Flash crowd

by Larry Niven

  "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 Jerryb
erry. Make it Barry."

  "God bless you, sir."

  "What do you want to know?"

  "How big is JumpShift?"

  "Ooohhh, pretty big. What'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?"

  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 aroun
d 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.