The Flight of the Horse

by Larry Niven

  "All right. Now, you put a lot of these escape booths wherever a crowd might gather-"

  "That could be anywhere. You said so yourself."

  'Yali.

  "We'd have to double the number of booths in the country.. . or cut the number of incoming booths in half. You'd have to walk twice as far to get where you're going from any given booth. Would it be worth it?"

  "I don't think this is the last riot," said Jerryberry. "It's growing. Like tourism. Your short-hop booths cut tourism way dQwn. The long-distance booths are bringing it back, but slowly. Would you believe a permanent floating riot? A mob that travels from crowd to crowd, carrying coin purses, looting where they can."

  "I hate that idea."

  Jerryberry put his hand on the old man's shoulder. "Don't wony about it. You're a hero. You made a miracle. What people do with it isn't your fault. Maybe you even saved the world. The pollution was getting very rough before JumpShift came along."

  "By God, it was."

  "I've got to be going. There are things I want to see before I run out of time."

  - 8 -

  Tahiti. Jerusalem. Mecca. Easter Island. Stonehenge. The famous places of the world. Places a man might dial almost on impulse. Names that came unbidden to the mind.

  Mecca. Vast numbers of Muslims (a number he could look up later) bowed toward Mecca five times a day. The Koran called for every Muslim to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. The city's only industry was the making of religious articles. And you could get there just by dialing....

  Jerusalem. Sacred to three major religions. Jews still toasted each other at Passover: "Next year in Jerusalem." Still a forming ground of history after thousands of years. And you could get there just by dialing....

  Stonehenge. An ancient mystery. What race erected those stones, and when and why? These would never be known with certainty. From the avenue at the northeast entrance a path forked and ran up a hill between burial mounds. . . and there was a long-distance displacement booth on the hill.

  It would be eleven at night in Stonehenge. One in the morning in Mecca and Jerusalem. No action there. Jerryberry crossed them out.

  Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Vatican. . . dammit, the most memorable places on Earth were all in the same general area.

  What could he see at midnight?

  Well- Tahiti. Say "tropical paradise," and every stranger in earshot will murmur, "Tahiti." Once Hawaii had had the same reputation, but Hawaii was too close to civilization. Hawaii had been civilized. Tahiti, isolated in the southern hemisphere, might have escaped that fate.

  Everything lurched as he finished dialing. Jerryberry stumbled against the booth wall. Briefly he was terrified. But he'd be dead if the velocity transfer had failed. It must be a little out of synch.

  He knew too much, that was all.

  There were six booths of different makes this side of customs. The single official had a hopeless look. He waved through a constant stream of passengers without seeming to see them.

  Jerryberry moved with the stream.

  They were mostly men. Many had cameras; few had luggage. English, American, French, German, some Spanish and U.S.S.R. Most were dressed lightly-and poorly, in cheap clothes ready to come apart. They swarmed toward the outgoing booths, the rectangular Common Market booths with one glass side. Jerryberry saw unease and dismay on many faces. Perhaps it was the new, clean, modem building that bothered them. This was an island paradise? Air conditioning. Fluorescent lighting.

  Jerryberry stood in line for the phone. Then he found that it wouldn't take his coin or his credit card. On his way to the change counter he thought to examine the displacement booths. They took only French money. He bought a heavy double handful of coins, then got back in line for the phone.

  They have to get used to traveling again. Right on.

  The computerized directory spoke English. He used it to get a string of booth numbers in downtown Papeete.

  * * *

  He was a roving newstaper again. Dial, watch the scene flick over, look around while inserting a coin and dialing. The coin slot was in the wrong place, and the coins felt wrong-too big, too thin-and the dial was a disk with holes in it. A little practice had him in the routine.

  There was beach front lined with partly built hotels in crazily original shapes. Of all the crowds he saw in Papeete, the thickest were on the beaches and in the water. Later he could not remember the color of the sand; he hadn't seen enough of it.

  Downtown he found huge blocks of buildings faced in glass, some completed, some half built. He found old slums and old mansions. But wherever the streets ran, past mansions or slums or new skyscrapers, he found tents and leantos and board shacks hastily nailed together. They filled the streets, leaving small clear areas around displacement booths and public rest rooms and far more basic portable toilets. An open-air market ran for several blocks and was closed at both ends by crowds of tents. The only way in or out was by booth.

  They're ahead of us, thought Jerryberry. When you've got booths, who needs streets? He was not amused. He was appalled.

  There were beggars. At first he was moving too fast; he didn't realize what they were doing. But wherever he flicked in, one or two habitants immediately came toward his booth. He stopped under a vertical glass cliff of a building, where the tents of the squatters ran just to the bouommost of a flight of stone steps, and waited.

  Beggars. Some were natives, men and women and children, uniform in their dark-bronze color and in their dress and their speech and the way they moved. They were a thin minority. Most were men and white and foreign. They came with their hands out, mournful or smiling; they spoke rapidly in what they guessed to be his language, and were right about half the time.

  He tried several other numbers. They were everywhere.

  Tahiti was a white man's daydream.

  Suddenly he'd had enough. On his list of jotted numbers was one that would take him out of the city. Jerryberry dialed it.

  Air puffed out of the booth when he opened the door. Jerryberry opened his jaws wide to pop his ears.

  The view! He was near the peak of a granite mountain. Other mountains marched away before him, and the valleys between were green and lush. Greens and yellows and white clouds, the blue-gray of distant peaks, and beyond everything else, the sea.

  It was a bus terminal. An ancient Greyhound was just pulling out.

  The driver stopped alongside him and shouted something amiable in French.

  Jerryberry smiled and shook his head violently. The driver shrugged and pulled away.

  This could not have been the original terminal. Before displacement booths it could have been reached only after hours of driving. In moving the

  terminal up here, the touring company had saved the best for first and last.

  The bus had looked full. Business was good.

  Jerryberry stood for a long time, drinking in the view. This was the beauty that had made Tahiti famous. It was good to know that Tahiti's population explosion had left something intact.

  In good time he remembered that he was running on a time limit. He walked around to the ticket window.

  The young man in the booth laid a paperback book face down. He smiled agreeably. "Yes?"

  "Do you speak English?"

  "Certainly." He wore a kind of uniform, but his features and color were those of a Tahitian. His English was good, the accent not quite French. "Would you like to buy a tour ticket?"

  "No, thanks. I'd like to talk, if you have a minute."

  "What would you like to talk about?"

  "Tahiti. I'm a newstaper."

  The man's smile drooped a bit. "And you wish to give us free publicity."

  "Something like that."

  The smile was gone. "You may return to your country and tell them that Tahiti is full."

  "I noticed that. I have just come from Papeete."

  "I have the honor to own a house in Papeete, a good property. We, my famil
y and myself, we have been forced to move out! There was no-no paysage-" he was too angry to talk as fast as he wanted-"no passage from the house to anyplace. We were surrounded by the tents of the-" He used a word Jerryberry did not recognize. "We could not buy an instant motion booth for the house. I had not the money. We could not have moved the booth to the house because the-"that word again-"blocked the streets. The police can do nothing. Nothing."

  "Why not?"

  "There are too many. We are not monsters; we cannot simply shoot them. It would be the only way to stop them. They come without money or clothing or a place to stay. And they are not the worst. You will tell them this when you return?"

  "I'm recording," said Jerryberry.

  "Tell them that the worst are those with much money, those who build hotels. They would turn our island into an enormous hotel! See!" He pointed where Jerryberry could not have seen himself, down the slope of the mountain. "The Playboy Club builds a new hotel below us."

  Jerryberry looked down to temporary buildings and a great steel box with helicopter rotors on it. He filmed it on the Minox, then filmed a panoramic sweep of the mountains beyond, and finished with the scowling man in the ticket booth.

  "Squatters," the ticket-taker said suddenly. "The word I wanted.

  The

  squatters are in my house now, lam sure of it, in my house since we moved out. Tell them we want no more squatters."

  "I'll tell them," said Jerryberry.

  Before he left, he took one more long look about him. Green valleys, gray-blue mountains, distant line of sea.. . but his eyes kept dropping to the endless stream of supplies that poured from the Playboy Club's Type ifi cargo booth.

  Easter Island. Tremendous, long-faced, solemn stone statues with topknots of red volcanic tuff. Cartoons of the statues were even more common than pictures ("Shut up until those archaeologists leave," one statue whispers to another), and even pictures can only hint at their massive solemnity. But you could get there just by dialing.

  Except that the directory wouldn't give him a booth number for Easter Island.

  Surely there must be booth travel to Easter Island. Mustn't there?

  But how eager would the Peruvian government be to see a million tourists on Easter Island?

  The other side of the coin. Displacement booths made any place infinitely accessible, but only if you moved a booth in. Jerryberry was grinning with delight as he dialed Los Angeles International. There was a defense.

  - 9 -

  At the police station on Purdue Avenue he couldn't get anyone to talk to him.

  The patience of a newstaper was unique in a world of instant transportation. He kept at it. Eventually a desk man stopped long enough to tell him, "Look, we don't have time. Everybody's out cleaning up the mall riot."

  "Cleaning up? Is it over?"

  "Just about. We had to move in old riot vehicles from Chicago. I guess we'll have to start building them again. But it's over."

  "Good!"

  "Too right. I don't mean to say we got them all. Some looters managed to jury-rig a cargo booth in the basement of Penney's. They moved their loot out that way and then got out that way themselves. We're going to hate it the next time they show up. They've got guns now."

  "A permanent floating riot?"

  "Something like that. Look, I don't have time to talk." And he was back on the phone.

  The next man Jerryberry stopped recognized him at once. "You're the man who started it all! Will you get out of my way?"

  Jerryberry left.

  * * *

  Sunset on a summer evening. It was cocktail hour again. . . three and a half hours later.

  Jerryberry felt unaccountably dizzy outside the police station. He rested against the wall. Too much change. Over and over again he had changed place and time and climate. From evening in New York to a humid seacoast to the dry furnace of Death Valley to night in the Sahara. It was hard to remember where he was. He had lost direction.

  When he felt better, he shifted to the Cave des Roys.

  For each human being there is an optimum ratio between change and stasis. Too little change, he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics and loses his ability to adapt. One who marries six times in ten years will not change jobs. One who moves often to serve his company will maintain a stable marriage. A woman chained to one home and family may redecorate frantically or take a lover or go to many costume parties.

  Displacement booths make novelty easy. Stability comes hard. For many the clubs were an element of stability. Many key clubs were chains; a man could leave his home in Wyoming and find his club again in Denver.

  Members tended to resemble one another. A man changing roles would change clubs.

  Clubs were places to meet people, as buses and airports and even neighborhoods no longer were. Some clubs were good for pickups ("This card gets me laid"), others for heavy conversation. At the Beach Club you could always find a paddle-tennis game.

  The Cave was for quiet and stability. A quick drink and the cool darkness of the Cave's bar were just what Jerryberry needed. He looked into the lights in the wall of bottles and tried to remember a name. When it came, he jotted it down, then finished his drink at leisure.

  Harry McCord had been police chief in Los Angeles for twelve years and had been on the force for far longer. He had retired only last year.

  The computer-directory took some time to find him. He was living in Oregon.

  He was living in a small house in the middle of a pine forest. From McCord's porch Jerryberry could see the dirt road that joined him to civilization. It seemed to be fading away in weeds. But the displacement booth was new.

  They drank beer on the porch. "Crime is a pretty general subject,"

  said Harry McCord.

  "Crime and displacement booths," said Jerryberry. "I want to know how your job was affected by the instant getaway."

  Jerryberry waited.

  "Pretty drastically, I guess. The booths came in. . . when?

  Nineteen ninety? But they came slowly. We had a chance to get used to them. Let's see; there were people who put displacement booths in their living rooms, and when they got robbed, they blamed us McCord talked haltingly

  at first, then gaining speed. He had always been something of a public figure. He talked well.

  Burglary: The honors were even there. If the house or apartment had an alarm, the police could be on the scene almost instantly. If the burglar moved fast enough to get away, he certainly wouldn't have time to rob his target.

  There were sophisticated alarms now that would lock the displacement booth door from the inside. Often that held the burglar up just long enough for the police to shift in. At opposite extremes of professionalism, there were men who could get through an alarm system without setting it off-in which case there wasn't a hope in hell of catching them after they'd left-and men who had been caught robbing apartment houses because they'd forgotten to take corns for the booth in the lobby.

  "Then there was Lon Willis. His MO was to prop the booth door open before he went to work on the house. If he set the alarm off, he'd run next door and use that booth. Worked pretty well-it slowed us up just enough that we never did catch him. But one night he set off an alarm, and when he ran next door, the next-door neighbor blew a small but adequate hole in him."

  Murder: The alibi was an extinct species. A man attending a party in Hawaii could shoot a man in Paris in the time it would take him to use the bathroom. "Like George Clayton Larkin did. Except that he used his credit card, and we got him," said McCord, "and we got Lucille Downey because she ran out of coins and had to ask at the magazine stand for change. With blood all over her sleeves!"

  Pickpockets:

  "Do you have a lock pocket?"

  "Sure," said Jerryberry. It was an inside pocket lined with tough plastic. The zipper lock took two hands to open. "They're tough to get into, but not impossible."

  "What's in it? Credit cards?"

  "Right."

&
nbsp; "And you can cancel them in three minutes. Picking pockets isn't profitable any more. If it was, they would have mobbed the mall riot."

  Smuggling: Nobody even tried to stop it.

  Drugs: "There's no way to keep them from getting in. Anyone who wants drugs can get them. We make arrests where we can, and so what? Me, I'm betting on Darwin."

  "How do you mean?"

  "The next generation won't use drugs because they'll be descended from people who had better sense. I'd legalize wireheading if it were up to me. With a wire in your pleasure center, you're getting what all the drugs are supposed to give you, and no dope peddler can hold out on you."

  Riots: The mall riot was the first successful riot in twenty years.

  "The police can get to a riot before it's a riot," said McCord. "We call them flash crowds, and we watch for them. We've been doing it ever since... well, ever since it became possible." He hesitated and evidently decided to

  go on. "See, the coin booths usually went into the shopping centers first and then the residential areas. It wasn't till JumpShift put them in the slum areas that we stopped having riots."

  "Makes sense."

  McCord laughed. "Even that's a half-truth. When the booths went into the slums, we pretty near stopped having slums. Everyone moved out.

  They'd commute."

  "Why do you think the police didn't stop the mall riot?"

  "That's a funny one, isn't it? I was there this afternoon. Did you get a chance to look at the cargo booth in Penney's basement?"

  "It's a professional job. Whoever rigged it knew exactly what he was doing. No slips. He probably had a model to practice on. We traced it to a cargo receiver in downtown L.A., but we don't know where it was sending to, because someone stayed behind and wrecked it and then shifted out. Real professional. Some gang has decided to make a profession of riots."

  "You think this is their first job?"

  "I'd guess. They must have seen the mall-type riots coming. Which is pretty shrewd, because a flash crowd couldn't have formed that fast before long-distance displacement booths. It's a new crime. Makes me almost sorry I retired."