Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  “Nevada,” Jerryberry finished for him.

  “Or Hawaii!” Whyte exclaimed. “Or the Grand Canyon! Crowding caused riots. We’ve eliminated crowding.”

  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 screen out from the wall and paged through it by rapping an index finger over the touch-sensitive surface, before dialing a second time.

  “Some day you’ll make any journey by dialing two numbers,” Whyte 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.

  “Carpinteria. 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.”

  Part of a history lesson floated to the top of Jerryberry’s mind. “I thought that happened in the Gulf.”

  “There were many oil-related disasters. 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.

  The reef went on and on, disappearing into gray distance.

  All those cars … Jerryberry suddenly remembered the smash-up between the El Camino and the Jaguar. The last car crash in California.

  Had those cars maybe ended up here, or were they still in their collectors’ proud possession? Or in that of their families?

  Jerry stood and stared until Whyte hustled them off again.

  ***

  “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,” Whyte said sternly. “Pictures.”

  “But even with your wonderful bottomless garbage cans, it must be easier just to dump it in the river.”

  Whyte fidgeted. “I guess so.”

  “And you still have to put the crap 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, Ph.D.”

  “Gem, where do you handle disposal of radioactive waste?”

  “Building Four.”

  The physicist’s hair exploded around her head like a black dandelion. She looked down at Jerryberry with genial curiosity. “Newstaper?”

  Was it that obvious? Jerryberry just nodded.

  “Don’t ever try to fool anyone,” Jones said. “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 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, “Back up 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 arrived,” 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 the trouble. Even if we could build enough booths and put them into the atmosphere, the atmosphere would crush and corrode the hardware within days. Maybe hours? Plus, where do we get the power to teleport away all that CO2? So 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 soda bottles on it. Whyte sat down rather disturbingly hard, even with Gem Jones trying to support his weight.

  She asked, “Can I get Doctor Janesko?”

  “No, Gem, just tired. Is there more where that came from?”

  Whyte was pointing at an empty bottle.

  Jerryberry found the vending machine. He paid for three colas.

  Turning around, he 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 tersely, handing the physicist her drink.

  “I believe it,” she said, taking the bottle. “Well, don’t let him run you so fast. Remember, he’s an old man.”

  Jerryberry returned and put one cola on the card table.

  Whyte twisted the bottle open and drank gratefully.

  “Better,” he sighed … and was suddenly back in high gear.

  “Now, you see, Barry? We’re cleaning up the world. We aren’t polluters.”

  “Right,” Barry said, having to admit the obvious.

  “Thank you.”

  “Now, what have you got for the mall riot?”

  Whyte looked confused.

  “The mall riot is still going on,” Jerryberry said. “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 said, twisting open his own cold cola.

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know. Just … keep working things out.”

  Jerryberry drank.

  “There’s always another problem behind the one you just solved,” Jerryberry said thoughtfully. “Does that mean you should stop solving problems? Well, let’s solve this one.”

  They each sat in silence, sipping.

  “Crowds,” Jerryberry said.

  “Right,” was Whyte’s only reply.

  “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?” Whyte said, his genius brain clicking over into solve mode. “You can put an E on the booth number. The only dials with Es in them are at police stations and fire stations. E for Emergency.”

  “All right. Now, you put a lot of these escape booths wherever a crowd might gather—”

  “That could be anywhere. You said so yourself.”

  “Yah.”

  “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 down. 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 sighed and put his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jerryberry said, looking Whyte in the eyes. “It’s my ass that’s toast, not yours. 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,” Whyte said fervently.

  “I’ve got to be going,” Jerryberry said. “There are still some 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 Jerryberry 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 a week didn’t pass without the Israelis and Palestinians being in the news. 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 Jerryberry see at midnight?

  Well—Tahiti. Say the words, “tropical paradise,” and every stranger in earshot would murmur, “Tahiti.” Once Hawaii had had the same reputation, but Hawaii was too close to the world. Hawaii had been civilized.

  Tahiti—isolated in the southern hemisphere—might have escaped that fate.

  Everything lurched as Jerryberry finished dialing. He 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.

  Jerryberry knew too much, now. 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 Russian. 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, modern building that bothered them.

  This was an island paradise?

  Air conditioning. Fluorescent lighting …

  Jerryberry stood in line for the assistance desk. Then he found that it wouldn’t take his coin or his credit card. On his way to the exchange counter he thought to examine the displacement booths. They took only Euros. He bought a heavy double handful of the two-color coins, then got back in line for the desk.

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

  ***

  Jerryberry was a roving newstaper again. Dial, watch the scene flick over, look around while inserting a coin, and dialing again. The coin slot was in the wrong place, but a little practice had him in the routine.

  There was beachfront lined with partially built hotels in crazily original shapes. Of all the crowds Jerryberry 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 lean-tos and pallet-board shacks hastily nailed together. They filled the streets, leaving small clear areas around displacement booths and public restrooms and the 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.