Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  After a fourth day spent aimlessly wandering the city—looking for news that didn’t happen—Barry reluctantly discussed his feelings with Horace.

  “Jerryberry,” Horace said, using the nickname that Sharlaqueen had hung on Barry the morning of day two, “we’ve all experienced the desire: to be in the midst of something so cataclysmic and overwhelming, that every second of footage is historic. The kind of stuff they’ll put on the national or world news and run for days or weeks. Do you know what the Hindenburg was?”

  “No,” Barry admitted.

  “Long time ago, before even I was born—so you know it’s been a while—they used to make blimps filled with hydrogen, instead of helium. Airships, they were called. Anyway, the Hindenburg was this great big airship that used to take people across the Atlantic ocean. Then one day as she was pulling into New Jersey, the Hindenburg burst into flames. And there were cameras and a man with a microphone there to report it. Herbert Morrison. His voice recording of the event went on to become world-famous, even long after he died.”

  “Whoa,” Barry said, his eyes gone wide.

  “Now,” Horace said, putting a hand on Barry’s shoulder, “the chances of you or I ever standing in Herbert Morrison’s shoes are remote. You can wish for such a thing, but it’s more probable that you won’t get to have a Herbert Morrison moment. And that’s OK. Not every clip need be about astounding disasters or tragedies. You should think outside the box a little. Look for good news. Or interesting events that spring up. Maybe even interesting people connected to interesting events? In my entire career I’ve never been there for a Hindenburg-style whopper. But I’ve gotten very good at digging for the stories-beneath-the-story, if you catch my drift?”

  Barry just nodded.

  And went back out on the street for a fifth day.

  The city seemed as devoid of actual news as ever.

  Then Barry strolled past the construction site on I-5.

  The decommissioning of the freeways wasn’t news anymore. Traffic had tapered down to the point that politicians could not justify the tax dollars to keep them up, so the onramps were barricaded and the all-but-empty freeways became an obsolete curiosity. Reminders of life in the previous century. Remanded to local state and municipal control.

  Even the military didn’t see a need for them anymore—and it had been the military which had caused freeways to come into being in the wake of World War Two.

  In California, many of the freeways sat utterly derelict.

  But here and there, people were putting them to good use.

  A brick-and-mortar superstore was being put up right in the middle of a twelve-lane section of the mighty mid-town Interstate. Three stories tall. With skybridges. Acres of eventual shopping space. Barry found himself fascinated by the surreal sight of men and heavy equipment moving huge steel beams into place, then bolting them directly down to the use-worn surface of the freeway’s concrete.

  Some of the huge crane trucks had to weigh many tons.

  Hmmmm …

  Barry waited until one of the crane operators took a break.

  In the meantime he got several minutes of interesting footage of the crane doing its work.

  When the crane stopped moving and the door on the crane’s cab popped open, Barry chased up to the fence surrounding the construction lot and waved for the crane operator’s attention—newstaper camera held high.

  The crane operator sauntered over.

  “Hiya, kid,” the man said, pulling off his hardhat and wiping his shining scalp with a handkerchief. “Helluva day to be parked on the concrete.”

  “Sure is,” Barry said, feeling his own shirt grow damp at the waist and around the pits of his arms. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about this project? It’s for the Golden State Bulletin-Gazette.”

  “Sure,” the operator said, smiling.

  “Can I come inside the fence?” Barry asked.

  “Better if I come outside of it.”

  Which the man did.

  Together, Barry and the operator—who identified himself as John Griggs—took a seat under one of the many tents surrounding the work site. Huge buckets of ice water and chilled, fruity electrolyte drink were perched on picnic tables, and Barry and John each filled themselves a foam cup before sitting on a bench and having a conversation.

  “How did the crane get here?” Barry asked.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “If the freeways are closed, how did the crane get to the work site?”

  “Well … we drove it, naturally. Special permit from the city.”

  “And what happens when the freeway has been used up for other stores, or parks, or anything else people might want to lay down over the top of the concrete? How will you be getting the cranes where they need to be?”

  John thought about it, rubbing his black moustache.

  “I suppose we’d have to fly it in.”

  “By helicopter?”

  “It’d be the only way.”

  “Are there helicopters big enough to lift a crane truck like yours?”

  “The Army or Forest Service might have some, I think. Huge birds. When I was a kid they were called Aircranes. With gargantuan rotors that flexed upward at the tips when they were lifting.”

  “A crane to lift a crane?”

  “Yuh,” John said, smiling and chuckling, then taking a long drink. “If you want, I can maybe get you a day permit on the site. Show you how the controls to my machine work.”

  Barry beamed.

  “Could you?”

  “Sure. The foreman might love the publicity, having a junior newstaper showing off the company logo all nice and big on the side of the truck. Let’s go to the trailer and get you authorized.”

  They walked to a double-wide unit chocked up on cinder blocks.

  Inside, several in-window air conditioners chugged noisily.

  “What’s your name, kid,” the middle-aged woman at the desk said as she scrawled Barry’s temporary credentials on an orange lanyard.

  “Jerryberry,” he blurted.

  “What?” the woman asked.

  “Sorry,” Barry said, ashamed to admit that the nickname had stuck, even in his mind. “Barry Jerome Jansen.”

  “I think I liked it better the first time,” she said, shaking her head and chewing her gum.

  She wrote JERRY BERRY in all caps, using a permanent marker.

  The crane operator smiled at Barry, then got official permission from the foreman, and took Barry over to climb up into the cab.

  ***

  Barry’s was the first piece from any of his intern peers to actually make it through Sharlaqueen’s jaundiced sieve. And that of the people upstairs. And even onto the wider state media scan.

  Because it wasn’t just the crane that proved interesting.

  The helicopter portion was interesting too. Barry went directly to a company that leased helicopters for construction airlift, and managed to spend time in the cockpit with one of the pilots. He even got a short ride while the pilot and a co-pilot took one of the huge machines up for a maintenance hop across town.

  Barry digitally recorded and talked his way through the whole thing.

  Properly edited, the piece made for a nice bit of variety news.

  And it got Barry a bonus, which he’d not been expecting.

  “It’s not often they give these out to kids,” Sharlaqueen said when she slipped Barry the envelope. “But the people upstairs were so pleased with the performance of your story, they let it be known that you deserved at least some portion of the profit.”

  Barry opened the envelope.

  It was more money than he’d ever held in one hand in his entire life.

  Sharlaqueen smiled.

  “Keep it up, Jerryberry. Most kids who come through my door looking to make it as a newstaper, wash out within two weeks. On account of boredom. But you? You seem to be the kind of person who just might make a go of it. Show me a few more pieces like this one,
and you won’t have any trouble coming on full-time.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Barry said, grinning from ear to ear.

  He left work that day, practically at a run. He couldn’t wait to show the check to his father.

  ***

  “It’ll take more than five hundred bucks to pay rent in this city,” Eric Jansen groused over the dinner table.

  Barry’s mother had been momentarily excited for Barry when he’d rushed in the door, envelope in hand. But that excitement had been summarily silenced by Eric Jansen’s unimpressed reception.

  “It’s just a start, dad,” Barry said, his tone revealing his impatience with his father’s criticism.

  Eric just stared at his son: a bushy, fatherly eyebrow raised.

  “Sorry, sir,” Barry muttered.

  “And how many hours did it take you to earn this?” Eric asked.

  “Six, maybe seven?”

  “Try forty,” Eric said. “Because it took you all week to come up with one good piece. And then the company took the lion’s share of your earnings. Hell, son, you might as well set up your own damned web site and go into business solo.”

  “I won’t get any market traction that way,” Barry said. “The only solo newstapers making money are the ones who started off with the big sites, and gained enough of an individual following to split off. I have to start small. Work my way up.”

  “It’s his first paycheck, Eric,” Barry’s mother mildly scolded her husband. “The least we can do is be thankful that he’s out trying to earn money. Unlike some of our friends’ kids. You know the Fredricks’ boy is already twenty five and he’s still not worked a day in his life? Your son will be sixteen next year, and he’s earning now.”

  Barry beamed.

  Eric Jansen remained unconvinced. His fingers drummed his thigh.

  “So how long before you make real money?”

  “Not long,” Barry said, half hoping it was true. “My boss says if I turn in a couple more solid pieces like the one I did today, they’ll take me on permanently. I get a quarterly stipend, plus better equipment. I can use the money to go to journalism school. Get an actual degree. When I graduate, I can take a shot at one of the major networks.”

  “That’s a long ways in the future,” Eric said. “And what guarantee will you have that you’ll keep getting lucky? Finding news worth their time and dollars? Seems to me this boss of yours has her finger on the pulse of whether you’ll starve on any given week. I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it!” Barry exploded, his adolescent temper having reached its end. He’d known the argument was coming. He’d been dreading it ever since he officially approached the Bulletin-Gazette. But now that the argument was in full swing, Barry found he had absolutely no appetite for it. None. Why did dad always have to be this way?

  Eric Jansen slapped his hand commandingly on the kitchen table.

  “Now look,” he said, leaning in to stare directly into Barry’s hotly glaring eyes, “as long as you’re under this roof I demand some basic respect. You’re not a man yet, you hear me? Just because you had a stroke of luck and got a little money in your pocket, you think you’re ready to go out and swing a bat with the big boys? Do you? Well you’re not. Believe me. I know what it’s like to fall on my face, son. It can happen at any time, anywhere.”

  “It’s better to try, and fail, than to not try at all,” Barry said with a thick voice as he swallowed back the tears.

  Eric Jansen simply kept staring into his son’s now-red eyes.

  Then Barry’s father’s shoulders drooped, and he muttered a few choice four letter words, then stood up and plodded back through the kitchen door to where his use-worn easy chair awaited him.

  Eric’s mother reached across the table and put her hand on one of Barry’s. He sniffed twice, finally allowing a few drops to leak down his face.

  “Don’t be too mad at him,” Barry’s mother said. “It’s not been easy. Your father didn’t have to work until much later in his life than you’re having to work now. He just doesn’t want to see you get disappointed the way he got disappointed.”

  “Dad never had a dream, Mom,” Barry said. “I do.”

  “I know that, dear,” she said, “and I think it’s wonderful to see you trying so hard. But the summer won’t last forever. And you still have school to worry about in September. Are you going to be running around all evening after class, chasing stories? When you should be doing homework?”

  “I don’t know,” Barry admitted.

  “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she finally said, offering her son a cautious smile.

  ***

  It was a couple of weeks before Barry turned in anything else worthy of Sharlaqueen’s approval. And then, a few more weeks again. When school came, Barry had to limit his activities to weekends, but it was worth it to him to keep bringing in the occasional bonus check, just to brandish it in his father’s sour face.

  Months rolled onward.

  By the time Jerryberry was sixteen, he’d been brought on part-time.

  At eighteen, he forgot all about journalism school and went full-time.

  Newstaping became his obsession. He traveled extensively from San Diego in the south to Sacramento in the north. He sent in countless variety pieces, bits of political reporting, follow-up stories connected to bigger news that had already passed from public attention, and then he struck gold. He got on the national scene with an extensive in-progress report on a bank robbery involving armed and armored gunmen lugging semiautomatic rifles and lobbing smoke grenades.

  That spectacular piece got Jerryberry noticed in a big way.

  The very next morning, he had the offer he’d been waiting for. Sitting in his e-mail box.

  Sharlaqueen’s expression was knowing when Jerryberry came through her door that afternoon.

  “They want you,” was all she said.

  “Yes,” Jerryberry admitted, somewhat sheepishly.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I’ve known it for a long time. The good ones always get taken. Newstaping is a lot like baseball. Talent rises. And you’ve got talent. It took a bit of honing, which I’ll happily take credit for. But like I told Horace when you started sending me the footage from the robbery yesterday, this was going to be your ticket up. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, Shar, I really appreciate it. Look, ummm, I don’t exactly want to have to say that I quit. I like you and I like the Bulletin-Gazette. Any chance we could set up some kind of special arrangement?”

  “Have you seen your new contract with the big network?” she asked.

  “No, just the offer. It’s a nice one. I can’t turn it down.”

  “I know you can’t. And I wouldn’t want you to. Look, unless they’re crazy, your contract won’t allow you to freelance for any other company. They’ll claim every second of everything you newstape from now until the contract expires. Just remember who taught you everything you know, okay? And if things get tight and you need to fall back, the Golden State Bulletin-Gazette’s doors are always open.”

  “Thanks, Shar,” Jerryberry said.

  He put out his hand as she stood up from behind her desk and walked around to where he was standing.

  Grabbing his hand, she pulled him into a bear hug.

  “Go get ’em,” Sharlaqueen said in his ear.

  “I hope I don’t let you down,” Jerryberry responded, feeling a lump in his throat.

  -1-

  FROM EDGE TO EDGE and for all of its length, from Central Los Angeles through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles and Santa Monica to the sea, Wilshire Boulevard was a walkway.

  Once there had been white lines on concrete, and raised curbs to stop the people from interfering with the cars. Now the lines were gone, and much of the concrete was covered with soil and grass. There were even a few trees. Concrete strips had been left for bicycles, and wider places for helicopters carrying cargo too big for the displacement booths.

  Wil
shire was wide for a walkway. People seemed to hug the edges, even those on bikes and motor skates. A boulevard built for cars was too big for mere people.

  Outlines of the street still showed through. Ridges in the grass marked where curbs had been, with breaks where there had been driveways. Some stretches in Westwood had a concrete center divider. The closed freeway ramps were unchanged and unused. Someday the city would do something about them.

  ***

  Jerryberry Jansen lived in what had been a seaside motel halfway between Bakersfield and San Francisco. On long-ago summer nights the Shady Rest had been packed with transients at ten dollars a head. Now it made a dandy apartment house, with swimming pool and everything, including a displacement booth outside the manager’s office.

  There was a girl in the booth when Jerryberry left his apartment. He glimpsed long, wavy brown hair and the shape of her back in the instant before she disappeared. Janice Wolfe. Too bad she hadn’t waited … but she hadn’t even seen him.

  Nobody was ever around the booths long enough to say hello to. You could meet someone by hovering outside the booths, but what would they think?

  Meeting people was for the clubs.

  A displacement booth was a glass cylinder with a rounded top. The machinery that made the magic was invisible, buried beneath the booth. Coin slots and a telephone dial were set into the glass at sternum level.

  Jerryberry inserted his C.B.A. credit card below the coin slot. He dialed by punching numbered buttons. Withdrawing the credit card closed a circuit. An eye blink later he was in an office in the Central Broadcasting Association building in downtown Los Angeles.

  The office was big and empty. Only once in an aeon was all that empty space ever used, though several score of newstapers saw it for a few seconds each day. One wall was lined with displacement booths. A curved desk down at the end was occupied by Jerryberry’s network boss.

  Unlike Sharlaqueen, George Bailey was fat from too much sitting. His skin was darkly tanned by the Nevada sun. He commuted to work every morning via the long-distance booths at Los Angeles International. Today he waved at Jerryberry without speaking. Routine, then. Jerryberry chose one of several C.B.A.-issue cameras and slung the padded strap over his shoulder. He studied several lists of numbers posted over the table before picking one.