Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  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 ahold 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 housewares 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 booth 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 environmentalism.”

 
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.