PRACTICE OF MECHANICAL TELEPORTATION:

Here my theme becomes complex. I intend to demonstrate that any limitations

we assume for our teleportation system are going to imply a society: one society for
each set of limitations. Again, I will quote my sources where I can remember them,
sometimes. But much of what follows is my own.

THE ASSUMPTION: We don't need a transmitter. Our teleport receiver will bring
anything to itself, from anywhere. Limitations may exist as to distance or mass of cargo.
THE RESULT: Thieves capable of stealing anything from anyone in perfect
safety. Such machinery was discovered by Seaton, and later by DuQuesne, in THE
SKYLARK OF SPACE. In practice, anyone who has such machinery is king of the
world. If many men have transmitterless receivers, society falls apart. When society
stops making parts for the machines, the machines fall apart, and everything starts over.

II

THE ASSUMPTION: No receiver is needed. Our teleport transmitter will place its
cargo anywhere we choose.
THE RESULT: We can put a bomb anywhere. The idea was used at least once,
in THE PERSON FROM PORLOCK. In practice, a government that owned one of these
would-again-own the world. Two such governments would probably bomb each other
back to a preteleport level of civilization. Presumably it could happen any number of
times.

III

Given the assumptions in (I) and (II) you don't really get a society. You get a short
war. Hence most stories assume that teleportation requires both a transmitter and a
receiver.
Let's do the same. Let us further assume that transmitters (transceivers?) look
like telephone booths. You walk into a booth, you put a coin in the slot, you dial. You're
elsewhere.
How do they work? We assume either space-bending or the tunnel diode effect.
We assume the operation is relatively cheap: no more than a few quarters in the slot.
Finally, a slug in the slot will send the customer straight to police headquarters.
THE RESULT: All present transportation becomes obsolete: cars and trucks and
freeways, ships and docks, airliners and airports, trains and train stations. What do we
do with a continental net of freeways once the cars and busses have disappeared? You
use them for drag races and bicycle riding; you put houses on them or turn them into
parks. Or you pack them with cars because there's no place else to put the damn
useless cars. Not only freeways and turnpikes, but streets and roads and even
sidewalks become obsolete. In business districts you keep the sidewalks for window
shopping.
Elsewhere, pfftt!
The mind boggles. Assume the population problem continues in the direction it's
going. Then, as Isaac Asimov has suggested, new generations could grow up without
seeing the exterior of any building, including their own homes. There might soon be no
countryside to see in any case, and precious few exteriors to buildings. Without need for
streets or sidewalks, there would be no- space between buildings; they would be built
wall to wall, or in units a mile cubic. And the people get their exercise by riding bicycles
between two open booths arranged like E and F in Figure I.

IV

But suppose there are limitations on the booths? For each assumed limitation
one gets a different society.
Let's take a few examples.
THE ASSUMPTION: Booths are expensive to operate.The price for any
jump, regardless of distance, is two hundred dollars. (A reasonable restriction. Any
spacestressing operation might well cost as much as any other. Ditto for a single tunnel-
diode operation.)
THE RESULT: Cars, motor scooters, busses will remain. Except for emergencies,
nobody would use booths for distances shorter than a transcontinental flight. But
airplanes would disappear, except perhaps for cargo flights.
Change the price and you change the result. As price goes down, freight traffic
by train and truck dwindles, and then. even automobiles begin to go. Raise the price to
a few thousand dollars, and only spacecraft disappear.
THE ASSUMPTION: The booths are cheap, a couple of bucks a jump, but
limited as to distance. Ten miles, let us say, is the upper limit.
THE RESULT: A traveler would move in "hops", naturally. But there would come a
point where an airplane is cheaper and more convenient, or both, than a succession of
teleport booths. Thus, cars would go, but airplanes and shipping would remain.
Change the limiting distance and, again, you change the society. At a mile a jump
only the cars go. At a thousand miles a jump, only spacecraft remain.
THE ASSUMPTION: Teleportation is limited by the Laws of Conservation of
energy and Momentum.
THE RESULT: Not very different from above. Cars would go, airplanes would
remain. By teleportation we could not travel long distance north and south; we would
have to do it on short hops. The longer the hop, the harder momentum would jerk the
passenger sideways each time.
Traveling east, our momentum would lift us a few inches from the chair of the
receiver booth on each hop. (Yes, I said chair. You might try it standing up, but I
wouldn't.) Traveling west would be worse: momentum would slam you down hard. A
New Yorker might prefer to reach San Francisco via the western route, in a line of
booths crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

(Assume a passenger is at the equator, teleporting straight east a distance of X miles.

Then X/4000 is the angle $ of his jump in radians. For X small, we take sine$=$
and get:
X *1000/4000=X/4 [We multiplied the sine of the angle, equal to the angle itself for small
angles given in radians, by the rotational velocity of the Earth.]
X/4 is the velocity at which the passenger gets lifted off his feet. Going west, he
gets slammed down, same equation. For small angles, the equation holds elsewhere
than at the equator. Decreasing the distance from the Earth's axis of rotation decreases
the speed of rotation, but increases the angle of shift.)

Notice one important exception. We can travel from the northern hemisphere to
the southern in perfect comfort, provided the departure point and destination are at
corresponding latitudes.
Elevators become more important than ever. In Earth's gravitational field, at
ground level, we lose-seven degrees Fahrenheit for every mile we teleport upward and
we gain as much going downhill. Elevators are more comfortable.
So: you want to go skiing in the Swiss Alps, at St. Moritz. From the United States
your best bet is to take a plane to someplace with a big landing field, ride an elevator
half a mile up to a teleportation booth, then teleport to St. Moritz. Do it any other way
and you wind up sick for a couple of days. But from New York you can reach Angol,
Chile in one jump!

So much for booths. They still look like our best attempt at prophecy; but let's try
some wilder ideas and see what we get.
THE ASSUMPTION: Open teleport discs. You step on a disc, it teleports
you to another disc. Cost, pennies per thousand trips.
THE RESULTS: All present transportation disappears. With the proper setup, you
can walk anywhere on the planet. Figure 2 is a design for intercity transportation, but it
can easily be adapted for longer distances. The blocks shown could be lines of
longitude and latitude; their length is optional.

For the rectangular city layout shown, we simply walk in the direction we wish to
go. The distance between the receiver plate, at the center of the intersection, and the
next transmitter disc is about three paces. In three paces one covers a block, whose
length, I repeat, is optional. Perhaps there would be faster lanes through the center of
town, and faster still between towns: intersections a mile or ten miles apart. To get out of
the system one walks around the final disc and goes window shopping or whatever.
The biggest advantage is that we can give up all the endless dialing!
THE ASSUMPTION: Our transmitter is hand sized. We can hang it from our belt.
It has (oh, well) a telephone-type dial on it. The receiver is bigger: an open platform,
either a small plate at home, in vestibule, or a community receiver the size of a public
square. Cost is equivalent to the cost of using a telephone. There are (if necessary)
compensators for momentum-and heat-transfer in the receiver plates.
 THE RESULT: Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION, with minor changes. No
mazes behind the doors; simply unlisted receiver numbers.