Larry Niven: Flash crowd

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 what 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?"