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. '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 a place to stay. And they are not the worst. You will tell them 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!' He pointed where Jerryberry could not have seen himself, down the slope of the mountain. 'The Playboy Club builds a new hotel below us.'
Jerryberry looked down to temporary buildings and a great steel box with helicopter rotors on it. He filmed it on the 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 word I wanted. The squatters are in my house now, lam sure of it, in my house since we moved out. Tell them we want no more squatters.'
'I'll tell them,' said Jerryberry.
Before he left, he 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 Playboy Club's Type ifi cargo booth.
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 their massive solemnity. But you could get there just by dialing.
Except that the directory wouldn't give him 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?
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 he couldn't get anyone to talk to him.
The patience of a newstaper was unique in a world of instant transportation. He kept at it. Eventually a desk man 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 Penney's. 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.
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 changed 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, he 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. Many 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'), others 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 in Oregon.
He was living in a small house in the middle of a pine forest. From McCord's porch Jerryberry could see the dirt road that joined him to civilization. It seemed to be fading away in weeds. But the displacement booth was new.
They drank beer on the porch. '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. . when? Nineteen ninety? 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.
