Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  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 of 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 sewage with 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 whhooosh 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 starship, 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 Pöyzen Böyzen 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 EPA 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 lobst
ers 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, Pleshy,” 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, S.T., 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 wire-rims, 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, S.T., 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 Pleshy. 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 Pöyzen Böyzen 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 an
y 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 salt shaker 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.”