Flash crowd

5

He flicked in at Los Angeles International, off-center in a long curved row of displacement booths: upright glass cylinders with rounded tops, no different from the booths on any street corner. On the opposite wall, a good distance away, large red letters said "TWA." He stood a moment, thinking. Then he dialed again.

He was home, at the Shady Rest. He dialed again.

He was near the end of the row-a different row, with no curve to it. And the opposite wall bore the emblem of United.

The terminal was empty except for one man in a blue uniform who was waxing the floor.

Jerryberry stepped out. For upwards of a minute he watched the line of booths. People flicked in at random. Generally they did not even look up. They would dial a long string of digits-sometimes making a mistake, snarling something, and starting over-and be gone. There were so many that the booths themselves seemed to be flickering.

He took several seconds of it on the Minox.

Beneath the United emblem was along, long row of empty counters with scales between them, for luggage. The terminal was spotless-and empty, unused. Haunted by a constant flow of ghosts.

A voice behind him said, "You want something?"

"Is there a manager's office?"

The uniformed man pointed down an enormous length of corridor. "The maintenance section's down that way, where the boarding area used to be. I'll call ahead, let them know you're coming."

The corridor was long, u

"Thanks." Jerryberry climbed aboard. He handed over his C.B.A. credit card. "I'm doing some research for a-a documentary of sorts. What can you tell me about the long-distance booths?"

"Anything you like. I'm Nils Kjerulf. I helped install these booths, and I've been working on them ever since."

"How do they work?"

"Where do I start? Do you know how a normal booth works?"

"Sure. The load isn't supposed to exist at all between the two endpoints. Like the electron in a tu

This Nils Kjerulf was lean and ancient, with deep smile wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. His hair was thick and white. He said, "They had to give up that theory. When you're sending a load to Mars, say, you have to assume that something exists in the ten minutes or so it takes the load to make the trip. Conservation of energy."

"All right. What is it?"

"For ten minutes it's a kind of superneutrino. That's what they tell me. I'm not a physicist. I was in business administration in college. A few years ago they gave me a year of retraining so I could handle long-distance displacement machinery. If you're really interested in theory, you ought to ask someone at Cape Canaveral. Here we are."

Two escalators, one going up, one motionless. They rode up. Jerryberry asked, "Why didn't they build closer? Think of all the walking we'd save."

"You never heard a 707 taking off?"

"Sound is only part of it. If a plane ever crashed here, nobody would want it hitting all the main buildings at once."

The escalator led to two semicircular chambers. One was empty but for a maze of chairs and couches and low partitions, all done in old chrome and fading orange. In the other the couches had been ripped out and replaced with instrument consoles. Jerryberry counted half a dozen men supervising the displays.

A dim snoring sound began somewhere, like an electric razor going in the next-door apartment. Jerryberry turned his head, seeking. It was outside. Outside, behind a wall of windows, a tiny single-engine plane taxied down a runway.

"Yes, we still function as an airport," said Nils Kjerulf. "Skydiving, sport flying, gliding. I fly some myself. The jumbo-jet pilots used to hate us; we use up just as much landing time as a 747. Now we've got the runways to ourselves."

"I gather you were a manager somewhere."

"Right here. Iran this terminal before anyone had heard of teleportation. I watched it ruin us. Thirty years, Mr. Jansen."

"With no offense intended whatever, why did they train a professional administrator in quantum displacement physics? Why not the other way around?"

"There weren't any experts where the long-distance booths were concerned, Mr. Jansen. They're new."

"What have you learned in two years? Do you still get many breakdowns?"

"We still do. Every two weeks or so, something goes out of synch. Then we go out of service for however long it takes to find it and fix it-usually about an hour."

"And what happens to the passenger?"

Kjerulf looked surprised. "Nothing. He stays where he started-or rather, that giant neutrino we were talking about is reflected back to the transmitter if the receiver can't pick it up. The worst thing that can happen is that the link to the velocity damper could be lost, in which case-but we've developed safeguards against that.

"No, the passengers just stop coming in, and we go out of service, and the other companies take the overflow. There isn't any real competition between the companies anymore. What's the point? T.W.A. and United and Eastern and the rest used to advertise that they had better meals in flight, more comfortable seats, prettier hostesses.. like that. How long do you spend in a displacement booth? So when we converted over, we set the dialing system up so you just dial Los Angeles International or whatever, and the companies get customers at random. Everyone saves a fortune in advertising."

"An antitrust suit-"

"Would have us dead to rights. Nobody's done it, because there's no point. It works, the way we run it. Each company has its own velocity shift damper. We couldn't all get knocked out at once. In an emergency I think any of the companies could handle all of the long-distance traffic."

"Mr. Kjerulf, what is a velocity shift damper?"

Kjerulf looked startled. Jerryberry said, "I took journalism."

"Ah."

"It's not just curiosity. My dad lost a fortune on airline stock-"

"So did I," said Kjerulf, half-smiling with old pain.

"Oh?"

"Sometimes I feel I've sold out. The booths couldn't possibly compete with the airlines, could they? They wouldn't send far enough. Yet they ruined us."

"My dad figured the same way."

"And now the booths do send that far, and I'm working for them, or they're working for me. There wasn't all that much reason to build the long-distance systems at airports. Lots of room here, of course, and an organization already set up. . but they really did it to save the airline companies."

"A little late."

"Perhaps. Some day they'll turn us into a public utility." Kjerulf looked about the room, then called to a man seated near the flat wall of the semicircle. "Dan!"

"Yo!" the man boomed without looking up.

"Can you spare me twenty minutes for a public-relations job?"

The man stood up, then climbed up on his chair. He looked slowly about the room. Jerryberry guessed that he could see every instrument board from where he was standing. He called, "Sure. No sweat."

They took the cart back to the terminal. They entered a booth. Jerryberry inserted his C. B. A. credit card, then waited while Kjerulf dialed.

They were in a concrete building. Beyond large square windows a sunlit sea of blue water heaved and splashed, almost at floor level. Men looked around curiously, recognized Nils Kjerulf, and turned back to their work.

"Lake Michigan. And out there-" Kjerulf pointed. Jerryberry saw a tremendous white mass, a flattened dome, very regular. A great softly rounded island. "-is the United Air Lines velocity damper. All of the dampers look about like that, but they float in different lakes or oceans. Aeroflot uses the Caspian Sea. The T.W.A. damper is in the Gulf of Mexico."