Red Tide

by Larry Niven

There was no time. The feet were coming down the inner stairs.

  Rob clicked a large green GUI button that simply said HOME and ran for the booth. He stepped into it and stared around dumbly, looking for the dialer just as he would have done inside a JumpShift booth. It had to be there, right? Right??

  The feet were off the stairs.

  Rob pulled out the pistol and worked the slide, taking the safety off.

  Kevin, Mike, and Dave flew into the room. Two of them had shotguns, though not at the ready.

  Rob aimed squarely at them.

  “You have clumsy henchmen,” Rob said. “Tell me how to activate the booth and I won’t shoot.”

  “Fire on one of us,” Dave said, “and you won’t have time to react before the other two of us ruin your day.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Whyte,” Kevin said. “We could both make a lot of money. You need me.”

  “So does my wife, apparently,” Rob said, with a touch of sad sarcasm.

  Suddenly, a new set of feet could be heard coming down the stairs.

  Rob felt something hard against the back of his heel. A small bump.

  Sparky tore into the room.

  BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK!

  Rob’s kidnappers turned to ward off the Lab-Basset, who was clearly in buzz-saw mode. The shotguns came up, aimed away from Rob.

  Dr. Whyte made an instant decision. Raising his heel, he aimed his pistol at the largish computer tower sitting on the desk—the one that ran the software for Kevin’s booth.

  Timing, timing!

  “Sorry Sparky,” Rob said mournfully.

  —Heel down on the bump, CLICK.

  —Trigger pull, BANG!

  Two actions, one instant.

  In the tiniest fraction of a second it took for the bullet to exit the muzzle of the Beretta and bury itself into the hard drive of the computer tower, the booth flicked Rob from the basement of Kevin’s lair to … what appeared to be someone’s garage.

  Again, an invisible force threw Rob around the booth. This time even more violently than before.

  Rob stood up and stumbled out, pistol aimed back the way he’d come, prepared for whoever decided to follow.

  When five minutes passed with no one coming to get him, Rob traced the second booth’s cables to the second workstation, which he promptly shut down and unplugged, just for good measure.

  Then he searched the house for a phone.

  Then … he dialed the back line for Lightspeed Labs.

  ***

  “You didn’t call the police?” Jerryberry said incredulously. “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “It would have been a mess trying to explain things to them right there in Kevin’s living room. I was sure they’d have busted me for unlawful entry. The booths weren’t part of the culture then, like they are now. They were a technological toy, and not entirely proven to work. A toy the legal system wasn’t prepared for. Yet. So my first concern was with JumpShift. I had to let them know that I was not only alive, but well. And that we had a rather severe technical problem that had to be overcome before we could take the booths to market.”

  “So you never told the authorities?”

  “In time, sure. Once everyone at Lightspeed Labs calmed down, and I’d been able to quietly exit Kevin’s place—turned out he had a house within blocks of mine, where Daniella lived.”

  “Your wife. Right. What happened to her?”

  “I divorced her.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What else could I do? There was no proof of anything. Just what Kevin had told me. And once I confronted Daniella about the affair—no mention of insurance or potential murder, just the affair—she quietly conceded. And agreed to an amicable split. Last I heard she’d been married twice more herself, though I think she died alone.”

  Jerryberry noticed that Rob’s expression was sad, instead of vindictive. Though Daniella had clearly destroyed the marriage, some thread of affection still lingered in the old man’s heart.

  “Amazing,” Jerryberry said.

  “Want to know what else? They never did find Kevin or his buddies.”

  “Never?”

  “Nope. Nevada state patrol eventually sent a chopper out to check that property, once I helped them zero in on it using an internet map. They found evidence of temporary habitation, and the wreck of Kevin’s booth. But no people.”

  “So Kevin made it out alive?”

  “Who knows? Personally, I think he and his three pals bit the dust. Dead within a day, in that heat, with no water. They couldn’t stay at the house for fear that the fuzz would show up. So they tried to walk out—and never made it.”

  “You can’t be sure,” Jerryberry said.

  “Nope. But when nobody tried to put a bullet in me or blow up my car within the first year after JumpShift’s stock hit the market—and soared—I figured the window of real danger had passed. And I am reasonably certain that, all this time later, I was right in that assumption. But I never wanted to stir the hornet’s nest, either. Which is why I’ve not gone public about the whole thing until you talked me into doing this exposé. Now that the project is almost ready to air, I can come clean.”

  “Did you ever feel bad?” Jerryberry asked.

  “About what? Kevin? Not really. Like I said, we had a falling out when Daniella came around. Kevin was just as hot for her as I was. He didn’t like that she took more of an interest in me, out of college, than him. So of course it probably felt like justice that he got to screw Daniella behind my back. In hindsight I think they deserved each other. I married Paula three years after the divorce from Daniella, got divorced again six years after that, and didn’t meet Karolyn until JumpShift had made me a mega-millionaire.”

  “That sort of puts the lie to the idea that rich men can’t find true love.”

  “Only because Karolyn and I had been friends in high school, and when the twenty-five-year reunion came around … well, anyway, she was divorced, I was divorced, we got to talking, and so forth. It was a quiet romance. Which was just fine by me, since JumpShift was giving me more public attention than I wanted, or could handle. Karolyn was like an island of calm amidst the publicity storm.”

  “Speaking of which, how did you fix the security hole, with the booths?”

  “We encrypted the booth-to-booth signal that each of the booths uses to synchronize. Dumb and simple, really. Not nearly as mysterious or hard as Kevin made it sound. We’d have thought of it eventually, because the problem would have become apparent sooner or later. Kevin just rushed it to the forefront. Nowadays it’s an afterthought, and the only way the different booth networks in the different countries can stay sorted out from each other. If your particular booth on your street corner can’t ‘talk’ to the booth on the other side of town, then there’s no flicking between them. Easy-peasy.”

  “Nice to know we’ve been protected all this time.”

  “It’d be major news before now, if you weren’t. Bigger news than something like the mall riot, which exposed a different hole.”

  “Indeed,” Jerryberry said. “Anyway, what I really meant to ask you was, did you ever feel bad about the dog?”

  “Sparky? Oh, he lived to a ripe old age.”

  “But you said—”

  “I saw Dave and Mike raise their guns, I never saw them fire.”

  “But how—”

  “He was hungry as death when the Nevada cops showed up at the house, but he’d been drinking out of the toilet all week, so there wasn’t any lasting harm done. I suppose maybe my one and only shot at the computer had diverted Kevin’s boys’ attention from Sparky? Or maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to kill an innocent animal. Who knows? I do know that Sparky came home to me and stayed there, and fathered a nice bunch of puppies. I always did like that damned dog.”

  “Perfect,” Jerryberry said, smiling.

  He stood up from the chair and stretched, then went to the digital recorder and pressed the switch that turned it of
f. The little blue light grew dim, and darkened.

  “You’ll want to see my edited second run of this,” Jerryberry said.

  “Sure,” Rob said, blinking his weary eyes.

  Jerryberry pulled out his phone and checked the time.

  “It’s late. I’ll start cutting this into the exposé tomorrow. The hidden story behind one of JumpShift’s most potentially fatal foul-ups, narrowly averted by the quick thinking of JumpShift’s founder.”

  “The dog did it,” Rob said. “It was Sparky. If he’d not started making a racket when Kevin and his boys came back to the house, I’d have still been quietly fiddling with that inner door when they caught me. Probably would have died, right then. And now Kevin would be laying here in this bed, instead of me. Telling you his side of how it all worked out.”

  Jerryberry chuckled as he collapsed the tripod and packed his things.

  “My alternate self is doing just that right now,” he said.

  Robin Whyte chuckled too.

  “And my alternate self is snowboarding in Alaska.”

  “One can hope, Rob. Thanks for having me over for one more startling interview. As a newstaper, I could not have asked for anything better.”

  Rob’s mouth suddenly stretched wide with a yawn. He coughed a couple of times, then wiped at his lower lip and looked up into Jerryberry’s eyes—a pleading expression on the old man’s face.

  “Just make sure the exposé does me justice? More than that, make sure the exposé does JumpShift justice. We’re a good company, Barry. Always have been. We ran it straight and we kept it narrow. We never gouged on price, and we always tried to deliver quality product with quality service. Not everyone appreciates that. Not everyone likes how we changed the world.”

  “Not even me, if I remember correctly,” Jerryberry admitted.

  “No, not even you.”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment.

  “Goodnight, Rob,” Jerryberry said, turning to go for the door.

  “Goodnight, Barry,” came the reply.

  Jerryberry clicked off the light to the bedroom as he left. Dr. Whyte was already snoring.

  A booth at the building’s lobby took Jerryberry out.

  He flicked four times, through four different quick snatches of scenery, then found himself back in the studio. A place he’d built with his own hands and money, until it had become one of the more respected color journalism newstaper offices in America.

  Most everyone else had gone home, but Jerryberry was eager to work. If Rob had been right, there wasn’t a lot of time left. And Jerryberry felt like he owed it to the old man to deliver him a finished product.

  BOOK FOUR: DISPLACEMENT ACTIVITY

  MATTHEW J. HARRINGTON

  INTRODUCING MATTHEW J. HARRINGTON

  I first encountered Matthew Joseph Harrington when he wrote a story for the Man-Kzin Wars, of which I am an editor. In fact, he wrote several, all involving a protector. Protectors are part of my Known Space universe: they’re the adult form of humanity and its progenitors, the Pak. The Pak breeder stage wasn’t evolved for intelligence. The protector stage is a genius and a weapon.

  If I’d caught him in time, I would have warned Matthew that writing about a character more intelligent than the author is the most difficult challenge he can face. Matthew didn’t need the warning. Peace Corbin the human protector is a wonderful invention.

  We knew each other pretty well when Matthew suggested collaboration. I did an easy thing: I sent him a partly finished novel that had gone stale on me, and hoped he’d get inspired. He did: he blitzed the rest of it, and we published the result as THE GOLIATH STONE in 2013.

  When Michael suggested this book, Matthew was an obvious choice for inclusion.

  Larry Niven

  DISPLACEMENT ACTIVITY

  GREG CAME INTO THE WATCHROOM to find Mike screening another of his weird vintage movies. This one was odder than usual, and that was saying something. What looked like a fairly pureblooded Oriental and a mixed African were beating each other up and wrecking the furniture in the process, which was not unusual for the era, but the dialogue decidedly was:

  “Spartan dog!” Smash. “Roman cow!” Smash. “Spanish fly!” Smash. “Turkish Taffy!” Smash.

  “What in hell are you watching?” Greg said.

  Mike, normally quite the talker, looked at him, opened his mouth, looked at the screen, looked at Greg again, and said, “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

  The lights dimmed.

  At the Mercury Interstellar Receiving Station, the lights had never gone dim. Something had just come in with a phenomenal load of kinetic energy to dump. They both looked through the observation window at the arrival platform, imagining that the Lazarus rescue team had somehow rigged the derelict starship to self-transmit.

  What they saw was a single man in a heavy armored suit, getting to his feet.

  Check: not a man. His arms and legs were too long for his torso, though he did have the standard five-point body form that evolution favored on Earth … and, apparently, wherever he was from too.

  The alien turned slowly until he saw the window, and did something to his helmet—probably zooming in on them. He looked around again, visibly slumped, and did something to a forearm readout. Then he was gone again.

  After an unknown amount of silence, Greg turned to Mike again and said, “Compared to what?”

  Mike said, “We should send a report.”

  “Ya think?”

  *****

  The recording of the arrival created a great deal of excitement at the emergency JumpShift board meeting, as well it might. This was bigger than the discovery of Lazarus, and almost as big as teleportation itself. Back when the UN was still an expensive debating society, the Russian spy service had once come up with a transmitter small enough for a man to carry, but only to a dedicated receiver, and it didn’t send the device along. (It hadn’t worked out well for them; the first time an agent had used one, the people after him had promptly used the same thing to transmit a box of plastique to the same destination. Later models had a timed self-destruct built in, which had the effect of allowing an armed and accurate pursuer to blow up the agent carrying the thing. A plausible argument could be made that JumpShift had done less to bring down the Soviet Empire by breaking its isolation than by destroying KGB morale.)

  The alien suit was clearly a self-transmitter, and obviously not tuned to a particular receiver. Director Bartholomew Jansen watched the recording less than halfway through before saying, “It’s a lifeboat. Look at the legs. Scorch marks. Something went badly wrong for that guy, and he was trying to get home. I wonder how he missed?” He brushed his hand over the fringe of his snowy mountain-man beard as if it were a bubble he was trying not to pop, something he did when he was upset; his friends were of the view that he had too much empathy to be good for him.

  Everyone else leaned forward to see that played back. Director Gail Strong, white hair coming in blonde again, said quietly, “I wonder where he’ll end up.” She and Jansen exchanged a glance. JumpShift had never made the mistake of giving top hire-and-fire authority to nontalent, but these two were talent without any technical knowledge.

  Strong had come up with the continuous-teleport vacuum distillery—while dead drunk, at the party right after the transfer effect was first achieved—and had been kept on salary for over sixty years since, in the hope that she would come up with something else as lucrative. Last year, when JumpShift was sued by an Oregon sect whose members claimed that using transfer booths had removed their souls, she had persuaded the judge to have the plaintiffs watch Old Yeller in court. The jury was back in about twenty minutes. Worth every penny.

  Jansen had suggested the Riot Control system for dealing with flash mobs. After that, Robin Whyte had, essentially, backed progressively larger truckloads of money up to his house until he agreed to join the Board. A couple of years after that, Jansen had thought up the notion of putting an east-west divider insi
de distillery towers, up to just a little below the level of the seawater inside, and painting the side facing the Equator black. That way water would heat up and evaporate faster on the sunny side of the tower, sink due to higher salt content, and refill from the shady side. JumpShift hadn’t needed a tower cleaned out or equipped with circulation pumps since.

  Discussion among the other Board members was brisk at first, largely concerning how a self-transmitter could be made so small and still send itself, with equally excitable remarks about a power supply that could do repeat jumps. It gradually died down as people noticed that the two nontechnical Members, who had increased net company profits more than the rest of them put together, weren’t talking to anyone but each other.

  Chairman Boynton said, “Any ideas from the Advising Directors?”

  Jansen said, “We were wondering how long it takes a body in transit to lose a definable position from interaction with matter.”

  Samuel Watt, who had recently retired from heading Engineering, said, “A body in transit doesn’t interact with matter.”

  “Bullshit,” said Strong cheerfully. (The Kurtzberg-Simon treatments were doing a wonderful job of improving cell-wall function, but a side effect of the resulting rejuvenation was that it tended to make the patient somewhat aggressive.) “It interacts with the receiver just fine, or we wouldn’t have a business—except selling garbage disposals.”

  “And getting rid of bodies,” Jansen murmured. He’d been a newsman once. It had never entirely worn off.

  Watt stared at them hard and raised an arthritis-knotted finger, but nothing came out of his mouth for a while. Then he said, “So you’re wondering if someone who’s in transit long enough could be picked up just anywhere, right?”

  “Right,” said Jansen, and Strong gave Watt a big smile.

  “I am goddamned if I know. I’m not even sure how to check in a single lifetime.”

  “Why does it have to be in a single lifetime?” Strong said. “We were thinking it might be a good idea to build a refuge. Someplace where lost travelers can be collected and provided with a habitable environment.”