'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!'
'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-'
'You won't find it here. Look, a dozen passengers and we're almost busy. A thousand people suddenly pour through those booths, and what would we do? Hide under something, that's what we'd do.'
'I still want to see the incoming booths.'
Scheffer thought it over, shrugged, and let him through. He stood at Jerryberry's shoulder while Jerryberry used his eye and his camera.
The booth was just like a street-corner booth, except for the blank metal face where a dial would be. 'I don't know what's underneath,' Scheffer told him. 'For all of me, it's just like any other booth. How much work would it be to leave off the dial?'
Which made sense. But it was no help at all.
6
They tape the Tonight Show at two in the afternoon.
Twenty minutes into it, the first guest is lolling at his ease, just rapping, talking off the top of his head, ignoring the probable hundred million eyes behind the cameras. This is a valuable knack, and rare. Tonight's first guest is a series hero in a science-fiction tapezine.
He is saying, 'Have you ever seen a red tide? It's thick down at Hermosa Beach. I was there this weekend. In the daytime it's just dirty water, muddy-looking, and it smells. But at night…'
This enthusiasm that can reach through a teevee screen to touch fifty million minds, this enthusiasm is in no way artificial. He means it. He only expresses it better than most men. He leans forward in his chair; his eyes blaze; there is harsh tension in his voice. 'The breakers glow like churning blue fire! Those plankton are fluorescent. And they're all through the wet sand. Walk across it, it flashes blue light under your feet! Kick it, scuff your feet through it, it lights up. Throw a handful of sand, it flashes where it hits! This light isn't just on the surface. Stamp your foot, you can see the structure of the sand by the way it flares. You've got to see it to believe it,' he says.
They will run the tape starting at eight thirty tonight.
7
Standard booths: how standardized?
Who makes them besides JumpShaft? Monopoly? How extensive? Skip spaceflight?
Space exploration depended utterly on teleportation. But the subject was likely to be very technical and not very useful. He could gain time by skipping it entirely. Jerryberry considered, then turned the question mark into an exclamation point.
His twelve hours had become nine.
Of the half-dozen key clubs to which he belonged, the Cave des Roys was the quietest. A place of stone and wood, a good place to sit and think. The wall behind the bar was several hundred wine bottles in a cement matrix. Jerryberry looked into the strange lights in the glass, sipped occasionally at a silver fizz, and jotted down whatever occurred to him.
Sociology. What has teleportation done to society?
Cars.
Oil companies. Oil stocks. See back issues Wall Street Journal.
Watts riot? Chicago riot? He crossed that last one out. The Chicago riot had been political, hadn't it? Then he couldn't remember any other riots. They were too far in the past. He wrote:
Riot control. Police procedure.
Crime? The crime rate should have soared after displacement booths provided the instant getaway. Had it?
Sooner or later he was going to have to drop in at police headquarters. He'd hate that, but he might learn something. Likewise the library, for several hours of dull research. Then?
He certainly wasn't going to persuade everybody to give up displacement booths:
He wrote: OBJECTIVE: Demonstrate that displacement booths imply instant riot. It's a social problem. Solve it on that basis. For the sake of honesty he added, Get 'em off my back. CROWDS. In minutes the mall had become a milling mass of men. But he'd seen crowds form almost as fast. It might happen regularly in certain places. After a moment's thought he wrote. Tahiti. Jerusalem. Mecca. Easter Island. Stonehenge. Olduvai Gorge.
He stood up. Start with the phone calls.
'Doctor Robin Whyte,' Jerryberry said to the phone screen. 'Please.'
The receptionist at Seven Sixes was no sex symbol. She was old enough to be Jerryberry's aunt, and handsome rather than beautiful. She heard him out with a noncommittal dignity that, he sensed, could turn glacial in an instant.
'Barry Jerome Jansen,' he said carefully.
He waited on hold, watching dark-red patterns flow upward in the phone screen.
Key clubs were neither new nor rare. Some were small and local; others were chains, existing in a dozen or a hundred locations. Everyone belonged to a club; most people belonged to several.
But Seven Sixes was something else. Its telephone number was known universally. Its membership, large in absolute terms, was small for an organization so worldwide. It included presidents, kings, winners of various brands of Nobel prize. Its location was-unknown. Somewhere in Earth's temperate zones. Jerryberry had never heard of its displacement booth number being leaked to anyone.
It took a special kind of gall for one of Jerryberry's social standing to dial 666-6666. He had learned that gall in journalism class. Go to the source- no matter how highly placed; be polite, be prepared to wait, but keep trying, and never, never worry about wasting the great man's time.
Funny: They still called it journalism, though newspapers had died. And the Constitution that had protected newspapers still protected 'the press.' For a while. But laws could change.
The screen cleared.
Robin Whyte the physicist had been a mature man of formidable reputation back when JumpShift first demonstrated teleportation. Today, twenty-five years later, he was the last living member of the team that had formed JumpShift. His scalp was pink and bare. His face was round and soft, almost without wrinkles, but slack, as if the muscles were tired. He looked like somebody's favorite grandfather.
He looked Jerryberry Jansen up and down very thoroughly. He said, 'I wanted to see what you looked like.' He reached for the cutoff switch.
'I didn't do it,' Jerryberry said quickly.
Whyte stopped with his finger on the cutoff. 'No?'
'I am not responsible for the mall riot. I hope to prove it.'
The old man thought it over. 'And you propose to involve me? How?'
