Short story about teleport trips and passengers going missing

Question

I know that there are a lot of this kind of question but I've looked through as many as I can find and none fit my recollection of this story.

• There's a world where humans are able to teleport long distances, by visiting a central hub, like an airport, to do so.
• There's some talk about how occasionally people just don't show up the other end, but statistically it's still safer than air travel etc.
• Over the course of the story, the main character "goes missing" and it turns out that the teleport streams are being hijacked to build a secret resistance to something.

My memory gets fuzzy there but I'd really like to re-read it.

As I recall, it was likely in an anthology that my parents had. They had a lot of old school anthologies. Ones that I remember were edited by James White and Isaac Asimov, I believe.

Answer 1

This seems to be a week for asking about stories by Lloyd Biggle Jr. You are describing the plot line of the novel All The Colors of Darkness (1963). From the cover blurb:

In the summer of 1986, the Universal Transmitting Company, after a long series of inexplicable failures, public indifference, and financial problems, has finally perfected a matter transmitter capable of transporting a person instantaneously from terminals scattered throughout the United States to any major city in foreign countries. Chief Engineer Ted Arnold's genius had paid off - the transmitter represents man's ultimate conquest of time.

Opening day in New York City is a tremendous success, with throngs of travelers crowding into the terminal. But on the second day of operations two women fail to arrive at their destinations and cannot be traced. UTC enlists the services of private detective Jan Darzek.

Darzek discovers that the disappearances were engineered by two women in various disguises, that their identification papers were false, and that no friends reported them missing. Where Darzek arrives when he follows up these clues and what he discovers make a strange tale of extraterrestrial adventures and gripping suspense ....

There is a follow-up novel about Darzek's subsequent employment by these same extraterrestrials Watchers of the Dark. It seems "private detective" is not a common occupation in other parts of the universe.