Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  Zodiac

  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 unbeara
ble. 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.

&
nbsp; 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 sewage