Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  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 eyedroppers 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 anchor-droids. 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 as 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 grâce, 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 coopt 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 molecu
le 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 Abby 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 S.T.”

  “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 Air-stream. 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 years. 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.”