Flash crowd

by Larry Niven

  "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.

  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 corns for the booth in the lobby.

  "Then there was Lon Willis. 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, "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?"

  "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 cards?"

  "Right."

  "And you can cancel them in three minutes. Picking pockets isn't profitable any more. If it was, they would have mobbed the mall riot."

  Smuggling: Nobody even tried to stop it.

  Drugs: "There's no way to keep them from getting in. Anyone who wants drugs can get them. We make arrests where we can, 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 w
hat 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."

  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 cargo booth in Penney'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. They must have seen the mall-type riots coming. 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 displacement-booth design.

  Seven o'clock. The interview with 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 the looters escape, too. But there might be no way to stop that. At least it would get the innocent bystanders out of a riot area.

  Hah! Escape booths send only to police station!!!

  He crossed that out and wrote, All booths send only to police station!!! He crossed 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.

  He 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.

  And it had seemed like such a good idea.

  * * *

  He was dawdling over coffee when the rest of it dropped into place. He 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 through his hat-in front of a big audience.

  Twenty minutes later, as he was about to get up and call again, the headwaiter came to tell him that Dr. Robin Whyte was on the 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." Whyte half-closed his eyes to think. "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 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 stopped suddenly and frowned. "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."

  "How many? There's a distance him Bany, 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 Oregon!"

  Whyte was laughing. "If you could see your face! Barry, you're a dreamer."

  "You can't do it."

  "No, of course we can't do it. Wait a minute." Whyte pursed his lips.

  "There's a way. We could do it if there was a long-distance receiver at the police station. Hook the network to a velocity damper! I told you, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to dial to a long-distance receiver from any booth."

  "It would work, then!"

  "You'd have to talk the public into paying for it. Design wouldn't be much of a problem.. We could cover the country with an emergency network in a couple of years."

  "Can I quote you?"

  "Of course. We sell displacement booths. That's our business."

  10

  Talk shows are one of the few remaining pure entertainment features on teevee. With cassettes the viewer buys a package; with a talk show he never knows just what he's getting. It is a different product. It is cheap to produce. It can compete.

  The Tonight Show shows at 8:30 P.M., prime time.

  Around nine they start flicking in, pouring out of the coin booths that line the street above the last row of houses. They mill about, searching out the narrow walks that lead down to the strand. They pour over the low stone wall that guards the sand from the houses. They pause, awed.

  Breakers roll in from the black sea, flashing electric-blue.

  Within minutes Hennosa Beach is aswarm with people: men, women, children, in couples and family groups. They hold hands and look out to sea. They stamp the packed wet sand, dancing like savages, and whoop with delight to see blue light flash beneath their feet. High up on the dry sand are piles of discarded clothing. Swimmers are thick in the water, splashing blue fire at each other.

  Many were drunk or high on this or that when the Tonight Show led them here. Those who came were happy to start with. They came to do a happy thing. Some carry six-packs or pouches of pot.

  The line of them stretches around the curve of the shore to the north, beyond Hermosa Pier to the south, bunching around the pier. More are shifting in all the time, trickling down to join the others.

  Jerryberry Jansen flicked in almost an hour early for the interview.

  The station was an ant's nest, a swarm of furious disorganization. Jerryberry was looking for Wash Evans when Wash Evans came running past him from behind, glanced back, and came to a jarring halt.

  "'Lo," said Jerryberry. "Is there anything we need to go over before we go on?"

  Evans seemed at a loss. "Yah," he said, and caught his breath a little. "You're not ne
ws anymore, Jansen. We may not even be doing the interview."

  Jerryberry said a dirty word. "I heard they'd cleared up the riot-"

  "More than that. They caught the lady shoplifter."

  "Good!"

  "If you say so. One out of a thousand people that recognized your pictures of her turned out to be right. Woman name of Inna Hennessey, lives in Jersey City but commutes all over the country. She says she's never hit the same store twice. She's a kick, Jansen. A newstaper's dream. No offense intended, but I wish they'd let her out of jail tonight. I'd interview her."

  "So I didn't cause the mall riot anymore, now you've got Irma Hennessey. Well, good. I didn't like being a celebrity. Anything else?"

  He was thinking, All that jumping around, all the things I learned today, all wasted. Unless I can get a tapezine lecture out of it.

  Evans said, "Yah, there's a new mall riot going on at Hermosa Beach."

  "What the hell?"

  "Craziest damn thing." Wash Evans lit a cigarette and talked around it. "You know Gordon Lundt, the 'zine star? He was on the Tonight Show, and he happened to mention the red tide down at Hermosa Beach. He said it was pretty. The next thing anyone knows, every man, woman, and child in the country has decided he wants to see the red tide at Hermosa Beach."

  "How bad is it?"

  "Well, nobody's been hurt, last I heard. And they aren't breaking things. It's not that kind of crowd, and there's nothing to steal but sand, anyway. It's a happy riot, Jansen. There's just a bitch of a lot of people."