Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  “In most places the bugs die for lack of PCBs to eat. But some of them find their way to your huge PCB spill.

  “Your plan succeeds brilliantly. The PCBs disappear. The guy from GEE gives up on it.

  “Then the covalent-chlorine level starts to rise. You’re not dumping PCBs, but the levels are rising anyway. It’s impossible, it doesn’t make sense. But after some simple tests, one of your genetic engineers figures it out. Your tank of PCB-eaters got contaminated with a very small number of bugs that do the opposite thing. They got into the sewers along with the others. At first, they didn’t do very much. The size of the colony was tiny compared with the size of the PCB-eating colony. But after a few weeks, they’ve multiplied. They can multiply as much as they want. They have an unlimited supply of food—all the salt in the seven seas.”

  I drank beer and let them ponder that one.

  “And all of that salt could be converted into organic chlorine?” Boone said, sounding kind of breathy.

  “Let’s not worry about that right at the moment,” I said. Boone and Jim laughed nervously.

  “It’s like not worrying about nuclear war,” I suggested. “We’ll get used to it.”

  “How does this lead to Bathtub Man?” Jim said.

  “Well, you realize that you’re in big trouble. The guy from GEE comes back and discovers rising PCB levels, tracing them back to your CSO. He doesn’t understand the whole thing yet, but you’re in serious trouble now and you can’t take chances. You try to kill him.

  “In the meantime, you’re going on to Plan B. You knew all along that your crime might come to light one day. But you’re ready for it. That’s why you used the sewers in the first place. You pick out one of your employees, one who’s known to be a zealous worker, a fanatic for the project, and you put some of the bugs in his food. They take up residence in his bowel. Whenever he takes a shit and flushes the toilet, he’s sending more of them down to the Harbor. So if the bugs ever get traced to your company, you just say, ‘Well, this employee of ours got too enthusiastic and violated the extremely rigid safety procedures we have set up. As a result he got infected, and every time he used the toilet, spread more of these bugs down toward the sea.’”

  “And, in the meantime, the bugs are turning the salt in this guy’s food. …”

  “Into toxic waste. In his stomach. He gets chloracne and right away he figures out what’s going on. He’s being poisoned from within. So are all the people who’ve eaten lobsters or fish from the contaminated zones of the Harbor. Or who were dumb enough to swallow a mouthful of seawater near the CSO, like me. They’re all getting chloracne, they’re all getting organic-chlorine poisoning.”

  “Time out,” Boone said. “I’m no chemist, but I know a little. It takes energy to convert salt to organic chlorine, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So where do these bugs—the bad bugs—get their energy supply?”

  “Just a hypothesis,” I said. “All the stuff I was sampling was polycyclic. Carbon rings in various numbers and combinations. If our bugs knew how to make those rings, they could get a lot of energy that way. It takes energy to break up a six-pack of carbon, right? Which means that if you make a six-pack, you get some energy out of it. And if you use that energy to make some organic chlorine, and tack that chlorine onto the six-pack, you’ve just made some type of useful, but toxic, chemical. That’s what I was seeing out by the CSO—all kinds of polycyclic-chlorine compounds.

  “Anyway, say you’re Laughlin, the guy running this sorry outfit. You didn’t succeed in killing the environmentalist. He got away and he’s been on the phone. The toxic information is spreading. There’s no way to contain it. Your only choice is to destroy the credibility of that person. You have to put a stain on his character. And what’s the worst stain a guy can have right now? Being linked to terrorism. So you blow up the guy’s house and say it was a bomb factory. You put a mine on Pleshy’s yacht, steal the guy’s car, park it nearby and say he was trying to assassinate Big Daddy. Even if the guy survives, no one will ever believe him.

  “Now let’s say you’re the infected employee, the zealot who has gotten infected with the PCB-eating bug. Dolmacher. You’re smart, you know exactly what’s happening, because you’ve been worrying about it. You tell your company that you’ve been infected and they say, ‘Stay at home, Dolmacher, and we’ll send you some antibiotics.’ And they do. But they don’t seem to work. And the company goes along day after day without announcing the extreme danger to the general public. You realize you’ve been set up. They’ve been sending you placebos. They’re letting you die. And if they’re willing to do that, maybe they’re willing to assassinate you. You get intensely paranoid, you arm yourself. Some guy comes around from the company, God knows what for, and something goes wrong—he makes the mistake of threatening you and about a second later, he’s wearing half a dozen slugs. So you hit the road. You get out of your house. You take one of your numerous guns, your electric Tazer, and start hitting drugstores and stealing mass quantities of antibiotics off the shelves.”

  “And then what do you do?” Jim asked, sounding as though he already knew.

  “That, my friends, is the sixty-thousand-dollar question, and I’m not a good enough detective to predict the answer.”

  “This guy is a violence freak,” Boone observed.

  I agreed and told them about the survival game.

  “Up in New Hampshire, huh?” Jim said. “Sneaking around shooting at people. Did it occur to you that Pleshy’s stumping New Hampshire at the moment?”

  We just sat there, stunned.

  “Time to roll on down that lonesome highway,” Boone said.

  27

  Dolmacher wasn’t the type to own Tupperware, but he did have a big half-gallon vat of some kind of margarine substitute in his fridge. I scooped all this unknown substance out onto his counter, ran the container under hot water to wash out the remains, sloshed some of his bleach around in there, and rinsed it. Then I dropped my 501s, squatted over the thing and deposited a sample. I put the lid on.

  Borrowed a razor blade from Dolmacher’s medicine chest, sterilized it, and cut one of my toes. Just a little cut. We got on the highway and followed the first series of hospital signs we saw, straight to the emergency room. I had Jim and Boone carry me in. We waited half an hour and then they came to look at me.

  “Early this morning we were playing soccer down in Cambridge by the Charles River and I waded in after the ball and cut my foot,” I said. “Tried real hard to keep it clean, sterilized it and everything, but now, shit, I’m vomiting, got the shakes, my joints hurt like hell, diarrhea. …”

  They shut me up by sticking a thermometer in my mouth. The nurse left me alone for a while so I put the thermometer on the electric baseboard heater until it was up into the lethal range, then shook it down to about a hundred and four.

  Same as before: they shot me full of killer antibiotics, and gave me some more in pill form. We went out to the car and I ate some. I’d borrowed some of Dolmacher’s essential supplies: aquarium charcoal and laxative. I took a lot of both and rode in the back of the truck. Enough said about that. We drove around to Kelvin’s house in Belmont, a little suburb just west of Cambridge.

  Kelvin is a difficult person to describe. We had gone to college together, sort of. He had this way of drifting in and out of classes. I’m not sure if he even registered or paid tuition. It didn’t matter to him because he didn’t care to have grades, or credits, or a diploma. He was just interested in this stuff. If one day’s lecture was boring, he walked out, wandered up and down the halls and maybe ended up sitting in the back of an astrophysics or medieval French seminar.

  Later I found out that he was on a special scholarship program that the administration had set up to lure in the kinds of students who normally went to Harvard or MIT. The university waived all tuition and fees, and set up a special dorm on Bay State Road. It wasn’t really an expensive program because they didn’t have t
o pay any money out. They just avoided taking any in from these particular students. That was no loss, because without the program those students wouldn’t have showed up anyway.

  Kelvin only showed up when he felt like it. He got in on the first year of the program, in the stage where they still had a few bugs to work out of the system. They decided that Kelvin was one of the bugs. So after the first year they started clamping down, insisting that he register for some classes and make decent grades. He registered for freshman gut courses, devoted an hour a week to them and aced them. The rest of the time he was hanging out in the astrophysics seminars.

  The next year they insisted that he show steady progress toward a specific degree. That was his last year. Subsequently he went out and started his own company and did pretty well with it. He lived out in this house in Belmont with his wife, his sister and some kids, I could never tell exactly whose, wrote highly conceptual software, mostly for 32-bit personal computers and, every once in a while, helped me out with a problem.

  It was past eleven when we got there and the house was mostly dark, but we could see him up on the third floor in his office, a kind of balcony surrounded by windows. He noticed us driving up; I stood there and waved since I didn’t want to send the house into a frenzy by ringing the doorbell. He came down and opened the door.

  “S.T.,” he said, “what a pleasure.” Completely genuine, as usual. His mutt came out and sniffed my knees. I was about to walk in when I realized that for once in my life I was in a house where children lived.

  “I’m not sure if I should come in, Kelvin. I’m contaminated with a form of genetically engineered bacteria.”

  Kelvin was the only person in the world I could just say that to straightfaced, without giving him prior notice that we were venturing into the realm of the totally bizarre. He found it unremarkable.

  “Dolmacher’s?” he said.

  Of course. Dolmacher would have done the same thing: thought of Kelvin.

  “It’s E. coli, with PCB-metabolizing plasmids, right?” he continued.

  “If you say so.”

  “What do I smell?”

  “I unloaded some of it in the back of the truck. Into a bucket.”

  “Just a sec.” Kelvin went into his garage and came out with a can of gasoline. Taking the shit-filled bucket out of the back of the truck, he poured gasoline into it, walked about ten feet away and threw a match at it. We all stood around and watched it for a few minutes, not saying much. The Fire Department came around; the Alzheimer’s victim across the street had called in a chimney fire. We told them it was a chemical experiment and they left.

  “I’ll let you in the back door. We can talk in the basement,” Kelvin said, after it had burned down to ash.

  We went into his basement, which was mostly full of electrical and electronic stuff. We sat around on stools and I put the sealed margarine tub up on his workbench. There was a naked light bulb hanging above it which filled the container with yellow light; the toxic turd cast a blunt shadow against the flower-patterned sides.

  “Good. Dolmacher brought me a sample but he’d already weakened it pretty badly with antibiotics.”

  “How do you know this one isn’t weak?” I asked.

  “It’s well-formed. If you were taking the kind of antibiotics that are effective against E. coli, you’d have diarrhea.”

  Boone and Jim exchanged grins. “Looks like we came to the right place,” Boone said.

  He was right. When it came to pure science, Boone and Jim had no idea what I was talking about. But Kelvin was as far ahead of me as I was of them.

  “I’m sorry to come around at this time of night,” I said, “but… well, correct me if I’m wrong, but we are talking about the end of the world here, aren’t we?”

  “That’s what I asked Dolmacher. He said he wasn’t sure. It may be a little too simple-minded to make the extremest possible assumption—that it’ll convert all the salt in the earth’s oceans to polychlorinated biphenyls.”

  “Does Dolmacher know how to kill this bug?”

  Kelvin smiled. “Probably. But he wasn’t speaking in complete sentences. Had some undried blood on his pantlegs.”

  “Damn, Kelvin, you should have made him sit down and talk.”

  “He was armed,” Kelvin said, “and he showed up during Tommy’s birthday party.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anything can be killed. You could dump huge amounts of toxins into the Harbor and poison it. But there’s a Catch-22 involved. If you aren’t Basco, you don’t have the resources necessary for such a big project. And if you are Basco, you don’t want to use such obvious methods because … because of people like you, S.T.”

  “Thanks. I feel a lot better.”

  “Of course, now that you’re dead, maybe they’ll loosen up a little.”

  “So what did Dolmacher come here for? Just to give you some warning?”

  “Yes. And he phoned two days ago, between holding up drugstores. He managed to find some trimethoprim and that seems to kill the bug pretty effectively.”

  “So why not dump a shitload of that into the Harbor?” Jim asked.

  “We don’t have a sufficient shitload,” Kelvin said. “No, I don’t think that antibiotics are the answer. They are large, complex molecules, you know. Totally against Sangamon’s Principle.”

  “Kelvin, I am honored.”

  “It’s hard to assemble big complicated molecules in Harbor-sized quantities. The only way to do that is through genetic engineering—turning bacteria into chemical factories. That is exactly what we’re competing against, an army of little poison factories—but we don’t have an army. There is no rival bug making trimethoprim. So we have to find the equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Something simple and devastating.”

  Here, Kelvin seemed to find something interesting in what he’d just said. “That’s actually an idea,” he said. “If the infection got totally out of hand, we might have to save the world by detonating some nukes in the Harbor. We’d lose Boston but it would be worth it.”

  At this point Jim and Boone had moved back into the shadows and were just watching Kelvin’s performance open-mouthed. We heard the soles of someone’s Dr. Dentons scraping against the linoleum upstairs, and then light spilled down the steps from the living room.

  “Kelvin?” said a five-year-old kid, “can I have some cranraz?”

  “Yes, honey. Use your She-Ra mug,” Kelvin said.

  “Cranraz?” Boone asked.

  “Cranberry-raspberry juice,” Kelvin explained. “I like this house, so let’s not think in terms of nuclear weapons right off the bat. That was just supposed to be an analogy. We need to find some chemical susceptibility that these things have. And your sample here should make that a lot easier. I wish I had a better lab, though.”

  I told him how to get in touch with Tanya and Debbie. That should get him into the nice labs at the university. Kelvin’s kid wandered down the steps holding the She-Ra mug, and Kelvin had him sit on his lap. The kid held the mug to his face like a gas mask and made rhythmic slurping noises, watching us.

  “Do those people know you’re alive?”

  “Probably not. Hey, Kelvin. Did you know that I was? Were you surprised to see me?”

  He frowned. “I was kind of wondering when your body was going to wash ashore. I didn’t think you were that much of an asshole—to go out on the ocean without an exposure suit.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But are Tanya and Debbie to be told that you’re alive?”

  “Sure, as long as you don’t do it over the phone, or in one of their cars, in their houses, in the lab. …”

  “If you’re worried about electronic surveillance, just say so.”

  “Fine. I am.”

  “Okay. I’ll hand them a note.”

  “Kelvin, you are so—” I was going to say fucking, but the kid was looking at me “—eminently practical.”

  “Would you like to assist me in this project?”

&n
bsp; “I wouldn’t be able to go to the lab. Hell, we were sitting in an alley behind the Pearl and I almost got recognized.”

  “You’re paranoid, S.T.,” Jim said.

  “I’m alive, too,” I said.

  Kelvin said, “You’ve got as much experience with these new species as anyone.”

  “You’re saying there’s more than one?”

  “One that binds up oxygen in the water to create an anaerobic environment. Another that makes benzenes and phenyls, eats salt and poops toxic waste. The second one is a parasite on the first.”

  “Dolmacher’s not such a dick-brain after all. He’s the one we really need.”

  “Dolmacher is not available to us.”

  “We have this crazy idea. We think we can find him. If we can do that, maybe we can calm him down, get him to cooperate on killing the bug.”

  “I think he was headed northwards, when I saw him.”

  “How did you get that, Sherlock? Was he wearing mukluks?”

  “He borrowed my map of New Hampshire.”

  Great. Now Kelvin was going to be a co-conspirator in an assassination attempt. I didn’t mention that to him. He probably knew. Dolmacher had no guile.

  “One more thing,” Kelvin said, after he’d ushered us out to the driveway. “Did you blow up that speedboat last week?”

  “Yeah, that was me.”

  He smiled. “I thought so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was right next to the Tea Party Ship. The birthplace of the direct-action campaign.”

  “Good luck, Kelvin.”