He looked Jerryberry Jansen up and down very thoroughly. He said, "I wanted to see what you looked like." He reached for the cutoff switch.
"I didn't do it," Jerryberry said quickly.
Whyte stopped with his finger on the cutoff. "No?"
"I am not responsible for the mall riot. I hope to prove it."
The old man thought it over. "And you propose to involve me? How?"
Jerryberry took a chance. "I think I can demonstrate that displacement booths and the mall riot are intimately connected. My problem is that I don't know enough about displacement-booth technology."
"And you want my help?"
"You invented the displacement booths practically single-handed," Jerryberry said straight-faced. "Instant riots, instant getaways, instant smuggling. Are you going to just walk away from the problem?"
Robin Whyte laughed in a high-pitched voice, his head thrown way back, his teeth white and perfect and clearly false. Jerryberry waited, wondering if it would work.
"All right," Whyte said. "Come on over. Wait a minute, what am I thinking? You can't come to Seven Sixes. I'll meet you somewhere. L'Orangerie, New York City. At the bar."
The screen cleared before Jerryberry could answer. That was quick, he thought. And, Move, idiot. Get there before he changes his mind.
In New York it was just approaching cocktail hour. L'Orangerie was polished wood and dim lighting and chafing dishes of Swedish meatballs on toothpicks. Jerryberry captured a few to go with his drink. He had not had lunch yet.
Robin Whyte wore a long-sleeved gray one-piece with a collar that draped into a short cape, and the cape was all the shifting rainbow colors of an oil film. The height of fashion, except that it should have been skin-tight. It was loose all over, bagging where Whyte bagged, and it looked very comfortable. Whyte sipped at a glass of milk.
"One by one I give up my sins," he said. "Drinking was the last, and I haven't really turned loose of it yet. But almost. That's why your reverse salesmanship hooked me in. I'll talk to anyone. What do I call you?"
"Barry Jerome Jansen."
"Let me put it this way. I'm Robbie. What do I call you?"
"Oh. Jerryberry."
Whyte laughed. "I can't call anyone Jerryberry. Make it Barry."
"God bless you, sir."
"What do you want to know?"
"How big is JumpShift?"
"Ooohhh, pretty big. What's your standard of measurement?"
Jerryberry, who had wondered if he was being laughed at, stopped wondering. "How many kinds of booth do you make?"
"Hard to say. Three, for general use. Maybe a dozen more for the space industry. Those are still experimental. We lose money on the space industry. We'd make it back if we could start producing drop-ships in quantity. We've got a ship on the drawing boards that would transmit itself to any drop-ship receiver."
Jerryberry prompted him. "And three for general use, you said."
"Yes. We've made over three hundred million passenger booths in the past twenty years. Then there's a general-use cargo booth. The third model is a tremendous portable booth for shipping really big, fragile cargoes. Like a prefab house or a rocket booster or a live sperm whale. You can set the thing in place almost anywhere, using three strap-on helicopter setups. I didn't believe it when I saw it." Whyte sipped at his milk. "You've got to remember that I'm not in the business anymore. I'm still chairman of the board, but a bunch of younger people give most of the orders, and I hardly ever get into the factories."
"Does JumpShift have a monopoly on displacement booths?"
He saw the Newstaper! reaction, a tightening at Whyte's eyes and lips. "Wrong word," Jerryberry said quickly. "Sony. What I meant was, who makes displacement booths? I'm sure you make most of the passenger booths in the United States."
"All of them. It's not a question of monopoly. Anyone could make his own booths. Any community could. But it would be hideously expensive. The cost doesn't drop until you're making millions of them. So suppose. . Chile, for instance. Chile has less than a million passenger booths, all JumpShift model. Suppose they had gone ahead and made their own. They'd have only their own network, unless they built a direct copy of some other model. All the booths in a network have to have the same volume."
"Naturally."
"In practice there are about ten networks worldwide. The U.S.S.R. network is the biggest by far. I think the smallest is Brazil-"
"What happens to the air in a receiver?"
Whyte burst out laughing. "I knew that was coming! It never fails." He sobered. "We tried a lot of things. It turns out the only practical solution is to send the air in the receiver back to the transmitter, which means that every transmitter has to be a receiver, too."
"Then you could get a free ride if you knew who was about to flick in from where, when."
"Of course you could, but would you want to bet on it?"
"I might, if I had something to smuggle past customs."
"How do you mean?"
"I'm just playing with ideas. The incoming booths at customs are incoming because there's no way to dial out-"
"I remember. Type I's with the dials removed."
"Okay. Say you wanted to smuggle something into the country. You flick to customs in Argentina. Then a friend flicks from California to Argentina, into your booth. You wind up in his booth, in California, and not behind the customs barrier."
"Brilliant," said Whyte. "Unfortunately there's a fail-safe to stop anyone from flicking into an occupied booth."
"Sorry," Whyte said, grinning. "What do you care? There are easier ways to smuggle. Too many. I'm not really sorry. I'm a laissez-faire man myself."
"I wondered if you could do something with dials to stop another mall riot."
Whyte thought about it. "Not by taking the dials off. If you wanted to stop a riot, you'd have to stop people from coming in. Counters on the booths, maybe."
"What was it like, Barry?"
"Crowded. Like a dam broke. The law did shut the booths down from outside, but not fast enough. Maybe that's the answer. Cut out the booths at the first sign of trouble."
"We'd get a lot of people mad at us."
"You would, wouldn't you?"
"Like the power brownouts in the seventies and eighties. Or like obscene telephone calls. You couldn't do anything about them, except get more and more uptight. . readier to smash things. . That's why riots happen, Barry. People who are a little bit angry all the time."
"Oh?"
"All the riots I remember." Whyte smiled. "There haven't been any for a long time. Give JumpShift some credit for that. We stopped some of the things that kept everyone a little bit angry all the time. Smog. Traffic jams. Slow mail. Slum landlords; you don't have to live near your job or your welfare office or whatever. Job hunting. Crowding. Have you ever been in a traffic jam?"
"Maybe when! was a little boy."
"Friend of mine was a college professor for a while. His problem was he lived in the wrong place. Five days a week he would spend an hour driving to work-you don't believe me? — and an hour and a quarter driving home, because traffic was heavier then. Eventually he gave it up to be a writer."