"By God, it was."
"I've got to be going. There are things I want to see before I run out of time."
Tahiti. Jerusalem. Mecca. Easter Island. Stonehenge. The famous places of the world. Places a man might dial almost on impulse. Names that came unbidden to the mind.
Mecca. Vast numbers of Muslims (a number he could look up later) bowed toward Mecca five times a day. The Koran called for every Muslim to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. The city's only industry was the making of religious articles. And you could get there just by dialing….
Jerusalem. Sacred to three major religions. Jews still toasted each other at Passover: "Next year in Jerusalem." Still a forming ground of history after thousands of years. And you could get there just by dialing….
Stonehenge. An ancient mystery. What race erected those stones, and when and why? These would never be known with certainty. From the avenue at the northeast entrance a path forked and ran up a hill between burial mounds. . and there was a long-distance displacement booth on the hill.
It would be eleven at night in Stonehenge. One in the morning in Mecca and Jerusalem. No action there. Jerryberry crossed them out.
Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Vatican. . dammit, the most memorable places on Earth were all in the same general area. What could he see at midnight?
Well- Tahiti. Say "tropical paradise," and every stranger in earshot will murmur, "Tahiti." Once Hawaii had had the same reputation, but Hawaii was too close to civilization. Hawaii had been civilized. Tahiti, isolated in the southern hemisphere, might have escaped that fate.
Everything lurched as he finished dialing. Jerryberry stumbled against the booth wall. Briefly he was terrified. But he'd be dead if the velocity transfer had failed. It must be a little out of synch.
He knew too much, that was all.
There were six booths of different makes this side of customs. The single official had a hopeless look. He waved through a constant stream of passengers without seeming to see them.
Jerryberry moved with the stream.
They were mostly men. Many had cameras; few had luggage. English, American, French, German, some Spanish and U.S.S.R. Most were dressed lightly-and poorly, in cheap clothes ready to come apart. They swarmed toward the outgoing booths, the rectangular Common Market booths with one glass side. Jerryberry saw unease and dismay on many faces. Perhaps it was the new, clean, modem building that bothered them. This was an island paradise? Air conditioning. Fluorescent lighting.
Jerryberry stood in line for the phone. Then he found that it wouldn't take his coin or his credit card. On his way to the change counter he thought to examine the displacement booths. They took only French money. He bought a heavy double handful of coins, then got back in line for the phone.
They have to get used to traveling again. Right on.
The computerized directory spoke English. He used it to get a string of booth numbers in downtown Papeete.
He was a roving newstaper again. Dial, watch the scene flick over, look around while inserting a coin and dialing. The coin slot was in the wrong place, and the coins felt wrong-too big, too thin-and the dial was a disk with holes in it. A little practice had him in the routine.
There was beach front lined with partly built hotels in crazily original shapes. Of all the crowds he saw in Papeete, the thickest were on the beaches and in the water. Later he could not remember the color of the sand; he hadn't seen enough of it.
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.