Zodiac_ The Eco-Thriller Part 1

Zodiac_ The Eco-Thriller.

by Neal Stephenson.

Zodiac-THE INMATES

1

ROSCOMMON CAMEand laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway. My landlord and I have an arrangement. He charges me and my housemates little rent-by Boston standards, none at all-and in return we let him play fast and loose with our ecosystem. Every year at about this time he destroys my garden. He's been known to send workmen into the house without warning, knock out walls in the middle of the night, shut off the water while we shower, fill the basement with unidentified fumes, cut down elms and maples for firewood, and redecorate our rooms. Then he claims he's showing the dump to prospective tenants and we'd better clean it up. Pronto.This morning I woke to the sound of little green pumpkins exploding under the tires of his station wagon. Then Roscommon stumbled out and tore down our badminton net. After he left, I got up and went out to buy a Globe. Wade Boggs had just twisted his ankle and some PCB-contaminated waste oil was on fire in Southie.When I got back, bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics-my favorite carcinogen by a long shot. Bartholomew was standing in front of the stove. With the level, cross-eyed stare of the involuntarily awake, he was watching a heavy-metal video on the TV. He was clenching an inflated Hefty bag that took up half the kitchen. Once again, my roommate was using nitrous oxide around an open flame; no wonder he didn't have any eyebrows. When I came in, he raised the bag invitingly. Normally I never do nitrous before breakfast, but I couldn't refuse Bart a thing in the world, so I took the bag and inhaled as deep as I could. My mouth tasted sweet and five seconds later about half of an orgasm backfired in the middle of my brain.On the screen, poodle-headed rockers were strapping a cheerleader to a sheet of particle board decorated with a pentagram. Far away, Bartholomew was saying: "Poyzen Boyzen, man. Very hot."It was too early for social criticism. I grabbed the channel selector."No Stooges on at this hour," Bart warned, "I checked." But I'd already moved us way up into Deep Cable, where a pair of chaw-munching geezers were floating on a nontoxic river in Dixie, demonstrating how to push-start a comatose fish.Tess emerged from the part of the house where women lived and bathrooms were clean. She frowned against the light, scowling at our bubbling animal flesh, our cubic yard of nitrous. She rummaged in the fridge for some homemade yogurt. "Don't you guys ever lay off that stuff?""Meat or gas?""You tell me. Which one's more toxic?""Sangamon's Principle," I said. "The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide-a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol-nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms." '"So?""Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they'll do. It is my understanding, Tess, that you've been referring to me, about town, as a 'Granola James Bond'."Tess didn't give a fuck. "Who told you about that?""You come up with a cute phrase, it gets around.""I thought you'd enjoy it.""Even a horse's ass like me can detect sarcasm.""So what would you rather be called?""Toxic Spiderman. Because he's broke and he never gets laid."Tess squinted at me, implying that there was a reason for both problems. Bart broke the. silence. "Shit, man, Spider-man's got his health. James Bond probably has AIDS."I went outside and followed Roscommon's tire tracks through the backyard. All the pumpkins were destroyed, but I didn't care about these decoys. What could you do with a pumpkin? Get orange shit all over the house? The important stuff-corn and tomatoes-were planted up against fences or behind piles of rubble, where his station wagon couldn't reach.We'd never asked Roscommon if we could plant a garden out here in the Largest Yard in Boston. Which, because it wasn't supposed to exist, gave him the right to drive over it. Gardens have to be watered, you see, and water bills are included in our nominal rent, so by having a garden we're actually ripping him off.There was at least an acre back here, tucked away in kind of a space warp caused by Brighton's irrational street pattern. Not even weeds knew how to grow in this field of concrete and brick rubble. When we started the garden, Bartholomew and Ike and I spent two days sifting through it, putting the soil into our plot, piling the rest in cairns. Other piles were scattered randomly around the Largest Back Yard in Boston. Every so often Roscommon would dynamite another one of his holdings, show up with a rented dump truck, back across the garden, through the badminton net, and over some lawn furniture, and make a new pile.I just hoped he didn't try to stash any toxic waste back there. I hoped that wasn't the reason for the low rent. Because if he did that, I would be forced to call down a plague upon his house. I would evacuate his bank accounts, bum his villages, rape his horses, sell his children into slavery. The whole Toxic Spiderman bit. And then I'd have to becomethe penniless alter ego, the Toxic Peter Parker. I'd have to pay real Boston rent, a thousand a month, with no space for badminton.Peter Parker is the guy who got bit by the radioactive spider, the toxic bug if you will, and became Spiderman. Normally he's a nebbish. No money, no prestige, no future. But if you try to mug him in a dark alley, you're meat. The question he keeps asking himself is: "Do those moments of satisfaction I get as Spiderman make up for all the crap I have to take as Peter Parker?" In my case, the answer is yes.In the dark ages of my life, when I worked at Massachusetts Analytical Chemical Systems, or Mass Anal for short, I owned your basic VW van. But a Peter Parker type can't afford car insurance in this town, so now I transport myself on a bicycle. So once I'd fueled myself up on coffee and Bart's baco-cinders-nothing beats an all-black breakfast-and read all the comics, I threw one leg over my battle-scarred all-terrain stump-jumper and rode several miles to work.Hurricane Alison had blown through the day before yesterday, trailed by hellacious rainfall. Tree branches and lakes of rainwater were in the streets. We call it rainwater; actually it's raw sewage. The traffic signal at Comm Ave and Charlesgate West was fried. In Boston, this doesn't lead to heartwarming stories in the tabloids about ordinary citizens who get out of their cars to direct traffic. Instead, it gives us the excuse to drive like the Chadian army. Here we had two lanes of traffic crossing with four, and the two were losing out in a big way. Comm Ave was backed up all the way into B.U. So I rode between the lanes for half a mile to the head of the class.The problem is, if the two drivers at the front of the line aren't sufficiently aggressive, it doesn't matter how tough the people behind them are. The whole avenue will just sit there until it collectively boils over. And horn honking wasn't helping, though a hundred or so motorists were giving it a try-When I got to Charlesgate West, where Comm Ave was cut off by the torrent pouring down that one-way four-Ianer, I found an underpowered station wagon from Maine at the head of one lane, driven by a mom who was trying to look after four children, and a vintage Mercedes in the other, driven by an old lady who looked like she'd just forgotten her own address. And half a dozen bicyclists, standing there waiting for a real asshole to take charge.What you have to do is take it one lane at a time. I waited for a twenty-foot gap in traffic on the first lane of Charlesgate and just eased out into it.The approaching BMW made an abortive swerve toward the next lane, causing a ripple to spread across Charlesgate as everyone for ten cars back tried to head east. Then he throbbed to a halt (computerized antilock braking system) and slumped over on his horn button. The next lane was easy: some Camaro-driving freshman from Jersey made the mistake of slowing down and I seized his lane. The asshole in the BMW tried to cut behind me but half the bicyclists, and the biddy in the Benz, had the presence of mind to lurch out and block his path.Within ten seconds a huge gap showed up in the third lane, and I ate it up before Camaro could serve over. I ate it up so aggressively that some Clerk Typist II in a Civic slowed down in the fourth lane long enough for me to grab that one. And then the dam broke as the Chadian army mounted a charge and reamed out the intersection. I figured BMW, Camaro, and Civic could shut their engines off and go for a walk.Pedestrians and winos applauded. A young six-digit lawyer, hardly old enough to shave, cruised up from ten cars back and shouted out his electric sunroof that I really had balls.I said, "Tell me something I didn't know, you fucking android from Hell."The Mass Ave Bridge took me over the Charles. I stopped halfway across to look it over. The river, that is. The river and the Harbor, they're my stock in trade. Not much wind today and I took a big whoof of river air in my nostrils, wondering what kind of crap had been dumped into it, upstream, the night before. Which might sound kind of primitive, but the human nose happens to be an exquisitely sensitive analytical device. There are certain compounds for which your schnozz is the best detector ever made. No machine can beat it. For example, I can tell a lot about a car by smelling its exhaust: how well the engine is tuned, whether it's got a catalytic converter, what kind of gas it bums.So every so often I smell the Charles, just to see if I'm missing anything. For a river that's only thirty miles long, it has the width and the toxic burdens of the Ohio or the Cuy-ahoga.Then through the MIT campus, through the milling geeks with the fifty-dollar textbooks under their arms. College students look so damn young these days. Not long ago I was going to school on the other side of the river, thinking of these trolls as peers and rivals. Now I just felt sorry for them. They probably felt sorry for me. By visual standards, I'm the scum of the earth. The other week I was at a party full of Boston yuppies, the originals, and they were all complaining about the panhandlers on the Common, how aggressive they'd become. I hadn't noticed, myself, since they never panhandled me. Then I figured out why: because I looked like one of them. Blue jeans with holes in the knees. Tennis shoes with holes over the big toes, where my uncut toenails rub against the toeclips on my bicycle. Several layers of t-shirts, long underwear tops, and flannel shirts, easily adjustable to regulate my core temperature. Shaggy blond hair, cut maybe once a year. Formless red beard, trimmed or lopped off maybe twice a year. Not exactly fat, but blessed with the mature, convex body typical of those who live on Thunderbird and Ding-Dongs. No briefcase, aimless way of looking around, tendency to sniff the river.Though I rode through MIT on a nice bike, I'd sprayed it with some cheap gold paint so it wouldn't look nice. Even the lock looked like a piece of shit: a Kryptonite lock all scarred up by boltcutters. We'd used it to padlock a gate on a toxic site last year and the owners had tried to get through using the wrong tools.In California I could have passed for a hacker, heading for some high-tech company, but in Massachusetts even the hackers wore shirts with buttons. I pedalled through hacker territory, through the strip of little high-tech shops that feed off MIT, and into the square where my outfit has its regional office.GEE, the Group of Environmental Extremists. Excuse me: GEE International. They employ me as a professional asshole, an innate talent I've enjoyed ever since second grade, when I learned how to give my teacher migraine headaches with a penlight. I could cite other examples, give you a tour down the gallery of the broken and infuriated authority figures who have tried to teach, steer, counsel, reform, or suppress me over the years, but that would sound like boasting. I'm not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it.I carried my bike up four flights of stairs, doing my bit for physical fitness. GEE stickers were plastered on the risers of the stairs, so there was always a catch phrase six feet in front of your eyes: SAVE THE WHALES and something about the BABY SEALS. By the time you made it up to the fourth floor, you were out of breath, and fully indoctrinated. Locked my bike to a radiator, because you never knew, and went in.Tricia was running the front desk. Flaky but nice, has a few strange ideas about phone etiquette, thinks I'm all right. "Oh, shit," she said."What?""You won't believe it.""What?""The other car.""The van?""Yeah. Wyman.""How bad?""We don't know yet. It's still sitting out on the shoulder."I just assumed it was totalled, and that Wyman would have to be fired, or at least busted down to a position where he couldn't so much as sit in a GEE car. A mere three days ago he had taken our Subaru out to buy duet tape, and in a parking lot no larger than a tennis court, had managed to ram a concrete light-pole pedestal hard enough to total the vehicle. His fifteen-minute explanation was earnest but impossible to follow; when I asked him to just start from the beginning, he accused me of being too linear.Now he'd trashed our one remaining shitbox van. The national office would probably hear of it. I almost felt sorry for him."How?""He thinks he shifted into reverse on the freeway.""Why? It's got an automatic transmission.""He likes to think for himself.""Where is he now?""Who knows? I think he's afraid to come in.""No. You'd be afraid to come in. I might be afraid. Wyman won't be afraid. You know what he'll do? He'll come in fresh as a daisy and ask for the keys to the Omni."Fortunately I'd taken all the keys to the Omni, other than my own, and hammered them into slag. And whenever I parked it, I opened the hood and yanked out the coil wire and put it in my pocket.You might think that the lack of coil wire or even keys would not stop members of the GEE strike force, Masters of Stealth, Scourge of Industry, from starting a car for very long. Aren't these the people who staged their own invasion of the Soviet Union? Didn't they sneak a supposedly disabled, heavily guarded ship out of Amsterdam? Don't they skim across the oceans in high-powered Zodiacs held together with bubble gum and bobby pins, coming to the rescue of innocent marine mammals?Well sometimes they do, but only a handful have those kinds of talents, and I'm the only one in the Northeast office. The others, like Wyman, tend to be ex-English majors who affect a hysterical helplessness in the face of things with moving parts. Talk to them about cams or gaskets and they'll sing you a protest song. To them, yanking out the Omni's coil wire was black magic."And you got three calls from Fotex. They really want to talk to you." "What about?""The guy wants to know if they should shut their plant down today."The day before, talking to some geek at Fotex, I'd mumbled something about closing them down. But in fact I was going to New Jersey tomorrow to close someone else down, so Fotex could keep dumping phenols, acetone, phthalates, various solvents, copper, silver, lead, mercury, and zinc into Boston Harbor to their heart's content, at least until I got back."Tell them I'm in Jersey." That would keep them guessing; Fotex had some plants down there also.I went back to my office, cutting across a barnlike room where most of the other GEE people sat among half-completed banners and broken Zodiac parts, drinking herbal teas and talking into phones:"500 ppm sounds good to me.""Don't put us on the back page of the Food section.""Do those breed in estuaries?"I wasn't one of those GEE veterans who got his start spraying orange dye on baby seals in Newfie, or getting beat senseless by Frog commandos in the South Pacific. I slipped into it, moonlighting for them while I held down my job at Mass Anal. Partly by luck, I broke a big case for GEE, right before my boss figured out what an enormous pain in the ass I could be. Mass Anal fired, GEE hired. My salary was cut in half and my ulcer vanished: I could eat onion rings at IHOP again, but I couldn't afford to.My function at Mass Anal had been to handle whatever walked in the door. Sometimes it was genuine industrial espionage-peeling apart a running shoe to see what kinds of adhesives it used-but usually it amounted to analyzing tap water for the anxious yuppies moving into the center of Boston, closet environmentalists who didn't want to pour aromatic hydrocarbons into their babies any more than they'd burn 7-Eleven gasoline in their Saabs. But once upon a time, this guy in a running suit walked in and got routed to me; _ anyone who wasn't in pinstripes got routed to me. He was brandishing an empty Doritos bag and for a minute I was afraid he wanted me to check it for dioxins or some other granola nightmare. But he read my expression. I probably looked skeptical and irritated. I probably looked like an asshole."Sorry about the bag. It was the only container I could find on the trail.""What's in it?""I'm not sure."Predictable answer. "Approximately what's in it?""Dirt. But really strange dirt."I took the Doritos bag and emptied it out all over the comics page of the Globe. I love the comics, laughing out loud when I read them, and everyone thinks I'm a simpleton. The runner let out kind of a little snort, like he couldn't believe this was how I did chemistry. It looks impressive to pour the sample into a fresh Pyrex beaker, but it's faster to spread it out over Spiderman and Bloom County. I pulled the toothpick out of my mouth and began to pop the little clods apart. But that was just for the hell of it, because I already knew what was wrong with this dirt. It was green-and purple and red and blue. The runner knew that, he just didn't know why. But I had a pretty good idea: heavy-metal contamination, the kind of really nasty stuff that goes into pigments. "You jogging in hazardous waste dumps, or what?" I asked. "You're saying this stuff's hazardous?" "Fuck, yes. Heavy metals. See this yellow clump here? Gotta be cadmium. Now, cadmium they tested once as a poison gas, in World War I. It vaporizes at a real low temperature, six or seven hundred degrees. They had some people breathe that vapor." "What does it do?" "Gangrene of the testicles."The jogger inhaled and shifted his pair away from my desk. One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time. "Where?""Sweetvale College. Right on campus. There's a wooded area there with a pond and a running trail."I, a B.U. graduate, was trying to imagine this: a college campus that had trees and ponds on it."This is what it looks like," the guy continued, "the dirt, the pond, everything." "Colored like this?" "It's psychedelic."Despite being a chemist, I refuse psychedelics these days on the grounds that they violate Sangamon's Principle. But I understood what he was getting at.So the next day I got on my bike and rode out there and damned if he wasn't right. At one end of the campus was this weedy patch of forest, sticking out into a triangle formed by some of the Commonwealth's more expensive suburbs. It wasn't used much. That was probably just as well because the area around the pond was a heavy-metal sewer, and I ain't talking about rock and roll. Rainbow-colored, a little like water with gasoline floating on it, but this wasn't superficial. The colors went all the way down. They matched the dirt. All the colors were different and-forgive me if I repeat myself on this point-they all caused cancer.From my freshman gut course in physical geography at Boston University, I knew damn well this wasn't a natural pond. So the only question was: what was here before?Finding out was my first gig as a toxic detective, and the only thing that made it difficult was my own jerk-ass fumbling in the public library. I threw myself on the mercy of Esmerelda, a black librarian of somewhere between ninety and a hundred who contained within her bionic hairdo all knowledge, or the ability to find it. She got me some old civic documents. Sure enough, a paint factory had flourished there around the turn of the century. When it folded, the owner donated the land to the university. Nice gift: a square mile of poison.I called GEE and the rest was history. Newspaper articles, video bites on the TV news, which didn't look that great on my black-and-white; state and federal clean-up efforts, and a web of lawsuits. Two weeks later GEE asked me to analyze some water for them. Within a month I was chained to a drum of toxic waste on the State house steps, and within six, I was Northeast Toxics Coordinator for GEE International.My office was the size of a piano crate, but mine nonetheless. I wanted a computer on my desk, and none of the other GEE honchos would risk sharing a room with one. Computers need electrical transformers, some of which are made with PCBs that like to vaporize and ooze out of a computer's ventilation slots, causing miscarriages and other foul omens. The boss gave me his office and moved into the big barnlike room.The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our "office manager," started painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them to toxic fumes millions of times more concentrated than what I was getting from my computer. But they didn't notice because they're used to paint. They paint things all the time. Same deal with the stuff they spray on their underarms and put into their gas tanks. Gomez wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn't let him.Esmerelda, ever vigilant, had shot me a bunch of greasy xeroxes from the microfilm archives. They were articles from the Lighthouse-Republican of Blue Kills, N.J., a small city halfway down the Jersey Shore which was shortly to feel my wrath. It was the kind of newspaper that was still running Dennis the Menace in the largest available size. A Gasoline Alley, Apartment 3-G, and Nancy kind of paper.The articles were all from the sports section. Sports, as in hunting and fishing, which take place outdoors, which is where the environment is. That's why environmental news is in the sports section.Esmerelda had found me four different articles, all written by different reporters (no specialist on the staff; not considered an important issue) on vaguely environmental subjects. A local dump leaching crap into an estuary; a freeway project that would trash some swamp land; mysterious films of gunk on the river; and concerns about toxic waste that could be coming from a plant just outside of town, operated by a large corporation we shall refer to as the Swiss Bastards. Along with the Boston Bastards, the Napalm Droids, the Plutonium Lords, the Hindu Killers, the Lung Assassins, the Ones in Buffalo, and the Rhine-Rapers, they were among the largest chemical corporations of a certain planet, third one out from a certain mediocre star in an average spiral galaxy named after a candy bar.Each of the articles was 2500 words long and written in the same style. Clearly, the editor of the lighthouse-republican ruled with an iron hand. Local residents were referred to as Blukers. Compound sentences were discouraged and the inverted-pyramid structure rigorously followed. The PR flacks who worked for the Swiss Bastards were referred to by the old-fashioned term "authorities," rather than the newer and sexier "sources."My only worry was that maybe this editor was so fucking old and decrepit that he was already dead, or even retired. On the other hand, it seemed he was a dyed-in-the-wool "sportsman," a type traditionally long-lived, unless he'd spent too much time sloshing around in a particular toxic swamp. Esmerelda, accustomed to my ways, had sent a xerox of the most recent masthead, which didn't show any changes. The senior sports editor was Everett "Red" Grooten and the sports-page editor was Alvin Goldberg.Raucous laughter probably sounded from my office. Tricia hung up on Fotex's PR director and shouted "S.T., what are you doing in there?" Called the florist and had them send the usual to Esmerelda. Cranked up my old PCB-spitter and searched my files. "Fish, marine, sport, Mid-Atlantic, effects of organic solvents on." "Estuaries, waterfowl populations of, effects of organic solvents on." These were old boilerplate paragraphs I'd written long ago. Mostly they referred to EPA studies or recent research. Every so often they quoted a "source" at GEE International, the well-known environmental group, usually me. I directed the word processor to do a search-and-replace to change "source" to "authority."Then I pulled up my press release about what the Swiss Bastards were pumping into the waters off Blue Kills, which my gas chromatograph and I had discovered during my last trip down there. Threw it into the center of the piece and then composed a hard-hitting topic sentence in basic Dick-and-Jane dialect, no compound sentences, announcing that Bluker sportsmen might be the first ones to feel the effects of the "growing toxic waste problems" centered on the Swiss Bastards' illegal dumping. Hacked it all into an inverted-pyramid shape, and ended up with 2350 words. Put on a final paragraph, the lowly capstone of the pyramid, mentioning that some people from GEE International, the well-known environmental group, might be dropping by Blue Kills any day now.Opened up my printer and put in a daisy wheel that produced a typeface that went out of style in the Thirties. Printed the article up on some unpretentious paper, stuck it in an envelope along with some standard GEE photos of dead flounder and two-headed ducks, suitable for the Lighthouse-Republican's column width. Federal Expressed it to one Red Grooten at his home address, because I had this idea that maybe he didn't stop by the office all that often. So this fine lady was lending us the Omni, no strings attached, and paying the insurance as well. We didn't even know who she was.Normally an Omni is a piece of shit, an econobox with a 1.6-liter engine. But for a higher sticker price you can get an Omni GLH, which has aerodynamic trim and 2.2 liters and, for a few hundred more, an Omni GLH Turbo, which has all of that plus a turbocharger. GLH, by the way, stands for Goes Like Hell. Honest. When the blower is singing, the engine puts out as much power as a small V8. Add big fat racing tires and alloy wheels and you have yourself a poor man's Porsche, the most lethal weapon ever developed for the Boston traffic wars. Sure, spend three times as much and you could get a car that goes a little faster, but who is seriously going to thrash a vehicle that costs that much? Who'll risk denting it? But if it's an Omni, who cares?I popped in the coil wire, a detail that Gomez richly appreciated-he made sure I knew it too-and we blew out of there. First we had to unload a lot of junk from out of the back to make room for what we were going to strip off the van: the two containers of hydraulic cement had to go. If I felt the urge to plug a pipe between here and Everett, I'd have to fulfill it later. The big, long roll of nylon banner material, the rappelling harness and climbing ropes, an extra outboard-motor gas tank, a Zodiac inflation pump, and the traveling chemistry lab we jettisoned. The laptop computer for tapping into the GEE International databases. The $5000 gas chromatograph. My big magnets. The Darth Vader Suit. We packed it all into the trunk of Gomez's Impala so we wouldn't have to haul it up to the fourth floor.We'd hired Gomez after I'd inadvertently gotten him canned from his previous job as a minimum wage rent-a-cop at one of the state office buildings. Unfortunately for his breed, I make my living by making people like him look like jerks. For weeks we'd been trying to make an appointment with a honcho in the state environmental agency, and he wouldn't even answer our letters.Shortly before Christmas, I dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit and had Tricia and Debbie (one of our interns) dress up as elves. I forged an ID card, complete with a mug shot of Saint Nick and an address at the North Pole, stuffed my Santa sack full of GEE leaflets, and we blew right pastGomez; he was really in the Christmas spirit. We hit on an Untergruppen-secretary who passed us on up to an Uber-gruppen-secretary, then three floors up to a Sturmband-secretary, then ten more floors on up to Thelma, the Ubersturmgruppenfuhrer-sectetary, and that poor lady didn't even blink. She led us right into Corrigan's office, the place we'd been trying to penetrate for three months, without even the courtesy of a nasty letter."Ho ho ho," I said, and I was sincere. "Well, Santy Claus!" said Corrigan, that poor jackass. "What you got there?""I've got a surprise for you, you naughty boy! Ho ho ho!" In the corner of my eye I could see beams of high-energy light sweeping down the hall as the Channel 5 minicam crew stormed past Thelma's vacant desk."What kind of surprise," he said. I upended my pillowcase and treated him to a propaganda blizzard just as the cameraman centered his crosshairs on Corrigan's forehead. We not only got him to agree to a meeting, but also got the agreement broadcast throughout the Commonwealth -just about the only way to make an environmental appointee keep his word. Corrigan hasn't been very nice to me since then, but I did make Thelma's Christmas card list.Anyway, Gomez got fired for accepting my fake ID. We ended up hiring him to do jobs here and there around the office. Nothing illegal. When it came to finding things that needed fixing or painting he was an enterprising guy. To watch him find loose stair treads and peeling paint was to see free enterprise in action. Not unlike my own job.

2

WYMAN CALLED. Wyman, the Scourge of Cars. He wanted the keys to the Omni so that he could drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to see his girlfriend, who was about to leave for Nicaragua. For God's sake, she could be bayoneted by contras and he'd never see her again. "Where's the van, Wyman?""I'm not telling you until I get the keys to the Omni." So I hung up and called the Metro Police, who told me: on the shoulder, westbound lanes, Revere Beach Parkway, near the bridge over the Everett River. Due to be towed at any moment. I hung up when they asked for my name, grabbed my toolbox and headed out.Gomez heard the wrenches crashing against the insides of the toolbox, fired the last half of his whole-wheat croissant into the "noncompostable nonrecyclables" wastebasket, where it belonged, and intercepted me at the top of the stairs. "Got a job?""Sure. What the fuck, come on."The van was right where Wyman had left it, in the dirtiest, the most dangerous, the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Boston. I'm not talking about crack dealers, tenements, or minority groups here. The neighborhood isn't Roxbury. It's the zone around the Mystic River where most of New England's heavy industry is located. It's split fifty-fifty between Everett and Charlestown. I spend a lot of my time up here. Most of the "rivers" feeding into the Mystic are drainage ditches, no more than a couple of miles long. The nation's poisoners congregate along these rivers and piss into them. In my Zodiac I have visited them personally, smelled their yellow, brown, white, and red waters, and figured out what they're made of.We could see Wyman's footprints wandering out across the mud flats next to the Everett River, heading for a side street that might lead him to a telephone. I already knew the name of the street: Alkali Lane. We could see the place where he got a whiff of something, maybe, or got close enough to read the name of the street, then spun around and loped back to the nontoxic shoulder, obsessively wiping his Reeboks on the dead ragweed. From there, he'd hitchhiked.Gomez stripped the van in much the same way that a Sioux would dismantle a buffalo. I just concentrated on getting the wheels off, with their brand-new, six-hundred-dollar set of radials that Wyman was going to abandon - a free gift from GEE to a randomly chosen junkyard. I also made sure we got our manhole-lifting tool, which is to me what a keychain is to a janitor. Gomez got the battery, electronic ignition box, cassette player, sheepskin, jack, lug wrenches, tire chains, half case of Ray-Lube, spare fan belt, alternator, and three gallons of gasoline. He was going after the starter when I officially pronounced the van dead.We took the license plates so we could prove to the insurance company that we weren't driving it anymore, and then I removed the Thermite from the glove compartment. It's wise to keep some handy in case you need to weld some railroad rails together. The van's serial number was stamped on its parts and body in three places, all of which I'd noted down, so I put Thermite on each and ignited them with my cigar. Instant slag. Like a Mafia hitter chopping the fingertips off a corpse.The identification numbers were still smoking as we climbed back into the Omni. But immediately a vehicle pulled up behind us, a Bronco II with too many antennas and a flashing light on the roof."Fucking rent-a-cop," Gomez said. From being one himself, he'd become sensitized to the whole absurd concept.I walked back so I could read the sign on the Bronco's door: BASCO SECURITY. I knew them well. They owned everything on Alkali Lane and most of the Everett River. In fact, if you stepped off the shoulder of the parkway, you were on their property. Then your shoes would dissolve."Morning," said the rent-a-cop, who, like Gomez, was young and skinny. They never had the authority belly of a true Boston cop."Morning," I said, sounding like a man in a hurry, "Can I help you?"He was looking at a picture of me from what looked startlingly like a dossier. Also included were photographic representations of my boss, and of a jerk named Dan Smirnoff, and one I hadn't seen in a while, a fugitive named Boone."Sangamon Taylor?""You got a warrant somewhere. Hey! You aren't a real cop at all, are you?""We got some witnesses. A bunch of us security guards been over there on the main building, watching you here. Now, we know this van.""I know, we're old pals.""Right. So we recognized it when it stopped here last night. And we watched you stripping it. And maybe fucking with the VIN?""Look. If you want to hassle me, just go to your boss and say, 'pH'. Just tell him that.""P-H? Isn't that something they put in shampoo?""Close enough. Tell him 'pH thirteen'. And for your sake, get a different job. Don't go out there, into those flats, patrolling around. You understand? It's dangerous.""Oh, yeah," he said, highly amused. "Big criminal element down there.""Exactly. The board of directors of Basco. The Fleshy family. Don't let them kill again."Back at the Omni, Gomez said, "What'd you tell him?""pH. Went here last week and tested their pH and it was thirteen.""So?""So they're licensed for eight. That means they're putting shit into the river that's more than two times the legal limit.""Shit, man," Gomez said, scandalized. That was another good thing about Gomez. He never got jaded.And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of fiasco's pipe was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed. The difference between pH 13 and pH 8 was five, which meant that pH 13 was ten to the fifth power-a hundred thousand times-more alkaline than pH 8. That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken. But if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably outraged.

3

I HAD GOMEZ DROP ME OFF in Harvard Square so I could eat birdseed and tofu with a reporter from The Weekly. Ditched my cigar. Then I went in to this blond-wood extravaganza, just off the square, allowed the manager to show me her nostrils, and finally picked out Rebecca sitting back in the corner."How's the Granola James Bond?"I nearly unleashed my Toxic Spiderman rap but then remembered that some people actually admired me, Rebecca among them, and it was through admiration and James Bond legends that we got things like free cars and anonymous toxic tips. So I let it drop. Rebecca had picked the sunniest corner of the room and the light was making her green eyes glow like traffic lights and her perfume volatilize off the skin. She and I had been in the sack a few times. The fact that we weren't going to be there in the near future made her a hundred thousand time - oops - more than twice as beautiful. To distract myself, I growled something about beer to a waiter and sat down."We have-" the waiter said, and drew a tremendously deep breath."Genesee Cream Ale.""Don't have that, sir.""Beck's." Because I figured Rebecca was paying."The specialty is sparkling water with a twist," Rebecca said."I need something to wash the Everett out of my mouth.""Been out on your Zode?""Zodiac to you," I said. "And no, I haven't."We always began our conversations with this smart-assed crap. Rebecca was a political reporter and spent her life talking to mushmouths and blarney slingers. Talking to someone who would say "fuck" into a tape recorder was like benzedrine to her. There was also an underlying theme of flirtation-"Hey, remember?" "Yeah, I remember." "It was all right, wasn't it?" "Sure was.""How's Project Lobster?""Wow, you prepared for this interview. It's fine. How's the paper?""The usual. Civil war, insurrection, financial crisis. But everyone reads the movie reviews.""Instead of your stuff?""Depends on what I'm digging up.""And what's that?"She smiled, leaned forward and observed me with cunning eyes. "Fleshy's running," she said."Which Fleshy? Running from what?""The big Fleshy.""The Groveler?""He's running for president.""Shit. End of lunch. Now I'm not hungry.""I knew you'd be delighted.""What about fiasco? Doesn't he have to put all that crap into a blind trust?""It's done. That's how I know he's running. I have this friend at the bank."The Fleshy family ran Basco - they'd founded the company - and that made them the number one polluters of Boston Harbor. The poisoners of Vietnam. The avant-garde of the toxic waste movement. For years I'd been trying to tell them how deep in shit they were, sometimes pouring hydraulic cement into their pipes to drive the point home.This year, the Pleshy-in-charge was Alvin, a.k.a. the Groveler, an important member of the team of management experts and foreign policy geniuses that brought us victory in Vietnam.Rebecca showed me samples of his flacks' work: "Many environmentalists have overreacted to the presence of these compounds..." not chemicals, not toxic waste, but compounds "... but what exactly is a part per million?" This was followed by a graphic showing an eyedropper-ful of "compounds" going into a railway tank car of pure water."Yeah. They're using the PATEOTS measuring system on you. A drop in a tank car. Sounds pretty minor. But you can twist it the other way: a football field has an area of, what, forty-five thousand square feet. A banana peel has an area of maybe a tenth of a square foot. So the area of the banana peel thrown on the football field is only a couple of parts per million. But if your field-goal kicker steps on the peel just as time is expiring, and you're two points down ...""PATEOTS?""Haven't I told you about that?""Explain.""Stands for Period At The End Of This Sentence. Remember, back in high school the hygiene pamphlets would say, 'a city the size of Dallas could get stoned on a drop of LSD no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.' A lot easier to visualize than, say, micrograms.""What does that have to do with football?""I'm in the business of trying to explain technical things to Joe Six-pack, right? Joe may have the NFL rulebook memorized but he doesn't understand PCBs and he doesn't know a microgram from cunnilingus. So a microgram is about equal to one PATEOTS. A part per million is a drop in a railway tank car - that's what the chemical companies always say, to make it sound less dangerous. If all the baby seals killed last year were laid end to end, they would span a hundred football fields. The tears shed by the mommy seals would fill a tank car. The volume of raw sewage going into the Harbor could fill a football stadium every week.""Dan Smirnoff says you're working together now."Some beer found its way into my sinuses. I had to give it to Rebecca: she knew her shit.Smirnoff was the whole reason for this conversation. All this crap about Fleshy and tank cars was just to get me loosened up. And when I went into my PATEOTS rap, she knew I was ready to be goosed in the 'nads. How many times had I given her my patented PATEOTS rap? Two or three at least. I like a good story. I like to tell it many times. By now she knew: talk to S.T. about eyedroppers and tank cars and he'll fly off the handle. Once I got flying on any toxic theme, she could slip in one tough question while my guard was down, watch my hairy and highly expressive face for a reaction, and glimpse the truth. Or find a basis for all her darkest suspicions."Smirnoff's one of these people I have to have contact with. Like a prison guard has to have contact with a certain number of child molesters.""You'd put him in that category?""No, he's not crafty enough. He's just pissed off and very full of himself.""Sounds familiar.""Yeah, but I have a reason to be arrogant. He doesn't.""Patti Bowen at NEST says...""Don't tell me. Smirnoff went to her and said, 'Hey, I'm putting a group together, a direct-action group, more hardhitting than GEE, and Sangamon Taylor is working with me.""That's what Patti Bowen said.""Yeah, well Smirnoff got ahold of me the other day - you understand, I just hung up on the bastard, because I don't want the FBI to even imagine him and me on the same line - so he tracked me down in the food co-op when I was cutting fish. And he said, 'Patti Bowen and me are working together on a hard-hitting direct-action group, nudge nudge wink wink.' So I waved my boning knife at him and said, 'Listen, pusswad, you are toxic, and if you ever call me, ever call GEE, ever come within ten feet of me again, I'll take this and gut you like a tuna.' Haven't heard from him since.""Is that your position? That he's a terrorist?""Yeah."Rebecca started writing that down, so I added slowly and distinctly, "And we're not.""So he's the same as Hank Boone, in your opinion."I had to squirm. "Morally, yes. But no one's really like Boone."Boone had this thing about whaling ships. He liked to sink them. He was a founder of GEE and hero of the Soviet invasion, but he'd been kicked out seven years ago. Off the coast of South Africa he had filled a Zodiac full of C-4, lit the fuse, pointed it at a pirate whaler, and jumped off at the last minute. The whaler went to the bottom and he went to hide out in some weepy European social democracy. But he kept dropping out of sight and whaling ships kept digging craters on the floors of the seven seas."Boone's effective. Smirnoff is just pathetic.""You admire Boone.""You know I can't say that. I sincerely don't like violence. Honest to God.""That's why you threatened Smirnoff with a knife.""Second-degree. It's premeditated violence I can't stand. Look. Boone isn't even necessary. The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses."Rebecca sat back with those green eyes narrowed to slits, and I knew some sort of profound observation was coming down the pipeline. "I didn't think you were scared of anything, but Smirnoff scares you, doesn't he?""Sure. Look, GEE rarely does illegal things and we never do violent things. The worst we do is a little property damage now and then - and only to prevent worse things. But even so, we're bugged and tapped and tailed. The FBI thinks I'm Carlos the fucking Jackal. And we never talk about anything over the phone. 'Regular professionals.' But that clown Smirnoff is trying to organize an openly terroristic group - over the fucking telephone! He's about as shrewd as your brain-damaged Lhasa Apso. Shit! I wonder if we could sue him for defamation, just for mentioning our name.""I'm not a lawyer.""I could definitely see a defamation suit, though, if a news organization tried to connect us in any way."She was more amused than furious. I knew she would be; she thinks I'm cute when I'm angry. After you've fucked a man on a Zodiac in the middle of Boston Harbor on your lunch hour, it's hard to distance yourself from him, say what you want about objectivity and ethics."S.T., I am stunned. Did you really just threaten The Weekly?""No, no, not at all. I'm just trying to express how important it is that we are kept separate from him and Boone in the public mind. And as soon as we're done I'm going to drop a dime on one of our earnest young ecolawyers and see if we can sue the crap out of him."She smiled. "I don't want to connect you. There is no real connection. But I am interested in the topic. I mean, the Ike Walton League fades into the Sierra Club fades into GEE fades into NEST....""Right, and then Smirnoff, then Boone, then al-Fatah. And I think Basco and Fotex are down there somewhere. It's a dangerous premise, babe. You have to draw a definite line between us and Smirnoff. Or even NEST.""You're not allowed to call me babe.""It's a deal. You can call me anything but a terrorist."

4

I TOOK THE T into the middle of Boston and cut across the North End to a particular yacht club. Mostly it was run by lifestyle slaves who were studying to be Brahmins, but there were a couple of old vomit-stained tour boats that ran out of there, one fishing boat, and it was the home base for GEE Northeast's nautical forces. They'd donated a small odd-shaped berth, a little trapezoid of greasy water caught between a couple of piers, for the same reason that someone else gave us the Omni. Upstairs we had a locker for our gear, and that's where I headed, driving up the blood pressures of all the deck-shoed, horn-rimmed twits waiting to be let into the dining room. I cruised past and didn't even turn around when some high-pitched jerk issued his challenge."Say! Excuse me? Sir? Are you a member of this club?" It happens every so often, mostly with people who've just spent their Christmas bonuses on memberships. I don't even react. Sooner or later they learn the ropes.But something was familiar about that goddamn voice. I couldn't keep myself from turning around. And there he was, standing out from that suntanned crowd like a dead guppy in a tropical aquarium, tall and slack-faced and not at all sure of himself. Dolmacher. When he recognized me, it was his nightmare come to life. Which was only fair since he was one of my favorite bad dreams."Taylor," he sneered, ill-advisedly making the first move."Lumpy!" I shouted. Dolmacher looked down at his fly as his companions mouthed the word behind his back. Grinning yuppie hyenas that they were, I knew that I had renamed Dolmacher for his career.The implications did not penetrate and he sauntered forward a step. "How are things, Taylor?""I'm having the time of my life. How about you, Dolmacher? Pick up a new accent since we left B.U.?"His soon-to-be ex-associates began to file their teeth."What's on the agenda for today, Sangamon? Come to plant a magnetic limpet mine on an industrialist's yacht?"This was vintage Dolmacher. Not "blow up" but "plant a magnetic limpet mine on." He cruised bookstores and bought those big picture books of international weapons systems, the ones always remaindered for $3.98. He had a whole shelf of them. He went up on weekends and played the Survival Game in New Hampshire, running around in the woods shooting paint pellets at other frustrated elements."Yachts are made out of fiberglass, Dolmacher. A magnetic mine wouldn't stick.""Still sarcastic, huh, S.T.?" He pronounced the word as if it were a mental illness. "Except now you're doing it professionally.""Can I help it if the Groveler lacks a sense of humor?""I don't work for Basco any more.""Okay, I'm stunned. Whom are you working for?""Whom? I'm working for Biotronics, that's whom."Big deal. Biotronics was a wholly owned subsidiary of Basco. But the work was impressive."Genetic engineering. Not bad. You work with the actual bugs?""Sometimes."Dolmacher dropped his guard the minute I started asking him about his job. No change at all since our days at B.U. He was so astounded by the coolness of Science that it acted on him like an endorphin."Well," I said, "remember not to pick your nose after you've had your hands in the tank, and enjoy your lunch. I've got samples to take." I turned around."You should come to work for Biotronics, S.T. You're far too intelligent for what you're doing."I turned back around because I was pissed off. He had no idea how difficult... but then I noticed him looking sincere. He actually wanted me to work with him.The old school ties, the old dormitory ties, they're resilient. We'd spent four years at B.U. talking at each other like this, and a couple years more on opposite sides of the toxic barricades. Now he wanted me to rearrange genes with him. I guess when you've come as far as he had, you feel a little lonely. Way out there on the frontiers of science, it hurts when a former classmate keeps firing rock salt into your butt."We're working on a process you'd be very interested in," he continued. "It's like the Holy Grail, as far as you're concerned.""Dolmacher, party of four?" demanded the maitre d'."If you ever want to talk about it, I'm in the book. North Suburban. Living in Medford now." Dolmacher backed away from me and into the dining room. I just stared at him.Up at our locker I picked up an empty picnic cooler. My deal with the cook was that he'd fill it up with free ice if I told him a dirty joke, a transaction that went smoothly. Then out and across the docks to our little grease pit.The tide was out so I had to use the rope ladder to get down into the Zodiac. As soon as you drop below the level of the pier, the city and the sun disappear and you're dangling in a jungle of algae-covered pilings, like Tarzan sliding down a vine into a swamp.It's not doing a Zodiac justice to call it an inflatable raft. A Zodiac has design. It has hydrodynamics. It's made to go places. The inflatable part is horseshoe-shaped. The bend of the horseshoe is in front, and it's pointed; the prongs point backwards, tapering to cones. The floor of the craft is made of heavy interlocking planks and there's a transom in back, to keep the water out and to hold the motor. If you look at the bottom of a Zodiac, it's not just flat. It's got a hint of a keel on it for maneuverability.Not a proper hull, though. Hull design is an advanced science. In the days of sail it was as important to national security as aerodynamics are now. A hull was a necessary evil: all that ship down under the water gave you lots of drag but without it the rest of the ship wouldn't float.Then we invented outboard motors and all that science was made irrelevant by raw power. You could turn a bathtub into a high-performance speedboat by bolting a big enough motor on it. When the throttle's up high, the impact of the water against the bottom of the hull lifts it right up out of the water. It skims like a skipping rock and who gives a fuck about hydrodynamics. When you throttle it down, the vessel sinks into the water again and wallows like a hog.This is the principle behind the Zodiac, as far as I can tell. You take a vessel that probably weighs less than its own motor, you radio the control tower at Logan Airport and you take off.We had a forty-horse on this puppy - a donation - and I'd never dared to throttle it up past about twenty-five percent of maximum. Remember that a VW Bug has an engine with less than thirty horsepower. When you hit running speed in this Zode, if the water's not too rough, the entire boat rises from the water. The only wet part is the screw.It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land, there's the Omni, but all these slow cars get in the way. There's public transit - the T - but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water nothing stops you, and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.Contrary to what every bonehead believes, the land surface has been stretched out and expanded by civilization. Look at any downtown city: what would be a tiny distance on a backpacking trip becomes a transcontinental journey. You spend hours traveling just a few miles. Your mental map of the city grows and stretches until things seem far away. But get on a Zodiac, and the map snaps back into place like a rubber sheet that has been pulled out of shape. Want to go to the airport? Zip. It's right over there. Want to cross the river? Okay, here we are. Want to get from the Common to B.U., two miles away, during rush hour, right before a playoff game at Fenway Park? Most people wouldn't even try. On a Zodiac, it's just two miles. Five minutes. The real distance, the distance of Nature. I'm no stoned-out naturehead with a twelve-string guitar, but that's a fact.The Mercury was brand-new, not even broken in. Some devious flack at the outboard motor company had noticed that our Zodiacs spent a lot of time in front of TV cameras. So we get all our motors free now, in exchange for being our extroverted selves. We wear them out, sink, burn and break them; new ones materialize. I hooked up the fuel line, pumped it up, and the motor caught on the first try. The stench of the piers was sliced by exhaust. I dropped it to a tubercular idle, shifted into forward, and started snaking out between the pilings. If I wanted to commit suicide here, I could just twitch my hand and I'd be slammed into a barnacled tree trunk at Mach 1.Then out into a finger of water that ran between piers. The piers were actually little piers attached to big piers, so out into a bigger finger of water that ran between the big piers, then into the channel, and from there to a tentacle of the Harbor that fed the channel.At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown. Boston Harbor is my baby. There are biologists who know more about its fish and geographers who have statistics on its shipping, but I know more about its dark, carcinogenic side than anyone. In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamn pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their secrets to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting that the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the water line, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt.In a waterproof chest I keep a number of big yellow stickers: NOTICE. THIS OUTFALL is BEING MONITORED ON A REGULAR BASIS BY GEE INTERNATIONAL. IF IN VIOLATION OF EPA REGULATIONS, IT MAY BE PLUGGED AT ANY TIME. FOR INFORMATION CALL: (then, scribbled into a blank space, and always the same), SANGAMON TAYLOR (and our phone number).Even I can't believe how many violators I catch with these stickers. Whenever I find a pipe that's deliberately unmarked, whose owners don't want to be found, I slap one of these stickers up nearby. Within two weeks the phone rings."GEE," I say."Sangamon Taylor there?""He's in the John right now, can I have him call you back?""Uh, okay, yeah, I guess so.""What did you want to talk to him about?""I'm calling about your sticker.""Which one?""The one on the Island End River, about halfway up?""Okay." And I dutifully take their number, hang up, and dial right back.Ring. Ring. Click. "Hello, Chelsea Electroplating, may I help you?"Case closed.A few years of that and I owned this Harbor. The EPA and the DEQE called me irresponsible on odd-numbered days and phoned me for vital information on even-numbered ones. Every once in a while some agency or politician would announce a million-dollar study to track down all the crap going into the Harbor and I'd mail in a copy of my report. Every year The Weekly published my list of the ten worst polluters:(1)Bostonians (feces)(2-3)Basco and Fotex, always fighting it out for number two, (you name it)(4-7)Whopping defense contractors (various solvents)(8-10)Small but nasty heavy-metal dumpers like Derinsov Tanning and various electroplaters.The Boston sewage treatment system is pure Dark Ages. Most of the items flushed down metropolitan toilets are quickly shot into the Harbor, dead raw. If you go for a jog on Wollaston Beach, south of town, when the currents are flavorful, you will find it glistening with human turds. But usually they sink to the bottom and merge.Today I was out on the Zodiac for two reasons. One: to get away from the city and my job, just to sit out on the water. Two: Project Lobster. Number one doesn't have to be explained to anyone. Number two has been my work for the last six months or so.Usually I do my sampling straight out of pipes. But no one's ever satisfied. I tell them what's going in and they say, okay, where does it end up? Because currents and tides can scatter it, while living things can concentrate it.Ideally I'd like to take a chart of the Harbor and draw a grid over it, with points spaced about a hundred yards apart, then get a sample of what's on the sea floor at each one of those points. Analysis of each sample would show how much bad shit there was, then I'd know how things were distributed.In practice I can't do that. We just don't have the resources to get sampling equipment down to the floor of the Harbor and back up again, over and over.But there's a way around any problem. Lobstermen work the Harbor. Their whole business is putting sampling devices - lobster traps - on the floor of the sea and then hauling them back up again carrying samples - lobsters. I've got a deal with a few different boats. They give me the least desirable parts of their catch, and I record where they came from. Lobsters are somewhat mobile, more so than oysters but less than fish. They pretty much stay in one zone of the Harbor. And while they're there, they do a very convenient thing for me called bioconcentration. They eat food and shit it out the other end, but part of it stays with them, usually the worst part. A trace amount of, say, PCBs in their environment will show up as a much higher concentration in their livers. So when I get a lobster and figure out what toxins it's carrying, I have a pretty good idea of what's on the floor of the Harbor in its neighborhood.Once I get my data into the computer, I can persuade it to draw contour maps showing the dispersion pattern of each type of toxin. For example, if I'm twisting Basco's dick at the moment, I'll probably look at PCBs. So the computer draws all the land areas and blacks them out. Then it begins to shade in the water areas, starting out in the Atlantic, which is drawn in a beautiful electric blue. You don't have to look at the legend to know that this water is pure. As we approach Boston, the colors get warmer, and warmer. Most of the harbor is yellow. In places we see rings of orange, deepening toward the center until they form angry red boils clustered against the shore. Next to each boil I write a caption: "Basco Primary Outfall." "Basco Temporary Storage Facility." "Basco-owned Parcel (under EPA Investigation)." "Parcel Owned by Basco Subsidiary (under EPA Investigation)." Translate this into a 35-mm slide, take it to a public hearing, draw the curtains and splash it up on a twenty-foot screen - wild, an instant lynch mob. Then the lights come up and a brand-new Basco flack comes out, fresh from B.U. or Northeastern, and begins talking about eyedroppers in railway tank cars. Then his company gets lacerated by the media.This is the kind of thing I think about when buzzing around, looking for Gallagher the lobsterman.Sometimes I had this daydream where a big-time coke runner from Miami got environmentally conscious and donated one of his Cigarette boats. It wasn't going to happen - not even coke dealers were that rich. But I thought about it, read the boating magazines, dreamed up ways to use one. And right now on the channel between Charlestown and Eastie, two miles north, I could see a thirty-one foot Cigarette just sitting there on the water. It's kind of like what my Zodiac would look like if it had been built by defense contractors: way too big, way too fast, a hundred times too expensive. The larger models have a cabin in front, but this didn't even have that comfort. It was open-cockpit, made for nothing in the world but dangerous speed. I'd seen it yesterday, too, sitting there doing nothing. I wondered if it would be terribly self-important if I attributed its presence to mine. The worst Fotex plant was up that way, and maybe they were anticipating a sneak attack.Implausible. If their security was that good, they'd know that our assault ketch, the Blowfish, was off the coast of New Jersey, homing in on poor unsuspecting Blue Kills. Without it we didn't have enough Zodiacs, or divers, to stage a pipe-plugging raid on Fotex. So maybe this was some rich person working on a suntan. But if he owned a boat that could do seventy miles an hour, why didn't he take it off that syphilitic channel? He was on the Mystic, for God's sake.I caught up with the Scoundrel off the coast of Eastie, not far from the artificial plateau that made up the airport. These guys were the first to join Project Lobster, and hence my favorites. Initially none of the lobstermen trusted me, afraid that I'd ruin their business with my statements of doom. But when the Harbor got really bad, and people started talking about banning all fish from the area, they started to see I was on their side. A clean Harbor was in their own best interests.Gallagher should have been extra tough, because I had a tendency to rag on the subject of Spectacle Island. This was not a true island but a mound of garbage dumped in the Harbor by an ancestor of his, a tugboat operator who'd been lucky enough to get the city's garbage-hauling concession in the 1890s. But, as Rory explained many times and loudly, those were the Charlestown Gallaghers, the rich, arrogant, semi-Anglicized branch. Sometime back in the Twenties, some Gallagher's nose had gotten splintered in a wedding brawl or something, thus creating the rift between that branch and Rory's - the Southie Gallaghers, the humble farmers of the sea."Attention all crew, we have a long-haired invironmintl at ten o'clock, prepare to be boarded," Rory called, his Southie accent thick as mustard gas. All these guys talked that way. Their "ar" sounds could shatter reinforced concrete.I'd been to a couple of games with them; we'd sit up there in the bleachers and inhale watery beer and throw cigars to the late, lamented Dave Henderson. They couldn't not be loud and boisterous, so they gave me shit about my hair, which didn't even come down to my collar. I could take a few minutes of this, but then I needed to go to a nice sterile shopping mall and decompress."Aaaay, we got some beauties for you today, Cap'n Taylor, some real skinny oily ones."."Going to the game tonight, Rory?""A bunch of us are, yeah. Why, you wanna go?""Can't. Going to Jersey tomorrow.""Jersey! Sheesh!" All the buys on the boat went "sheesh!" They couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to go to that place.They tossed me a couple of half-dead lobsters and showed me where they'd trapped them on the chart. I jotted the locations down and put the bugs on ice. Later, when I got back, I'd have to dismantle them and run the analysis.We traded speculation on what Sam Horn might do against the Yanks. These guys were Negro-haters all, and their heroes were gigantic black men with clubs, a contradiction I wasn't brave enough to point out.I went to handle the most depressing part of my job. Poor people get tired of welfare cheese after a while and start looking for other sources of protein. For example, fish. But poor people can't charter a boat to go out and catch swordfish, so they fish off docks. That means they're looking for bottom fish. Anyone who knows about Boston Harbor gets queasy just at the mention of bottom fish, but these people were worried about kwashiorkor, not cancer. Three-quarters of them were Southeast Asian.So a month ago I'd typed up a highly alarming paragraph about what these particular bottom fish would do to your health, especially to the health of unborn children. Tried to make it simple: no chemical terms, no words like "carcinogenicity." Took it to the Pearl, which is my hangout, and persuaded Hoa to translate it to Vietnamese for me. Took it to an interpreter at City Hospital and got her to translate it into Cambodian. Had a friend do it in Spanish. Put them all together on a sign, sort of a toxic Rosetta Stone, made numerous copies and then made a few midnight trips to the piers where they like to do this fishing. We put the signs up in prominent places, bolted them down with lag screws, epoxied those screws into place and then chopped the heads off.And when I came around the curve of the North End, bypassing a few hundred stalled cars on Commercial Street, riding the throttle high because I had miles to go before I'd sleep, I saw the same old pier, all hairy with fishing poles. It looked like one of those shadows you see under a microscope, with cilia sticking out all over to gather in food, healthy or otherwise.Somehow I didn't figure these guys were sportsmen. They weren't of the catch-and-release school, like those geezers on TV. They were survivalists in a toxic wilderness.The old etiquette dies hard. I grew up in a family that liked to fish, and I couldn't bring myself to break up the party. I backed off on the throttle when I was far away, and coasted to a safe distance where I wouldn't scare off any of those precious shit-eaters under the pier. Circled it slowly, looking at the fishermen, and they looked back at me. The name of my organization was writ large in orange tape on the side of the Zodiac. I wondered if they were reading it, and making the connection with those threatening signs just above their heads.They were Vietnamese and black, with a few Hispanics. The blacks I wasn't as worried about. Not because they were black but because they seemed to fish for recreation. They'd been fishing here forever. You saw old black guys everywhere in Boston where there was water, sitting there in their old fedoras, staring at the water, waiting. Never saw them catch anything. But the Vietnamese went at it with a passion born of long-term protein deficiency.There was kind of a ripple of interest up there on a corner of the pier and the crowd parted, leaving one Vietnamese in the middle. They were getting their lines and poles out of his way so he could reel one in. A flopping, good-sized flounder emerged, seeming to levitate because you couldn't see the line. Headed for a family wok in Boston. It wouldn't yield much meat, but the concentration of PCBs and heavy metals in that flesh would be thousands of times what it was in the water around us.I glumly watched it ascend, thinking, these guys must use heavy-duty lines, because they had to support the whole weight of the fish. You didn't have a chance to net it in the water. The lucky angler made a grab for his prize and our eyes snagged each other for a second. I'd seen this guy before; he was a busboy at the Pearl..What the fuck. Cranked up the Zode, twisted it, blew a crater in the Harbor and wheeled it around. Flounder be damned. When it came to this issue, GEE was fucked both ways. Try to stop them from poisoning themselves, and you look like you're interfering with a band of spunky immigrants. But now I had a face, at least. There wasn't any reason to hound this particular busboy, but I had good relations with Hoa and maybe I could get in touch with these people through him. Maybe GEE could run a free fishing charter out into the Atlantic, take these people out where they could catch some real fish. But pause to consider what the liability insurance would cost on that sucker.Then, out of nowhere, it hit me: what I needed was some bitterly cold beer and really loud, brain-crushing rock and roll. Maybe some nitrous to go with that. I lit a cigar, cranked the Mercury up into one loud, long power chord, and headed for our naval base.

5

BARTHOLOMEW WAS LURKING in his van in front of GEE when I got back. He started leaning on the horn as soon as he spotted me climbing up out of the T. All around the square, defense contractors flocked to their metallized windows to see if their BMWs were being violated, then drifted back, unable to localize the sound. I sauntered on purpose, pretended to ignore him, climbed the stairs to get my bike. I should have known that if I wanted recreation, my roommate would be thinking along the same lines. That is why, despite many kinds of incompatibility, we lived together: our minds ran in parallel ruts."Hey, you!" Tricia shouted, as I unlocked my bike. "That ain't yours.""I'm fuckin' out of here," I said."Jim called," she said coyly, so I stepped just barely inside the door."What?""They're ready and waiting.""He found a beachhead?""Yeah." Reading from a note, now: "Dutch Marshes State Park, ten miles north of Blue Kills. Take Garden State Parkway south to the Route 88 exit ... well, this goes on for a while. Here you go.""Don't want it.""Sangamon," she said in her flirtatious whine, which had been known to put men in the mind of taking their clothes off. "I spent ten minutes taking this down. And I don't like taking dictation.""I'll never understand why people give out directions, or ask for them. That's what fucking road maps are for."Outside, Bart blew a few licks on his horn."Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone's half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you're sunk. I've got maps of that fucking state an inch thick.""Okay." Tricia was getting into some serious pouting; I bit the inside of my cheek, hard."Just tell me what time.""He didn't say. You know, tomorrow afternoon sometime. Just follow the barbecue smoke.""Ten-four on that. And now I truly am gone.""Here's some mail.""Thanks. But it's all junk.""Don't I get to kiss the departing warrior?""Feels too weird, in a room that's bugged."Threw my bike into Bartholomew's big black van and we headed west. Before going to work this morning, he'd had enough foresight to stop by our living-room canister and fill a couple of Hefty bags with nitrous, so I moved back behind the curtain and jackhammered my brain. Bart bragged that he could pass out on the stuff, but when that happens you let go of the Hefty and it all escapes.He turned down the stereo a hair and screamed, "Hey, pop those suckers and we can have another Halloween party."Last Halloween we had rigged up nitrous and oxygen tanks in one of our rooms, sealed the doors and windows, and created, shall we say, a marvelous party atmosphere. That was the first night I ever slept with a nonprint journalist. But it was an expensive way to seduce someone.By the time we'd poked through Harvard Square, I was up in the front seat again, watching the colonial houses roll by."Yankees," Bart said.Translation: "The Yankees are playing the Red Sox on TV tonight; let's stay at the Arsenal for the entire duration of the game.""Can't," I said. "Have to do dinner with this frogman at the Pearl.""French guy?""Frogman. A scuba diver. He's going on the Blue Kills thing. Don't worry, you hold down the fort and I'll ride over on my bike.""You got a light on that thing?"I laughed. "Since when are you the type to worry about that?""It's dangerous, man. You're invisible.""I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption."Sometimes it's nice to get away from the East Beirut ethnic atmosphere of the city and hang out in a bar where all the toilets flush on the first try and no one has ever died. We go to a place in Watertown, right across the river from our house, where there's a bar called the Arsenal. Character-free, as you'd expect in a shopping mall. But it's possible for a bar to have too much character, and there were a lot of bars like that in Boston. Right across the mall was a games arcade, which made the Arsenal even better. Into the bar for a beer, across the mall for a few games of ski-ball, back for another beer, and so on. You could eat up a pretty happy, stupid evening that way.We ate up a couple of hours. I won about three dozen ski-ball tickets. Checked through the junk mail. I get a lot of junk mail because I own stock in hundreds of corporations - usually one share apiece. That puts me on the shareholder mailing lists, which can be useful. It's a hassle; I have to do it under as assumed name, through a P.O. box, paid for with money orders, so people can't ambush me on TV for some kind of conflict of interest.I leafed through Fotex's annual report; a lot about their shiny new cameras, but nothing at all about toxic waste.Also picked up some corporate news from a newsletter: it seemed that Dolmacher had a new boss. The founder/president of Biotronics had "resigned" and been replaced by a transplant from the Basco ranks. There were photos of the founder - young, skinny, facial hair - and the new guy, a Joe Palooka type in yuppie glasses. Typical story. The people who founded Biotronics, bright kids from MIT and B.U., were chucked out to make room for some chip-off-the-old-monolith.Bartholomew started a long-distance flirtation with some pert little sociology-major type who'd probably driven her Sprint over here from Sweetvale College, looking for Harvard students or chip designers, but that romance died as soon as she noticed he was covered with something that looked remarkably like dirt. Bart worked in a retread business. All day long he picked up tires and flung them onto heaps, and by five o'clock he was vulcanized.When it was time, I hauled my bike out of Bart's van and crossed the river into Brighton - a kind of small Irish panhandle that sticks way out to the west of Boston proper - then followed back streets and sidewalks due east until I was in Allston, part of the same panhandle, but scruffier and more complicated. For example, here lived many of the Asian persuasion. If you judged from restaurants alone, you'd conclude that the Chinese dominated, that the Thais were catching up fast and that the Vietnamese ran a distant third. But I don't think that's true at all. The Vietnamese are just more discriminating when it comes to starting restaurants. The Chinese and the Thais, and for that matter the Greeks, print up menus automatically as soon as they get into the city limits; it's like a brainstem function. But the Vietnamese tend to be hard-luck cases to begin with, and they have a fastidious, catlike attitude about their chow. Maybe they got it from the French. To them, Chinese is gooey and greasy while Thai is monotonous - all that lemon grass and coconut milk. The Vietnamese cook for keeps.Hoa's location was awful. In Boston, where landlords are as likely to carry gasoline cans as paint cans, all other buildings like this had long ago been reduced to smoking holes. It was a solo Italianate monster that rose like a tombstone beside the Mass Pike, facing Harvard Street. Parking was no problem, though there was some question as to whether your car would still be there when you got out. The inside was bare and bright as a gymnasium, containing a dozen mismatched tables with orange oilcloth thumbtacked onto them. The decor was beer signs, depressing photographs of old Saigon and framed restaurant reviews from various newspapers, favoring phrases like "this Pearl is a diamond in the rough" and "surprising discovery by the Pike" and "worth the trip out of your way."For the first couple months I had the feeling I was supporting this place singlehandedly by insisting that we hold large GEE luncheon meetings here. Then, after those reviews came out, it was "discovered" by Harvard Biz hopefuls who came to worship at the shrine of Hoa's entrepreneurial spirit. So I no longer felt like Hoa's kids would go hungry if I didn't eat there three times a week. But when people hemmed and hawed about where to eat, the Pearl was still my choice.I carried my bike inside the front door, a privilege earned by steady patronage. Hoa and his brother thought it was outlandish that I, a relatively well-to-do American, rode around on a bike. I might as well have insisted on wearing a conical hat and black pajamas. They drove cars exclusively, scabrous beaters that got stolen or burned several times a year.Once through the vestibule, I checked out my fellow diners. The man in circular glasses, with a one-inch-thick alligator briefcase? No, this was not the GEE frogman. Nor the five Asians, efficiently snarfing down something that wasn't on the menu. The three blue-haired Brighton Irish ladies, still flabbergasted by the lack of handles on the teacups? Not likely. But the mid-thirties unit, seated under a blurry photo of the statue of the marine, hair to his shoulders, Nicaraguan peasant necklace, bicycle helmet on the table, now this was a GEE frogman. Though at the moment he was interrogating Hoa's brother, in half-forgotten Vietnamese, about what kind of tea this was."Hey, man," he said when he saw me, "I recognize you from the '60 Minutes', thing. How you doing?""Tom Akers, right?" I sat down and moved his bike helmet to the floor."Yeah, that's right. Hey, this is a great place. You hang out here?""Constantly.""What's good?""All of it. But start with the Imperial Rolls.""Kind of pricey.""They're the best. All the other Vietnamese places wrap their rolls in egg-roll dough. So it's just like a Chinese roll. Here they use rice paper.""Outstanding!""It's so delicate that most restaurants won't fuck with it. But Hoa's wife has the touch, man, she can do it with her toes.""How's their fish stuff? I don't eat red meat."My recommendation - Ginger Fish - got stuck on the way out. It was a mound of unidentifiable white fish in sauce.I was ashamed to be thinking this. Hoa, the man who barely broke even on his egg rolls because of the rice paper, wouldn't serve bottom fish to his customers. I am, I reconsidered, an asshole."It's all good," I said. "It's all good food."Tom Akers was a freelance diver, working out of Seattle, who did GEE jobs whenever he had a chance. When I needed some extra scuba divers, the national office got hold of him and flew him out. That's standard practice. We avoid taking volunteers, since anyone who volunteers for a gig is likely to be overzealous. We prefer to send out invitations.Normally we'd have flown him straight to Jersey, but he wanted to visit some friends in Boston anyway. He'd been hanging out with them for a few days, and tonight he was going to crash at my place so we could get a fast start in the morning."Good to see you again," Hoa was saying, having snuck up on me while I was feeling guilty. He moved soundlessly, without displacing any air. He was in his forties, tall for a Vietnamese, but gaunt. His brother was shorter and rounder, but his English was poor and I couldn't pronounce his name. And I can't remember a name I can't pronounce."How are you doing, Hoa?""You both ride your bike?" He held his hands out and grabbed imaginary handlebars, grinning indulgently, eyeing Tom's helmet. Double disbelief: not one, but two grown Americans riding bicycles.As it turned out, he wanted to encourage Tom to move his bike inside where it wouldn't get ripped off. There wasn't room in the vestibule so Tom put it around back just inside the kitchen door."Lot of activity out in the alley, man.""Vietnamese?""I guess so.""They're always coming to the back door for steamed rice. Hoa gives it out free, or for whatever they can pay.""All right!"We had a five-star meal for about a buck per star. I had a Bud and Tom had a Singha beer from Thailand. I used to do that - order Mexican beers in Mexican places, Asian beers in Asian joints. Then Debbie and Bart and I sat down one hot afternoon and she administered a controlled taste-test of about twelve different imported brands. It was a double-blind test - when we were done, both of us were blind - but we concluded that there wasn't any difference. Cheap beer was cheap beer. No need to pay an extra buck for authenticity. Furthermore, a lot of those cheap importeds got strafed in the taste test. We hated them.Hoa's brother was our waiter. That was unusual, but Hoa had his hands full babysitting the three biddies. Also, he had to chew out an employee in the back room; fierce twanging Vietnamese cut through the hiss of the dishwashers. Tom liked the food, but got full in a hurry."You want doggy bag for that?" Hoa's brother said."Aw, sure, why not.""Good." He eyed us for a minute, fighting with his shyness. "I hate when people come, eat little, then I got throw food in dumpster. Make me very mad. Lot of people could use. Like the blacks. They could use. So I get mad sometime you know, and talk to them. Sometime, I talk about Ethiopia."He left us to be astounded. "Man," Tom said, "that guy's really into it."The busboy, emerging from the back, had obviously been at the quiet end of Hoa's tantrum. I guessed he'd spent most of his life in this country; he had an openly sullen look on his face, and loped and sauntered and jived between the tables. When he came out of the kitchen, we locked eyes again, for the second time that day. Then he glanced away and his lip curled.There's a certain look people give me when they've decided I'm just an overanxious duck-squeezer. That was the look. To get through to this guy I'd somehow have to prove my manhood. I'd have to retain my cool in some kind of life-threatening crisis. Unfortunately such events are hard to stage.We were staging one in Blue Kills, but it wouldn't make the Boston news. That was part of the GEE image: to take chances, to be tough and brave, so that people wouldn't give us the look that Hoa's busboy was giving me.He didn't know that he was getting fucked coming and going. Basco and a couple of other companies had rained toxic waste on his native land for years. Now, here in America, he was eating the same chemicals, from the same company, off the floor of the Harbor. And Basco was making money on both ends of the deal."What're you thinking about?" Tom asked."I hate it when people ask me that fucking question," I said. But I said it nicely."You look real intense.""I'm thinking about goddamn Agent Orange," I said."Wow," he said, softly. "That's what I was thinking about."Tom followed me back across Allston-Brighton and home. I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerrilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyone in a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That's why I don't even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.Tom mumbled a few things about paranoia, and then I was too far ahead to hear him. We had a nice ride through the darkness. On those bikes we were weak and vulnerable but invisible, elusive, aware of everything within a two-block radius. A couple of environmental extremists in a toxic world, headed for a Hefty bag and a warm berth in the mother ship.

6

WE INVADED the territory of the Swiss Bastards shortly before dawn. At sea we had three Zodiacs, two frogmen, a guy in a moon suit, and our mother ship, the Blowfish. We had a few people on land, working out of the Omni and a couple of rented vehicles. Our numbers were swelled by members of the news media, mostly from Blue Kills and environs but with two crews from New York City.At about three in the morning, Debbie had to shake a tail put on us by the Swiss Bastards' private detectives. There was nothing subtle about the tail, they were just trying to intimidate. Tanya, our other Boston participant, was driving the car and Debbie was lying down in the back seat. Tanya led the tail onto a twisting road that wasn't sympathetic to the Lincoln Town Car following them. She thrashed the Omni for five minutes or so, putting half a mile between herself and the private dicks, then threw a 180 in the middle of the road - a skill she'd learned on snowy Maine roads last February while we were driving up to Montreal to get some French fries. Debbie jumped out and crouched in the ditch. Tanya took off and soon passed the Lincoln going the other way. The private dicks in the Lincoln were forced to make an eleven-point turn across the road, then peeled out trying to catch up with her.Debbie walked a couple hundred yards and located the all-terrain bicycle we'd stashed there previously. It was loaded with half a dozen Kryptonite bicycle locks, the big U-shaped, impervious things. She rode a couple of miles, partly on the road and partly cross-country, until she came to a heavy gate across a private access road. On the other side of the gate was a toxic waste dump owned by the Swiss Bastards, a soggy piece of ground that ran downhill into an estuary that in turn ran two miles out to the Atlantic. The entire dump was surrounded by two layers of chainlink fence, and this gate was a big, heavy, metal sucker, locked by means of a chain and padlock. Debbie locked two of the Kryptonites in the middle, augmenting the Swiss Bastards' chain system, then put two on each hinge, locking the gates to the gateposts. In the unlikely event that an emergency took place on the dump site, she stuck around with the keys so that she could open the gates for ambulances or fire trucks. We aren't careless fanatics and we don't like to look as though we are.I was on the Blowfish, explaining this gig to the crew. Jim, the skipper, and hence their boss, was hanging around in the background.Jim does this for a living. He lives on the boat and sails back and forth between Texas and Duluth; along the Gulf Coast, around Florida, up the Atlantic Coast, down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, and west from there. Then back. Wherever he goes, hell breaks loose. When GEE wants an especially large amount of hell to break loose, they'll bring in professional irritants, like me.Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking. They anchor in prominent places and hang banners from the masts. They dump fluorescent green dye into industrial outfalls so that news choppers can hover overhead and get spectacular footage of how pollution spreads. They blockade nuclear submarines. They do a lot of that antinuclear stuff. Their goal is to be loud and visible.Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. There's no direct action you can take to stop nuclear proliferation, and direct action to save mammals is just too fucking nasty. I don't want to get beat up over a baby seal. But there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes. Doing that requires coordinated actions, what the media like to describe as "military precision."This crew doesn't like anything military. In the Sixties, they would have been stuffing flowers into gun barrels while I was designing bombs in a basement somewhere. None of them has any technical background, not because they're dumb but because they hate rigid, discipline thinking. On the other hand, they had sailed this crate tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of weather. They'd survived a dismasting off Tierra del Fuego, blocked explosive harpoons with their Zodiacs, lived for months at a time in Antarctica, established a beachhead on the Siberian coast. They could do anything, and they would if I told them to; but I'd rather they enjoyed the gig."These people here are environmental virgins," I said. We were sitting around on deck, eating tofu-and-nopales omelets. It was a warm, calm, Jersey summer night and the sky was starting to lose its darkness and take on a navy-blue glow. "They think toxic waste happens in other places. They're shocked about Bhopal and Times Beach, but it's just beginning to dawn on them that they might have a problem here. The Swiss Bastards are sitting fat and happy on that ignorance. We're going to come in and splatter them all over the map."Crew members exchanged somber glances and shook their heads. These people were seriously into their nonviolence and refused to take pleasure in my use of the word "splatter.""Okay, I'm sorry. That's going a little far. The point is that this is a company town. Everybody works at that chemical factory. They like having jobs. It's not like Buffalo where everyone hates the chemical companies to begin with. We have to establish credibility here.""Well, I forgot to bring my three-piece suit, man," said one of the antisplatter faction."That's okay. I brought mine." I do, in fact, have a nice three-piece suit that I always wear in combination with a dead-fish tie and a pair of green sneakers splattered with toxic wastes. It's always a big hit, especially at GEE fundraisers and in those explosively tense corporate boardrooms. "They're expecting, basically, people who look like you." I pointed to the hairiest of the Blowfish crew. "And they're expecting us to act like flakes and whine a lot. So we have to act before we whine. We can't give them an excuse to pass us off as duck squeezers."There was a certain amount of passive-aggressive glaring directed my way; I was asking these people to reverse their normal approach. But I was directing this gig and they'd do what I asked."As usual, if you don't like the plan, you can just hang out, or go into town or whatever. But I'll need as many enthusiasts as I can get for this one.""I'm into it," said a voice from the galley. It was Arty, short for Artemis, author of the omelets, the best Zodiac jockey in the organization. Naturally she was into it; it was a Zodiac-heavy operation, it was exciting, it was commando-like. Artemis was even younger than me, and military precision didn't come with all the emotional baggage for her that it did for the middle-aged Blowfish crew.At 4:00 A.M., Artemis powered up her favorite Zode and prominently roared off, heading for some dim lights about half a mile away. The lights belonged to a twenty-foot coast guard boat that was assigned to keep an eye on us. It happens that boats of that size don't have cooking facilities, so Artemis had whipped up a couple of extra omelets, put them in a cooler to keep them warm and was headed out to give these guys breakfast. She took off flashing, glowing and smoking like a UFO, and within a couple of minutes we could hear her greeting the coast guards with an enthusiasm that was obscene at that time of the morning. They greeted her right back. They knew one another from previous Blowfish missions, and she liked to flirt with them over the radio. To them she was a legend, like a mermaid.That was when Tom and I took off in one of the other Zodes. This one had a small, well-muffled engine, and we'd stripped off all the orange tape and anything else that was easy to see in the dark.The Blowfish was three miles off the coast and maybe five miles south of the toxic site that had just been locked up by Debbie and Tanya. Jim waited fifteen minutes, so the coast guards could eat and we could slip away, then cranked up the Blowfish's huge Danish one-cylinder diesel: whoom whoom whoom whoom. We could easily hear it from the Zode and if anyone ashore was listening, they could probably hear it too. Normally, for environmental reasons, Jim used the sails, but this was right before dawn and there wasn't any wind. Besides, we were aiming for military precision here.Around 6:00 we heard them break radio silence with a lot of fake traffic between Blowfish and GEE-1 and GEE-2 and Tainted Meat, which was my current code name, and loose talk about banners and smoke bombs. We knew that the rent-a-dicks were monitoring that frequency. Meanwhile, Tanya was in Blue Kills, trailing a parade of Lincoln Town Cars, rousting the media crews from their motel rooms, handing out xeroxed maps and press releases.The import of the press releases was that we were mightily pissed off about the toxic marsh north of town. You know, the one that two Zodiacs were converging on at this very moment. I was imagining it: Artemis undoubtedly in the lead, spiky hair slicing the wind, thrashing the morning surf at about forty miles an hour, as some lesser Zode pilot desperately tried to keep up with her. She'd been through a special GEE course in Europe where she'd learned how to harass two-hundred-foot, waste-dumping vessels, dipping in and out of their bow wave without getting sucked under. She knew how to massage a big roller with her Mercury, how to slide up and down the troughs without going airborne.We were listening too, but we already knew what was going on. The whole flotilla was headed for the estuary. There was nothing the coast guard could do except watch, because there's nothing illegal about riding a boat up a river. By now, the Swiss Bastards would have dispatched all available rent-a-cops and rent-a-dicks to the scene, ordering them to drive into that toxic waste dump and stand shoulder-to-shoulder along the shoreline to prevent the GEE invasion forces from establishing a beachhead.When they arrived, pushing through the horde of media, they would find the gate impregnably locked. They would find, as they always did, that no boltcutter in the world had jaws that opened wide enough to cut through a Kryptonite lock. They would then find that their hacksaws were dulled useless by the tempered steel. If they were exceedingly bright, they would get a blowtorch and heat the metal enough to destroy its temper; then they could hacksaw it, and, after a few hours, get inside their own dump. Meanwhile, the cameras would be rolling, as would the GEE demonstration, unmolested, on the other side of the transparent fences. Unless, in full view of the NYC minicams, they wanted to send rent-a-cops clambering over their own fences, or chop them up with boltcutters.Tanya and Debbie had parked the Omni right in front and were propagandizing with a bullhorn. Listening to the radio, I could occasionally make out a word or two of what they were saying. Basically they were encouraging everyone to stay cool - always a major part of our gigs, especially when state troopers were present.Riding in one of the Zodiacs was a man dressed up in a moonsuit, one of those dioxinproof numbers with the goggles and the facemasks. Nothing looks scarier on camera. This Zodiac was about three inches from the shore - no trespassing had yet been committed. He had some primitive sampling equipment mounted on long poles, so that he could reach into the dump and poke around pseudoscientifically.In the other Zodiac was a guy in scuba gear, who, as soon as they arrived, jumped into the water and disappeared. Every few minutes he would resurface and hand a bottle full of ugly brown water to Artemis. She would take it, wearing gloves of course, and hand him an empty. Then he would disappear again.They hated it when we did this. It just drove them wild. From previous run-ins with me, they knew the organization now had some chemical expertise, that we knew what we were talking about. Neither the guy in the moon suit nor the diver ever showed his face, so they didn't know which one was Sangamon Taylor. This sampling wasn't just for show, or so they thought. All of this shit was going to be analyzed, and embarrassing facts were going to be, shall we say, splattered across the newspapers.That had started the day before, with an article in the sports section by well-respected journalist/sportsman, Red Grooten, who detailed, with surprising sophistication, the effects of this swamp's toxins on sports fishing. Next to it had been a shocking picture of a dead flounder. GEE authorities were quoted as speculating that this entire estuary might have to be closed to fishing.In half an hour, the Blowfish would pull into view, and earnest GEE employees would begin examining the river-banks downstream for signs of toxicity. If they were lucky they'd find a two-headed duck. Even if they found nothing, the fact that they went looking would be reported.Tom and I were converging, slowly and quietly, on the real objective.

7

MUCH OF NEW JERSEY'S COAST is protected from the ocean by a long skinny barrier beach that runs a mile or two offshore. In some places it joins to the mainland, in some it's wide and solid, and in other places (off Blue Kills, for example) it peters out into islands or sandbars."Kill" is Dutch for "creek." What we have here is short, fat river that spreads out into a network of distributaries and marshes when it reaches the sea. The kills are braided together along an estuary that's supposed to be a wildlife refuge.The estuary was north of us. The town of Blue Kills and the little principality of Blue Kills Beach were built on higher and dryer ground on its south side. The whole area was semi protected from the Atlantic by a dribble of isles and sandbars. We were out on the toxic lagoon enclosed behind them.I'd been studying my LANDSAT infrared photos so I knew where to find a shrub- and tree-covered island pretty close to our target, about a mile off Blue Kills Beach. We beached the Zodiac among the usual clutter left behind by teen beer-chugging expeditions. Tom checked his gear and climbed into the Darth Vader Suit.Normally divers wear wet suits, which are thick and porous. Water gets through them, the body warms the water up, they insulate you. But you wouldn't be caught dead wearing something like that when you are screwing around with toxic waste. So the Darth Vader Suit was built around a drysuit, which is waterproof. I'd added a facemask made from diving goggles, old inner tubes, a patching kit, and something called Tennis Shoe Repair Goo. When you wrestled it down over your face, the scuba mouthpiece fit into the proper orifice and there was kind of a one-way valve over your nose so you could breathe out. When it was put on correctly, it would protect you from what you were swimming through, at least for a little while.Tom didn't like drysuits but he wasn't arguing. Before he put it on, we protected the parts of his skin that would be uncomfortably close to leaks or seams in the Darth Vader Suit. There's a silicone sealant that's made for this kind of thing - Liquid Skin. Smear it on and you're semiprotected. The suit goes on over that. We equipped him with a measuring tape, a scuba notepad, and an underwater 8-mm video camera."Just one thing. What's coming out of this sucker?""Amazing things. They're making dyes and pigments back in there. So you have your solvents. You have your metals. And lots of weird, weird phthalates and hydrazines.""Meaning what?""Don't drink it. And when you're done, take a nice swim out here, where the water's cleaner.""This kind of shit always bugs me.""Look at it this way. A lot of toxins are absorbed through the lungs. But you've got a clean air supply in those tanks. A lot more get in through your skin. But there's not enough solvents in that diffuser, I think, to melt the suit.""That's what they told us about Agent Orange.""Shit." There was no reason for me to be astonished. I just hadn't thought of it before. "You got sprayed with that stuff?""Swam through the shit.""You were a SEAL?""Demolition. But the Viet Cong didn't have much of a navy so it was mostly blue-collar maintenance. You know, cleaning dead buffaloes out of intake pipes.""Well, this stuff isn't like Agent Orange. No dioxin involved here.""Okay. You've got your paranoia and I've got mine."We were being paranoid. I'd already admitted it. After our midnight ride through Brighton he had a pretty good idea of how my mind worked."I don't care if they see me checking out their pipe on the surface, Tom. I don't even care if they recognize me. But if they see a diver, that's a giveaway. Then they know they're in trouble. So just bear with me."So he climbed into the water and I towed him, submerged, to a place where the water turned black. Then I cut the motor. He thumped on the bottom of the Zode.I gave him a minute to get clear, then restarted the motor and just idled back and forth for a few minutes. I already had pretty good maps, but this was a chance to embellish them, note down clumps of trees, docking facilities, hidden sandbars, and media-support areas. About half a mile south was a public pier belonging to a state park; then, moving north, there was a chainlink fence running down to the water, separating park land from the Swiss Bastards' right-of-way. A few hundred feet past that was another fence and then some private property, some old retired-fishermen's homes.The Swiss Bastards' right-of-way was deceptively wooded. When the wind came up a little, the trees sighed and almost covered the rush-hour roar of the parkway. Just out of curiosity, I took the Zode closer to shore and scanned the trees with binoculars. One of the rent-a-cops loitering back there was giving himself away by his cigarette smoke. Or, knowing the habits of rent-a-cops, maybe it was oregano somebody had sold him as reefer.I knew what direction the pipe ran, so I could follow it inland using my compass, trace its path under some swampy woods and crackerbox developments, out to the parkway, a couple of miles inland. Then a forest of pipes rose up behind the real forest. Whenever the wind blew the right way, I got a whiff of organic solvents and gaseous byproducts. The plant was just coming alive with the morning shift, the center of the traffic noise. Tomorrow I'd make a phone call and shut it all down.The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they'd printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it's easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger.No chemical crime is perfect. Chemical reactions have inputs and outputs and there's no way to make those outputs disappear. You can try to eliminate them with another chemical reaction, but that's going to have outputs also. You can try to hide them, but they have this way of escaping. The only rational choice is not to be a chemical crook in the first place. Become a chemical crook and you're betting your future on the hope that there aren't any chemical detectives gunning for you. That assumption isn't true anymore.I don't mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of them all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God's sake, they wouldn't even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don't have the balls to take preventive measures, punitive action doesn't even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don't know what to do. They don't even look for violators.I do look. Last year I went on an afternoon's canoe trip in central Jersey, taking some sample tubes with me. I went home, ran the stuff through my chromatograph, and the result was over a million dollars in fines levied against several offenders. The supply-side economists made it this way: created a system of laissez-faire justice, with plenty of niches for aggressive young entrepreneurs, like me.A rubber-coated hand broke the water ahead of me and I cut the motor. Tom's head emerged next to the Zodiac and he peeled back the Darth Vader mask to talk. His mouth was wide open and grimacing; he was surprised. "That is one big motherfucker.""How long?""It's so long I can't swim to the end of it. I'll need a lift.""And there's black shit coming out of it?""Right." Tom placed the little video camera on the floor of the Zode. I picked it up, rewound the tape, put the camera to my face and started to replay the tape through the little screen in the viewfinder. "Some shots of the diffusers," Tom explained. "Each one is three and a quarter inches in diameter. The crossbar is three-eighths inch.""Nice job.""Wasn't doing much when I showed up, then it started really barfing that stuff out.""Morning shift. You missed the rush hour when you were down there. Let's see."Through the viewfinder I was looking at the smooth, unnatural curve of a large pipe on the seafloor. It was covered with rust, and the rust with hairy green crap. The camera zoomed in on a black hole in the side of the pipe; understandably, nothing was growing near that. Cutting across the center of the hole was a crossbar."This remind you of anything?""What do you mean?" he said."Looks like the Greek letter theta. You know? The ecology symbol." I held up a press release bearing GEE's logo and he laughed."I guess this means to hell with the secrecy fetish," I said. "Hang on and I'll take you out farther."We worked our way offshore about a hundred yards at a time, then, and when we got bored and started thinking about lunch, a quarter mile at a time. The slope of the bottom was gentle and the water never got deeper than about fifty feet. I'd motor him out, following the pipe with my compass, and he'd drop off and swim down to see if it was still there. When Tom finally found the end of it, we were pretty close to our starting place on the little shrub-covered island. The fucking thing was a mile long.I hadn't worked with him before, but Tom was good. When you dive for a living I guess it pays to be precise. I knew some other GEE divers who would have said. "Whoa, man, it's a big fucking pipe, it's, like, about this wide." Tom was a fanatic, though, and came up with pages of measurements and diagrams.We hung out on the island for an hour, savored a couple of beers, and talked it over."The holes are all the same size," he said. "Spaced a little over fifty feet apart. That tape measure is just an eighteen-footer, so I had to be kind of crude.""All on the same side of the pipe?""Alternating sides.""So if the thing is about a mile long ... that works out to something like a hundred three-inch holes we have to plug up.""It's a big job, man. Why did they build it that way, anyhow? Why not have your basic huge pipe, just barfing the stuff out?""They used to think this was the answer. Diffusion. There's a strong current up the shore here.""I noticed.""The same current that created this island we're on, and all the barrier beaches. They figured if they could spread their pollution out across a mile of that current, it would more or less disappear. Besides, a big barfing pipe is mediapathic.""And you're sure it's illegal?""In about six different ways. That's why I want to close it down.""Think you can bluff them?""What do you mean?""Call them up, say, 'This is GEE, we're going to shut off your diffuser, better close down the plant.' ""Anywhere else I could, but they wouldn't go for it here. They know how hard this thing would be to plug up. Besides, I want more than a bluff. I want to stop pollution."He grinned. So did I. It was a catch phrase we repeated when frustrated by a hopeless task: "I want to stop pollution, man!""So what do we do? Postpone it?""Naah." I started to rewind the tape for the third time. "Necessity is the mother."

8

HE DUMPED HIS GEAR into the Zode and we headed up the shore to rendezvous with the Blowfish. It was easy to find, as it turned out, since they'd set off some huge military surplus smoke bombs near the dump. Gluttons for attention, I guess.I had Tom drop me off. It was time to do some ruminating, and that wouldn't be possible in the groovy chaos of the Blowfish. They'd all be exhilarated by the gig, they'd want to talk too much, and I wanted to think. So we brought the Zodiac right up on the public beach. I waded to shore in my underwear, the only bather present who was smoking a cigar, and put my clothes on once I reached the beach. Normally guys in their underwear attract a lot of attention, but none of the kids and oldsters who were here noticed. They were all gathered in a clump a hundred feet down the beach, staring at something on the ground. I figured someone had stroked out while swimming. It was ghoulish, but I walked down there anyway to have a look.But it wasn't a dead person they were looking at. It was a dead dolphin."Hey, S.T., come to help this poor guy out?"A geezer had snuck up on me. No one I knew. He'd probably seen me at the civic association meeting I'd attended the month before. A lot of these retirees keep an eye on the tube, read the papers every day, go to the meetings.It seemed an odd thing for him to say, so I moved forward to the front row and took a closer look. The dolphin wasn't dead, just close to it. Its tail was oscillating weakly against the sand."I wish I knew the first thing about it," I mumbled. A couple of young muscleheads decided they did know about it. One of them grabbed the dolphin's tail, hoping to drag it back to the water. Instead, its skin peeled back like the wrapper on a tray of meat. I turned around and walked as fast as I could in the other direction. People were screaming and vomiting behind me."Looks like another victim of you-know-what," the old guy was saying. I looked over to see him matching me stride for stride. There wasn't much to say, so I checked him out. We were talking appendectomy from long ago and a fairly recent laparotomy. Exploratory surgery, maybe. His tubes seemed okay; probably a nonsmoker. I gave him fifteen years; if he'd worked at the plant, five years."Didn't know I had a name around here," I said.He grinned, shook his head, and converged on me, chortling silently. He was laughing, but swallowing it. A born conspirator. "Oh, those guys hate you. They hate your guts up there!" He allowed himself an audible laugh. "Where you guys have your headquarters?"Exactly the kind of information I hate to give out. "Somewhere out there," I said, "on a boat.""Uh huh. What do you do when someone wants to get a hold of you?""Got a cellular phone in our car.""Oh yeah. For the media. That's smart. You give 'em all your number then.""Yeah, you know, on the press releases.""Hey! You got one of those? I'm kind of a news junkie, you know, get the Times and the Post every morning; got a satellite dish behind the house and I'm always following it, got a shortwave....".I had a few press releases folded up in my pocket, always carried them with me, so I handed one to the guy and also gave him a GEE button that he thought was hilarious."Where's a good hardware store?" I said. A trivial question for him to answer, but priceless for me."What kind of stuff you looking for?" he asked, highly interested. He had to establish that I deserved to have this information. Blue Kills probably had a dozen mediocre ones, but every town has one really good hardware store. Usually it takes about six years to find it."Not piddley-shit stuff. I need some really out-of-the-way stuff. ..."He cut me off; I'd showed that I had some taste in hardware, that I had some self-respect. He gave me directions.Then, what the hell, he gave me a ride to the damn place. Dropped me off in the parking lot. Drove me in his Cadillac Seville with the Masonic calipers welded to the trunk lid. This guy was a goddamn former executive. With an obvious grudge."You know Red?" I said on the way over.Dave Hagenauer (according to the junk mail on his dashboard) laughed and thwacked his maroon naugahyde steering wheel. "Red Grooten? I sure as hell do. How the hell do you know Red?""Old fishing buddies?" I asked, ignoring the question."Oh, hunting, fishing, you name it. We been going out for a long time. Course the most we do now is a little fishing, you know, plunking off a boat.""Not in the North Branch I hope."He whistled silently and glinted his eyes at me, Aqua-Velva blue. "Oh, no. I've known about that place for a long time. Shit no."By that time we were at the store. "Stay out of trouble!" he said, and he was still laughing when I slammed the door.Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. I strike up conversations with the oldest people who work there, we talk about machine vs. carriage bolts and whether to use a compression or a flare fitting. If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything and they ask a lot of stupid questions in the process. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.So in the first couple of minutes I had to blow off two zesty young clerks. It's easy for me now, I just mumble about something very technical, using terms they don't understand. Pretending to know what I mean, they direct me off toward another part of the store. Young clerks like to use a zone coverage, whereas the oldtimers prefer a loose man-to-man, so you can wander and think, pick up an armload of items, frown, turn around, put them all back and start over again.I did a lot of that. After half an hour, an old clerk orbited by, just to be courteous, to establish that I wasn't a shoplifter. "Anything I can help with?" he asked understandingly."It's a long, long story," I said, and that put him at ease. He went back to coffee and inventory and I took another swing down the plumbing aisle, visions of theta-holes dancing in my head.What we had here was your basic hard-soft dilemma. I needed something soft that would form itself to the gentle curve of the pipe and make a toxic-waste-tight seal. But it had to have enough backbone that the pressure wouldn't destroy it. Two laps around the Best Hardware Store in Blue Kills had demonstrated that no single object would do the trick. Now I was trying to break it down, one problem at a time.First, the soft part. And there it was: ring-shaped, four inches across, rubber. Attractively blister-packed and hanging there like fruit on a tree."How many of these toilet gaskets you have in stock?" I shouted. The young clerks froze in dismay and the old clerk took it right in stride,"How many toilets you got?" he called."A hundred and ten.""Wow!" piped a younger clerk, "Must be some house!""I'm a plumber missionary," I explained, wandering toward the front of the store. "Going down to..." almost said Nicaragua, but caught myself "... Guatemala next week. Figure the only way to stop the spread of disease down there is put in modern plumbing facilities. So I need a whole shitload of those things."Of course they didn't believe me, but they didn't need to."Joe, go see how many," said the boss. Giggling nervously, Joe headed for the basement. I turned around before they could bother me with questions and moved on to Phase II: something hard and round that could hold the pressure, hold those toilet gaskets against the side of the big pipe. Some kind of disk. God help us if we had to cut a hundred disks out of plywood. I could see us up all night on the deck of the Blowfish, running out of saber-saw blades. Somewhere in this great store there had to be a lot of hard round cheap things.To summarize: they were having a sale on salad bowl sets in the house wares department. Cheap plastic. A big bowl, serving implements, and half a dozen small bowls nested inside. I borrowed a small bowl from the display set and carried it over to plumbing, where I could hold it up against the toilet gaskets: a perfect match.Now I just needed something that would hold the salad bowls with their rims pressed against the gaskets pressed against the pipe. All along I'd known that the crossbar running across each hole could serve as an anchor. In the back they had yards and yards of threaded steel rod, which would do just fine. Cut it into five-inch chunks, use a vise to bend a hook into one end, hook it over the crossbar, run it through a hole in the center of the bowl and use a wingnut to hold the bowl down. It'd take some work, but that's what nitrous oxide was for.I bought a hundred and ten toilet gaskets, nineteen salad bowl sets, fifteen three-foot-long threaded quarter-inch rods, a hundred and fifty wingnuts (we were sure to drop some), an extra vise, a chunk of lead pipe (for leverage when bending hooks into the rods), four hacksaws, some files, some pipe cement, and a couple of spare 5/16-inch drills for drilling through the bottoms of the bowls. Paid in cash and persuaded them to deliver it to the public dock at Blue Kills Beach at the close of the business day. Then I walked out into the bright Jersey sunlight, a free man. It was well past noon and time for a burger.This place was a little out of the way, as good stores usually are, so I found a phone and dialed the number of the phone in our Omni.All I could hear was Joan Jett, very loud, singing a song about driving around in New Jersey with the radio on. This was hastily turned down, then I heard the phone shuffling around in someone's hand, the roar of the road coming through the tinfoil walls of that little crackerbox and the coyote howl of the engine, doing at least five thousand RPM and approaching the redline."Shift!" I screamed, "Shift!""Shit!" Debbie answered. The phone dropped from her shoulder and bounced off something, probably the handbrake, then got crushed against the seat as she rammed the tranny into a higher gear. The engine calmed down. "Where the fuck is the horn," Debbie said dimly, then found it and described someone as a "rich bastard." Then, cut off in traffic, she had to downshift. I rummaged in my pocket for more change; this might take a while."Such a fucking right-handed car!" Debbie said. "The shift lever, the stereo, now the phone. What's the problem with the horn?""The whole middle part of the steering wheel is the horn button," I said."Oh, S.T. Stress. I love it. I adore stress.""How'd it go?""Real fine. They gave up on the Kryptonites. Tried to send some boats up the channel to get us from that direction, but Jim blocked the deep part of the river with the Blowfish and they skragged one of their propellers on an old oil drum. One of theirs, probably.""Wonderful. Very mediapathic.""Didn't find any deformed birds but we got some trout with scuzz on their bodies. What did you find?""Toxic Disneyland. Want to come pick me up?"I stayed on the phone and guided her on a hunt-and-miss expedition through the metropolitan area; did not hang up until the bumper of the Omni was in contact with my knees.The grille was a crust of former insects, and waves of heat issued from the louver on the hood. As I checked the oil, she emerged to hover and squint, skeptically, at the engine."Master's degree in biology from Sweetvale, and you're driving around with a dry dipstick."She couldn't believe what a jerk I was being, but that's okay, I even surprise myself sometimes. "What kind of macho crap is this?""You can call it macho, but if you redline it with no oil, it's going to go Chernobyl in the middle of the Garden State Parkway and we'll have to take the Green Tortoise home again."She laughed. "Oh, fuck." We remembered half a dozen granola Green Berets, staggering onto a hippie bus at three in the morning wearing scuba gear and carrying a blown-up motorcycle.I opened up the back and took out a couple of cans of oil. "You ever read The Tragedy of the Commons?""Environmental piece, I know that.""Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up. It's the same deal with this.""Okay, okay, I can make the connection.""Putting oil into the Omni is another form of environ-mentalism."I shoved the oil sprout into the can, immediately making a sexual connection in my own mind. Then I poked the spout into the proper hole on the Omni, and looked at her, smearing the oil around on my fingers. She was looking at me.The TraveLodge maid barged in and found us dorking each other's brains out on the rug, right in front of the door. Above us, Debbie was being interviewed on the telly. For some reason we had turned on all the hot water taps in the bathroom and the place was boiling with steam; Debbie's interview, and her other sound effects from below, were half drowned out by the buzz of the Magic Fingers. She slammed the door on her way out. What the hell did they expect, giving us the honeymoon suite?"If you're planning to stay more than one day, it's traditional to inform the hotel," I said when we were finished. Debbie didn't answer because she was laughing too hard.

9

IT WAS THREE O'CLOCK. Debbie called the front desk and told them we'd stay another day. Big surprise. We took a shower, then went down and hauled our CB out of the Omni and checked in with the mother ship. I told them that I had an idea for tomorrow that I'd like to bring up with them, and made arrangements to be picked up at the public dock at five.Debbie and I had first run into each other when I was doing a full media splatter number on that toxic pond on the Sweetvale campus. It stirred up lot of interest among the student body, the idea that the green ivy of New England academe was just like algae growing on a rusty drum of industrial waste. They asked me to show up on campus and I went, foolishly expecting to be treated like a hero.In fact, most of them were incredibly pissed off. They had pulled some blame-reversal thing where they felt the existence of toxic metals in their soil and swimming hole was somehow my fault. That if I'd kept my mouth shut, it would have been safe. This shouldn't have surprised me, because the ability to think rationally is pretty rare, even in prestigious universities. We're in the TV age now and people think by linking images in their brains. That's not always bad, but it led to some pretty ludicrous shit there at Sweetvale, and when some student leaders really started getting on my case in the media, I regrettably had to strip them naked, figuratively, before the toxic glare of the TV cameras. At some point during all that ugliness, Debbie found something decent either in me or GEE International and got involved with one or both of us, I'm not sure. We'd never been in the sack until now, but we'd both been considering it.One of the New York City remote crews drifted by in their van, reminding me: we've got a media apocalypse to run tomorrow, and these guys don't even know it yet.For that matter, neither did the victims. They'd been waiting for us to arrive for a month. Today we'd created a big noise and made them look like jerks. Now they were sitting back, holding meetings with their PR flacks, getting started on the damage control. That was awful, they were thinking, but now it's over, and we can stop the bleeding and pour some more death into the oceans.Hardey-har-har. Tomorrow they'd need both hands just to hold their intestines in place. But we had to prep the media."Sangamon Taylor? Quite a show. Were you involved?"This was one of the local media types, a classic horse's-ass TV reporter with a pneumatic haircut. He was winking at me, assuming that I was the man in the moon suit."Wait until tomorrow," I said. "Then we'll have some great visuals for you.""You're doing something else tomorrow?""Yeah. Not one of these media events, you understand. I mean, what we did today, I'm sure you can see that it was intended just to look kind of flashy on TV. No real news value."Shock flashed over his face like a blue beam from a cop car, then he managed a grin. "I gathered that," he said, a few tones higher than his baseline anchortone. "You did a good job of it.""Thanks, but I'm sure a journalist like you can understand there's more to GEE than just a bunch of clowns waving at the camera. We do serious work, too. Stuff that'll make for a real story - not just a piece of fluff."What could I lose? His piece of fluff was already cued up in a videotape machine at the station."Tomorrow?""Yeah. We'll start real early in the morning, but this is going to be a long operation. All day long.""Where?"I told him how to get to Blue Kills Beach and gave him a xeroxed handout we prepared for the Fourth Estate - tips on how to protect and use your camera on a rocking Zodiac and that sort of thing. I also tossed him a videotape, stock footage of GEE frogmen working off of Zodiacs, plugging pipes."Thanks," he said, "I'll copy this and get it back to you.""Keep it. We've got others.""Oh, thanks!" He hefted the videotape and did a doubletake on it. "Jesus! This is three-quarter inch!" Then he gave me a sly wink and promised to see me tomorrow.In the Omni, Debbie was on the phone to a reporter who'd been sent here from one of the New York papers. He'd be more portable than a minicam crew, shrewder, harder to manipulate and a lot more fun to hang out with.We and the reporter - a round grizzled type named Fisk - and the Blowfish and the truck from the hardware store and a Lincoln with two rent-a-dicks all converged on Blue Kills Beach. I considered trying to hide our purchases from the dicks, but even if they saw what we had, they'd never anticipate our plan.The driver from the hardware store was severely rattled. He was just a sixteen-year-old, probably doing his part-time on his way to being an artillery loader at Fort Dix. His dad probably worked at the plant. He'd never seen men with hair before."You know anything about outboards?" I asked him by way of male bonding. We got into a long rap about whether I needed to check the carburetor on one of our Mercs. Artemis got involved and soon the kid relaxed completely. He allowed as how he'd never seen such big motors on such small boats and she took him for a ride while we unloaded the truck. When he came back, half drenched with salt water, phthalates and hydrazines, he thought we were pretty cool. And that's fine, because we were pretty cool - Artemis is, anyway - and it wouldn't be fair for him to go away with the wrong impression. We take people for rides while the chemical companies lay off their cancerous dads, and sooner or later they decide on their own who the good guys are.Several of the Blowfish crew wanted to do laundry and bathe in real tubs, so Debbie and I handed over the keys to the Omni and the honeymoon suite, after I talked to them briefly about dipsticks and redlines. Then we headed out to sea on the Blowfish.I sat down on the foredeck with Fisk, who accepted one of my illegal cigars. We smoked and drank beer and traded environmental stories for a bit, then I showed him the pictures of the theta-holes, sketched the diffuser, laid out the whole gig.He was interested, but not overly. "I figured you had something big planned," he said, "but my main reason for coming was this." "What?""This," he said, and swept his arms out wide. Then I noticed that we were sprawling on the deck of one very fine handmade wooden ketch, on the open ocean, under a golden afternoon sky, cooled by the breeze and warmed by the sun, sailing along strongly and quietly, smoking fine Cuban cigars. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Fringe benefit." Over dinner it came out that this was Captain Jim's birthday. Tanya had brought out some kind of politically incorrect cake, buried an inch deep in frosting, with a crude picture of a ketch on top. Debbie took the opportunity to give him something she'd been meaning to give him anyway.She'd put in a lot of time on banner duty. More time than anyone should. She had a knack for visual thinking, Debbie did, and we knew it. These days she just sketched them out and canvassers - our student gnomes - did the sewing. One of her better efforts was a big square banner that we shackled to the top of a Fotex water tower one fragrant spring evening. It was simple: a skull and crossbones with the international circle/slash drawn over it in red.Given the same assignment, I would have written a twenty-five-word manifesto with a little picture down in the corner. Debbie said the same thing with a picture. I was impressed. When drunk, I referred to it as the Toxic Jolly Roger. The next time I went down to my Zodiac, someone had been there and attached a little fiberglass pole to the transom, a segment of a fishing rod. A little hand-sewn nylon flag was flying from it: black, with the skull and crossbones in white and the circle/slash in red. That was when I knew this woman liked me.Then she came up with the idea of making a big one for the Blowfish. For some reason, I had to help, so we went to fabric stores and I loitered among the heavy, manly fabrics in the canvas section and scared off business while she charged up yards of ripstop nylon on a credit card that turned out to be mine. Then we laid it all out on the floor of her living room and drew the patterns. She had to educate me in basic cloth facts: if you draw the pattern on a chunk of cloth that is stretched out of shape, the pattern will be messed up. Then we had to seal the edges against fraying by running them through a candle flame, filling the apartment with every toxic fume known to man; I could feel the dissolved brain cells dribbling out my ears. Debbie insisted that no operation connected with sewing could really be toxic. And finally we ran it through her fucking Singer. I just went to the other room and watched the static from the sewing machine tear across the screen of her television. I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.So when we presented it to Jim, everyone applauded Debbie, and I just sat there like a turd on a platter. Then it was time for boy stuff. I cranked on the ship's generator and started ripping open boxes.We drilled holes in bowls until 11 P.M., when I went to sleep. Debbie and I crammed ourselves into a berth meant for one. That was okay, since today was our first time. But in a week or so we'd need a kingsize waterbed. Fisk hung out on the deck in a sleeping bag, drinking brandy and making Artemis laugh. Jim just curled up next to the tiller, looking at the stars and thinking about whatever a forty-five-year-old sea drifter thinks about. The Atlantic rocked us to sleep, even as it was killing some more dolphins. The Toxic Jolly Roger grinned down over one and all.And I woke up in the middle of the night sweating and panting like a pesticide victim, Dolmacher's slack skull-face staring at me. It's the Holy Grail, as far as you're concerned."What are you thinking about?" Debbie asked.I hate that fucking question. Didn't answer.Up there, a couple hundred miles north of us, Dolmacher was up - I knew he was still awake, still at the lab at two in the morning - tinkering around with genes. Looking for the Holy Grail.I'd never play with genes. Wouldn't touch them. Any molecule more complicated than ethanol is too scary for me; bigger than that and you never know what they'll do. But Dolmacher was fucking with them. And the thing of it was: I always got higher scores on exams than him. I'm smarter than Dolmacher.

10

THAT WAS THE LAST SLEEP I got for about twenty-four hours. At four in the morning, I got up, destroyed the rest of the cake and chased it down with two cans of Jolt. Got a scuba outfit all ready, tromped around on top of the boat to get people awake and moving, then got into the best Zode with Artemis and we took off. At the last minute Fisk woke up and joined us.The rent-a-dicks were lurking nearby in an open boat. There was no need for stealth, so we just warmed up the Mercury and let them eat our wake. We were quickly out of sight, and it's hard to track by sound when your own motor is blatting away ten feet behind you. Headed north, just to give them the wrong idea, then doubled back and homed in on the end of the diffuser.I can dive if I have to, but it's not my thing. This time we needed lots of divers, though, and in any case the principle had to be tested. Arty saved me from certain embarrassment and possible demise by pointing out that I'd hooked up my tubes wrong. As we got them fixed, Fisk winked at me. "From here on out," he said, "I'm an objective journalist, sort of.""Funny you should say that, since I'm about to commit a criminal act. Sort of." And I fell off the Zodiac.After a certain amount of aimless swimming around, I located the diffuser. It wasn't putting much out right now, so I couldn't follow the black cloud. And Tom was right, the current was powerful, and a greenhorn like me would end up in Newark if he didn't keep swimming south.But I had some big old magnets, things that would grip with a force of a hundred pounds, and I'd brought one along. Once I found the diffuser, I slapped the magnet on and tied myself to that with some rock-climbing webbing. This way I could plant my flippers and lean back against the tug of the rope while I worked.From here on in it was just a problem of industrial engineering. How many holes could we plug per diver per hour, and how could we make it go faster? The key was to assemble the bowl/gasket/bolt/wingnut contraptions in the Zodiacs and hand them to the divers as they were needed.The plug fit better than I deserved. There would be some leakage owing to the curvature of the pipe, but the diffuser's ability to emit toxic substances would be cut down to a thousandth of the norm. It was easy to hook the curved end of the bolt under the crossbar and twirl the wingnut down to tighten it. I took my time and estimated how far we could pretighten the wingnuts in the Zodiacs so that the divers wouldn't have to spend cumulative hours twisting them down.Then I smeared some pipe cement over the threads. Hopefully it would harden up and prevent the wingnuts from being removed.Not bad. I pretightened the wingnut on another assembly, checked my watch, swam to the next hole, and plugged it. That took five minutes. Five minutes per hole meant five hundred diver-minutes. They'd spend half their time farting around with air tanks and other friction, so we needed a thousand diver-minutes, or something like sixteen diver-hours. If we wanted to do it in four hours, we'd need four divers.When I broke the water, our objective journalist was in a truly passionate clinch with Artemis. His fault. I'd made a point of waving my light around to warn them. When making love to granola commandos, leave your eyes open. They broke apart and I pretended to be looking the other way."I'm in luck," I said. "We only need four divers. And we happen to have four, besides me - so I can stay on top. Where I belong."Artemis dunked me for that. Then we went back to the Blowfish, which blazed with light and cast a heavenly garlic smell across the water. Jim was up cooking - it had to be Jim, whose passion for garlic was fine by me."I'm not trying to sound, like, militaristic," I announced to the tofu-eating multitude, "but we have a go, Houston."Everyone said "all right" and some raised an herbal toast. Now that these people were used to me, they were getting into the project. The prospect of destroying a mile-long toxic waste diffuser - hell, destroying anything a mile long - was a fiendish temptation."You want to call the plant, then?" Jim asked."I figure, as soon as we're done eating, we go over there and start. We've got two divers here and two at the TraveLodge and they'll be meeting us in half an hour. So once we get it working smoothly, get all those initial bugs worked out-""The part of the operation where we look like assholes," Debbie said, translating."-correct, we shut down the plant. That'll take about thirty seconds on the phone. Then we start the carnival." With Fisk present, I wasn't going to get any more explicit than that.It all went pretty well, except that Fisk suddenly admitted, when the Blowfish was halfway there, that he had a gram of coke in his photographer's vest. He decided to fess up when he noticed that we all went through one another's clothing, looking for anything that could be construed as a drug or weapon; for obvious reasons we always did this when we were likely to get busted. And once Fisk owned up, I felt guilty and admitted to a square of blotter acid in my wallet which, since it was on a Boston Public Library card I didn't think would ever be noticed. But guilt is guilt.LSD is a violation of Sangamon's Principle. It's a complicated molecule and hence makes me nervous. But sometimes you get in situations so awful, or so physically taxing, that nothing else will penetrate.So the library card was burned, its ashes scattered, and Fisk's coke went up certain noses. We attacked our task with renewed vigor.The TraveLodge people showed up a little late and we hustled them off to work. I hung out on shore, watching the media and authorities gather. They took pictures of me inflating a child's large wading pool. Hard to look like a commando when you're doing that; we'd have to get us a pump. I have to get the toxics off the bottom of the sea and onto the cathode-ray tubes of the public in order for this kind of gig to work and, because the diffuser was completely hidden, this wouldn't be easy. All we had to show was a bunch of scuba divers jumping into the water with salad bowls and toilet parts and coming back up without them. So about the time all our media were in place, I took a Zode out and borrowed Tom from the salad-bowl operation. We went out to the Blowfish, picked up a portable pump and motored back in toward shore. Tom swam down to the diffuser and put the pump's intake hose into a diffuser hole, and I hauled the Zode up onto the beach and dragged the pump's output hose into the wading pool. Minicams clustered like flies on a muffin. I'd chosen a pool with a nice bright yellow bottom, so the Swiss Bastards' black sludge hit it with a nice mediapathic splash.We ran the pump until the pool was nearly full. Along with Zodiacs and moonsuits, wading pools are among my favorite tools. We were lucky here, because the waste looked really bad. Sometimes you get stuff that's clear as water, and it's hard to convince people that it's really just as dangerous. After the pool, we also filled a couple of 55-gallon drums - these we'd chain to the doors of the New Jersey Statehouse in a couple of days-!-and then we were all done with the pump. I went over to the Omni and picked up the phone. Every large corporation has its own telephone maze, its juicy numbers and dead ends, its nickel-plated bitch queens and sugary do-gooders. I'd already navigated this particular maze from Boston on my WATS line. So I dialed a particular extension three or four times, until I got the receptionist I wanted, and she punched me through to the plant manager."Yes?" he said, kind of groggy. I checked the Omni's clock. It was only 8:30."Yes, this is Sangamon Taylor from GEE International. How are you today?""What do you want?""I'm fine, thanks. Uh, we've discovered a big pipe sticking out into the ocean that's putting very large amounts of hazardous wastes right into the water. In fact, of the six pollutants that EPA has licensed you to discharge into the water at this point, you're exceeding the legal limit on all six. And since they're very dangerous substances, what you're doing is illegally endangering the health and welfare of everyone who lives in this region, which is a lot of people. So, uh, we're shutting the diffuser off now, and I'd recommend that you stop putting wastes into it, for obvious reasons. If you'd like to get in touch with us, we're down at Blue Kills Beach. Would you like to take down our phone number here?""Listen, buddy, if you think that's just some little old pipe, you're wrong."So I gave him a complete description of the pipe and what we were doing to plug it.By this time the Omni's window had become kind of a TV screen for all the media to watch. I rolled the window down and turned the phone over to the "speaker" setting so that they could hear the whole conversation. On the whole, it was calm and professional, no fireworks. I go out of my way to be polite, and people entrusted with running huge chemical plants, unlike some of their bosses, tend to be in control of themselves. One techie to another. It's the flacks and executives who fly off the handle, because they have no understanding of chemistry. They don't imagine they might be wrong.Half an hour later, our divers told me that nothing was coming out of the diffuser any more.By that time I was the ringmaster of a full-scale media circus. Each crew had to be taken out on a Zodiac, given a thrilling ride through the surf, given a chance to videotape our divers and to walk around on the Blowfish and nuzzle the ship's cat. Meanwhile, Debbie hung out on the beach to placate those who were waiting their turn, giving them interviews, telling jokes and war stories - and later, confronting the small army dispatched here by the corporation. Fortunately she was well cut out for that; dinky, tough, quick witted and exceedingly cute. Not the flummoxed rad/fem/les they were hoping for.For a big outfit, the Swiss Bastards were pretty quick on their feet. They'd already xeroxed up their press releases, and they always had reams of prepackaged crap about eye-droppers in railway tank cars and the beneficent works of the chemical industry. You know: "These compounds are rapidly and safely dispersed into a concentrated solution of dihydrogen oxide and sodium chloride, containing some other inorganic salts. Sound dangerous? Not at all. In fact, you've probably gone swimming in it - this is just a chemist's way of describing salt water." This is precisely the sort of witticism that TV reporters love to steal and pass off as their own, granting their stories a cheery conclusion on which to cut back to the beaming anchordroids. It's much more upbeat than talking about liver tumors, and it's why we have to do this business with wading pools.When I got back from taking a local TV reporter on his joyride, the suits were fully mobilized. They'd set up a folding table on the beach with their nicely forested property as a back-drop. Tactical error on my part! I should have strung a nice big banner out across that fence so they couldn't use it. We had a big roll of banner stuff in the Omni-green nylon cloth on a white backing - so I asked Debbie and Tanya if they could try to whip something up real quick.They'd propped one end of their table up on some bundles of press releases, because the beach sloped toward the water, as beaches do. It was too much to hope that the incoming tide would undermine and topple it. I was tempted to speed that process up with the pump, but that would be openly juvenile and too close to actual assault. Their head flack was waddling around in the sand, which was pouring in over the tops of his hand-tooled dress shoes. They even had makeup people handy to spackle his trustworthy face.To watch a big corporation throw its PR machine into action can be kind of imposing. I got scared the first couple of times, but fortunately I was with some GEE veterans who were old hands at trashing press conferences. You have to attack on two levels - challenging what the PR flacks are saying, and at the same time challenging the conference itself, shattering the TV spell.I waved Artemis close in to shore. As soon as the Swiss flack started in with his prepared statement, I nodded at her and she cranked up her motor pretty loud, in neutral, forcing him to raise his voice. That's very important. They want to be media cool, like JFK, and if you make them shout they become media hot, like Nixon. I started thinking about five-o'clock shadows and how we could cast one on a flack's face. An idle inspiration that was probably too subtle for us.The flack unleashed his poster about eyedroppers in tank cars. I ran to the Omni for my poster about banana peels on football fields. He talked about sodium chloride and dihydrogen oxide, and I countered that calling trinitrotoluene "dynamite" doesn't make it any safer. He showed a map of the plant, then of Blue Kills, showing where the big pipe ran underneath the city and out to this beach.That was fine with me. If he wanted to show people how their toxic waste was passing under their homes, let him.In fact, I couldn't figure out what the hell he was thinking. Why did he want to emphasize that? I started flipping through one of their press packets and found the same map, with their underground pipe highlighted. Exactly what they didn't want people to know.Then the bastard drygulched me. He almost nailed me to the wall."By plugging up the diffuser at the end of this pipe, the GEE people are running the risk that the pipe will burst, somewhere back in here . . ." (pointing to a residential neighborhood) ".. . and release these compounds into the soil. This should lay to rest any misconceptions about their concern for the people of Blue Kills. What these people are, pure and simple, is t-""What he's saying," I shouted, stepping up behind him and holding a salad bowl in the air, "is that this pipeline..."I pointed to the map "... that's carrying tons of toxic waste under people's homes, is so fragile, so shoddily made and poorly maintained, that it's weaker than a contraption made from a salad bowl and a toilet part that we just whipped up on the spur of the moment."I could see the guy deflate. He refused to turn around. "And if these compounds are as safe as he says, why is he worried about them getting into the soil? Why does he equate that threat with terrorism? That should tell you how safe it really is."And, finally, I got to deliver my traditional coup de grace, namely, handing the flack a glass tumbler full of the awful black stuff and inviting him to drink it.Sometimes I feel sorry for flacks. They don't have a clue about chemistry or ecology or any of the technical issues. They just have an official line they're told to repeat. My job is to get them fired. The first few times I did this, I felt great, like an avenging angel. Now I try to co-opt them. I go easy. I don't blow their brains out on-camera unless they get sleazy, attacking me or GEE. I've been responsible for a lot of people getting fired - security guards, PR flacks, engineers - and that's the most troublesome part of my job.

11

THE COPS SHOWED UP. All kinds of cops. Blue Kills cops, state police, coast guardsmen. It didn't much matter because we'd already plugged ninety-five of the holes.All the cops stood in knots on the beach and argued about jurisdiction. What they came up with was this: several state troopers and Blue Kills policemen took a coast guard boat out to the Blowfish - which a trooper boarded, just to show the flag - and then their boat escorted us way around to the north and into a dock that was part of Blue Kills proper, not Blue Kills Beach.It was a fun trip. The wind had come up and the Blue Kills cops, on that dinky CG boat, spent most of it doubled over the side, chucking their donuts. On the Blowfish, I chatted with Dick, the state trooper, a pretty affable guy of about forty. He asked me a lot of questions about the plant and why it was dangerous and I tried to explain."Cancer happens when cells go crazy and don't stop multiplying. That happens, basically, because their genetic code has gotten screwed up.""Like nicotine or asbestos or something."I glanced up and saw Tom Akers sidling over in our direction, listening to the conversation."Yeah. Nicotine and asbestos have some way of altering your genes. Genes are just long stringy molecules. Like any other molecule, they can have chemical reactions with other molecules. If the other molecule happens to be, say, nicotine, the reaction will break or damage the gene. Most of the time it won't matter. But if you're unlucky, the gene will be changed in just the wrong way...." "And you get the Big C.""Right." I couldn't help thinking of Dolmacher - the world's biggest carcinogen - cracking genes up there in Boston. "The thing is, Dick, that for a chemist it's pretty obvious, just looking at any molecule, whether it's going to cause cancer or not. There are certain elements, like chlorine, that are very good at breaking apart your genes. So if you're dumping something into the environment that has a lot of available chlorine on it, you have to be a jerk not to realize it's cancer-causing.""But you can never prove it," Tom said, sounding kind of sullen."You can never prove it the way you can prove a case in court. That's why the chemical corporations can get away with so much. Someone gets a tumor, it's impossible to trace it back to a particular chlorine atom that came from a molecule that was discharged by such-and-such a plant. It's all circumstantial, statistical evidence."Dick said, "So this stuff coming out of this pipe down here-""Some of it has chlorine on it. Also there are some heavy metals coming out, like cadmium, mercury, and so on. Everyone knows they're toxic.""So why does the EPA allow these guys to do it?""To dump that stuff? They don't.""What do you mean?""The EPA doesn't allow it. It's against the law.""Wait a minute," Dick said. I could see the methodical cop mind at work; I could see him writing up an arrest report. "Let's take this from the top. What these guys are doing is against the law.""Exactly.""So how come we're arresting you?""Because that's the way of the world, Dick.""Well, you know, a lot of people around here . . ." he leaned forward, though nobody was even close to us "... are on your side. They really like what you're doing. Everyone's known that these guys were dumping poison. And people are sick of it." He leaned even closer. "Like my daughter for example. My seventeen-year-old daughter. Hey! That reminds me! You got any stuff on this boat?""What do you mean?" I thought he was talking about drugs."Oh, you know, bumper stickers, posters. I'm supposed to get some for my daughter, Sheri."I took him down below and we redecorated Sheri's room with big posters of adorable mammals."How about stuffed animals? You got any stuffed animals?" Then his eyes went wide and he glanced away. "Sorry. I didn't mean that as a joke."For a second I didn't catch the reference. Then I figured that he was talking about an incident a couple of weeks before when a van of ours, completely jammed with stuffed penguins, had caught fire on the Garden State Parkway. Our people got out, but the van burned like a flare for three hours. Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline."Yeah, we're a little short."I got some coffee for Dick and we hung out in the cockpit watching Blue Kills approach, watching the cops on the CG boat do the technicolor yawn. "How long you staying in Jersey?" he asked."Couple days.""You know, Sheri just thinks you guys are great. She'd love to meet you. Maybe you could come by for dinner." We fenced over that issue for a while - God help me, getting involved with an underage Jersey state trooper's daughter - and then Dick and his friends busted us and took us to jail.We were each allowed one phone call. I used mine to order a pizza. We'd already notified the national office of GEE, down in Washington, and they had dispatched Abigail, the attack lawyer. She was on her way now, probably in a helicopter gunship.By the time our mug shots and fingerprints were taken and we'd exchanged business cards with our new cellmates, it was eight in the evening and I just wanted to sleep. But Abbey showed up and sprang us."It's a totally awful, bogus bust," she explained, dragging on a cig and massaging her aluminum briefcase. "Jurisdiction is totally coast guard, because it all happened offshore. You were working out of the town of Blue Kills Beach. But the cops who busted you were from Blue Kills. So it's just a total fuck-up. And the charges will probably be dropped anyway.""The charges are-""Sabotaging a hazardous-waste pipeline."I looked at her."Honest to God. That's actually a crime in New Jersey. I do not make this up," she said."Why do you think they'll drop the charges?""Because that will force the company to go into court and testify that this pipeline is carrying hazardous waste. Otherwise, it's not a hazardous-waste pipeline, is it?"When I got out to the Omni I sat there for a while with the seat leaned back, dozing, waiting for them to let Debbie out of girl jail. The phone rang."GEE?" said an old voice."Yeah.""I want to talk to ST.""Speaking."And that was all it took. The guy just started to ramble. He talked for fifteen minutes, didn't even pause to see if I was still connected. He didn't tell the story very coherently, but I understood pretty clearly. He'd worked at the plant, or ones like it, for thirty-two years. Saved up money so he and his wife could buy an Airstream and drive around the country when they retired. He went on and on about that Airstream. I learned about the color scheme, what kind of material the kitchen counters were made of, and how many pumps it took to flush the toilet. I could have rewired that trailer in the dark by the time he was done describing it.Now he had a form of liver cancer."Hepatic angiocarcinoma," I said."How'd you know?" he said. I let him figure it out.His doctor said it was a very rare disease, thought it seemed to be pretty common around Blue Kills. This guy knew three other people who had died of it. All of them had the same job he did."So I just thought you might like to know," he said, when he'd finally come around to this point, when he was ready to drive the knife home, "that those bastards have been dumping waste solvents into a ditch behind the main plant for thirty year. They're still doing it every day. The supervisors do it now so the workers don't know about it. And I just know they're scared shitless that someone like you is going to find out."A guy in a suit had materialized right outside the Omni. When I suddenly noticed him it was like waking up from a dream. For a second I thought he was a hit man, thought I was going to die. Then he pressed a business card up against the glass. He wasn't a hit man or a rent-a-dick or a PR flack. He was an assistant attorney general from a particular state or commonwealth somewhere between Maine and the Carolinas. His last name wasn't necessarily Cohen, but Cohen is what I'll call him.I reached around and unlocked the passenger-side door. Then I tried to think of a way to end this phone conversation. What do you say to a guy in those circumstances? He was halfway between this world and the next, and I was a twenty-nine-year-old guy who likes to watch cartoons and play ski-ball. He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer.This assistant A.G. was polite, anyway. He stood outside the passenger door as long as I kept talking. The old guy gave me exhaustive directions on how to find this ditch. It would involve sneaking onto the plant grounds in the middle of the night, avoiding security cops here and here and here, going one hundred yards in such-and-such direction, and drilling. We would have to backpack a soil corer all the way in.All of this was slightly more illegal than what I was used to. Besides, that trench wasn't a secret. Others had already spilled the toxic information to the media. The neighborhood plague of birth defects and weird cancers had already been noticed; red thumbtacks had already gone up on the map, splattering away from the trench like blood from a bullet. In a couple of months the first suit would be filed. That trench was going to be an issue for the next ten years. There was a pretty good chance it would drive the corporation into bankruptcy."I just hope you can use this because I want those son of a bitches to dry up and fall into the ocean." And on and on, more and more profane, until I hung up on him.Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure if I have, yet.Cohen rapped on the window glass. I motioned him in, but I didn't move my seat to the upright position. I just lay there while he got in, and tried to remember all the crimes I had committed in Cohen's particular state/commonwealth. None in the last six months."Phoning home to Mom?""Not exactly. Hey, look, Cohen, our lawyer's inside, okay? I have nothing to say to you.""I'm not here to prosecute you."When I looked him in the face, he nodded in the direction of a Cadillac that was aswarm with suits from the company. "I want to prosecute them.""Shit. Four different kinds of cops, now five, all arresting different people. I need a scorecard.""Could you prove in court that someone like that was violating the law?""I can run a chemical analysis that proves it. But any chemist can do that. You don't need me.""Why are you laughing?""Because this is unbelievable. I just get sprung from jail and now....""You have a pretty low opinion of law enforcement in my state, don't you?"A delicate question. "A lot of laws get broken there, let's put it that way." But that was a dodge. Of course I had a low opinion. I'd seen this before. GEE draws attention to a problem and suddenly the cops - particularly the category of cops who have to be reelected - are on the ball."It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture.""I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that.""Well, I wouldn't say it in public. But we don't need this image problem.""Sounds like strategy and tactics, man, like some important up-for-reelection type sat down with a chart, in the Statehouse maybe, and said: 'Item number two, this toilet-of-the-United-States business. Cohen, get out there and bust some corporate ass.'"Cohen was nice enough to give me a bitchy little smile. "If that's how you want to view it, fine. But real life is more complicated."I just sneered out the windshield. After I've gotten the date and done the work for them, ecocrats love to give me some pointers on real life. If it makes them feel better, I don't care."We want to prosecute these people," Cohen continued, "but getting evidence is hard.""What's so hard about it?""Come on, Mr. Taylor, look at it from a cop's point of view. We aren't chemists. We don't know which chemicals to look for, we don't know where or how to look. Infiltration, sampling, analysis, all those activities require specialists - not state troopers. You're very scornful, Mr. Taylor, because for you - with your particular skills - for you all those things are easy. You can do them with your eyes closed." "Holy shit, is this going where I think it is?" It was. Cohen wanted me to break into a fucking chemical plant in the middle of the night, with cops! a warrant, in his home state, and get samples. Me, I was far too tired to hear this bizarre stuff. I desperately needed cold beer and loud rock and roll. So Cohen went on and on, about how I should think this over, and then I found myself sitting alone in the Omni, leaned back in the reclining seat with Debbie's Joan Jett tape blasting on the stereo - I'm in love with the modem world / I'm in touch, I'm a modern girl - drawing stares from the company suits, wondering if I'd just dreamed the whole thing.

12

BACK IN BOSTON, we worked out a settlement with Fotex. They had just lost their most vicious negotiator, my oldest and wiliest enemy in this business, who had toppled off a rusty catwalk into an intake pond, been sucked into a big pipe, shredded into easily digestible bits by rotating knives and processed into toxic sludge. I guessed it was suicide. This Fotex deal was a big hassle since Wes, who runs the Boston office, was using the Omni for a business trip through northern New England. I had to ride my bike to and from their goddamn plant, way up north in the high-chemical-crime district and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.Someone had donated an old computer system, a five-terminal CP/M system about ten years old. Boston already had a Computer Museum, but we were neck-and-neck with them as a showcase of obsolete machinery. Old used computers are economically worthless and we pick them up for little or nothing. Usually they're good enough for what we want to do: telecommunications, printing up mailing lists, slowly crunching a few numbers.Debbie and I took a vacation up to Quebec City and then over to Nova Scotia for a couple of days. I had a terrible time."If we get up now-" I said one night at about 3:00 A.M., looking at my digital nerd-watch."-and roll up the tent real fast," she continued, and by this time I was already embarrassed, but she kept going, "and jump into the car and drive all night, we could reach the ferry that runs down to the states, and be in Boston, wallowing in sludge, within twenty-four hours.""Yeah.""Instead of being out here on the beach, listening to the waves, relaxing and screwing," she continued."We aren't screwing," I pointed out, but suddenly we were. Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in tune with nature. Fortunately there was a trawler out there somewhere, maybe a mile out, and when its wake attacked the beach, the waves started piling in on top of each other, blending into one fast pounding whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. I burst the zipper out of my sleeping bag, Debbie kicked a pot of cold hot chocolate out into the sand, and for a while we just lay there, half tumbled out onto the beach, feeling the cold and the warmth on opposite sides, and I said to hell with the damn ferry. Every so often I got some hint that this woman really wanted me, and it was scary. When she wanted other things she was so crafty and effective.Eventually we found our way back and then didn't see each other for a while. It was a nice summer and I spent more time at the beach, or playing ski-ball, than working. Bart had a friend in Tacoma who mailed us a shitload of powerful fireworks he'd bought on an Indian reservation. We got arrested shooting them off in a park and I had to sell off some shares of my old Mass Anal stock to pay the fine. The guy who arrested us was good - some kind of ex-military man. He waited until we lit off a whistle, so we couldn't hear his engine, then he closed on us at some huge speed, with his lights off, stopped right in front of us, pinning us against a retaining wall, and hit us with all of his cop lights at once.Brilliant tactics. I congratulated him heartily; it was useful to remember that smart cops did exist.The Blowfish showed up. It was about to turn the corner around Maine and head into the Buffalo area. But first we took a trip out to Spectacle Island, a couple of miles off of South Boston. It really ought to be called Gallagher Tow Island, because it was kind of a patrimony for that family. The guy who'd founded Gallagher Tow - I don't know his first name - had held down the city garbage-towing concession for fifty years. He'd clung to that concession like something out of an Alien movie; he couldn't be removed without killing the patient. He'd used everything - graft, blackmail, bullshit, violence, Irishness, defamation of character, arranged marriages, the Catholic church, and simple groveling. He'd hung on to that garbage contract, built up his fleet of tugs from one to fifteen, created an entire goddamn island out in the middle of the Harbor, and, like a true magnate, died of a massive stroke. Now his grandson, Joe, ran Gallagher Tow, and he'd moved on to other forms of envirocide. They had a brand new behemoth named Extra Stout, a 21,000-horse tugboat that could probably haul Beacon Hill out to sea if they could figure out where to attach the hawser. Instead they used it to haul oilrigs through twenty-foot swells in the North Atlantic.So the Gallagher garbage-dumping days are over, but the evidence is still there. You can go walk around on it. Someday, I'm sure, a set of yuppie condos will spring up on Spectacle Island. The heating bills would be low, because all that trash is still decaying; if you stick a probe into its bowels in the middle of the winter, you will find that the entire island is blood-warm. It just sits there decomposing, throwing off heat and gases. As far as I'm concerned it kind of sums up Boston Harbor.You can dig a hole and sample the blood of Spectacle Island, a reddish-brown fluid that permeates the entire dump, a cocktail of whatever's been piled up there, mingled together and dissolved in rainwater. But once you analyze it, you know there's more to the island than used diapers, rotting sofas and Sox scorecards. There are solvents and metals, too. Industry has been out dumping its trash.Sometimes I got the impression that companies were still coming out here and unloading difficult pieces of garbage. That was hard to prove, unless I camped out on the island and waited for them to show up, and I didn't want to live on a mound of garbage. Roscommon's house was close enough.Our Blowfish expedition was an experiment. I'd been reading about a place in Seattle where they'd constructed houses close to an old covered-over dump site. The houses started to explode spontaneously and it was found that methane gas, created by the decay, was seeping into their basements. So the city sank pipes into the ground to let the gas escape, and if you lit them they'd make nice flares.We loaded a number of long pipes onto the Blowfish, rented a drilling rig, and cruised out there on a sunny Saturday morning. When we got there, the obligatory crew of under-age shitheels, half a dozen of them, were throwing a party on the fetid beach. They were all standing around a bonfire because there's no place on Spectacle Island where you'd want to sit down. They were drinking Narragansett, which had put them into kind of a traditional Russian mood; whenever they finished a bottle, they'd fling it down and shatter it. They were drinking in a hurry, because it was windy and cool, the place stank and they probably knew the whole trip was a mistake. The tinkling explosions were almost nonstop. Gulls circled, hoping some edible garbage would show up, swooping down to intercept the flying glass.We anchored a little ways offshore and used a Zode to ferry the equipment onto the island. The Narry drinkers had come out here in someone's dad's boat, an open, four-seat fishing cruiser, and had pulled it up onto the best landing spot. It hurt just to see that, because the bottom of that nice fiberglass hull had probably picked up some long, deep scars. We settled for a less-convenient spot about a hundred yards away, and started piling up our equipment.I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather. If Bartholomew were here, he could identify their favorite band just by looking at their colors. I stayed on shore with the equipment while Wes ran stuff back and forth. He'd dumped off some pipes and was on his way back to the Blowfish when he noticed that the partyers had found a stack of junk tires. They were swarming like ants on candy, shouting, laughing, calling each other "dude," and throwing them on the bonfire.My attitude was, who the fuck cares? That's why I'll never be in charge of a regional office. Wes was a different type.To me it was just some black smoke into the air. Kind of unsightly, a little toxic, but unimportant in the big scheme of things. To Wes it was a symbolic act, a desecration of the environment. It didn't matter that, in this case, "the environment" was an immense garbage dump to begin with. So before I could tell him not to worry about it, he was drowning out my voice with his outboard, buzzing over there to intervene.Once they got over being stunned, they reacted exactly as you'd expect: went into a blind testosterone rage. "Fuck you! Fuck you!" "Now listen . . ." "Fuck you!" One of them dragged a strip of burning Goodyear out of the fire, whirled it up into a flaming spiral, and let it fly toward Wes, who had to knock it aside with an oar before he had time to get scared. He shot away, bottles splashing in his wake, and then, of course, they noticed me.Standing there with a five-gallon can of gasoline, recalling the Road Warrior, I could think of a thousand interesting ways to scare these twits off. Unfortunately, these were the sort who'd be apt to carry guns. If there wasn't a Saturday Night Special in one of their belts, you could bet they had one in the boat. So a frontal assault wasn't a wise idea.Wes believed anyone could be converted to an environmentalist by negotiation. It hadn't worked, but at least he had the presence of mind to see that they were headed my way. Wes was no expert with the Zodiac, but the water was calm and he could make it faster than the goons could run. Unfortunately the goons had a head start. I ran away from them along the shore, and as Wes caught up with me I waded out so he wouldn't have to pull his motor up, or, worse, forget and skrag the prop.When I was up to midthigh, he reached me and I took one last step forward, half-falling into the boat. My foot came down on a sharp piece of metal and I felt it slash through the sole of my tennis shoe and gouge me. Then I was lying crosswise on the Zodiac, random pieces of Gallagher's trash pile were splashing into the water around us, and we were headed back to the Blowfish.We changed course halfway there when Wes noticed that the goons were trashing the equipment we'd left on shore. They were especially interested in the drilling rig, which they started wrecking with the primitive weapons at hand. It was like watching Homo Erectus discover how to make tools out of flint.Wes brought us to within about a bottle's throw from the shore and shouted at them. I don't think they even looked up.They did seem to notice when they heard the sound of a second Zodiac motor cranking out some high RPMs. We all looked down the shoreline. Artemis had taken her Zodiac in to shore, tied its stern rope to the back of their fishing boat and tugged it off the beach. Now she was hauling it ass-backwards out to sea.Later there were loud and long and dull debates about whether this was consistent with GEE principles. It wasn't exactly violence, but it did imply a certain willingness to let these guys starve to death on a pile of garbage, within sight of home. Like most of these debates, this one never got resolved.It modified their attitudes, though. They stopped pounding on the drill motor and ran back to inform Artemis that she was a "fucking cunt." When this didn't work, they quieted down, watching their boat go out to sea.In about five minutes, the jerks had dumped all the Narries out of their cooler and were using it to haul water up from the surf and dump it on the bonfire. It never really went out - tire fires never do - but it stopped billowing smoke.I asked Wes to take me out to Artemis, then clambered on board their boat, hopped around leaving bloody waffle prints on the deck and checked in the glove compartment.The gun wasn't the little .22 revolver I'd expected, but a big, chrome-plated cannon, stuck in a stiff new shoulder holster. When I pulled it out, it took me a minute to untangle the straps."All six chambers are loaded," Artemis observed. "Not a great idea unless you want to shoot yourself in the armpit." When I shot her an odd look, she shrugged. "My dad was into guns, what can I say."It looked like someone else had a real jackass for a dad too. I chucked the weapon into the sea. Then, just for the hell of it, I kept rummaging. We had all day, we were already into some serious criminality, and we'd never be prosecuted. But if these pricks gave us any more trouble, I wanted to know where they lived.Couldn't find a damn thing. Other than the gun, this boat was eerily clean. No papers, no registration, no old beer cans. The life vests were brand new and unmarked. When I climbed back onto the Zode, I had no information at all, nothing but a chemical trace. There was an odor about that boat, and it followed me, unwelcome, onto the Zode. It was on my hand. The smell of some goddamned men's cologne. I'd picked it up from the revolver.Artemis mocked me with no mercy. "Shit, I'd rather have PCBs on me," I said. "PCBs you can wash off; other people's perfume sticks with you like a bladder infection." I trailed my hand in the water.We reunited these little fucks with their transportation and they left, quietly. The injured dignity on their faces was something to behold. You'd think we'd just busted up a monastery.They didn't say a word until they were a hundred yards out, almost out of earshot. Then, I think, they looked in the glove compartment. They just exploded with more lusty fucks, cunts, and pricks. I could hardly make it out, and I didn't want to.Wes turned to me with just a grin on his face. "Did you hear that?""What?""Satan will get you.""That's what they said?""I think so.""Shit. Then I'll tell Tricia to expect a call from the Prince of Darkness.""She'll probably hang up on him."We didn't have the stuff we needed to repair the drilling rig. That was okay, since I didn't really think it would work anyway. It was made to bore down through reasonably soft dirt, not a pile of trash that included lots of iron fragments. We had something more reliable: a couple of sledgehammers. I picked out a promising place on the north end, visible from both South Boston and downtown, and we started pounding pipe segments down into the bowels of Spectacle Island.Ridiculously slow work. We spent about four hours on it, taking turns on the sledgehammers and keeping an eye out for the goons on the boat.My foot had a one-inch gash in it, ranging from not very deep to pretty fucking deep. Back on the Blowfish, I scrubbed it out with soap and water, taking scientific care to probe the deepest parts of the cut, squeezing it to make it bleed, the whole bit; disinfected it with something incredibly painful and wrapped a sterile bandage around the foot. Walking around was painful, so when I wanted to do a little investigating I had to go by water, on a Zodiac.What I wanted to see was near the northeast corner of the island. It was a huge, rusty, old barge, a piece of shit, but apparently seaworthy. There was no cargo on it. It looked like it had simply run aground.Right now the tide was almost out and about three-quarters of the barge was high and dry. It was way, way up there; when it had rammed this island, the tide must have been especially high, or it must have been going very fast, or both.Or maybe it had been deliberately abandoned. Maybe Joe Gallagher had come here and put the nose of the Extra Stout against the ass end of the barge and just tossed it up onto the rest of the garbage. The interesting thing was that it was new - it wasn't here three months ago, the last time I was out - and it must have carved some pretty deep gashes into the island.Geologists love earthquakes and other natural upheavals because they tear things open, providing views into the earth's secrets. I had a similar attitude about this barge. There was no way to drag it off the island and then jump down into the cavity it had dug, but I could skulk around the edges with my sampling jars and see what was coming out. But I probably wouldn't bother. If I were doing a Ph.D. dissertation on Spectacle Island, I'd go wild over it. But I know what Spectacle Island is: a big heap of garbage. As long as there were bigger issues in the Harbor, no point in getting obsessed with the details.But just for the hell of it, because it was new and interesting, I circumnavigated the barge, partly on the water and partly by foot. Nothing much to see besides hundreds of feet of vertical, rust-covered wall. Graffiti was sprinkled near the waterline and on the part that stuck out into the Harbor. The walls were a natural for graffiti, but Spectacle Island wasn't accessible to your average jerk with a spraycan. The SMEGMA man had made it out here - some guy who'd been wandering around Boston for a couple of years painting the word SMEGMA everywhere. Super Bad Larry had made it, probably swam one-handed all the way from Roxbury. Someone in the Class of '87, and VERN + SALLY = LOVE apparently had had access to a boat. Three-quarters of the graffiti was in red, though, done by a single group. Besides being red, it had a distinctive look to it. Most graffitists just scribble something down and run away, having made their point, but the people with the red spray-paint were performing black magic, exercising ritual care. This was most obvious with the pentacles, which were inscribed in a circle. It's hard to stand on a rolling boat in the middle of the night and draw a perfect five-foot circle with a spray can, but the Satan worshippers had done it repeatedly, all around the barge. Then they drew upside-down stars in the circles, forming your basic pentagram, and an inverted cross underneath that. Arched over the top of the circle were the words POYZEN BOYZEN - a heavy-metal band with a thing about nuns and pit bulls.They weren't finished with the umlauts, though. They put another in the center of the pentagram. If you stood back and looked at it the right way, the inverted star then became a face. The umlaut made two beady red eyes, the bottom prong of the star made a sharp muzzle, the top prongs a pair of horns, and the two side prongs a pair of goatlike ears.The name of the brand was written a few other places, billboard-sized, along with a bunch of incantations I didn't recognize. Old magic symbols cribbed from a book on the occult, I guess: circles and lines and dots connected in rigid but meaningless patterns. A nonchemist might mistake them for molecular diagrams.The Satan worshippers had left a few other symptoms of their presence scattered around the island. For example, a wrecked toilet with a cross painted on it, surrounded by the remains of five bonfires. A mock shrine, I guess. I knocked it apart by throwing football-sized rocks at it, not because I'm some kind of heavy Christian, but only because it got on my nerves. Besides, there's no incentive to keep a garbage pile neat, which was the problem with Boston Harbor to begin with. I kicked at one of the old bonfires and noticed that they had been burning old wood that had been pressure treated with some kind of preservative. That was fine with me. When you bum that kind of wood, the smoke contains an amazingly high concentration of dioxin. Let's hope Poyzen Boyzen fans like to roast marshmallows.A curl of that toxic smoke rose up out of the ashes. This fire was brand new, left over from last night.I hadn't seen any boats beached near here, so they must have all gone home. Hell, maybe it was the same group we'd been arguing with. I went down to the pseudobeach next to the barge and looked for signs of activity and, sure enough, a few footprints. This obviously was their landing zone, and the graffiti was dense. WELCOME TO HELL, it said, and a few yards after along, written higher than I could reach, a small pentacle and the word SATAN with an arrow pointed upward.

THEANTICHRISTISIN.

That's why the unrusted area caught my eye. It was way up at the top of the barge, above the SATAN sign. A pair of little spots, a silver umlaut, where the rust had been worn away. They were a little more than a foot apart. At first I thought they were paint spots, but then caught them glinting in the sun.I went over and stood beneath them. This patch of ground looked smoother, harder-packed. There were some weak indentations, a little more than a foot apart. The Poyzen Boyzen people had been using a ladder to climb up into the barge.It didn't look like a rusted-out hulk to me anymore. It looked like an iron-walled fortress, something out of Tolkien. God knows what was going on inside of it.I had a pretty good idea: high-school kids came out here to drink Names and fornicate. Maybe they traded in cocaine, or cheaper highs, but at any rate the lunatic fringe to this group owned a lot of red spray paint and had been to some bookstore in Cambridge with an "occult" section in the back.There was no reason in the world I would want to discover their purpose, so I limped back to the Zode and went back to our pipe-pounding operation.Frank, the biggest guy on the Blowfish crew, had broken through for us. Something was definitely escaping from the pipe. If you held your hand over it, the warm, moist draft made your skin crawl. I had everyone stand back, lit a 4th of July sparkler, and threw it toward the pipe from about ten feet away. I didn't see the rest, because I turned away instinctively, but I heard a large but quiet thwup as a big ball of gas went up. Then there was a mild roaring sound, like distant traffic. The crew of the Blowfish applauded and I turned around. We had a nice flare going, a big raggedy yellow flame.We lengthened the pipe so that its outlet was about ten feet off the ground and then we left it there, burning. In my fantasies, I wanted to encircle Spectacle Island with a blazing corona of yellow flares, a beacon to ships at sea, a landmark for airline pilots, permanent fireworks for the yuppies in the new waterfront condos. It wouldn't really accomplish that much, other than to remind people: Hey. There's a harbor out here. It's dirty.

13

WHEN I GOT HOME I washed my foot again, applied vodka (a particular brand that I keep around strictly as an organic solvent) and rebandaged. My dreams were hallucinatory nightmares about fleeing from oversized, heavily perfumed PR flacks with chrome revolvers. I got up three times during the night to vomit, and when my alarm went off I couldn't move my arm to hit the snooze button because all my joints had gone stiff. My vision was blurry and I had a 104 fever. My muscles and joints were all welded into a burning, smoking mass. I lay there and moaned "two hundred pounds of tainted meat" until Bart came in and brought me a Hefty. When I took enough nitrous to get to the bathroom and finish up with the vomiting and diarrhea, I looked in the mirror and found that my tongue was carpeted with whitish-brown fuzz.Bart drove me to the big hospital downtown to see Dr. J., my old college roommate. He'd gotten his M.D. on the six-year shake-and-bake program, done an Ivy League residency, and now he worked ERs. Not very prestigious, but the pay is steady. A fine way to subsidize other life projects.When I explained how I'd cut my foot, he looked at me as though I had just taken both barrels from a twelve-gauge."There's some very serious stuff out there in the Harbor, man. I'm not kidding. All those decay organisms? They work on your body too, S.T.," he said, shooting me up with some kind of stupendous antibiotic cocktail. He gave me more of the same in pill form, but in the end I was to take only about half the bottle. Whatever those antibiotics were, they just blew the shit out of whatever, was in my system. That included the natural bacteria in my colon, the E. coli, so I had continuing diarrhea. Life is too short to spend on a toilet, wondering if there's more, so I stopped taking the pills and let my own defenses handle the mop-up work. And yes, I got a tetanus shot."I ran into some people you'd like," I told Bart as he drove me home. "Poyzen Boyzen fans."He sniffed the air and frowned slightly. Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. "Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of material - they write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passe.""Isn't that the whole point of heavy metal?""Yeah. I'm the one who told you that," he reminded me. "Heavy metal will never leave you behind.""Where are they from?""Long Island somewhere. Not the Brooklyn end." He looked at me. "Who were these dudes? How'd you know they were fans?""Instinct." I told him about the barge."Shitty bargainers," he said."What do you mean?""These people sold their souls to the Devil and all they got was a rusty old barge? I would've held out for something with a wet bar. Close to the T."When we got home, he went to his racks of albums and tried to remember whether Poyzen Boyzen was filed under P or B. The answering machine was blinding, so I rewound it, listening to the message fast and backwards. And when you run it backwards, it's supposed to be gibberish. But this wasn't. It was a melody, a song with a strong beat that was compressed into a tinny tik-tik-tik by the machine. And above that rhythm, a little high-pitched voice was babbling: "Satan is coming. Satan is coming."When it rewound all the way, I played it forward. It was heavy-metal thrash. Bart came running in, amazed. "What the fuck?" he was saying. "That's on the machine?""Yeah.""That's Poyzen Boyzen, man. Second album. It's called 'Hymn.'""Nice song."They'd left the entire song for us. When it was over, there was about ten seconds of a woman screaming. And that was it.It didn't sound like Debbie, really, but then I'd never heard Debbie scream. She wasn't the type. So I dialed her number and she answered the phone, sounding fine."I'd like to talk to you," she said, and I knew I was in trouble."You want to get together?" I said."If that's okay with you." Okay, so I was in trouble.We had dinner at the Pearl. She let me twist for a long time before she got down to business."Are you still interested in seeing me?" she asked."Shit, of course I am. Jesus!"She just fixed me with a big-eyed stare, penetratingly cute, yet one of keen intelligence."I'm sorry that I haven't been calling you enough," I said. "I realize that I don't call enough.""How about if I just stopped calling you? Would that give you any more incentive?""Isn't that what you did?""Not like that, I didn't.""You lost me, Debbie. Explain.""I like you, S.T., and I've tried, a few times, to reach out and get in touch with you. And now you're addicted to it.""Howzat?" She was a speck on the horizon."We're getting into this shit now where you expect me to follow you around. To keep track of where you are, pick up the phone and call you, do the social organizing, set up our dates. And then, when we're together, you give me this gruff shit.""I do?""Yeah. You make me come on to you, and then you pretend you don't want it. I had to put up with that once or twice on the Canada trip and I'm never going to do it again. No way. You want something from me, call me up - you've got my fucking number - and ask for it."After that, my eyes didn't blink for about half an hour. It reminded me a whole lot of being popped by that smart cop when Bart and I were having our boys' night out. You go around thinking you're cool, a veritable shadow in the night, and then you find out that someone's got your number.Like the Poyzen Boyzen fans. A band of assholes I probably wouldn't even recognize in civilian dress."That reminds me of something," I said. "I'm being kind of threatened, kind of, by a bunch of Satan worshippers. I want you to look out.""How the fuck..." she said, then got up and walked out of the restaurant.I finished her five-spices chicken and doodled around with my nerd watch. After a major social fuck-up, it's good to have machinery to screw around with. I programmed the alarm to go off in ten days. When it did, I'd give her a call.Between now and then I could drink a lot, meditate on my own unfitness to live, and get nice and shit-eatingly lonesome. And worry about the Poyzen Boyzen thing. When I got done wandering home slowly, I played the tape backwards again, listened to the backwards message, then erased it.For cavemen, they were quick on their feet. Was I that easy to track down?The thing of it was: nobody had my number. Six months ago I'd gotten another damn call at 3:00 A.M. from some GEE hanger-on who'd just landed at Logan and wanted to be picked up and given a free place to crash. That was enough of that, so I changed to an unlisted number and didn't tell anybody. Not even my employer. If GEE wanted to reach me, they had to get clever.Which brought up another sore point. Usually they called Debbie and got her to call me, and she had said a few things about not being a receptionist. Another relationship felony. Just another reason to get to drinking.But I still didn't know how the crew from the island had tracked me down. Maybe one of them worked at the phone company or something. Maybe one of them knew someone who knew someone who knew Bart.When my watch alarm went off, I called Debbie, and found out she was vacationing in Arizona for three weeks. So I set my alarm watch for three weeks later.It went off around Labor Day, in the middle of the night. I was deep in a chemical factory in another state, nestled up against a fifty-five-gallon drum on a loading dock, doing a bag job for Cohen. Had to press the damn watch against my thigh to muffle the sound, unstrap the wristband, pry the back off with a screwdriver, and scramble the innards. That's the last digital watch I'll ever own.Despite that, the job was a cakewalk. It was just like being a criminal, except it was all-pretend. If they caught you, you could just stand up and show them your warrant. They didn't.

14

I SENT ESMERELDA a box of Turtles and she went through the Boston Globe Index and checked out all the entries under Spectacle Island for the last three months. I was interested in something along the lines of "Spectacle Island - Abandoned barges running into."She found it, and I should have figured it out myself. It was Hurricane Alison, or the last remnants thereof, which had hit us when we were having an abnormally high tide. Whenever a big, systemic disaster hit, a blizzard or heat wave, the Globe ran enormous articles "compiled from reports by" followed by lists of twenty names. They had to list every single bad thing that had happened to Massachusetts or else people would call in, claim they'd been neglected and cancel their subscriptions.Buried in one of those was a paragraph about an old barge, due to be scuttled anyway, that had broken loose from Winthrop during the storm and had been batted around the Harbor all night. It wasn't much of a problem because no boats were out in that weather. By the time they even noticed it was missing, the barge had dug itself into Spectacle Island, which was a fine place for it anyway.I was throwing a lot of work into Project Lobster. I wanted to get the damn thing finished, and Debbie was deliberately unavailable, and I was out of nitrous, and by that point in the summer I didn't have enough money for anything but newspapers and ski-ball.All those tainted lobsters had to be run through a pretty complicated chemical analysis. It required equipment GEE didn't have, so I'd worked out an arrangement with a lab at a university. Tanya, the Blue Kills Marauder, who'd been working for GEE since her high school days in California, was one of their grad students. She helped with various projects, and in return for "educating" her we got access to nifty analytical equipment.This particular university had a glut of it anyway, having been so successful in attracting the devotion of big Route 128 corporations that you had to think they'd made their own pact with Satan, negotiated by their toughest lawyers. The high-tech companies coughed up gobs of expensive equipment and the university had to hold hysterical fund-raising drives just to build buildings big enough to keep it out of the rain. You could wander through the basements and find analytical devices costing half a million dollars, so powerful, so advanced that no one was even using them. Once I had gotten access, I had to go down, study their owner's manuals, take off the plastic, and calibrate the gizmos.Then we were in business. Tanya or I, usually Tanya, broke the lobsters open and located their livers. Whether you're a human or a lobster, your liver filters the toxins out of your system, so that's where you find the bad stuff. We checked them for obvious signs, like tumors or necrosis, and then we ran them through the big machines from Route 128. We got their levels of various metals and organic bad things and put it all into our database.And we stood around a lot, edgy as hell, because Tanya was Debbie's roommate, and though she was willing to work with me, forgiveness had apparently not yet been earned.In the weeks surrounding Labor Day we were working at this for twelve or fourteen hours a day, I out on the Zodiac nagging my pals for fresh samples, and Tanya down in the basement cutting bugs. The university wasn't far from the Charles, so once or twice a day I'd bring the Zode around - as I said, the fastest Boston transportation - and she'd come down to the water and we'd make a handoff.I was a little perturbed when she missed one, but not surprised. Probably in the middle of something. I hung out on the Zode for maybe half an hour. Why not? Even if the water below me was dirty, I was in the middle of a park. But I got sick of waiting, fast - I was tired of this project and wanted to get on with it. I tied the boat to a tree, took out the fuel line, and hiked inland, schlepping the beer cooler. Trotted up out of the water-side park and into the campus.Our lab was down in a corridor that still smelled like fresh paint and linoleum glue. One room after another filled with microchips. But the odor got sharper as I approached our lab. Smells trigger memories, and this one made me think of building model airplanes when I was a kid.It was the smell of spray paint. And on the brand-new laboratory door was some graffiti, still wet, done up in cherry red. A rough pentagram, the inverted cross below, the staring umlaut in the middle. Above it: SATAN SEZ: STAY THE FUCK OUT. The laboratory was dark.Didn't touch a thing. I ran upstairs to the lobby and phoned Tanya and Debbie's place.Debbie answered, sounding kind of tense, even though she didn't know it was me yet. "Yeah?""Don't hang up, this is business. Tanya there?""She can't come to the phone right now. What the hell have you guys been doing? What's with her?""I was going to ask you.""Why is she acting so bent?""What's she doing?""She came home crying, ran into the bathroom. I heard her throw up a couple of times and now she's been in the shower for about half an hour.""Sounds like-""No. She wasn't raped.""You got your door locked anyway?""Damn right."I hung up and ran back downstairs. Call me strange, but I tend to carry latex surgical gloves around in my pocket, because it's my business to touch so many nasty things. I put them on before I did any touching.Good. She hadn't been too freaked out to lock the door when she left.No signs of struggle. The gas chromatograph was still turned on. I could smell organic solvents in here, the same ones we didn't like big corporations to use, and something else too: an oily, foul odor, mixed in with the marine stench of the lobsters. I recognized it. Some of the lobsters I'd gotten off Gallagher's boat had smelled that way. In fact that was the reason they'd given them to me. Big enough to sell, but they stank too bad. They had come from the entrance to the Inner Harbor.Just for the hell of it, I locked the door. And that made me think, wait a minute. Tanya had gotten home half an hour ago? And it would have taken her at least half an hour to get home. So whatever was bothering her had taken place an hour ago. But the spray paint on the door was a lot fresher than that.I opened the door again and checked out the graffiti. It was shitty work. The stuff on the barge had been carefully done. This was done in a hurry, and done badly, with lots of drips and runs.Spray paint is messy. It throws a fog of paint into the air. Standing in the doorway, I could see a penumbra of paint mist fading out across the white floor. And right in front of the door the red was interrupted by a pair of white ovals where no paint had fallen - shadows cast by the graffitist's feet. The shadows were pointy-toed, but bigger than a woman's feet.When he'd walked away, he'd gotten paint mist on the soles of his shoes, and tracked it down the hallway some distance. They were faint tracks, but they'd been made by dress shoes.That was charming. The Poyzen Boyzen now had yuppies working for them. So that's how they afforded those Back Bay condos.Just as important, Tanya hadn't left any tracks. She'd cleared out of there before the graffitist had.So I went back into the lab. What had freaked her out so bad? Something she'd seen during the analysis?I approached the workbench. Slowly. This reminded me of when you hear a rat trap go off in the middle of the night, and when you go down in the morning you know you're going to find something really unpleasant. You just don't know when or where it's going to hit you.Whatever had set Tanya off wasn't obvious. Not two-headed monsters, no parasites squirming loose on the bench. Hell, that wouldn't have bothered her anyway. She was a biochemist, a scientist, and she had listened to a full recitation of my relationship crimes. Nothing could gross her out. She was about halfway through dissecting one of Gallagher's big stinky lobsters. She'd removed the legs and tail and pried back the shell around the body to expose the liver. The bug was sprawled out on its back under a hot light, and the odor was billowing out of it like smoke from a fire. Had she gotten the liver out? Hard to tell. Something was definitely wrong down in there.No, she hadn't. There was hardly any liver left. It had necrosed-a fancy word for died. Rotted away, inside the body, leaving just a puddle of black stuff. Surrounded by blobs of yellowy material, vesicles or sacs of something that I'd never seen inside a lobster before. Some kind of toxin that the liver had desperately tried to remove from the lobster's system, killing itself in the process. I found a ballpoint pen and poked one of the sacs; something greasy poured out and a wave of the oily scent rose up into the light.There used to be a plant in Japan that made oil out of rice. The oil had to pass through a heat exchanger to cool it down. In other words, it flowed over a bunch of pipes that had a colder fluid running through them. The cold fluid was a polychlorinated biphenyl. A PCB.If you're an engineer, and you're not very bright, it's easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls. They are cheap, stable, easy to make and they take heat very well. That's why they end up in heat exchangers and electrical transformers. It's how they got into that machine in Japan and, when the pipes started to leak, it's how they got into a lot of rice oil. Unfortunately, rice oil is for human consumption, and as soon as human beings enter the equation, PCBs no longer look very good. If we were robots, living in a robot world with robot engineers, we could get away with using them, but the problem with humans is that they have a lot of fat in their bodies and PCBs have this vicious affinity for fat. They dissolve themselves in human fat cells and they never leave. They are studded with loose chlorine atoms that know how to break up chromosomes. So when that heat exchanger started leaking, the city of Kusho, Japan started to look like the site of a Biblical plague. Newborn babies came out undersized and dark brown. People started to waste away. They developed a fairly disgusting skin rash called chloracne - the same one Tom had gotten in Vietnam - and they felt very sick.Now the plague had come to Boston Harbor.

15

A PERSON MIGHT WONDER why I, Sangamon Taylor, didn't run out and go home and scrub myself raw like Tanya did. It had nothing to do with male/female issues, or personal bravery or any of that crap. It had to do with how we viewed ourselves. Tanya was pure as the Antarctic snow. She wore a gas mask when she rode her bicycle. She was born vegetarian, the child of hippies. She didn't smoke and she didn't drink; her worst vice was mushrooms - organically grown mushrooms. When she'd looked down into that puddle of PCBs, she'd gotten the first whiff of her own mortality, and she didn't like it.We all owe a toxic debt to our bodies, and sooner or later it comes due. Cigarettes or a chemical-factory job boost that debt to the sky. And though Tanya had hardly any debt at all, when she figured out she was staring at PCBs, smearing them on her skin, breathing them into her lungs, she probably felt like all her carefulness had been erased. All that tofu was for nought. Suddenly she was up there with the I.V.-drug abusers.I have no illusions about my own purity. I avoid the really bad stuff, I use common sense. I refuse to work with the nastier solvents and I don't inhale my cigars. But I could look at those PCBs and say, okay, I'm poisoned, maybe if I give up cigars and ride my bike a little more I can pay off this debt.You don't get PCB poisoning from the air anyway. You get it by eating the stuff.When I thought of that, I thought of Gallagher and his crew. Those bastards lived on lobsters. I had to get in touch with them right away. Easy enough.The tough part was this. Where were the PCBs coming from? I was used to finding trace amounts just about everywhere. Basco had put lots of them into the Harbor. But I'd never actually seen the stuff before; just detected it with exquisitely sensitive instruments. To actually stand there and watch it running through a lobster's viscera like melted butter - that was a fucking nightmare. Unheard of. Somebody had to be dumping it into the Harbor by the barrel load.First things first, so I got myself decently protected and wrapped the lobsters up in many layers of PCB-proof plastic, marked it as hazardous waste, and left it there for the time being. I wasn't normally in the business of disposing of hazardous waste and wasn't sure how to begin. Scrubbed the counter down and locked the place up, then went to a different lab and hosed myself off. Finally got Tanya on the phone; she was jittery as hell, but laughing a little now. I tried to tell her she was okay as long as she hadn't been licking her fingers, but with her background she knew more about it than I did. I asked her to put Debbie on."Yeah?""We have a big thing coming up. A huge thing. Would you like to work on it?""Sure.""And sometime, if I can find some time, I would like very much, more than I can really say here at this pay phone, to, like, take you to dinner or something of that nature.""Well, you have my number," she said.And you've got mine, I refrained from saying. And then what? How could I explain the Poyzen Boyzen thing?"Gotten any weird messages on your phone lately?""Have you been doing that?""What?""Putting that awful music on our phone machine?""No. That's being done by some - some assholes. Heavy-metal fans.""What do they want?"Actually, that was a damn good question. What did these guys want? If they wanted to scare me, it was working. But what did they want to scare me into? Thugs can be so nonspecific."They're pissed about something. Something to do with Spectacle Island. And the lab.""Drugs?""There you go." Spectacle Island - specifically, that old barge - would be a great place to process drugs. A nice, abandoned, lawless zone, only minutes from downtown.Bart had said that PCP was very hip among the Poyzen Boyzen drones. PCP was easy to make - even a metalhead could manufacture it by the fifty-five-gallon drum. And I could detect it, by the wastes and smell it generated. No wonder they didn't want me taking samples out there."You want to know exactly what happened?" I said. "Those poor idiots overheard me saying I was hunting for PCBs, and they thought I said PCP!""Great. So you've got a band of dustheads after you?""No. We have a band dustheads after us.""That's great. I'll never take another shower."I refrained from offering showering privileges at my place. Without being her official boyfriend, there wasn't much I could do.Reassuring was my best bet, but I wasn't. I wanted Debbie and Tanya as scared as I was, because that way they'd be careful. "Watch your ass. I have stuff to do.""Going to call the cops?" she asked."About what - the PCBs?""No, the PCP.""Uh, no. Look, the angel dust is weird and exciting; the PCBs are ten times as important. So right now I'm thinking about the PCBs. Sorry."Went to a bank machine and took out a hundred dollars.I'm not sure why. Called Bartholomew and told him where I was going, just in case. And had an idea."How'd you like to become a Poyzen Boyzen fan?'"I have to anyway. Amy is.""Oh. Is that your woman?" Amy was his new girlfriend. Hadn't met her face-to-face, but I'd heard her in the next room, late at night; the second loudest copulater I'd ever heard."Yeah. Have you guys met?""Indirectly. Well, go hang out with the hard core if you can, okay? The young ones - teenagers. Shit, I'll even subsidize it.""But teen Boyzen heads are like two-legged cockroaches or something.""So bring some Raid. Come on, you're the social critic, right? This is it, man.""We'll see."Then I headed for Fenway Park, only a few blocks away. Everything in Boston's only a few blocks away. It was approaching dusk and the wind was coming up, with something cold and wet behind it. The baseball game probably wouldn't make it to the seventh inning. Tonight it was going to rain like hell - the first Nor'easter of the fall.When I was almost there, I walked by another phone booth, saw its white pages fluttering in the wind and remembered Dolmacher. Formerly of Basco and presently of Biotronics, a subsidiary of Basco, he was now my prime suspect. "I'm in the book - look me up," he'd said. So I did. I knew for damn sure he wasn't about to tell me anything, but if I hit him with a frontal assault, and he was his emotionally retarded self, I'd know he was totally ignorant. If he went into adrenaline overdrive and called me a terrorist, I'd know Basco was involved. So I dropped a dime on Dolmacher and let the phone ring twelve times."Hello?""Dolmacher, this is ST.""Hi!" He sounded terribly cheerful, and a cheerful Dolmacher was almost unbearable. It meant that his work was going wonderfully. "I just got in the door from work, S.T.""Dolmacher, just tell me one thing. Why is the floor of the Harbor, right off Castle Island Park, a lake of solid PCBs this evening?"He laughed. "You're taking too many of those hallucinogenic alkaloids, Sangamon. Better get a real job."I hung up - he didn't know shit - then I bought a bleacher ticket and ran around to the dark side of Fenway Park.A toxic crime had been committed. I had witnesses and an address. The witnesses were bleacher creatures, and the address was underwater. First I had to see those witnesses, and it was easy to track them down. Like dolphins, Townies communicate with high-pitched sonar; "Heyyy, Maaahk! I'll meet ya at the Aaahk afta da geem!""Mr. Gallagher," I said."Heyyy, S.T.! Heyyy, guys, look who's here! It's the invironmintle!""Heyyy, S.T, how ya doin?""Barrett grounded out, Horn flew out, now it's 0 and 2 on Dewey. He's swinging for the bleachers, that stupid bastard.""Look. Those oily-smelling lobsters. You haven't been eating any, have you?""Shit no. Tried it once but they taste awful. When you gonna do something about that, S.T? That whole area there, it's for shit now."S.T., when are you going to stop pollution? "Which area?"Gallagher looked around at his buddies and they all threw out rough descriptions: "Right out there, you know." "South of the airport." "North of Spectacle Island." "Right off Southie.""Since when?""Month or two.""Look, Rory. I gotta tell you something. I know sometimes you guys give me shit, you think I'm kind of flaky, but I'm telling you that shit is dangerous. I'm not talking about maybe getting cancer in twenty years, I'm talking about croaking next week. Don't eat those lobsters. I want you to go find all the other lobstermen and tell them not to use that area."Gallagher took me seriously until I got to the last part, then his face turned even redder and he laughed. "Hell, ST., no one uses it anyway. They all found the same thing we did. But shit, it's a big area, I got no business telling people not to use it."Fenway Park turned on its lights. I knew Gallagher was right. He couldn't personally embargo half the harbor. Maybe I could get through to the state authorities. But the last time I'd done that, I had to dress up in a Santa Claus suit. What was the drill this time, Bozo the Clown?I had my back to the field, standing with one foot propped up on the bleacher. I felt a big guy beside me, trying to get past, so I moved aside and he scrunched through. It was a hot prestorm afternoon and he wasn't wearing a shirt. This was kind of unfortunate, since he had a skin condition.Now, a lot of people have skin conditions. Especially fair-complexioned people who work under the hot sun, around salt water, for a living. This guy who sat down next to Rory was blanketed by a rash of little blackheads, so small and close together that they looked like a five o'clock shadow. I was trying not to stare, but that's no good when the person you're staring at is a little touchy."You got a problem?" he asked."Nope. Sorry."What was I going to do, demand a close examination right there under the lights? The guy was gripping a large, fresh brew in his left hand and I saw a wedding band."Just remember, Rory," I said, real loud, loud enough for even this guy to understand. "The oily lobsters. Those things are poison. Especially for kids and pregnant women. Throw 'em away and go eat a Big Mac or something. Eat too many of those things, you get a skin rash and it's downhill from there."I turned around and left. "What was he talking about?" said the guy with chloracne.It was time to mobilize GEE's PR machine, phone all my media connections and make a lot of noise about oily lobsters. Had to contact some kind of healthy authority too. Maybe Dr. J. could spread the word. So I phoned the ER."What's the word?" he said."Chlorachne.""Whoa!""Look out for it. Tell your colleagues. Fishermen, Southeast Asians, anyone who eats fish from the Harbor.""What's the source?""I don't know. But I'm going to find them, and then I'm going to blow them away.""Nonviolently.""Of course. Gotta run.""Thanks for the tip, S.T."Back at the Zodiac I replaced the vital parts and buzzed over to the MIT docks, where I tied up and jogged over to the office.No one was around. Probably at the Sox game, in better seats. I got the Darth Vader Suit and an air tank, a supply of sample containers - peanut butter jars - and some binoculars with big wide light-gathering lenses. Until the rain came, the light diffusing off the city should be enough to navigate by. Took a huge nautical-rescue strobe that we keep around just because it's powerful and irritating, and on the way back to the Zode I picked up a couple of gyros and a six-pack.When I got to the water between Spectacle Island and South Boston - the address of the crime - the sky was blue in the east and black in the west. I had no interest in wasting time. I was tired as hell, all alone, the wind was coming up, the temperature dropping, and below me was a sea of poison. I struggled into the scuba gear, double-checked when I remembered that I'd done it wrong once off Blue Kills, peeled on the Darth Vader mask, turned on the big strobe, and dove.This kind of work is a pain in the ass, and taking actual samples off the bottom is a last resort. That was the whole purpose of Project Lobster. The lobsters, I'd hoped, would tell me where to concentrate my efforts. This afternoon it had paid off in a big way and now I had to follow through.It was hard to figure: how had that lobster found so much PCB on the Harbor floor, here? If he'd been hanging out along the shore of some fiasco property, or under one of their pipes, I could understand. But down here, there was nothing.When I got to the scene of the crime, though, and flashed my spotlight, I was reminded that "nothing" is a relative term. Humans have been flinging garbage into Boston Harbour for three and a half centuries. I was standing in the foothills of Spectacle Island itself, staring around at everything from Coke cans to wrecked trawlers. Maybe, if I spent hours cruising the bottom, I'd find a cluster of fifty-five-gallon drums, thrown overboard by some corporation with too many PCBs on its hands. If I could do that, and trace them back to the owner, I could go ahead and paint their logo on the prow of my Zodiac. I already had two logos there and was eager to become an ace.But there were no drums sitting around within ten feet of me, and this wasn't the time for a full-scale search, so I scooped up some muck into a peanut butter jar. While I was screwing the lid down I shone my light into the sample and saw a condom spiraling through it. Reservoir tip, ribbed and used.A chunk of latex could definitely queer my sample, so I had to abandon that one and take another. I swam around for just a minute or so, hoping I'd get lucky, then headed slowly for the surface. Upstairs the weather was turning to shit. I'd been out on the water since 7:00 A.M. and it was time for normal recreation.One of my uncles grew up in New York and he used to tell me about diving for condoms in the Hudson. There was one stretch where you could dive down, holding your breath like a Polynesian pearl diver, and pick them off the river bottom. They'd dry them out, put them on broomsticks, dust them with talcum powder, roll them up, and sell them for a nickel. This was during the war and there were plenty of sailors in the market.When I was a kid I'd wondered how those condoms had ended up in the river. Did the sailors peel off their used condoms, take the bus out to the West Side and fling them into the water, all in the same place? No. When I went to my current job I figured it out. The sailors flushed them down the toilets and into the sewers. In most of your old cities, you have combined sewers - one system carrying human waste, rainwater, and industrial crap.But a sewer is just a collection of tubes that run downhill.It's an artificial river, with tributaries and out outfall. A tube, like a river, can only carry so much stuff. Then it overflows.There's no reason for a sanitary or an industrial sewer to overflow, because it gets steady, predictable inputs. Storm sewers are totally different. Take tonight, for example.When I broke the surface, it was raining. The Zode was flashing and rocking like mad about fifty feet away. By the time I climbed in, which is pretty difficult when there's no one on board to hold it steady, the rain was coming down hard. I stripped naked, turned off the strobe, and just lay there in the rain until I started to shiver.Sure, I'm a good environmentalist and I know that this rain was acidic because of coal-burning plants in Ohio, that it was carrying oxides of nitrogen because of automotive emissions from the Boston area. Maybe even a trace of nitrous oxide. But it was easily pure enough to drink. It was purer than I was, and there was no comparison with the sewage I'd just come out of. I could let it fall into my open mouth and not think for a minute about bioaccumulative toxins.It was falling all over the Boston Basin, running into the sewers and heading for this Harbor. If enough of it fell, the sewers would overflow.Sometimes, geysers of shit arise from downtown-Boston manholes after heavy rains. That's an example of combined sewer overflow. Normally it's kept under control. The engineers know that overflows will occur, so they have CSOs- Combined Sewer Overflows-all along the waterfront. If the sewers get too much runoff, they overflow directly into the Harbor and the Charles. What comes out of those CSOs isn't just rainwater, though. Industrial waste and sewage are running down the same tubes. It all comes out together. If it's really bad, and even the CSOs can't discharge enough sewage to empty those tubes, that's when manholes start to pop.There was a CSO near Castle Island Park. It explains why I'd found a condom out in the middle of the Harbor. There was probably a CSO in the Hudson River, in New York, upstream of my uncle's old condom-diving beds. Of course, he didn't have scuba gear. He just swam through the raw sewagewith his eyes open. He must have had the immune system of a junkyard dog.I cut slowly through the rain back toward the yacht club, chopping through big rollers the whole way.The visibility was next to nothing. So I was rather surprised when I came face to face with something big, shiny and blue, floating about a hundred yards from where I'd been diving. It was a boat, a good-sized powerboat, sitting there dark and quiet. And about the time I saw it, it saw me, and suddenly there was a tremendous whhooos echoed by a second one as its engines were started; the storm was drowned out by the sound of about a thousand horsepower digging a hole in the water. Its nose angled up like the prow of a star-ship, and it vanished into the night. No running lights. The only evidence it had ever been there was a clashing, foaming wake that knocked me around for a few seconds, and a high roar that dwindled to nothing in a hurry.I realized kind of slowly, on my way back, that it was a thirty-one foot Cigarette. The same one I'd seen before, up in that channel, sitting idle on the water. And the son of a bitch was watching me. As the man says: just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't really out to get me.For a second, I wanted to chase it down, try to see some identifying marks. Then I figured out why they were going to the trouble to use a hot-rod speedboat, a Miami penis-mobile, up here in this land of bankers' sloops and wallowing trawlers. Why they'd put nine hundred horses on its back, when it was only rated for six. They were using a Cigarette because it was the only boat in the harbor that my Zodiac couldn't catch.Or to look at it another way, the only boat I couldn't get away from. That one didn't occur to me until a few hours later, when I was trying to sleep.I took a long shower in the yacht club and then sat out under an awning, waiting for Bart to pick me up, watching yuppies destroy their umbrellas in the wind. I was wasted. But I was alert. If some Satan-worshipping heavy-metal dustheads decided to hurt you, or kill you, how would they go about it? The old multiple shotgun blasts probably wouldn't suffice. They'd want to cart me off somewhere, make a ritual of it. For the nth time in my career I considered owning a gun. But guns were tricky and hard to aim. I should think in terms of chemical warfare - something really obnoxious I could use to slow down whoever came after me.I had an idea already: 1,4-diamino butane; a.k.a., putrescine - the distinctive chemical scent given off by decaying corpses. I could whip up a batch and carry some on me. That would give anyone second thoughts.When Bart pulled in, he cranked up a Poyzen Boyzen tape and I half-breathed all the way home - half a breath of air, half a breath of nitrous. Phoned Debbie and Tanya to make sure they were all right. Tanya's boyfriend was holed up there, answering the phone, and armed. He was into some kind of martial art that involved samurai swords, so I felt better. I took another shower and then started drinking. Bart and I sat in the living room watching the Stooges on Deep Cable until about two in the morning, and I think Amy came over, though I never heard a single moan, shriek or wail. Roscommon drove through sometime during the night and sideswiped Bart's van, streaking it with white paint.I took the T into the university, ran into the lab, locked the door behind me, and ran a test on my sample. It was full of PCBs. The concentration was roughly a hundred times higher than the worst ever recorded in Boston Harbor. The lobsters and Gallagher and Tanya and I had discovered a toxic catastrophe.

16

I THOUGHT, SHIT. The Mafia. I'm fucking around with the Mafia. It would be just like them to take this blatant approach, just haul a few barrels of PCBs out into the Harbor and throw them overboard.For two reasons I didn't want to fuck with the Mafia. The first reason is obvious. The second reason is that I can't do anything about them. I pressure large corporations by hurting their image. By making them look like criminals. There wasn't much point in trying that approach on the Mafia. Besides, we already have cops to fight them. Not just ERA officials. Cops with guns. Recently they'd been doing a pretty good job of it and they didn't need my help.If it was the Mafia, they were being awfully subtle. The goons in the Cigarette first had hidden from me, then had run away. I should have found a horse's head in my bed by now, at the very least. Why so coy?You had to figure they'd warn me off before killing me. That's what I'd have to bet on. As soon as I got a warning, I'd forget about it. Maybe issue some dire warnings about lobsters from the Harbor, but not cause any real trouble.If I didn't hear from them, this was going to get interesting fast.In the early days, GEE didn't play anything close to the vest, they took what they had and ran with it. But I've got this chemistry background and it's given me some habits I can't break. I won't go to the media until I've got lots and lots of information. One shit-filled Jiffy jar didn't qualify.What I needed was a lot more samples and a rough plot of the spill's distribution on the Harbor floor. Then a lot of poisoned lobsters to freeze for later display. In the meantime I could make a few discreet media contacts. When the story broke, there was going to be a lot of background to explain, so I contacted Rebecca at The Weekly, the Globe's environmental reporter and a local freelancer who had been eating macaroni and cheese for three weeks."I'm kind of busy with your friend, Fleshy," Rebecca told me."The big one? Alvin?" I never could keep them straight. For Brahmins they multiplied quickly."Alvin. You know, he's kicking off his campaign....""Don't tell me. Faneuil Hall. Shit! I wish I knew about it-""Forget it. Look, ST., to you he's just a local hack, but he's important nationally. He's got Secret Service three deep. You don't want to get near him.""Oh, I don't know. Maybe we could borrow a rocket launcher from Boone - oh, I almost forgot. This line's tapped."When they first started bugging my phone, I went out of my way not to use keywords like "ammo" and "detonator." But after a couple of years I figured, fuck it. The poor bastard who sat there listening to me talking to Esmerelda about her grandchildren, talking to my roommates about which movie we should go see, explaining to reporters the difference between dioxin and dioxane - he must have been bored out of his mind. So from time to time I'd toss in a reference to an RPG-7 or a shipment of Soviet plastique, just to spice things up a little.They say that the people who listen to bugs for a living are all thirty-five-year-old men who still live with their mothers. That was the image I kept in my own mind. Some kind of balding, spare-tired paleface in wirerims, sitting at a desk, monitoring my life and worrying about the carburetor on his Chevette. I didn't care what he heard, because if he didn't know by now that I wasn't a terrorist, he'd never figure it out."Anyway, ST., I have a proposal," Rebecca said. "He's supposed to be the Democrats' Great White Hope, right? But you seem to think his environmental record is less than clean.""Got that impression, huh?""So I want to borrow you as an expert consultant. Sangamon Taylor on Alvin Fleshy. Front page of the Politics section. Basically a dossier piece. You'd look at his career at Basco, then his political career, critique his work on the environment.""Very tempting. But I'm skeptical. Because you know what'll happen?""What?""His Basco career will stink. The Vietnam part, you know, when he was undersecretary of state for napalm, that'll reek. But that's all back in the Fifties and Sixties. Then when we get into the political part, it's going to be straight Democratic party line. Doesn't matter what he's been doing behind the scenes with Basco. So I'll have to say, 'Uh, well, he voted for the Clean Water Act, that's good. And a wilderness area in Alaska, that's good.' Very boring.""If there's that much of a contrast, we can play it up. Say, 'Well, he votes nice and pretty, but look at what he did to Vietnam.' What do you think?""I'll give it a shot. But I don't have time to research every move he made back three decades ago.""You're not supposed to, S.T. I've got an intern working on that. Down at the library, night and day.""Oh. Tell him to talk to-""Esmerelda. I already did. And it's a she, not a he.""Excuse my sexist ass. Rebecca, I must be off.""Bye. And thanks."I went into the lab and synthesized a few liters of 1,4-diamino butane. That's too much - you could render Boston uninhabitable with that much putrescine. But I was imagining possible future uses for it. I took my time hooking up a reactor that was closed-cycle, or else my host at the university would have to dynamite the building after I was finished. Decanted the substance into jars and packed them into a cheap, sheet metal safe that I kept in my desk. I was praying that the FBI would break in and go through my stuff again. But for immediate use, I put a tube of the stuff in my pocket. Would have been more effective to load it into Bart's enormous battery-powered squirt gun that looked exactly like an Uzi, but that could be dangerous.One of the divers from Boston was on vacation, plying his trade in the Caribbean, so I called down to the national office and they persuaded Tom Akers to come out again. He was always happy to visit Boston and was coming east anyway, to work with the Blowfish in Buffalo.I met him at Logan. In the airport lounge I relaxed for the first time since the Poyzen Boyzen thing started. No heavy-metal dustheads here.Then I remembered those footprints in the hallway: dress shoes. The whole operation couldn't be run by burnouts. It took capital to build a PCP lab, some chemical expertise. Maybe I had an Evil Twin. Somewhere there was a higher, suit-wearing echelon. So I couldn't make assumptions as to what these guys looked like. High-tech yuppies, maybe. People who knew chemistry. Or Mafia.We didn't get abducted and mutilated on the way home, though. I took Tom to our house and we sat down with a six-pack. "There's two ways you can help," I said. "First, by diving. Helping us get samples off the floor.""I thought you already did that, man.""I got one sample and a bunch of oily lobsters. But if I'm going to make the kind of noise I want to make, I need more. At least a dozen samples, preferably forty or fifty, distributed around the area, so I can show a pattern.""One time around is enough for me. I don't need no more chloracne.""That brings me to the second thing. You can be a witness for us. A victim of the same poisoning."Tom frowned and shook his head. Then he finished his beer. As soon as I brought up the subject, his beer consumption jumped to the chug-a-lug level. "Not the same. Remember? Agent Orange, man. That's what I have. This is PCBs."To Tom and most everyone else, Agent Orange was a different thing from PCBs. But the underlying problem was the same, and I'd have to explain how in a press release. Just another goddamn thing to get working on. This was turning into a paper-shoveling operation, more time spent at my desk than on my Zodiac.If this was the kind of house that had napkins, I'd have sketched it out for Tom. But Tess, Laurie, and Ike were all recycling maniacs and I usually had to wipe up spills with my shirt sleeves. Cloth towels were very nice if you had someone doing your laundry for you, but they sucked when all you had was a washing machine with a burned-out engine, and a landlord who filled the basement with water whenever he laid hands on a pipe wrench."I want you to explain all this shit to me anyway," Tom confessed."Okay, first of all, the bad thing about Agent Orange wasn't the Agent Orange. It was an impurity that got into it during the manufacturing process: dioxin. That's what you had, dioxin poisoning. But dioxin is just a shortened version of the full name. The full name is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin. Also known as TCDD.""This doesn't mean shit to me, man.""Just hang on. TCDD belongs to a class of similar compounds that are known as polychlorinated dibenzodioxins.""And that's related to polychlorinated biphenyls?""More or less. In both cases you've got a bunch of chlorine atoms, which is why it's called polychlorinated, and an organic structure that they're carried around on. In one case it's a biphenyl, in the other case a dibenzodioxin. You know what a benzene ring is? Ever take any chemistry?""No."I looked around for six similar objects I could arrange in a ring. Of course, they were right in front of me. "A benzene ring is a six-pack of carbon atoms. The six-pack is held together with this little plastic holder. That's like a benzene ring. It's stable. It's strong. The six-pack stays together. It takes some effort to pull one of the cans away. There's a couple different kinds: benzenes and phenyls. Both six-pack holders, but the phenyl has one less hydrogen atom.""Okay."I went and pulled another six-pack out of the fridge. "If you put two six-packs together, you have a twelve-pack. If the six-packs are phenyls, then it's called a biphenyl. If the six-packs are benzenes, it's a dibenzodioxin - because the connection between six-packs is made by using a couple of oxygen atoms. But it's basically similar to a biphenyl. So polychlorinated biphenyl and polychlorinated dibenzodioxin are structurally similar compounds.""So these six-pack things, they're the toxic part?""No. The toxic part is the chlorine. That's what gets you.""Well, shit, you should get chloracne from being in a swimming pool then, right? That's full of chlorine. Hell, drinking water's full of chlorine.""Yeah. That's why half of the people in GEE drink spring water. Because they've heard about chlorine and don't know shit about chemistry."Tom noticed the saltshaker on our table, laughed, and dumped a little salt out onto the table. "Shit, man! Sodium chloride, right? Isn't that in seawater? Hey, maybe that's why I got sick. It wasn't Agent Orange at all, man, it was the sodium chloride in that seawater.""Okay, you're asking me: why is chlorine so incredibly toxic in dioxin and not in table salt?""I guess that's what I'm asking.""Two reasons. First, what it's attached to. That biphenyl or dibenzodioxin structure - the twelve-pack - dissolves easily in fat. Once it gets into your body fat, it never leaves.""That's what they said about the Agent Orange, that it sits in your body forever.""Right. That's the first bad thing. The second bad thing is, the chlorine there is in covalent form, it's got the normal number of electrons, whereas the chlorine in salt is in ionic form. It's got an extra electron. The difference is that covalent chlorine is more reactive, it has these big electron clouds that can fuck up your chromosomes. And it slips right through your cell membranes. Ionic chlorine doesn't - the cell membranes are made to stop it.""So the six-packs are like the vehicle, the gunboat, and the chlorines are like the soldiers with the machine guns who ride on it.""Yeah, and the electrons are their ammunition. They ride up and down the river - your bloodstream - and slip into your cells and shoot up your chromosomes. The difference between that and table salt is that table salt is inorganic, ionic chlorine - soldiers without a boat, with no ammunition - and this other stuff is organic, covalent chlorine - bad stuff."Tom sat back, raised his eyebrows. "Well then, if you think I'm going to go down there, forget it.""Look, that's fine, and I don't blame you, but let me just say that I'm as paranoid as anyone and I went down there. I'm pretty sure we can do this without getting contaminated.""I'll do other diving but I won't go to the bottom. I got enough of this shit in my body already.""Fair enough."I phoned Esmerelda. After this was over we'd have to give her an honorary membership in the group. If GEE was like the Starship Enterprise, then I was Scotty and she was Spock.We had an extremely pleasant chat about her granddaughter's brand new pink dress, which had involved roughly a hundred man-hours of shopping, and about the weather and the Sox. Standing in the library, she spoke quietly, and I always found my own voice dwindling to a whisper during these conversations. It was like talking to an important Japanese warlord. You had to hem and haw and nibble around the edges for a few hours, just to be polite, before you got to the point."There's some kind of intern working there, a woman, working with The Weekly?""Yes. She had a little trouble threading the microfilm machines but now she's doing just fine.""If someone ever invents a self-threading microfilm machine, half you guys are going to be out of a job. No offense to you.""How can I help you, ST.?""If that woman comes up with anything really interesting, could you shoot me a copy?""About Mr. Fleshy?""You know it.""Anything in particular?""Oh, I don't know. Something with photos in it. That always makes them nervous. Would you mind?""Certainly not. Is there anything else?""No. Just wanted to see how you were doing.""Have fun, ST." That's how she always said goodbye to me. She must have some queer ideas about my job.The next day we organized, and the day after that we did it. With another diver from the Boston office I swam around scooping muck into sample jars. We'd hand them off to Tom, who'd relay them up to the Zodiac, where Debbie was waiting. That way we wouldn't have to decompress every time we had a full load of samples. Debbie was our navigator, using landmarks on shore to judge our position and mark down roughly where each sample came from. We could plot the results later on. If the PCB concentration increased sharply in one direction, that would give us a clue as to where the source was. If we were really lucky, we'd be able to track it down, probably to a few barrels on the bottom.The ultimate success would be to find some barrels with PCB still in them, and to get some photos. We couldn't salvage them ourselves, but the EPA probably could and, more important, they probably would. We could save the Harbor a lot of grief and we might find evidence that would lead us to the criminals.I didn't want Debbie sitting out there alone on a Zodiac. We knew the Poyzen Boyzen people had a boat, and they seemed to know a hell of a lot about who we were and where we hung out. So we looked through our donor list and found a couple of yacht owners, then convinced them that it really would be fun to spend a day bobbing around in the Harbor, showing the flag. We hoisted another Toxic Jolly Roger, persuaded Tanya's black-belt squeeze to join up, and ferried a few media people out from Castle Island Park. Rebecca came, as did the starving freelancer and the reporter from the Globe. So far it was background.We started roughly where I'd taken my first sample and worked our way outwards, covering about half a square mile of the Harbor floor. We ended up with thirty-six peanut butter jars full of raw sewage, and some very sore muscles.There's one advantage of hanging out with groovsters: they give good massage. A couple of hours of massage, beer, nitrous oxide, and Stooges after a day of diving - nothing could beat it.The next day we began to run the samples and got semi disastrous results. Disastrous for me - we weren't reading any PCBs at all. This was unbelievable - there had to be contamination inside the machine-and the whole operation went on hold for two days while I took the gas chromatograph apart, piece by piece, cleaned each one, and put it back together. Pure joy.Then I started to test the samples again. No one had stuck around for the two days of cleaning, so by this time I was working alone. No matter, I got exactly the same goddamn results. The level of PCBs in these samples was no different from those taken anywhere else in the Harbor.As we headed south, in the direction of Spectacle Island, the concentration dropped rapidly - not what I'd expected - and to the north of Spectacle we couldn't get any PCB readings at all. It was totally virgin.The Granola James Bond, the Toxic Spiderman, had fucked up. I'd overreacted to some oily lobsters, seen a guy with excema and called it chloracne. Then I'd gotten a bad sample, or run it wrong, and rushed the gig.It was hard to believe, but I had no choice. The only other possibility was that the culprits had somehow hoovered up the PCBs while I was shuffling papers. But that kind of a Cecil B. De Mille operation would have cost billions.It happens. Seen from the laboratory, the universe looks a lot more complicated than it does in your neat mental blueprints. But this time it really burned my ass. Debbie could have helped, but I didn't give her a chance. To be lonely and pissed feels better. So after I'd gone through the burning embarrassment, the denial and the anger, I got down into some serious depression.It was raining, cool for the season, and I wandered drunkenly until I hit an obstacle: a huge, overdressed throng in the marketplace. On a sunny weekend this wouldn't have been unusual, but today it was a little out of place. Then I saw the banners, the buttons, all the cheap, shimmering detritus of a political campaign, and heard The Groveler's voice ringing dingily out of some big speakers.These were just the groundlings out here. Bostonians practice idolatry in their politics - Curley, Kennedy, O'Neill, now Pleshy. Inside were the big shots, the power structure of so-called liberal Massachusetts's politics. All the people who bleated about cleaning up the Harbor until they discovered that people like Pleshy were responsible for making it dirty.This was too disgusting to witness, so I turned on my heel and headed across into Government Center. A couple of Secret Service types were watching me; one had stopped to buy a soft pretzel on the curb, and when I went past him we nodded at each other.At a phone booth I called the Boss collect, and told him I had to get the fuck out of town, that I needed a vacation."You deserve it," he said."GEE deserves it," I said. "I'm so into my job that I'm fucking up."Thank God Project Lobster was over with and I could say goodbye to skeptical lobstermen. They'd never let me forget this one. Busting into the middle of a ball game in Fenway to give them dire, unbelievable warnings, then showing up a week later and taking it all back; exactly the image I'd been fighting all along.I remembered Hoa's busboy giving me that sneer, that duck-squeezer look, and decided to eat Chinese for a while."Where are you going on vacation?" the Boss asked."Shit, I don't know, just hang around town.""How about Buffalo?""Buffalo?""Why not?" he said, sounding terribly innocent."Let me tell you a story about Buffalo. Last time I drove through there was in the middle of a windstorm. Huge, record-setting windstorm. Sixty-miles-an-hour winds in broad daylight. It was clear, but there was so much dust in the air that the light turned all brown, you know? And you couldn't even stand outside because the wind was picking up goddamn rocks, little pebbles, and flinging them through the air like hailstones. And I got to this place on the way to the bridge, in between a couple of embankments with big petrochemical tanks on either side of the road. Your basic industrial Mordor. The embankments acted like a wind tunnel and they were picking up coal dust off a huge pile beside the highway and so I was driving downhill through this thick, black, sulfurous cloud, sticks and stones hailing down against my windshield, caught between a couple of semis carrying gasoline, and I said to myself, shit, I accidentally took the off-ramp to Hell.""The Blowfish got there ahead of schedule," the Boss said, "and we've got an extra project that needs doing.""Forget it.""It involves plugging a dioxin pipeline."A good boss always knows how to dangle the right thing in front of your nose."And we'll pay your way. Debbie's going."That meant I could go on the train, in a sleeper coach, with Debbie in there too.I cruised home to pack, only to discover a little display was waiting for me. Someone had grabbed a stray neighborhood cat who hung around our home sometimes - Scrounger - and had beaten his skull in, then wrapped an unbent coat hanger around its neck and strung it up in front of the door.I cut Scrounger down, carried him around to the side and threw him into the garbage, burying the carcass under some other trash so my housemates would be spared the sight. Out back, I noticed some spots of blood on the ground, and followed them straight to the murder weapon: a fist-size hunk of concrete, smeared with blood.The house had been broken into through the back, and trashed. Not a thorough trashing, but a decent effort nevertheless. The TV was kicked in, as was my computer screen.They'd even yanked up the bottom half of the computer, a separate box, and stomped on it a few times. A lot of food was strewn around the kitchen in the messiest way possible, and they'd poked a screwdriver into the tubes in the freezer and let all the freon evaporate.And there was a black handprint on the door to my room, at about eye level.Fake Mafia or real Mafia, I had no way of knowing. But I was damn tired and depressed; I just wanted out of town. My big scandal had turned into a bad joke. And now someone was getting violent. Game over, case closed.

17

IONIC CHLORINE'S EASY TO GET. It's in seawater, as Tom Akeis pointed out. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current - a stream of electrons - flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This process is called Chloralkali.Simple enough. But to make industrial quantities of DDT, or PCBs, or solvents, or whatever it is you're shooting for, you need industrial quantities of chlorine. That takes a lot of electrical power. And if you want to manufacture a Niagara of chemicals, guess what? You need a Niagara-sized power source.Hence Buffalo. Its blessing, the beautiful Falls, was also its curse. And even though the Falls were getting all broken down and full of rocks, all those chlorine compounds remained. We call it toxic waste. Without Chloralkali, toxic waste would hardly exist. The only hazardous waste that doesn't flow from that fountain is the heavy-metal variety, and heavy metals are a pretty small trickle in the toxic stream. Chloralkali, also known as Niachlor (Niagara + chlorine) is virtually synonymous with toxic waste.Despite all my moaning and bitching, it's getting tougher to be a toxic polluter in this country. In the last three decades, especially since about 1974, the Chloralkali business has taken a nosedive, down by about forty percent. I'm shooting for a hundred.Going after the chemical industry in Buffalo meant going after Boner Chemicals - which was like shooting ducks in a barrel while half a million people stood around cheering you on - and this time it was going to be even easier. We didn't have to use shotguns on those toxic ducks anymore, because a friend of ours in Albany was providing us with flamethrowers.The EPA is so anemic, and this country so dirty, that they have to contract out a lot of their work. After the toxic catastrophe in Buffalo, they farmed some work out to a group of chemical consultants in Albany, similar to Mass Anal. In effect, that gave these consultants subpoena power over Boner, the sole cause of the catastrophe. They got to raid Boner's files and cart off the relevant maps and documents. They learned toxic secrets that would turn your blood to dioxin.One of the consultants resigned because he wanted to build a geodesic-dome house and start his own computer software company. I think you know the kind of guy I'm talking about. He got involved with GEE. He no longer had any secret documents, but he knew how to operate a Xerox machine. When my train pulled into Albany on its way to Buffalo, he joined Debbie and me in our sleeper coach; we poured him a Screwdriver and talked about things to come. His name was Alan Reading.Debbie and I had kept the bunks fastidiously folded away. We'd talked all the way from Boston to Springfield, paused so I could read the last couple of days' Wall Street Journal, and were just getting into the terrible subject of Commitment when we pulled into Albany. We weren't exactly in a good mood.We sat in the coach and studied a bunch of documents that Alan had illegally xeroxed. One was quite interesting: a map of the main Boner plant, showing in detail the boundary between Boner property and the public streets. There was an indentation in the boundary: a street that ran for half a block into Boner territory and then dead-ended. It was still public property, though it was surrounded on three sides by the plant. The only reason it existed was as a place to put a manhole. There was a sewer line running from the middle of boner Chemical out to Buffalo's general sewer system. This line ran along underneath the deadend street; at the end of that street, right up against the gate to Bonerland, was a manhole. Alan happened to know that at this very spot, Boner Chemical was dumping dioxins into the sewers."This is great stuff," I told him. "I have something you might want to read too." And I showed him the Journals. Seems as though another big corporate merger was in the offing. Basco was buying out Boner."Why on earth would anyone want to own it?" Alan mumbled. "It's a black hole.""If it makes money on paper, for the first year, it must be a good investment."Debbie had other things to concentrate on. Up at the Falls, she and the Blowfish people had some big splashy affair planned for the media, involving Canadians and Indians. It appeared that the Indians in upstate New York, the Seven Nations, continued to approve of us.This wasn't always the way it worked. GEE scouts were always pursuing the Indians, asking to sleep in their teepees and groove on their most sacred ceremonies. You couldn't be cool in some GEE circles unless you'd seen the inside of a Lakota sweat lodge; it was like a fetish. Usually the Indians were tolerant, but not always. The night before, I'd been on the computer, poking around in GEE's international message system, and learned that one of our boys was in the hospital in Rapid City. He had been smoking the peace pipe with some Sioux and had taken it upon himself to put in some marijuana. So they broke his arm. Little misunderstandings like this were common, and I was always amazed when the Northeastern tribes showed any interest at all in working with us. They had as much to lose from being slowly poisoned by large corporations as anyone, I guess. Maybe more, since they tended to be fishermen or factory workers.A donated car was waiting for us in Buffalo, a half-devastated Subaru with loose speakers dangling out of the door panels and ecostickers all over the windows. I dropped Alan and Debbie off at the marina where the Blowfish was parked. They were having a party for local supporters and I couldn't bear the thought of it. Sometimes, actually, I do feel like having fun, pretending to be charming, putting on my suit with the toxic tennis shoes, regaling local environmentalists with war stories, describing the variety of crap they have in their tap water. But other times, like now, I just wanted to drive around in the dark and look for trouble.We were going to be plugging a few pipes here, I knew that much. Pipe-plugging technology is pretty well established by now. For pipes less than about four feet across, you just stack bags of cement in them. The cement swells up and gets hard.If the pipe gets any larger, you have to plug it with a disk of some kind. But that's hard to do if any significant amount of crap is pouring out of the pipe, because it obviously tends to force the disk out. So you have to use a butterfly plug, which was invented by one of our people in Boston who has since gone into the computer biz. You cut the disk in half down the middle and fold the halves together, pointing them upstream, like the wings of a butterfly. You install it in that position and then release the sides of the disk. The pressure hits them and they slam open, sealing against the walls of the pipe. Then you can add extra devices to complicate removal if you really want to be an asshole. For example, you can clamp the plug on with C-clamps, then saw off the screws.The sewer coming out of the Boner plant was much larger than four feet across, but we couldn't construct a plate to go across. Why? Because it would have to go in via the manhole. So we'd have to use lots and lots of cement. Cement is more permanent anyway, and permanence was the key to this job. Those butterfly plugs are just media events. You put one in, with a big GEE logo painted across it, and the minicam crews hang around and film the seasick plant workers struggling to remove it. But this was underground and so there was no point in showing off. And the Boner waste was much too serious. Dioxin, man. Unacceptable stuff. Dump dioxin, you're playing for keeps, you die.First I drove up to the Falls and looked for a hotel room. It's funny. Everywhere I go, I like to rent the honeymoon suite. What the hell, GEE's picking up the tab. And the honeymoon suite is the best place to unwind after a rough day of humping cement bags and being hauled around in manacles. You can sit around in the heart-shaped tub, you can romp on the waterbed. And now, here I was on the road to Niagara Falls, where every room was a honeymoon suite. All I had to do was pick the best one.Took a while, but I found it: lava lamps, eight-foot water-bed with fur, mirrored ceiling, view of the freeway. The manager hated my looks but liked the idea that I was going to stay for a while. I charged up a few days on the GEE gold card, told her I'd be back later and headed back toward Buffalo.Now the only thing on my mind was the pair of suits who'd been tailing me ever since I'd left the train station. They were driving a Chevy Celebrity, conspicuous by its very dullness. My Subaru was smaller, more maneuverable, and probably just as fast, if the tranny didn't fall out. Once we got back into Buffalo, I got to engage in my favorite sport.I topped off the tank first, checked the tire pressure, emptied my bladder, bought a six-pack of Jolt. Then I headed for the on-ramp and gave them a chance to line up behind me. They wouldn't follow me directly onto the ramp because this was a covert tail. So I cruised up the ramp, cranking it as hard as it would go, then shut off my lights and braked onto the shoulder, using my handbrake so the taillights wouldn't give me away.A few seconds later they shot past me, their brake lights blazing in embarrassment, and I took off and followed them.And followed them and followed them. For four hours I followed those stupid fucks. My car had a shorter range, but I'd just filled it up.Nothing's more fun than following someone whose orders are to follow you. I could do it forever: cruising flamboyantly behind them, playing classic rock on the jury-rigged stereo and flicking cigar ashes out the window.They didn't even figure it out for twenty minutes or so. They decided to play it cool and stay ahead of me for a while before gradually dropping back. But I wouldn't let them. Finally they came to a full stop on the shoulder and waited. I stopped behind them and waited. They started up and pulled an illegal U-turn across the median strip. Obviously they weren't cops, because cops are trained how to do that maneuver, and these guys had never done it before. I followed them through that exercise, after pausing on the shoulder to give them a little time.Then they went into the next phase: wondering what to do now. They got off at the next ramp and I followed them around downtown Buffalo, listening to three Zevon songs about hapless mercenaries, back-to-back, no commercial interruptions. I doubt they had classic rock and roll playing on their stereo. They had a regular discussion in progress, with lots of hand-waving and glancing back over their headrests at me.Finally they pulled off at an IHOP. I watched them through the windows until they had ordered coffee, then opened my door, peed on the asphalt, and reclined the seat so I was below window level. They came out in a few minutes and took off. I gave them a minute to think they'd finally made it, then pulled in behind them again.Then they knew they were fucked. They thought: this isn't just a joke. This guy's going to follow us until we have to report in, and then he'll know who we are.Some bad driving ensued as they tried and failed to shake me. It's hard to shake a tail in a totally deserted downtown. These guys had learned how to drive by watching "Hawaii Five-O" reruns: if our tires are squealing, we must be going fast.So they definitely weren't cops. Cops or G-men would just stop the car and come up to me and say, "Okay, okay, very funny, asshole, now go home." And they weren't Mafia, or else I'd be bleeding in the dark. Some kind of cheap private dicks, or amateurs.If they were locals, they probably worked for Boner. If they'd followed me out from Boston, maybe they were connected to the PCP thing. Maybe we were talking about a drug lab, financed by yuppies, run by dustheads, and now that we'd gotten into this cloak-and-dagger stuff, the upper echelons didn't know quite how to handle it.They realized too late that most of the gas stations in downtown Buffalo are closed at three in the morning. They ran out of gas right in the middle of a lane. I came up behind them, bumper to bumper, and shoved them into a parking space. But at the last minute, thinking of Scrounger, I downshifted, gunned it and shoved them right through the space and into the back of a parked car. The Celebrity's power brakes didn't work when the engine was dead.They were really ticked. They jumped out of the doors and came after me. I backed down the street a couple of blocks, letting them chase me, getting a good look at their adrenalin-flushed all-American faces, then blew them off and found a phone booth and dialed 911. There had been a fender bender downtown, I said, and the culprits had abandoned their car and run away from it, and I suspected that maybe the car was stolen. Yes, I'd be happy to give my name. Yes, I'd be there to give the police a statement.The cops were on the scene within two minutes. We had a huge, fortyish black cop with a pissed-off demeanor, and his younger, female partner. The two suits were loitering grimly nearby, huddled together in the dark like aborigines. When they coughed up their driver's licenses, I got a peek over the woman cop's shoulder. Massachusetts licenses. The pissed-off cop got on the radio and was kind enough to speak their names for me: David Kleinhoffer and Gary Dietrich. A couple of good Americo-Aryan rent-a-thugs.That was all I was going to learn out here. I went to a pay phone and called the car rental company. I used my flack voice."Yes, this is Mr. Taylor. We've rented a vehicle from your office," and I gave her the description and license plate number, "we've misplaced the rental agreement, and there seems to be some confusion as to which account it's being charged to. I'm working in the accounting department and I need to know. Would you mind reading to me the impression from the charge slip?"She did. Turns out Kleinhoffer and Dietrich were working for a company named Biotronics.Now that I knew, it made sense. I should have guessed it. First Poyzen Boyzen, then the Mafia, leaving me threats. And the Mafia thing didn't start until right after I began worrying about it.Some assholes in fancy shoes had been trying to scare me. And for the most part they had done a damn fine job. But this bit with Scrounger was too fucking much.The tip was the computer. A Mafia goon would kick in the screen and say, that's it, that sucker's busted. Actually, monitor screens are cheap. The expensive part is the box underneath. Whoever trashed our place had known that much. He'd known about it, and cared. The thing with the freon, too. That was a pretty suburban way to trash a kitchen - letting the freon out of your fridge.Now that I'd seen the faces of the people who were trying to scare me, I was a lot less scared, and a lot more interested. Maybe they were really making PCP, or maybe they had some other nasty secret. When I got back from Buffalo I'd have to find out, and do these people some damage. In the meantime, I'd have to content myself with charging up tens of thousands of dollars' worth of lingerie on their credit card number.

18

STILL, THE DISAPPEARING PCBS were keeping me awake at night. I'd gone over the whole thing a dozen times in my head, trying to find my error. I wasn't even sure which time I'd screwed up - on that first lone sample or on the whole batch we collected later.That's the difference between being a toxic detective and some other kind. You're a regular detective and you find a dead person on the floor, you know murder's been committed; your eyes tell you. But if you're a toxic detective, your eyes are a gas chromatograph, not always as reliable. If that mechanical eye tells you there are PCBs in this sample, you have to ask: how was the sample taken? Is the machine okay? Who else has been dicking around with it?For a second, I had an inspiration. Maybe someone had gotten to our samples overnight, while I was in getting massaged and drunk. They'd been sitting out in the back of the Omni, and high-tech goons could be just clever enough to get in there, dump out the samples, and replace them with fakes.But there were too many problems with that. First of all, it was just too implausible. Second, I remembered seeing a flash of red in one of my samples - a fragment of a Coke can - which I also saw again later, the next day. And most conclusive, when we plotted the results on the map, the samples showed an even, steady pattern of decreasing PCB levels as we headed toward Spectacle Island. That couldn't be duplicated with fakes.My next inspiration: maybe the PCB spill was extremely localized. And maybe, just by dumb luck, I had come down into a hot spot on my first trip and gotten a really dirty sample by chance. This was just barely conceivable. Maybe there was some really big, old shark that had been hanging out in the Harbor for decades, eating bottom fish, building up incredibly high levels of bioconcentrated PCBs. Then it had croaked, settled to the bottom and decayed away to nothing, leaving a puddle of PCBs behind.Stranger things had happened. When you're being rational and scientific, you have to take into account that bizarre events can throw off your results. That's why good scientists take a lot of samples and check their numbers before they go public. I could at least feel good about that.I snagged a few Z's on the Blowfish and then went out and rented a U-Haul box truck. Debbie went out on the boat to plan the Niagara gig, while Alan and I, along with Frank, the largest member of the Blowfish crew, took the U-Haul outside of town to a big home-and-garden store. We filled the truck to its limit with hundred-pound sacks of dry cement and gravel and we also got ourselves some really vicious epoxy resin glue. Canvas gunny sacks we already had.We parked the truck near the marina for the time being and then I drove out to a nearby Indian reservation and met a guy named Jim Grandfather, whom I'd worked with before. He was shaped like me, in his forties, lived with his wife and dogs in a doublewide back in the trees, and drove a big old Dodge pickup with an Indianhead hood ornament that he'd lifted out of a junkyard somewhere. He had a couple of years of college and was the tribe's historian, archivist, and preserver of weird knowledge. Whenever environmental issues came up, he was the point man for the tribe. I don't knowif he had an official position in the tribal government, or if he was appointed by consensus, or by himself, but that was definitely his role. When I showed up, he was out on the front yard throwing sticks and frisbees for his dogs. There were two dogs and only one frisbee and consequently I had to sit there and wait while a tug of war was waged across the middle of the road. Finally Jim shouted something in a language I'd never know, and they both dropped it simultaneously. He stalked up to the car with a big grin."How's the Granola James Bond?""A little more toxic than last time, but good enough. How are you, dude?""Check this out." He opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of paper. It was a computer printout. A blood test."What, they testing you for drugs or something?""No, no, this is for cholesterol." He pointed to one line with one of his stubby fingers. "Low normal." He stepped back and held his hands off to his sides. "So? Does this look like a body with low cholesterol?""Congratulations, Jim.""Well, I thank you for it." The last time I'd seen Jim was about a year ago, and I'd hassled him about the amount of greasy food he ate. He belonged to some kind of a pig raising and butchering co-op, so he hit the bacon and sausage very hard. His wife, Anna, started getting on his case too. He had gone in for a checkup and found out that his cholesterol level was pretty high. So this was quite a turnaround."You been eating a lot of fish?""You see any oceans around here?""Tofu."He snorted. He already knew my opinion of that. "Venison, baby. Lean and tough. Like me. Take some sausage to work every day.""Why'd you do it?""Shut my wife up." Which might give you the wrong impression, because they loved each other.I parked my car half in the ditch and let his dogs smell me. At least I thought they were dogs."How can you tell these things from wolves?" I said."These have collars," he explained. "Don't worry, they're checking you for dioxin."They didn't find any, so we wandered up toward his house."Who's this asshole in South Dakota?" he said.I almost asked how the hell he'd heard about that, but then caught myself. If we had a computer bulletin board, why couldn't they? I'd seen this before, though. Go out to Alaska, California, talk to tribe officials, and it's like they've been poring over my dossier. They kept in touch."I don't know him myself. You can probably expect the national office will fall all over itself trying to apologize.""It's no longer necessary. They made their point."We sat down in his kitchen and he got me some coffee. "Anna's in town shopping," he said. "Soon as she gets back, we can take off.""No hurry. I don't have to be back until midnight."He laughed. "Typical. Most people have appointments at noon. You have them at midnight.""That's when all the midnight dumping takes place.""What's up with you these days? What's shaking in Boston?""Who the fuck ever knows?" I explained the PCB/PCP story to him, and included my speculations from last night. He seemed to favor the grand conspiracy theory."You don't want to fuck around with the Mafia, do you?""Not at all. They can do whatever they want. You think it's the Mafia, Jim?""Yeah. Something about the whole style of the operation.""I disagree. Too wimpy."He meditated on his coffee for a minute. "Well, look. If they get after you - if you get in trouble - get your ass to the Adirondacks.""I don't ski.""Doesn't even have to be there. Just any reservation. You go there and ask them for help and I'll make sure you get taken care of.""Yeah. I guess Sicilians stand out pretty bad on the res."He let my flip comment sail right out the window. "If they're suspicious, give them my name, have them call me or whatever. But don't hang around and let yourself get greased."I was surprised by his offer, and honored. It's not as though I'd helped him out all that much. But a reservation would be a great place to disappear.We talked about the week's operations, which were going to be split between grungy mechanic's work and full-splatter media events. For the time being I was worried about the grungy part, in Buffalo, while Jim was going to be hanging around up at the Falls, looking noble for the cameras. Later, after the cement had hardened, I'd join him up there.While we were waiting for Anna, we wandered around his property a little. He had a shooting range out back, for both archery and guns, and we farted around there for an hour or so. "This is what you should be packing," he recommended, hauling down a huge rifle with lots of scrollwork on it. "Lever-action. You seem like a lever-action kind of guy. Look at the size of that magazine.""What magazine?""Jesus, S.T., the tube on the bottom is the magazine. Forget it." He put the rifle back. "This is more your speed. We'll set you up with a fucking bow and arrow."He had a lot of those. He made them in the Nez Perce style, the Lakota style, the Iroquois style, you name it. He figured the only way to keep the knowledge from being lost was by using it. He could go into the woods armed with just a knife and make himself a birchbark canoe from scratch. "Only did it once, though," he had explained, "took me two weeks. Anna had to keep coming out with coolers full of baloney sandwiches. I ended up with viral pneumonia." Which sounded very humble, but he'd finished the canoe, and he still had it in his garage. The bows he made in his workshop, and he had no compunction about shaping them with a belt sander. "The idea," he said, "is to keep the information in my hand, not to live like a caveman."I couldn't really use his bows, even if I'd wanted too. I could draw them but I couldn't hold them steady long enough to sight in on the target. Also, I was nervous. The bowstrings were made of twisted horsehair. I was convinced that one of them would snap, and its ends whip into my eyeball at supersonic speed. Jim killed a few bales of hay for me, and that was about the time Anna came home.