Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  “We were working in the Mojave,” the old man said. “Lightspeed Labs. I’ve taken you there before. Only this was in the very beginning, before we ever sold a single commercial booth. Before JumpShift became what it is now. Daniella—my first wife—hated the desert. Wouldn’t come out of her social cocoon in San Francisco unless I begged her. Resented the fact that I was spending whole weeks on the company clock, at the Labs, trying to nurse my idea—cost-effective, instant teleportation—toward reality …”

  ***

  Dr. Rob Whyte was in his late thirties. Fit. Ambitious. And ready to show his dream to the world.

  After the success of the year-long test program which had sent pots and pans and all manner of other household objects flicking from one teleportation booth at one end of the lab, to its twin on the other end, and back, the time had come for the rubber to meet the road.

  A handful of adventurous grad students—on loan from Cal Tech—had been flicking each other from place to place around the Mojave. Each time, they’d moved the booths and extended the range; while also noticing the turbulence that resulted from conservation of energy and momentum: the further apart the booths were, the greater the jump, bump, or stumble that resulted at the end.

  Rob had a notion about that. Extending the booths to the range necessary to make them commercially appealing was a significant practical problem. Enough so that he began sketching digital designs on his e-pad: great, bobbing spheroids of metal, each suspended in a liquid buffer like Lake Tahoe in the Sierras, or the Great Salt Lake in Utah, or the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California if it came to it. Hook them up to the teleportation grid, use them to bleed off the energy mid-flick …

  But, first things first. Rob had a very important skeptic to convince. Someone who’d been dubious about his passion from the start, despite the fact that his startup company had attracted enough speculative investors to keep Mrs. Whyte comfortably housed and fed in one of the most expensive cities in the United States.

  Daniella Veracruz Whyte was stern-faced as Rob ushered her into the main lab area that housed the “home booth” of the fledgling JumpShift teleportation network. Shaped like a huge test tube with its bottom up, the booth was unremarkable save for the button-clustered control module that sat at about ribcage level in the booth’s interior.

  Half a dozen twins of the booth were scattered around the government-leased, thousand-acre campus of Lightspeed Labs. The plan was to take Daniella on a “tour” of the system, small as it might be. To show her that Rob’s madness was, in fact, genius after all. That they weren’t going to become paupers when the investors ran out and the company folded up into a colossal stone around their necks.

  “You’ll see,” Rob said, waving his hand with a flourish while half a dozen other technicians and assistants—most of them associates and friends from Rob’s days as a grad student himself—respectfully got to their feet.

  Daniella seemed unimpressed.

  “Robin,” she said, “it’s been a long day, and I am tired. Can we please just get this over with?”

  “Of course my dear, of course. But I think you’ll be quite surprised. This is the main booth—the one I’ve been telling you about since it was just an idea in my head, back before we met. Over against that far wall is Booth Two; the second prototype. There are a few more just like them placed here and there. I estimate that with quick dialing we ought to be able to complete the circuit in five minutes. If you would, please …”

  Daniella stared suspiciously at Rob’s hand, which motioned for her to step toward Booth One.

  “No,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon, my dear?”

  “No, Robin.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” he said. “We’ve had people flicking in and out of the booths for many days now. Hundreds of trips. Short, and not so short. It’s instantaneous. And painless. I’ve done it myself more than once. Trust me. You won’t be disappointed.”

  But Daniella wouldn’t budge.

  Rob looked down at Sparky, the short-legged Labrador-Basset mix who was Daniella’s constant companion. His leash was wrapped firmly in her hand while he gratefully laid his belly on the AC-cooled tiles of the lab floor, his pink tongue just slightly sticking out as he panted. This time of the year, the Mojave was blisteringly hot. No place for a canine with any sanity, Rob thought.

  “If I may,” Rob said, trying to take the leash from Daniella’s hands.

  “Don’t even think about—”

  “Daniella,” Rob said, “you’ve been worrying and complaining about this for many months. That this project—the company—was a dead-end. At least allow me to prove to you that JumpShift works. That it’s going to make every man and woman in this room rich.”

  Daniella’s grip on the leash remained iron-strong.

  “Animal testing is cruel, Robin. You know how I feel about that sort of thing. Putting Sparky in that contraption would be like putting a small child into it. What if something happens?”

  “Like I said,” Rob persisted, working to keep his voice calm, “I’ve had people using the system already. It’s absolutely safe. Now, I perfectly understand your hesitation to step into the booth yourself, because you haven’t been here to see the results before. So at least let me demonstrate the system’s harmlessness? The dog won’t get so much as a scratch.”

  Daniella’s fist remained clamped on the leash.

  “Please?” Rob said, looking directly into his wife’s eyes. “You know I’m as fond of this dog as you are. For God’s sake, Daniella, I wouldn’t put Sparky through anything I wasn’t willing to experience myself.”

  Slowly, she relaxed her hand, and Rob gently guided the amiable dog over to the interior of Booth One, where he told Sparky to sit, then fed him a small dog treat, and unhooked the leash. Well-trained by one of the best handlers in the Bay Area, Sparky complied perfectly, crunching his treat with gusto and watching passively as Dr. Whyte walked several paces to the main computer workstation that monitored and controlled the booths.

  “Should I cover my eyes?” Daniella said.

  “Nothing so dramatic,” Rob said, grinning. “First you see him there, and suddenly you see him—”

  Rob tapped a few keys, then aimed a finger at Booth Two.

  “—over there.”

  Sparky had vanished from Booth One.

  But Booth Two remained empty. Not even a tell-tale gust of air puffing out, as was sometimes the case during teleportation.

  Rob’s smile fell.

  Daniella’s expression began to turn murderous.

  “Where in the hell did you—”

  Rob cut her off, reaching for his cell phone and dialing quickly.

  “Station Three,” he said, “I just tried to send my wife’s dog through to Booth Two. Did you get him instead?”

  A moment of silence, then one of the grad students reported, “No sir, not a sign of anyone, nor any dog for that matter.”

  Rob hung up and dialed Station Four.

  Same result.

  Station Five … Station Six …

  “You’ve vaporized him!” Daniella accused. Her hands were clenched at her sides and her arms shook with outrage. She looked as if she was going to take a swing at her husband.

  Lightspeed Labs personnel scattered, slamming their butts into chairs in front of computers—keys being tapped frantically while they tried to unearth the nature of the malfunction.

  Rob closed his eyes and pinched his fingers over the bridge of his nose.

  “Sparky is not vaporized,” he said, ruing the fact that an obvious technical glitch—Murphy’s Law—had selected this moment in history to manifest itself.

  “Then where is my dog, Robin?” Daniella demanded.

  “Somewhere,” Rob said. “Just not here. The booths don’t destroy matter. They merely shift it from place to place. There always has to be a sender and a receiver. The booths just can’t magically materialize you anywhere, out of thin air.”

  “
So where is this extra booth?” Daniella asked, her arms now crossed over her California-implanted breasts. “If I don’t get Sparky back this instant I’m going to take it out of your ass, Robin! That dog is my baby! That dog is—”

  “Perfectly safe,” Rob finished for her.

  “Where??” Daniella said, her face turning bright pink.

  Rob continued to pinch his nose. Suddenly he looked up.

  “Let’s find out.”

  Moving so quickly that nobody could stop him, Dr. Whyte strode directly over and into Booth One. He pressed the orange SEND button, without dialing anything otherwise. That way the booth was guaranteed to transport him immediately to wherever Sparky had gone. For a split second Rob had the good sense to experience fear. The image of his scowling, excellently-manicured wife was replaced by the dimly-lit confines of what appeared to be an unfinished residential basement.

  An invisible force seemingly caused Dr. Whyte to lurch into the strange receiver’s wall. He fell to his knees. Long jump, he thought. Too long? Rob painfully got back to his feet and took a good look out of the receiver’s door—its walls were opaque, unlike the transparent booths Lightspeed Labs had been pioneering.

  Three men were clustered around a desk festooned with computer equipment that trailed cables up to the booth proper.

  One of them yelled at the top of his lungs for that goddamned dog to shut up.

  Sparky skipped and danced around in front of the booth, his throaty, deep bark belying his otherwise diminutive size.

  These were not people Rob knew.

  One of them turned to him, and aimed a fist—with a pistol in it.

  ***

  “That’s what I’d call a ‘check your shorts’ moment,” Jerryberry said, his eyebrows raised as he stared at Rob, who still lay on his pillows, his eyes gazing up and out into the darkening sky. There would be stars soon. With the advent of viable teleportation technology, much of California’s smog-inducing transportation system had become obsolete. No more cars, trucks, or buses. The day the last of the haze cleared from the L.A. skies, it had been international news. Just like in Salt Lake City, and Mexico City, and Beijing after that, and so on and so forth. Everywhere the JumpShift booths were put into wide use, the skies had cleared.

  “I nearly peed myself,” Rob said, smiling weakly at the memory.

  “So how the heck did you wind up in someone else’s lab?” Jerryberry asked.

  “To call it a ‘lab’ is being too generous,” Rob said. “It was a safe house. And those men? They weren’t grad students.”

  ***

  “Hands up,” the man with the pistol said.

  Rob reflexively raised his palms over his head, his eyes scanning the interior of the opaque booth with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

  Sparky continued to bark loudly, snarling low and guttural, deep in his thick throat.

  “Just shoot the bugger,” one of the other men said.

  “No, wait,” Rob said, “I can get him to stop.”

  “Do it,” said the man with the gun.

  Rob whistled once, and called Sparky over to him. The dog glared at the strangers for an instant, then waddled over on his outsized paddle-like Basset feet and huddled against Rob’s legs. The Doctor reached down and scratched the mongrel pet’s ears, then patted Sparky on his side reassuringly.

  “Do we know him?” asked the man with the pistol.

  One of the others turned and walked up to the receiver.

  “Yes,” the second man said. “I’ve seen his photos on the JumpShift web site. It’s the goddamned company founder.”

  The man with the pistol whistled loudly.

  “So what’s the scheme?” Rob asked, his hands still up. “Money? I can assure you that JumpShift doesn’t have much to spare. All of our capital is tied up in equipment and assets at this time. If you’re planning to get rich off JumpShift, I’d encourage you to send me back—no questions asked—then invest in stock once we go public in a few months.”

  The man with the gun smiled, and sniffed laughter: derision.

  “I’m totally serious,” Rob said.

  “I know that,” said the third man, who until now had been entirely focused on his computer screen. He turned, so that his face could finally be seen, and Rob blinked twice.

  “Kevin?”

  “How you doin’, Rob?”

  “Trying to avoid my wife’s fiery wrath,” Rob said. “How are you doing, Doctor Tanner?”

  “Oh, so-so,” the third man said.

  All of them were wearing blue jeans and white T-shirts. With black tennis shoes. No watches. Nothing that could have distinguished them in a crowd, nor given Rob any clue whatsoever as to where he was.

  “I didn’t expect you to be the one who came walking into my web,” Kevin said.

  “Oh? What precisely did you expect?”

  “I’ve been watching pots and pans blip in and out of my booth for a long time now. We turned it off for a while, to refine the programming on the big-neutrino network interrupt I’ve created, and only went live again this morning. I was expecting more hardware to blip through. But then your mutt showed up, followed quickly by yourself. I’m happy to report that our adjustments obviously paid off. Our prototype works beautifully.”

  “The booths must have precisely the same volume,” Rob said. “Down to the final cubic millimeter. Otherwise they won’t work. The test subject simply stays put. No teleport. I am figuring you didn’t just make a lucky guess. Someone on the inside—on my end—has to have been passing you information.”

  The buzz from numerous computer fans filled the air, while Sparky’s gentle panting could he heard at Rob’s feet. The other men were stone-faced, but fidgety. Kevin and Rob were being far too civil. A tremor of violence still lurked in the air, waiting to be unleashed.

  “Yes and no,” Kevin said. “Back in school you were very eager to share your ideas with the rest of us. Most might have thought you were nuts, but I actually kept some of your more detailed drawings and computer files you e-mailed me. I hung onto them. When news of JumpShift’s existence hit the technical community, I decided you might not be crazy after all. I went to work by myself. With a little effort and some try-and-fail, I eventually got the size and shape of the booth right. Figuring out the receiver took some intuition—along with some help from these fine gentlemen. But again, you were prone to sharing your ideas.”

  “So now you’re an industrial crook,” Rob said, his hands dropping. “What happened with the big IPO venture up in Seattle that was going to make you millions?”

  “It was a gamble,” Kevin said. “A bad one.”

  “And you went broke,” Rob said. “So now you’re trying to pirate my technology? What good will it do you? Especially now that someone you’re working with has a gun pointed at me, and I can reasonably identify all of you for the cops?”

  “You said it yourself, there is someone on the inside.”

  “I’d give a finger or two to know who.”

  “You won’t like the answer,” Kevin said with a dour smile.

  “Try me,” Rob replied.

  “In a minute maybe. Let’s go back to what you said earlier, about stock. JumpShift is going on the market? Do you think you’re that ready?”

  “We need the capital to get the booths into the wider world. As many as possible, as quickly as possible. Unless or until we can make the booths ubiquitous, they will be an industrial curiosity. Just like wireless phones and e-pads, we need people to need the booths.”

  “A booth in every garage?” Kevin said.

  “Just about.”

  Rob felt himself sweating under his shirt. The air in the basement was cool, but with that gun aimed at him, Rob’s heart rate remained at triple-time. Sparky stayed more or less calm, but if either of the two strangers made any sudden moves, Rob knew—from long experience—that it would set the dog off again. Which might prompt the man with the pistol to begin putting holes in things, as well as people.


  “Your best option,” Rob said, trying to keep his voice controlled, “is to send my dog and I back through the way we came.”

  “Just like that?” Kevin said. “No harm, no foul? Obviously you’ve got a major problem now that you know someone with the right knowledge can hack into your booth network.”

  “Obviously,” Rob said.

  “Have any idea yet how I did it?”

  “Not especially, no.”

  “Then that knowledge is worth something.”

  Rob smiled slightly, and began to nod his head. Ah. Very clever. His old buddy from Cal Tech had lost a small mint up north, and come crawling back to California with his hat in his hand. Unable to buy stock outright, Kevin was trying to extort his way into the JumpShift circle—either Rob adopted Kevin as a technical partner, with full shares, or Rob might be left scratching his head over the problem of how someone outside JumpShift had managed to produce a booth capable of shoehorning in on the JumpShift network.

  Unless the JumpShift booths could be proven to work safely and securely, the public would not trust them to the extent Rob needed the public to trust them, in order for JumpShift booths to reach the tipping point of saturation necessary for them to change the economy.

  “Ballsy,” Rob said to his old friend. Especially since Rob and Kevin had had a rather nasty falling out when Daniella first came on the scene.

  “How much do your henchmen get?”

  Kevin smiled without humor.

  “A full cut. Dave and Mike were at school with us. A year or two back. You wouldn’t remember them because you barely paid attention to what was in front of your nose at that time. They lost money in Seattle too. I convinced them that we could combine our efforts and obtain a reasonable slice of the JumpShift pie, and all we’d have to do is put in some after-office hours. As well as a little cash for the hardware.”

  “And if I refuse?” Rob said.

  “Don’t refuse,” said the man with the gun.

  “I’m not worth anything to you dead,” Rob said.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Kevin said.

  ***

  “You seriously went there?” Jerryberry asked.