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"We [science fiction writers] always wanted to believe in "private sector" space -- hucksters make better characters than a government does."
- Larry Niven
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| Key Club | ||
| A social club made exclusive by teleportation booth; may be in a chain with other physically identical locations. |
In the future world of Flash Crowd, social clubs were just as important as they are today. Perhaps more so, given the free access that displacement booths gave to every physical location.
| Displacement booths make novelty easy. Stability comes hard. For many the clubs were an element of stability. Many key clubs were chains; a man could leave his home in Wyoming and find his club again in Denver. Members tended to resemble one another. A man changing roles would change clubs. Clubs were places to meet people, as buses and airports and even neighborhoods no longer were... |
| Technovelgy from Flash Crowd,
by Larry Niven. Published by Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1972 Additional resources -
|
Key clubs could also be entirely exclusive; if you didn't have the code for its displacement booth, you could never find it.
Seven Sixes was something else. Its telephone number was known
universally. Its membership, large in absolute terms, was small for an organization so worldwide. It included presidents, kings, winners of various brands of Nobel prize. Its location was—unknown. Somewhere in Earth’s temperate zones. Jerryberry had never heard of its displacementbooth number being leaked to anyone.
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'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
