Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  Wash Evans grinned. “Of course you are, my child. Now, what did I miss?”

  “Displacement booths.”

  “Well, sure. If the booths had been cut off earlier—”

  “If the booths didn’t exist.”

  “You’re kidding … no, you’re not. Jansen, that’s a wishing horse. Displacement booths are here to stay.”

  “I know. But think about this. Newstapers have been around longer than displacement booths. Roving newstapers, like me—we’ve been using the booths since they were invented.”

  “So?”

  “Why didn’t the mall riot happen earlier?”

  “I see what you mean. Hmm. The airport booths. Jansen, are you actually going to face the great unwashed public and tell them to give up long-distance displacement booths?”

  “No. I … don’t know just what I have in mind. That’s why I want some time. I want to know more.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Evans, and waited.

  Jerryberry said, “Turn it around. Are you going to try to talk the public into giving up news programs?”

  “No. Maybe to put some restrictions on newstaping practices. We’re too fast these days. A machine won’t work without friction. Neither does a civilization … but we’d ruin the networks, wouldn’t we?”

  “You’d cut your own throat.”

  “Oh, I’d probably be out.” Evans said, smiling sardonically. “Take away the news broadcasts, and they wouldn’t have anything left to sell but reality shows, with commercials for toys and breakfast cereals.”

  Evans’s expression grew more grim. “Look, Jansen, I don’t know.”

  “Good,” said Jerryberry.

  Evans sat up a little straighter. “You question my dispassionate judgment? I’m on both sides. Suppose we do an interview live, at ten tonight. That’ll give you twelve hours—”

  “Twelve hours!” Jerryberry said loudly.

  “That’s enough, isn’t it? You want to research teleportation. I want to get this in while people are still interested in the riot. Not just for the ratings, but because we both have something to say.”

  Jerryberry tried to interrupt, but Evans overrode him.

  “We’ll advance you five thousand now, and five more if we do the interview tonight. Guaranteed. You get nothing if we don’t. That’ll get you back on time, if nothing else will.”

  Jerryberry wanted to tell Wash Evans to go to hell. But he accepted the terms.

  “One thing,” Jerryberry said. “Can you make Bailey forget to cancel my C.B.A. card for a while? I may have to do a lot of traveling.”

  “I’ll tell him. I don’t know if he’ll do it. But I’ll tell him.”

  -5-

  JERRYBERRY FLICKED IN at Los Angeles International, off-center in a long curved row of displacement booths: upright glass cylinders with rounded tops, no different from the booths on any street corner. On the opposite wall, a good distance away, large letters said DELTA.

  Jerryberry stood a moment, thinking. Then he dialed again.

  He was home, at the Shady Rest. He dialed again.

  He was near the end of the row—a different row, with no curve to it. And the opposite wall bore the emblem of AMERICAN.

  The terminal was empty except for one man in a blue uniform who was waxing the floor.

  Jerryberry stepped out. For upwards of a minute he watched the line of booths. People flicked in at random. Generally they did not even look up. They would dial a long string of digits—sometimes making a mistake, snarling something, and starting over—and be gone. There were so many that the booths themselves seemed to be flickering.

  He took several seconds of it on his personal Minox digital camera.

  Beneath the American Airlines emblem was a long, long row of empty counters with scales between them, for luggage. The terminal was spotless—and empty, unused. Haunted by a constant flow of ghosts.

  A voice behind him said, “You want something?”

  “Is there a manager’s office?” Jerryberry asked.

  The uniformed man pointed down an enormous length of corridor. “The maintenance section’s down that way, where the boarding area used to be. I’ll call ahead, let them know you’re coming.”

  The corridor was long, unnecessarily long, and it echoed. The walk was eating up valuable time … and then an open cart came from the other end and silently pulled up alongside him. A straight-backed old man in a one-button business lounger said, “Hello. Want a ride?”

  “Thanks.” Jerryberry climbed aboard. He handed over his C.B.A. credit card. “I’m doing some research for a—a documentary of sorts. What can you tell me about the long-distance booths?”

  “Anything you like. I’m Nils Kjerulf. I helped install these booths, and I’ve been working on them ever since.”

  “How do they work?”

  “Where do I start? Do you know how a normal booth works?”

  “Sure. The load isn’t supposed to exist at all between the two endpoints. Like the electron in a tunnel diode.” An answer right out of Popular Mechanics. Beyond that … Jerryberry could fake it.

  Nils Kjerulf was lean and ancient, with deep smile wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. His hair was thick and white. He said, “They had to give up that theory. When you’re sending a load to Mars, say, you have to assume that something exists in the ten minutes or so it takes the load to make the trip. Conservation of energy.”

  “All right. What is it?”

  “For ten minutes it’s a kind of superneutrino. That’s what they tell me. I’m not a physicist. I was in business administration in college. A few years ago they gave me a year of retraining so I could handle long-distance displacement machinery. If you’re really interested in theory, you ought to ask someone at Cape Canaveral. Here we are.”

  Two escalators, one going up, one motionless. They rode up. Jerryberry asked, “Why didn’t they build closer? Think of all the walking we’d save.”

  “You never heard an A380 taking off?”

  “No.”

  “Sound is only part of it. If a plane ever crashed here, nobody would want it hitting all the main buildings at once.”

  The escalator led to two semicircular chambers. One was empty but for a maze of chairs and couches and low partitions, all done in old chrome and fading orange. In the other the couches had been ripped out and replaced with instrument consoles. Jerryberry counted half a dozen men supervising the displays.

  A dim snoring sound began somewhere, like an electric razor going in the next-door apartment. Jerryberry turned his head, seeking. It was outside. Outside, behind a wall of windows, a tiny single-engine plane taxied down a runway.

  “Yes, we still function as an airport,” said Nils Kjerulf. “Skydiving, sport flying, gliding. I fly some myself. The jumbo-jet pilots used to hate us; we use up just as much landing time as a 777. Now we’ve got the runways to ourselves.”

  “I gather you were a manager somewhere.”

  “Right here. I ran this terminal before anyone had heard of teleportation. I watched it ruin us. Thirty years, Mr. Jansen.”

  “With no offense intended,” Jerryberry said, “why did they train a professional administrator in quantum displacement physics? Why not the other way around?”

  “There weren’t any experts where the long-distance booths were concerned, Mr. Jansen. They’re new.”

  “What have you learned in two years? Do you still get many breakdowns?”

  “We still do. Every two weeks or so, something goes out of synch. Then we go out of service for however long it takes to find it and fix it—usually about an hour.”

  “And what happens to the passenger?”

  Kjerulf looked surprised. “Nothing. He stays where he started—or rather, that giant neutrino we were talking about is reflected back to the transmitter if the receiver can’t pick it up. The worst thing that can happen is that the link to the velocity damper could be lost, in which case—but we’ve developed safeguards against that.

&
nbsp; “No, the passengers just stop coming in, and we go out of service, and the other companies take the overflow. There isn’t any real competition between the companies anymore. What’s the point? Delta and United and American and all the rest used to advertise that they had more comfortable seats, better leg room, in-flight wifi … stuff like that. How long do you spend in a displacement booth? So when we converted over, we set the dialing system up so you just dial Los Angeles International or whatever, and the companies get customers at random. Everyone saves a fortune in advertising.”

  “An antitrust suit—”

  “Would have us dead to rights. Nobody’s done it, because there’s no point. It works, the way we run it. Each company has its own velocity shift damper. We couldn’t all get knocked out at once. In an emergency I think any of the companies could handle all of the long-distance traffic.”

  “Mr. Kjerulf, what is a velocity shift damper?”

  Kjerulf looked startled.

  Jerryberry said, “I’m a newstaper, not an engineer.”

  “Ah,” Kjerulf said.

  “It’s not just curiosity. My dad lost a fortune on airline stock—”

  “So did I,” said Kjerulf, half-smiling with old pain.

  “Oh?”

  “Sometimes I feel I’ve sold out. The booths couldn’t possibly compete with the airlines, could they? They wouldn’t send far enough. Yet they ruined us.”

  “My dad figured the same way.”

  “And now the booths do send that far, and I’m working for them, or they’re working for me. There wasn’t all that much reason to build the long-distance systems at airports. Lots of room here, of course, and an organization already set up … but they really did it to save the airline companies.”

  “A little late.”

  “Perhaps. Some day they’ll turn us into a public utility.” Kjerulf looked about the room, then called to a man seated near the flat wall of the semicircle. “Dan!”

  “Yo!” the man boomed without looking up.

  “Can you spare me twenty minutes for a public-relations job?”

  Dan stood up, then climbed up on his chair. He looked slowly about the room—Jerryberry guessed Dan could see every instrument board from where he was standing.

  Dan called, “Sure. No sweat.”

  ***

  They took the cart back to the terminal. They entered a booth. 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, like a flattened dome, very regular, forming a 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 Delta 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,” Kjerulf said. “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 digital Minox. “Mind if I take some pictures?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  Jerryberry 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 hi-res featuring 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,” Jerryberry 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 Delta. 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 swipe your card, or drop your 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. Jerryberry 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 barrier: 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 steel barrier and clasped one knee in both hands. “Sure, I can talk a while. This isn’t one of the busy days. The only time these booths really get a workout is Christmas and New Year’s and Bastille Day and stuff 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. The
y 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,” Jerryberry said reluctantly.

  “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—”