Flash crowd

"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 begi

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 di

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 i

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?"

"Go ahead."

"First step is the police get word of a flash crowd, a mall riot-type crowd. They throw emergency switches at headquarters. Each switch affects the displacement booths in a small area."

"That's the way it works now."

"Now those switches turn off the booths. I'd like them to do something more complex. Set them so they can only receive from police and fire departments and can only transmit to a police station."

"We can do that." Whyte half-closed his eyes to think. "Good. Then the police could release the i

"Maybe. At least the receiver would be behind bars."

"You could issue override cards to the police and other authorities to let them shift in through a blockade."

"Good."

Whyte stopped suddenly and frowned. "There's a hole in it. A really big crowd would either wreck the station or smother, depending on how strong the cell was. Did you think of that?"

"I'd like to use more than one police station."

"How many? There's a distance him Bany, what are you thinking?"

"As it stands now, a long-distance passenger has to dial three numbers to get anywhere. You said you could cut that to two. Can you cut it to one?"

"I don't know."

"It's poetic justice," said Jerryberry. "Our whole problem is that rioters can converge on one point from all over the United States. If we could use police stations all over the United States, we wouldn't have a problem. As soon as a cell was full here, we'd switch to police stations in San Diego or Oregon!"

Whyte was laughing. "If you could see your face! Barry, you're a dreamer."

"You can't do it."

"No, of course we can't do it. Wait a minute." Whyte pursed his lips.

"There's a way. We could do it if there was a long-distance receiver at the police station. Hook the network to a velocity damper! I told you, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to dial to a long-distance receiver from any booth."

"It would work, then!"

"You'd have to talk the public into paying for it. Design wouldn't be much of a problem.. We could cover the country with an emergency network in a couple of years."

"Can I quote you?"

"Of course. We sell displacement booths. That's our business."

10

Talk shows are one of the few remaining pure entertainment features on teevee. With cassettes the viewer buys a package; with a talk show he never knows just what he's getting. It is a different product. It is cheap to produce. It can compete.

The Tonight Show shows at 8:30 P.M., prime time.

Around nine they start flicking in, pouring out of the coin booths that line the street above the last row of houses. They mill about, searching out the narrow walks that lead down to the strand. They pour over the low stone wall that guards the sand from the houses. They pause, awed.

Breakers roll in from the black sea, flashing electric-blue.

Within minutes He

Many were drunk or high on this or that when the Tonight Show led them here. Those who came were happy to start with. They came to do a happy thing. Some carry six-packs or pouches of pot.

The line of them stretches around the curve of the shore to the north, beyond Hermosa Pier to the south, bunching around the pier. More are shifting in all the time, trickling down to join the others.

Jerryberry Jansen flicked in almost an hour early for the interview.

The station was an ant's nest, a swarm of furious disorganization. Jerryberry was looking for Wash Evans when Wash Evans came ru

"'Lo," said Jerryberry. "Is there anything we need to go over before we go on?"

Evans seemed at a loss. "Yah," he said, and caught his breath a little. "You're not news anymore, Jansen. We may not even be doing the interview."

Jerryberry said a dirty word. "I heard they'd cleared up the riot-"

"More than that. They caught the lady shoplifter."

"Good!"

"If you say so. One out of a thousand people that recognized your pictures of her turned out to be right. Woman name of I

"So I didn't cause the mall riot anymore, now you've got Irma He

He was thinking, All that jumping around, all the things I learned today, all wasted. Unless I can get a tapezine lecture out of it.

Evans said, "Yah, there's a new mall riot going on at Hermosa Beach."

"What the hell?"

"Craziest damn thing." Wash Evans lit a cigarette and talked around it. "You know Gordon Lundt, the 'zine star? He was on the Tonight Show, and he happened to mention the red tide down at Hermosa Beach. He said it was pretty. The next thing anyone knows, every man, woman, and child in the country has decided he wants to see the red tide at Hermosa Beach."