Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  They’re ahead, thought Jerryberry. When you’ve got booths, who needs streets?

  He was not amused. He was appalled.

  There were beggars. At first Jerryberry 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 uppermost 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.

  Jerryberry tried several other numbers—the beggars were everywhere.

  Tahiti was a white man’s … daydream.

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

  ***

  Air puffed out of the booth when Jerryberry opened the door. He stretched 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.

  Presently, Jerryberry remembered 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 family 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—“and 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 any place to stay. And they are not the worst. You will tell people 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!”

  The man pointed where Jerryberry could not have seen himself, down the slope of the mountain. “Hilton, Ramada, Marriott, it doesn’t matter, they all come and they all buy and they all build, build, build.”

  Jerryberry looked down to temporary buildings and a great steel box with helicopter rotors on it. He filmed it on the digital 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 English word I wanted. The squatters are in my house now, I am sure of it, in my house since we moved out. Tell the world we want no more squatters!”

  “I’ll tell them,” said Jerryberry.

  Before he left, Jerryberry 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 cargo booth that was servicing the hotel construction site below.

  ***

  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 the statues’ massive solemnity. But you could get there just by dialing …

  Except that the directory wouldn’t give Jerryberry 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?

  Ah. 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, Jerryberry couldn’t get anyone to talk to him. But the patience of a newstaper is unique in a world of instant transportation. He kept at it.

  Eventually a deskman 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 that damned department store. 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, his face gone both pink and hot.

  ***

  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 shifted 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, Jerryberry 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. A lot of the 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!”) while others were 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 on the coast in Lincoln City, Oregon.

  Harry had a small house in the middle of a pine forest just up off the beach. From McCord’s back porch Jerryberry could see the gravel path that circled lazily down to the sand.

  Harry offered his guest a tallboy. They drank beer while sitting in Adirondack chairs.

  “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, 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 coins for the booth in the lobby.

  “Then there was Lon Willis,” Harry said. “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. “Never use your credit card. 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?” McCord asked.

  “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 and debit cards?”

  “Right.”

  “And you can cancel them in three minutes. Picking pockets isn’t profitable anymore. If it was, they would have mobbed the mall riot.”

  Smuggling: nobody even tried to stop it.

  Drugs: “There’s no way to keep people from getting them. And that was true even before the booths. Anyone who wants drugs can get drugs. We made arrests where we could, 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,” Jerryberry said.

  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 perps’ cargo booth in the department store’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, but they planned extensively. They must have seen the mall-type riots coming. Theoretical. 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.”

  “How would you redesign the booths to make life easier for the police?”

  But McCord wouldn’t touch the subject. He didn’t know anything about booth design.

  ***

  Seven o’clock. The interview with Wash Evans was at ten.

  Jerryberry shifted back to the Cave. He was beginning to get nervous. The Cave, and a good dinner, should help ease his stage fright.

  He turned down a couple of invitations to join small groups. With the interview hanging over his head, he’d be poor company. He sat alone and continued to jot during dinner.

  Escape booths. Send anywhere, receive only from police and fire departments.

  Police can shut down all booths in an area. Except escape booths? No, that would let looters escape, too. But there might be no way to stop that. At least it would get innocent bystanders out of a riot area.

  Hah! Escape booths send only to police station!

  Jerryberry blanked that out and wrote, All booths send only to police stations!

  He blanked that out, too, to write an expanded version:

  1. Riot signal from police station.

  2. All booths in area stop receiving.

  3. All booths in area send only to police station.

  Jerryberry went back to eating. Moments later he stopped with his fork half raised, put it down, and wrote:

  4. A million rioters stomp police station to rubble, from inside.

  Jerryberry sighed. It had seemed like such a good idea.

  ***

  He was dawdling over coffee when the rest of it dropped into place.

  Jerryberry went to a phone.

  The secretary at Seven Sixes promised to have Dr. Whyte call as soon as he checked in. Jerryberry put a time limit on it, which seemed to please her.

  McCord wasn’t home.

  Jerryberry went back to his coffee. He was feeling twitchy now. He had to know if this was possible. Otherwise he would be talking out his ass—and in front of a big audience, too.

  Twenty minutes later, as Jerryberry was about to call again, an unlisted number began buzzing his
cell phone.

  ***

  “It’s a design problem,” said Jerryberry. “Let me tell you how I’d like it to work, and then you can tell me if it’s possible, okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “First step is the police get word of a flash crowd, a mall riot-type crowd. They throw emergency switches at headquarters. Each switch affects the displacement booths in a small area.”

  “That’s the way it works now.”

  “Now those switches turn off the booths. I’d like them to do something more complex. Set them so they can only receive from police and fire departments and can only transmit to a police station.”

  “We can do that. Good. Then the police could release the innocent bystanders, send the injured to a hospital, hold the obvious looters, get everybody’s names … right. Brilliant. You’d put the receiver at the top of a greased slide, and have a big cell at the bottom.”

  “Maybe. At least the receiver would be behind bars.”

  “You could issue override cards to the police and other authorities to let them shift in through a blockade.”

  “Good.”

  Whyte’s voice stopped suddenly. “There’s a hole in it. A really big crowd would either wreck the station, or smother—depending on how strong the cell was. Did you think of that?”

  “I’d like to use more than one police station,” Jerryberry said.

  “How many? There’s a distance limit. Barry, what are you thinking?”

  “As it stands now, a long-distance passenger has to dial three numbers to get anywhere. You said you could cut that to two. Can you cut it to one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s poetic justice,” said Jerryberry. “Our whole problem is that rioters can converge on one point from all over the United States. If we could use police stations all over the United States, we wouldn’t have a problem. As soon as a cell was full here, we’d switch to police stations in San Diego or Tacoma!”

  Whyte was laughing.

  “You can’t do it,” Jerryberry said, deflated.

  “No, of course we can’t do it. Wait … wait just a damned minute.”