Larry Niven: Flash crowd

Downtown he found huge blocks of buildings faced in glass, some completed, some half built. He found old slums and old mansions. But wherever the streets ran, past mansions or slums or new skyscrapers, he found tents and leantos and board shacks hastily nailed together. They filled the streets, leaving small clear areas around displacement booths and public rest rooms and far more basic portable toilets. An open-air market ran for several blocks and was closed at both ends by crowds of tents. The only way in or out was by booth.

They're ahead of us, thought Jerryberry. When you've got booths, who needs streets? He was not amused. He was appalled.

There were beggars. At first he was moving too fast; he didn't realize what they were doing. But wherever he flicked in, one or two habitants immediately came toward his booth. He stopped under a vertical glass cliff of a building, where the tents of the squatters ran just to the bouommost of a flight of stone steps, and waited.

Beggars. Some were natives, men and women and children, uniform in their dark-bronze color and in their dress and their speech and the way they moved. They were a thin minority. Most were men and white and foreign. They came with their hands out, mournful or smiling; they spoke rapidly in what they guessed to be his language, and were right about half the time.

He tried several other numbers. They were everywhere.

Tahiti was a white man's daydream.

Suddenly he'd had enough. On his list of jotted numbers was one that would take him out of the city. Jerryberry dialed it.

Air puffed out of the booth when he opened the door. Jerryberry opened his jaws wide to pop his ears.

The view! He was near the peak of a granite mountain. Other mountains marched away before him, and the valleys between were green and lush. Greens and yellows and white clouds, the blue-gray of distant peaks, and beyond everything else, the sea.

It was a bus terminal. An ancient Greyhound was just pulling out. The driver stopped alongside him and shouted something amiable in French. Jerryberry smiled and shook his head violently. The driver shrugged and pulled away.

This could not have been the original terminal. Before displacement booths it could have been reached only after hours of driving. In moving the terminal up here, the touring company had saved the best for first and last.

The bus had looked full. Business was good.

Jerryberry stood for a long time, drinking in the view. This was the beauty that had made Tahiti famous. It was good to know that Tahiti's population explosion had left something intact.

In good time he remembered that he was running on a time limit. He walked around to the ticket window.

The young man in the booth laid a paperback book face down. He smiled agreeably. "Yes?"

"Do you speak English?"

"Certainly." He wore a kind of uniform, but his features and color were those of a Tahitian. His English was good, the accent not quite French. "Would you like to buy a tour ticket?"

"No, thanks. I'd like to talk, if you have a minute."

"What would you like to talk about?"

"Tahiti. I'm a newstaper."

The man's smile drooped a bit. "And you wish to give us free publicity."

"Something like that."

The smile was gone. "You may return to your country and tell them that Tahiti is full."

"I noticed that. I have just come from Papeete."

"I have the honor to own a house in Papeete, a good property. We, my family and myself, we have been forced to move out! There was no-no paysage-" he was too angry to talk as fast as he wanted-"no passage from the house to anyplace. We were surrounded by the tents of the-" He used a word Jerryberry did not recognize. "We could not buy an instant motion booth for the house. I had not the money. We could not have moved the booth to the house because the-"that word again-"blocked the streets. The police can do nothing. Nothing."

"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.

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.