosts of mountains. Jerryberry blinked and squinted. Whyte opened the door.
Jerryberry said, "Whoooff!"
"Death Valley. Hot, isn't it?"
"Words fail me at a time like this, but I suggest you look up the dictionary definition of blast furnace." Jerryberry felt perspiration start as a rippling itch all over him. "I'm going to pretend I'm in a sauna. Why doesn't anyone ever put displacement booths inside?"
"They did for a while. There were too many burglaries. Let's go around back."
They walked around the dry wooden building... and into an oasis.
Jerryberry was jarred. On one side of the building, the austere beauty of a barren desert. On the other was a manicured forest: rows and rows of trees.
"We can grow damn near anything out here. We started with date palms, went to orange and grapefuit trees, pineapples, a lot of rice paddies, mangoes-anything that grows in tropic climates will grow here, as long as you give it enough water."
Jerryberry had already noticed the water tower. It looked just like the transmitter. He said, "And the right soil."
"Well, yes. Soil isn't that good in Death Valley. We have to haul in too much fertilizer." Rivulets of perspiration ran down Whyte's cheeks. His soft face looked almost stern. "But the principle holds. With teleportation, men can live practically anywhere. We gave people room. A man can work in Manhattan or Central Los Angeles or Central Anywhere and live in- in-"
"Nevada."
"Or Hawaii! Or the Grand Canyon! Crowding caused riots. We've eliminated crowding-for a while, anyway. At the rate we're going we'll still wind up shoulder to shoulder, but not until you and I are both dead."
Jerryberry considered keeping his mouth shut but decided he didn't have the willpower. "What about pollution?"
"What?"
"Death Valley used to have an ecology as unique as its climate.
What's your unlimited water doing to that?"
"Ruining it, I guess."
"Hawaii, you said. Grand Canyon. There are laws against putting up apartment buildings in national monuments, thank God. Hawaii probably has the population density of New York by now. Your displacement booths can put men anywhere, right? Even places they don't belong."
"Well, maybe they can," Whyte said slowly. "Pollution. Hmm. What do you know about Death Valley?".
"It's hot." Jerryberry was wet through.
"Death Valley used to be an inland sea. A salt sea. Then the climate changed, and all the water went away. What did that do to the ecology?"
Jerryberry scratched his head. "A sea?"
"Yes, a sea! And drying it up ruined one ecology and started another, just like we're doing. But never mind that. I
want to show you some things. Pollution, huh?" Whyte's grip on Jerryberry's arm was stronger than it had any right to be.
Whyte was angry. In the booth he froze, with his brow furrowed and his forefinger extended. Trying to remember a number. Then he dialed in trembling haste.
He dialed two sequences. Jerryberry saw the interior of an airline terminal, then-dark.
"Oh, damn. I forgot it would be night here."
"Where are we?"
"Sahara Desert. Rudolph Hill Reclamation Project. No, don't go out there; there's nothing to see at night. Do you know anything about the project?"
"You're trying to grow a forest in the middle of the Sahara: trees, leaf-eating molds, animals, the whole ecology." Jerryberry tried to see out through the glass. Nothing. "How's it working?"
"Well enough. If we can keep it going another thirty years, this part of the Sahara should stay a forest. Do you think we're wiping out another ecology?"
"Well, it's probably worth it here."
"The Sahara used to be a lush, green land. It was men who turned it into a desert, over thousands of years, mainly through overgrazing. We're trying to put it back."
"Okay," said Jerryberry. He heard Whyte dialing. Through the glass he could now see stars and a horizon etched with treetop shadows.
He squinted against airport-terminal lights. He asked, "How did we get through customs?"
"Oh, the Hill project is officially United States territory." Whyte swung the local directory out from the wall and leafed through it before dialing a second time. "Some day you'll make any journey by dialing two numbers," he was saying. "Why should you have to dial your local airport first? Just dial a long-distance booth near your destination. Of course the change-over will cost us considerable. Here we are."
Bright sunlight, sandy beach, blue sea stretching to infinity. The booth was backed up against a seaside hotel. Jerryberry followed Whyte, whose careful, determined stride took him straight toward the water.
They stopped at the edge. Tiny waves brushed just to the tips of their shoes.
"Carpintena. They advertise this beach as the safest beach in the world. It's also the dullest, of course. No waves. Remember anything about Carpinteria, Barry?"
"I don't think so."
"Oil-slick disaster. A tanker broke up out there, opposite Santa Barbara, which is up the coast a little. All of these beaches were black with oil. I was one of the volunteers working here to save the birds, to get the oil off their feathers. They died anyway. Almost fifty years ago, Barry."
Part of a history lesson floated to the top of his mind. "I thought that happened in England."
"There were several oil-slick disasters. Almost I might say, there were many. These days we ship oil by displacement booths, and we don't use anything like as much oil."
"No cars."
"No oil wells, practically."
They shifted.
From an underwater dome they gazed out at an artificial reef made from old car bodies. The shapes seemed to blend, their outlines obscured by mud and time and swarming fish. Bent and twisted metal bodies had long since rusted away, but their outlines remained, held by shellfish living and dead. Ghosts of cars, the dashboards and upholstery showing through.
An occasional fiber-glass wreck showed as if it had been placed yesterday.
The reef went on and on, disappearing into gray distance.
All those cars.
"People used to joke about the East River catching fire and burning to the ground. It was that dirty," said Whyte. "Now look at it."
Things floated by: wide patches of scum, with plastic and metal objects embedded in them. Jerryberry said, "It's pretty grubby."
"Maybe, but it's not an open sewer. Teleportation made it easier to get rid of garbage."
"I guess my trouble is I never saw anything as dirty as you claim it was. Oil slicks. Lake Michigan. The Mississippi." Maybe you're exaggerating. "Just what has teleportation done for garbage collection?"
"There are records. Pictures."
"But even with your wonderful bottomless garbage cans, it must be easier just to dump it in the river."
"Ahh, I guess so."
"And you still have to put the gupp somewhere after you collect it."
Whyte was looking at him oddly. "Very shrewd, Barry. Let me show you the next step."
* * *
Whyte kept his hand covered as he dialed. "Secret," he said.
"JumpShift experimental laboratory. We don't need a lot of room, because experiments with teleportation aren't particularly dangerous. ..."
but there was room, lots of it. The building was a huge inflated Quonset hut. Through the transparent panels Jerryberry could see other buildings, set wide apart on bare dirt. The sun was 45 degrees up. If he had known which way was north, he could have guessed longitude and latitude.
A very tall, very black woman in a lab smock greeted Whyte with glad cries. Whyte introduced her as "Gemini Jones, Phd."
"Gem, where do you handle disposal of radioactive waste?"
"Building Four." The physicist's hair exploded around her head like a black dandelion, adding unnecessary inches to her height. She looked down at Jerryberry with genial curiosity. "Newstaper?"
"Don't ever try to fool anyone. The eyes give you away."
They took the booth to Building Four. Presently they were looking down through several densities of leaded glass into a cylindrical metal chamber.
"We get a package every twenty minutes or so," said Gem Jones.
"There's a transmitter linked to this receiver in every major power plant in the United States. We keep the receiver on all the time. If a package gets reflected back, we have to find out what's wrong, and that can get hairy, because it's usually wrong at the drop-ship."
Jerryberry said, "Drop-ship?"
Gemini Jones showed surprise at his ignorance. Whyte said, "Backup a bit, Barry. What's the most dangerous garbage ever?"
"Give me a hint."
"Radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants. Most dangerous per pound, anyway. They send those wastes here, and we send them to a drop-ship. You've got to know what a drop-ship is."
"Of course I-"
"A drop-ship is a moving teleport receiver with one end open.
Generally it's attached to a space probe. The payload flicks in with a velocity different from that of the drop-ship. Of course it's supposed to come tearing out the open end, which means somebody has to keep it turned right. And of course the drop-ship only operates in vacuum."
"Package," Gem Jones said softly. Something had appeared in the metal chamber below. It was gone before Jerryberry could quite see what it was.
"Just where is your drop-ship?"
"Circling Venus," said Whyte. "Originally it was part of the second Venus expedition. You can send anything through a drop-ship: fuel, oxygen, food, water, even small vehicles. There are drop-ships circling every planet in the solar system, except Neptune.
"When the Venus expedition came home, they left the drop-ship in orbit. We thought at first that we might send another expedition through it,
but-face it, Venus just isn't worth it. We're using the planet as a garbage dump, which is about all it's good for.
"Now, there's no theoretical reason we can't send unlimited garbage through the Venus drop-ship, as long as we keep the drop-ship oriented right. Many transmitters, one receiver. The payload doesn't stay in the receiver more than a fraction of a second. If it did get overloaded, why, some of the garbage would be reflected back to the transmitter, and we'd send it again. No problem."
"What about cost?"
"Stupendous. Horrible. Too high for any kind of garbage less dangerous than this radioactive stuff. But maybe we can bring it down someday." Whyte stopped; he looked puzzled. "Mind if I sit down?"
There were fold-up chairs around a card table with empty pop bulbs on it. Whyte sat down rather disturbingly hard, even with Gem Jones trying to support his weight. She asked, "Can I get Doctor Janes
ko?"
"No, Gem, just tired. Is there a pop machine?"
Jerryberry found the pop machine. He paid a chocolate dollar for a clear plastic bulb of cola. He turned and almost bumped into Gemini Jones.
She spoke low, but there was harsh intensity in her voice. "You're running him ragged. Will you lay off of him?"
"He's been running me!" Jerryberry whispered.
"I believe it. Well, don't let him run you so fast. Remember, he's an old man."
Whyte pulled the cola bulb open and drank. "Better." He sighed. . .
and was back in high gear. "Now, you see? We're cleaning up the world. We aren't polluters."
"Right."
"Thank you."
"I never should have raised the subject. What have you got for the mall riot?"
Whyte looked confused.
"The mall riot is still going on, and they're still blaming me."
"And you still blame JumpShift."
"It's a matter of access," Jerryberry said patiently. "Even if only ten men in a million, say, would loot a store, given the opportunity, that's still about four thousand people in the United States. And all four thousand can get to the Santa Monica Mall in the time it takes to dial twenty-one digits."
When Whyte spoke again, he sounded bitter. "What are we supposed to do, stop inventing things?"
"No, of course not." Jerryberry pulled open another bulb of cola.
"What, then?"
"I don't know. Just. . . keep working things out." He drank.
"There's always another problem behind the one you just solved. Does that mean you should stop solving problems?"
"Well, let's solve this one."
They sat sipping cola. It was good to sit down. The old man's running me ragged, thought Jerryberry.
"Crowds," he said.
"Right."
"You can make one receiver for many transmitters. In fact. . .
every booth in a city receives from any other booth. Can you make a booth that transmits only?"
Whyte looked up. "Sure. Give it an unlisted number. Potentially it would still be a receiver, of course."
"Because you have to flick the air back to the transmitter."
"How's this sound? You can put an E on the booth number. The only dials with E's in them are at police stations and fire stations. E for Emergency."