by Larry Niven
“You’re lucky you got out alive.”
“I know.”
George Bailey seemed to brace himself. “I hate to be the one to tell you. We’re going to have to let you go, Jansen.”
“What? You mean fire me?” Jerryberry’s stomach sank like a rock that’s been dropped into the ocean. He’d worked too damned hard to get to where he was, and had too many plans to move up in the C.B.A. food chain. But what could he do? The politics of the situation were irrefutable.
“Yah,” George said in a pained tone. “Public pressure. I won’t make it pretty for you. Wash Evans’s instant documentary has sort of torn things open. It seems you caused the mall riot. It would be nice if we could say we fired you for it.”
“But—but I didn’t!” Jerryberry exclaimed.
“Yes, you did. And so did I, in a way. I’m the guy who approved and fed your uncensored footage for livestreaming and live television. C.B.A. may have to fire me too.”
“Now—” Jerryberry stopped and started over. “Now wait a minute. If you’re saying what I think you’re saying … but what about freedom of the press?”
“We talked about that, too.”
“I didn’t exaggerate what was happening,” Jerryberry said defensively. “I reported a—a disturbance. When it turned into a riot, I called it a riot. Did I lie about anything? Anything??”
“Oh, in a way,” Bailey said in a tired voice. “You’ve got your choice about where to point that camera. You pointed it where there was fighting, didn’t you? And I picked out the most exciting scenes. When we both finished, it looked like a small riot. Fighting everywhere! Then everyone who wanted to be in the middle of a small riot came flicking in, just like Evans said, and in thirty seconds we had a large riot.
“You know what somebody suggested? A time limit on news. A law against reporting anything until twenty-four hours after it happens. Can you imagine anything sillier? For ten thousand years the human race has been working to send news farther and faster, and now. … Oh, hell, Jansen, I don’t know about freedom of the press. But the riot’s still going on, and everyone’s blaming you. You’re fired.”
“Thanks,” Jerryberry said, deadpan.
Angry as well as defeated, Jerryberry surged out of his chair on what felt like the last of his strength. Bailey moved just as fast, but by the time he got around the desk, Jerryberry was inside a booth, dialing.
Jerryberry stepped out into a warm black night. He felt sick and miserable and very tired. It was two in the morning. His suit was torn and crumpled and clammy.
George Bailey stepped out of the booth behind him.
“Thought so. Now, Jansen, let’s talk sense.”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“I had to guess you’d come straight home. Jansen, you won’t suffer for this. You may make money on it. C.B.A. wants an exclusive interview on the riot, your viewpoint. Thirty-five thousand bucks.”
“Screw that.”
“In addition, there’s two weeks’ severance pay and a stack of other bonuses. We used a lot of your footage. And when this blows over, I’m sure we’ll want you back. On the hush-hush, of course.”
“Blows over, huh?”
“Oh, it will. News gets stale awfully fast these days. I know. Jansen, why don’t you want thirty-five thousand bucks?”
“You’d play me up as the man who started the mall riot. Make me more valuable … wait a minute. Who have you got in mind for the interview?”
“Who else?”
“Wash Evans!”
“He’s fair. You’d get your say. Let me know if you change your mind. You’d have a chance to defend yourself, and you’d get paid handsomely besides.”
“No chance.”
“All right.”
Bailey went.
-3-
JERRYBERRY FUMED.
The words of his father came back to haunt him: falling on your face can happen anytime, anywhere.
For Eric Jansen and his family, displacement booths came as a disaster.
At first dad hadn’t seen it that way. He was twenty-eight (and Barry Jerome Jansen was three) when JumpShift, Inc., demonstrated the augmented tunnel diode effect on a lead brick. Dad had watched the technological debut on television, and found the prospect exciting. Or so he’d often said.
But Eric Jansen had never worked for a salary. At that time, everything came through grandpa’s estate. So dad wrote. Poetry and articles and a few short stories, highly polished, admired by a small circle of readers, sold at infrequent intervals to low-paying markets that dad regarded as prestigious. It hadn’t mattered to dad if his work brought in large sums of cash. His money came from inherited stocks. If he had invested in JumpShift then … but millions could tell that sad story.
Eric Jansen had considered it too much of a risk.
Dad was thirty-one when commercial displacement booths began to be sold for cargo transport. He was not caught napping. Many did not believe that the magic could work until suddenly the phenomenon was changing their world. But Eric Jansen looked into the phenomenon very carefully.
He found that there was an inherent limitation on the augmented tunnel diode effect. Teleportation over a difference in altitude made for drastic temperature changes: a drop of seven degrees Fahrenheit for every mile upward, and vice versa, due to conservation of energy.
Conservation of momentum, plus the rotation of the Earth, put a distance limit on lateral travel. A passenger flicking east would find himself kicked upward by the difference between his velocity and the Earth’s. Flicking west, he would be slapped down. North and south, he would be kicked sideways.
Cargo and passenger displacement booths were springing up in every city in America, but Eric Jansen knew that they would always be restricted to short distances. Even a ten-mile jump would be bumpy. A passenger flicking halfway around the equator would have to land running—at half a mile per second.
JumpShift stock was sky-high. Dad decided it must be overpriced.
He considered carefully, then made his move.
Eric Jansen sold all of his General Telephone stock. If anyone wanted to talk to someone, he would just go, wouldn’t he? A displacement booth took no longer than a phone call.
He tried to sell his General Motors, wisely, but everyone else wisely made the same decision, and the price fell like a dead bird. At least he got something back on the stock he owned in motorcycle and motorscooter companies. Later he regretted that. It developed that people rode motorcycles and scooters for fun. Now, with the streets virtually empty, they were buying more than ever.
Still, Eric Jansen had fluid cash—and the opportunity to make a killing.
Airline stock had dropped with other forms of transportation. Before the general public could realize its mistake, dad invested every dime in airlines and aircraft companies. The first displacement booths in any city were links to the airport. That lousy half-hour drive from the center of town, the heavy taxi fare in, were gone forever. And the booths couldn’t compete with the airlines themselves!
Of course you still had to check in early—and the planes took off only at specified times.
What it amounted to was that plane travel was made easier, but short-distance travel via displacement booth was infinitely easier (infinitely—try dividing any ten-minute drive by zero). And planes still crashed. DVDs and livestreaming had copped the entertainment market, so that television was mostly reality shows and news these days. You didn’t have to go anywhere to find out what was happening. Just turn on the TV.
A plane flight wasn’t worth the hassle.
As for the telephone stock, people still made long-distance calls. They tended to phone first before they went visiting. They would give out a phone-booth number, whereas they would not give out a displacement booth number.
The airlines survived, somehow, but they paid rock-bottom dividends.
Barry Jerome Jansen had therefore grown up poor in the midst of a boom economy. Dad hated the
displacement booths but used them, because there was nothing else.
Jerryberry had grudgingly accepted dad’s irrational hatred as part of his father’s overall dour personality. But Jerryberry did not share it. He hardly noticed the displacement booths. They were part of the background of existence. Like wallpaper. The displacement booths were the most important part of a newstaper’s life, and still Jerryberry hardly noticed their existence.
Until the day they turned on him.
-4-
IN THE MORNING there were messages stored in Jerryberry’s cell phone voice mail. He heard them out over breakfast.
Half a dozen news services and profile programs wanted exclusives on the riot. One call was from Bailey at C.B.A. The price had gone up to forty thousand dollars. The others did not mention price, but one was from a politics blog—known for paying high, and liking unpopular causes.
Three people wanted to murder Jerryberry.
On two of them the picture was blanked. The third was a graying dowdy woman, all fat and hate and disappointed hopes, who showed him a kitchen knife and started to tell him what she wanted to do with it.
Jerryberry cut her off, shuddering. He wondered if any of them could possibly get hold of his displacement booth number.
There was an electronic deposit notice in e-mail: severance pay and bonuses from C.B.A., as Bailey had promised.
And so, that was that.
Jerryberry was setting the dishes in the dishwasher when the phone rang. He hesitated, then decided to answer.
It was Janice Wolfe—a pretty oval face, brown eyes, a crown of long, wavy, soft brown hair—and not an anonymous killer. She lost her smile as she saw him. “You look grim. Could you use some cheering up?”
“Yes!” Jerryberry said fervently. “Come on over. Apartment six, booth number—”
“I live here, remember?”
He laughed. He’d forgotten. You got used to people living anywhere and everywhere. George Bailey lived in Nevada; he commuted to work every morning in three flicks, using the long-distance displacement booths at Las Vegas and Los Angeles International Airports.
Those long-distance booths had saved the airlines—after his father had dribbled away most of his stocks to feed his family. They had been operating only two years. And come to think of it—
Doorbell.
Over coffee Jerryberry told Janice about the riot. She listened sympathetically, asking occasional questions to draw him out. At first he tried to talk entertainingly, until he realized, first, that she wasn’t indulging in a spectator sport, and second, that she knew all about the riot already. She knew he’d been fired, too.
“That’s why I called,” she said. “They put it on the morning news.”
“It figures.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Get drunk. Alone if I have to. Would you like to spend a lost weekend with me?”
She hesitated. “You’ll be bitter.”
“Yah, I probably will. Not fit to live with … hey, Janice. Do you know anything about how the long-distance displacement booths work?”
“No. Should I?”
“The mall riot couldn’t have happened without the long-distance booths. That damn Wash Evans might at least have mentioned the fact … except that I only just thought of it myself. Funny. There hasn’t ever been a riot that happened that quick.”
“I’ll come with you,” Janice decided.
“What? Good.”
“You don’t start drinking this early in the morning, do you?”
“I guess not. Are you free today?”
“Every day, during summer. I teach school.”
“Oh. So what’ll we do? San Diego Zoo?” he suggested at random.
“Sounds like fun.”
They made no move to get up. It felt peaceful in Jerryberry’s tiny kitchen nook. There was still coffee.
“You could get a bad opinion of me this way. I feel like tearing things up.”
“Go ahead.”
“Mean it?”
“Me, too,” she said serenely. “You need to tear things up. Fine, go ahead. After that you can try to put your life back together.”
“Just what kind of school do you teach?”
Janice laughed. “Fifth grade.”
There was quiet.
“You know what the punch line is? Wash Evans wants to interview me. After that speech he made!”
“That sounds like a good idea,” she said surprisingly. “Gives you a chance to give your side of the story. You didn’t really cause the mall riot, did you?”
“No! … no. Janice, he’s just too damn good. He’d make mincemeat of me. By the time he got through I’d be The Man Who Caused the Mall Riot in every English-speaking country in the world, and some others, too, because he gets translations—”
“He’s just a pundit.”
Jerryberry started to laugh.
“He makes it look so easy,” Jerryberry said. “A hundred million eyes out there, watching Wash, and he knows it. Have you ever seen him self-conscious? Have you ever heard him at a loss for words? My dad used to say it about writing, but it’s true for Wash Evans. The hardest trick in the world is to make it look easy, so easy that any clod thinks he can do it just as well.
“Hell, I know what caused the mall riot. The news program, yes. He’s right, there. But the long-distance displacement booth did it, too. Control those, and we could stop that kind of riot from ever happening again. But what could I tell Wash Evans about it? What do I know about displacement booths?”
“Well, what do you know?”
Jerryberry Jansen looked into his coffee cup for a long time. Presently he said, “I know how to find out things. I know how to find out who knows most about what and then go ask. Legwork. I know legwork.”
He looked up and met her eyes. Then he lunged across the table to reach for his cell phone.
***
“Hello? Oh, hi, Jansen. Changed your mind?” said George Bailey’s voice.
“Yes, but—” Jerryberry began.
“Good, good! I’ll put you through to—”
“Yes, but—!” Jerryberry almost yelled.
“Oh. Okay, go ahead.”
“I want some time to do some research.”
“Now, damn it, Jensen, you know that time is just what we don’t have. Old news is no news. What kind of research?”
“Displacement booths.”
“Why that? Never mind—it’s your business. How much time?”
“How much can you afford?”
“Damn little.”
“Bailey, C.B.A. upped my price to forty thousand this morning. How come?”
“You didn’t see it? It’s on every screen in the country. The rioters broke through the police line. They’ve got a good section of Venice now, and there are about twice as many of them, because the police didn’t shut down the displacement booths in the area until about twenty minutes too late. Twenty minutes!” Bailey seemed actually to be grinding his teeth. “We held off reporting the breakthrough until they could do it. We did. A.B.S. reported it live on all their stations. That’s where all the new rioters came from.”
“Then … it looks like the mall riot is going to last a little longer.”
“That it does. And you want more time. Things are working out, aren’t they?” Then, “Sorry. Those A.B.S. bastards. How much time do you want?”
“As much as I can get. A week.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. You maybe can get twenty-four hours, only I can’t make the decision. Why don’t you talk to Evans himself?”
“Fine. Put him on.”
The phone went on hold. Pale-blue flow patterns floated upward in what had become a tiny kaleidoscope on Jerryberry’s phone screen.
Waiting, Jerryberry said, “If this riot gets any bigger, I could be more famous than Hitler.”
Janice set his coffee beside him. She said, “… or Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.”
“Who?”
The screen came back on. “Jansen, can you get over here right now? Wash Evans wants to talk to you in person.”
“Okay.” Jerryberry clicked off. He felt a thrumming inside him … as if he felt the motion of the world, and the world were spinning faster and faster. Surely things were happening too fast. But he had to take action, or risk losing everything he’d worked for in his life.
Janice said, “No lost weekend?”
“Not yet, love. Have you any idea what you’ve let me in for? I may not sleep for days. I’ll have to find out what teleportation is, what it does. Where do I start?”
“Wash Evans. You’d better get moving.”
“Right.” Jerryberry gulped his coffee in three swift swallows. “Thanks. Thanks for coming over, thanks for jarring me off the dime. We’ll see how it works out.” He went to Janice and gave her a quick hug, which she returned with a startled laugh. Then he was out the door, pulling on a coat.
***
Wash Evans was five feet four inches tall. People sometimes forgot that size was invisible before the camera eye. In the middle of a televised interview, when the picture was flashing back and forth between two angry faces, then the deep, sure voice and the dark, mobile, expressive face of Wash Evans could be devastatingly convincing.
Wash Evans looked up at Jerryberry Jansen and said, “I’ve been wondering if I owe you an apology.”
“Take your time,” said Jerryberry. He finished buttoning his coat.
“I don’t. Fact is, I psyched out the mall riot as best I knew how, and I think I did it right. I didn’t tell the great unwashed public you caused it all. I just told it like it happened.”
“You left some things out.”
“All right, now we’ve got something to talk about. Sit down.” They sat. Their faces were level now. Jerryberry said, “This present conversation is not for publication and is not to be considered an interview. I have an interview to sell. I don’t want to undercut myself.”
“I accept your terms on behalf of the network. We’ll give you a digital copy of this conversation.”
“I’m making my own.” Jerryberry tapped his inside pocket, which clicked.