Larry Niven - Flash crowd

Jerryberry considered keeping his mouth shut but decided he didn't have the willpower. "What about pollution?"

"What?"

"Death Valley used to have an ecology as unique as its climate. What's your unlimited water doing to that?"

"Ruining it, I guess."

"Hawaii, you said. Grand Canyon. There are laws against putting up apartment buildings in national monuments, thank God. Hawaii probably has the population density of New York by now. Your displacement booths can put men anywhere, right? Even places they don't belong."

"Well, maybe they can," Whyte said slowly. "Pollution. Hmm. What do you know about Death Valley?".

"It's hot." Jerryberry was wet through.

"Death Valley used to be an inland sea. A salt sea. Then the climate changed, and all the water went away. What did that do to the ecology?"

Jerryberry scratched his head. "A sea?"

"Yes, a sea! And drying it up ruined one ecology and started another, just like we're doing. But never mind that. I want to show you some things. Pollution, huh?" Whyte's grip on Jerryberry's arm was stronger than it had any right to be.

Whyte was angry. In the booth he froze, with his brow furrowed and his forefinger extended. Trying to remember a number. Then he dialed in trembling haste.

He dialed two sequences. Jerryberry saw the interior of an airline terminal, then-dark.

"Oh, damn. I forgot it would be night here."

"Where are we?"

"Sahara Desert. Rudolph Hill Reclamation Project. No, don't go out there; there's nothing to see at night. Do you know anything about the project?"

"You're trying to grow a forest in the middle of the Sahara: trees, leaf-eating molds, animals, the whole ecology." Jerryberry tried to see out through the glass. Nothing. "How's it working?"

"Well enough. If we can keep it going another thirty years, this part of the Sahara should stay a forest. Do you think we're wiping out another ecology?"

"Well, it's probably worth it here."

"The Sahara used to be a lush, green land. It was men who turned it into a desert, over thousands of years, mainly through overgrazing. We're trying to put it back."

"Okay," said Jerryberry. He heard Whyte dialing. Through the glass he could now see stars and a horizon etched with treetop shadows.

He squinted against airport-terminal lights. He asked, "How did we get through customs?"

"Oh, the Hill project is officially United States territory." Whyte swung the local directory out from the wall and leafed through it before dialing a second time. "Some day you'll make any journey by dialing two numbers," he was saying. "Why should you have to dial your local airport first? Just dial a long-distance booth near your destination. Of course the change-over will cost us considerable. Here we are."

Bright sunlight, sandy beach, blue sea stretching to infinity. The booth was backed up against a seaside hotel. Jerryberry followed Whyte, whose careful, determined stride took him straight toward the water.

They stopped at the edge. Tiny waves brushed just to the tips of their shoes.

"Carpintena. They advertise this beach as the safest beach in the world. It's also the dullest, of course. No waves. Remember anything about Carpinteria, Barry?"

"I don't think so."

"Oil-slick disaster. A tanker broke up out there, opposite Santa Barbara, which is up the coast a little. All of these beaches were black with oil. I was one of the volunteers working here to save the birds, to get the oil off their feathers. They died anyway. Almost fifty years ago, Barry."

Part of a history lesson floated to the top of his mind. "I thought that happened in England."

"There were several oil-slick disasters. Almost I might say, there were many. These days we ship oil by displacement booths, and we don't use anything like as much oil."

"No cars."

"No oil wells, practically."

They shifted.

From an underwater dome they gazed out at an artificial reef made from old car bodies. The shapes seemed to blend, their outlines obscured by mud and time and swarming fish. Bent and twisted metal bodies had long since rusted away, but their outlines remained, held by shellfish living and dead. Ghosts of cars, the dashboards and upholstery showing through. An occasional fiber-glass wreck showed as if it had been placed yesterday.

The reef went on and on, disappearing into gray distance.

All those cars.

"People used to joke about the East River catching fire and burning to the ground. It was that dirty," said Whyte. "Now look at it."

Things floated by: wide patches of scum, with plastic and metal objects embedded in them. Jerryberry said, "It's pretty grubby."

"Maybe, but it's not an open sewer. Teleportation made it easier to get rid of garbage."

"I guess my trouble is I never saw anything as dirty as you claim it was. Oil slicks. Lake Michigan. The Mississippi." Maybe you're exaggerating. "Just what has teleportation done for garbage collection?"

"There are records. Pictures."

"But even with your wonderful bottomless garbage cans, it must be easier just to dump it in the river."

"Ahh, I guess so."

"And you still have to put the gupp somewhere after you collect it."

Whyte was looking at him oddly. "Very shrewd, Barry. Let me show you the next step."

Whyte kept his hand covered as he dialed. "Secret," he said. "JumpShift experimental laboratory. We don't need a lot of room, because experiments with teleportation aren't particularly dangerous…"

but there was room, lots of it. The building was a huge inflated Quonset hut. Through the transparent panels Jerryberry could see other buildings, set wide apart on bare dirt. The sun was 45 degrees up. If he had known which way was north, he could have guessed longitude and latitude.

A very tall, very black woman in a lab smock greeted Whyte with glad cries. Whyte introduced her as "Gemini Jones, Phd."

"Gem, where do you handle disposal of radioactive waste?"

"Building Four." The physicist's hair exploded around her head like a black dandelion, adding unnecessary inches to her height. She looked down at Jerryberry with genial curiosity. "Newstaper?"

"Don't ever try to fool anyone. The eyes give you away."

They took the booth to Building Four. Presently they were looking down through several densities of leaded glass into a cylindrical metal chamber.

"We get a package every twenty minutes or so," said Gem Jones. "There's a transmitter linked to this receiver in every major power plant in the United States. We keep the receiver on all the time. If a package gets reflected back, we have to find out what's wrong, and that can get hairy, because it's usually wrong at the drop-ship."

Jerryberry said, "Drop-ship?"

Gemini Jones showed surprise at his ignorance. Whyte said, "Backup a bit, Barry. What's the most dangerous garbage ever?"

"Give me a hint."

"Radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants. Most dangerous per pound, anyway. They send those wastes here, and we send them to a drop-ship. You've got to know what a drop-ship is."

"Of course I-"

"A drop-ship is a moving teleport receiver with one end open. Generally it's attached to a space probe. The payload flicks in with a velocity different from that of the drop-ship. Of course it's supposed to come tearing out the open end, which means somebody has to keep it turned right. And of course the drop-ship only operates in vacuum."

"Package," Gem Jones said softly. Something had appeared in the metal chamber below. It was gone before Jerryberry could quite see what it was.

"Just where is your drop-ship?"

"Circling Venus," said Whyte. "Originally it was part of the second Venus expedition. You can send anything through a drop-ship: fuel, oxygen, food, water, even small vehicles. There are drop-ships circling every planet in the solar system, except Neptune.