Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That’s partly because I’m younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. There’s no direct action you can take to stop nuclear proliferation, and direct action to save mammals is just too fucking nasty. I don’t want to get beat up over a baby seal. But there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes. Doing that requires coordinated actions, what the media like to describe as “military precision.”

  This crew doesn’t like anything military. In the Sixties, they would have been stuffing flowers into gun barrels while I was designing bombs in a basement somewhere. None of them has any technical background, not because they’re dumb but because they hate rigid, disciplined thinking. On the other hand, they had sailed this crate tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of weather. They’d survived a dismasting off Tierra del Fuego, blocked explosive harpoons with their Zodiacs, lived for months at a time in Antarctica, established a beachhead on the Siberian coast. They could do anything, and they would if I told them to; but I’d rather they enjoyed the gig.

  “These people here are environmental virgins,” I said. We were sitting around on deck, eating tofu-and-nopales omelets. It was a warm, calm, Jersey summer night and the sky was starting to lose its darkness and take on a navy-blue glow. “They think toxic waste happens in other places. They’re shocked about Bhopal and Times Beach, but it’s just beginning to dawn on them that they might have a problem here. The Swiss Bastards are sitting fat and happy on that ignorance. We’re going to come in and splatter them all over the map.”

  Crew members exchanged somber glances and shook their heads. These people were seriously into their nonviolence and refused to take pleasure in my use of the word “splatter.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. That’s going a little far. The point is that this is a company town. Everybody works at that chemical factory. They like having jobs. It’s not like Buffalo where everyone hates the chemical companies to begin with. We have to establish credibility here.”

  “Well, I forgot to bring my three-piece suit, man,” said one of the antisplatter faction.

  “That’s okay. I brought mine.” I do, in fact, have a nice three-piece suit that I always wear in combination with a dead-fish tie and a pair of green sneakers splattered with toxic wastes. It’s always a big hit, especially at GEE fundraisers and in those explosively tense corporate boardrooms. “They’re expecting, basically, people who look like you.” I pointed to the hairiest of the Blowfish crew. “And they’re expecting us to act like flakes and whine a lot. So we have to act before we whine. We can’t give them an excuse to pass us off as duck squeezers.”

  There was a certain amount of passive-aggressive glaring directed my way; I was asking these people to reverse their normal approach. But I was directing this gig and they’d do what I asked.

  “As usual, if you don’t like the plan, you can just hang out, or go into town or whatever. But I’ll need as many enthusiasts as I can get for this one.”

  “I’m into it,” said a voice from the galley. It was Arty, short for Artemis, author of the omelets, the best Zodiac jockey in the organization. Naturally she was into it; it was a Zodiac-heavy operation, it was exciting, it was commandolike. Artemis was even younger than me, and military precision didn’t come with all the emotional baggage for her that it did for the middle-aged Blowfish crew.

  At 4:00 A.M., Artemis powered up her favorite Zode and prominently roared off, heading for some dim lights about half a mile away. The lights belonged to a twenty-foot coast guard boat that was assigned to keep an eye on us. It happens that boats of that size don’t have cooking facilities, so Artemis had whipped up a couple of extra omelets, put them in a cooler to keep them warm and was headed out to give these guys breakfast. She took off flashing, glowing and smoking like a UFO, and within a couple of minutes we could hear her greeting the coast guards with an enthusiasm that was obscene at that time of the morning. They greeted her right back. They knew one another from previous Blowfish missions, and she liked to flirt with them over the radio. To them she was a legend, like a mermaid.

  That was when Tom and I took off in one of the other Zodes. This one had a small, well-muffled engine, and we’d stripped off all the orange tape and anything else that was easy to see in the dark.

  The Blowfish was three miles off the coast and maybe five miles south of the toxic site that had just been locked up by Debbie and Tanya. Jim waited fifteen minutes, so the coast guards could eat and we could slip away, then cranked up the Blowfish’s huge Danish one-cylinder diesel: whoom whoom whoom whoom. We could easily hear it from the Zode and if anyone ashore was listening, they could probably hear it too. Normally, for environmental reasons, Jim used the sails, but this was right before dawn and there wasn’t any wind. Besides, we were aiming for military precision here.

  Around 6:00 we heard them break radio silence with a lot of fake traffic between Blowfish and GEE-1 and GEE-2 and Tainted Meat, which was my current code name, and loose talk about banners and smoke bombs. We knew that the rent-a-dicks were monitoring that frequency. Meanwhile, Tanya was in Blue Kills, trailing a parade of Lincoln Town Cars, rousting the media crews from their motel rooms, handing out xeroxed maps and press releases.

  The import of the press releases was that we were mightily pissed off about the toxic marsh north of town. You know, the one that two Zodiacs were converging on at this very moment. I was imagining it: Artemis undoubtedly in the lead, spiky hair slicing the wind, thrashing the morning surf at about forty miles an hour, as some lesser Zode pilot desperately tried to keep up with her. She’d been through a special GEE course in Europe where she’d learned how to harass two-hundred-foot, waste-dumping vessels, dipping in and out of their bow wave without getting sucked under. She knew how to massage a big roller with her Mercury, how to slide up and down the troughs without going airborne.

  We were listening too, but we already knew what was going on. The whole flotilla was headed for the estuary. There was nothing the coast guard could do except watch, because there’s nothing illegal about riding a boat up a river. By now, the Swiss Bastards would have dispatched all available rent-a-cops and rent-a-dicks to the scene, ordering them to drive into that toxic waste dump and stand shoulder-to-shoulder along the shoreline to prevent the GEE invasion forces from establishing a beachhead.

  When they arrived, pushing through the horde of media, they would find the gate impregnably locked. They would find, as they always did, that no boltcutter in the world had jaws that opened wide enough to cut through a Kryptonite lock. They would then find that their hacksaws were dulled useless by the tempered steel. If they were exceedingly bright, they would get a blowtorch and heat the metal enough to destroy its temper; then they could hacksaw it, and, after a few hours, get inside their own dump. Meanwhile, the cameras would be rolling, as would the GEE demonstration, unmolested, on the other side of the transparent fences. Unless, in full view of the NYC minicams, they wanted to send rent-a-cops clambering over their own fences, or chop them up with boltcutters.

  Tanya and Debbie had parked the Omni right in front and were propagandizing with a bullhorn. Listening to the radio, I could occasionally make out a word or two of what they were saying. Basically they were encouraging everyone to stay cool—always a major part of our gigs, especially when state troopers were present.

  Riding in one of the Zodiacs was a man dressed up in a moonsuit, one of those dioxinproof numbers with the goggles and the facemasks. Nothing looks scarier on camera. This Zodiac was about three inches from the shore—no trespassing had yet been committed. He had some primitive sampling equipment mounted on long poles, so that he could reach into the dump and poke around pseudoscientifically.

  In the other Zodiac was a guy in scuba gear, who, as soon as they arrived, jumped into the water and disappeared. Every few minutes he would resurface and hand a bottle full of ugly brown water to Artemis. She would
take it, wearing gloves of course, and hand him an empty. Then he would disappear again.

  They hated it when we did this. It just drove them wild. From previous run-ins with me, they knew the organization now had some chemical expertise, that we knew what we were talking about. Neither the guy in the moon suit nor the diver ever showed his face, so they didn’t know which one was Sangamon Taylor. This sampling wasn’t just for show, or so they thought. All of this shit was going to be analyzed, and embarrassing facts were going to be, shall we say, splattered across the newspapers.

  That had started the day before, with an article in the sports section by well-respected journalist/sportsman, Red Grooten, who detailed, with surprising sophistication, the effects of this swamp’s toxins on sports fishing. Next to it had been a shocking picture of a dead flounder. GEE authorities were quoted as speculating that this entire estuary might have to be closed to fishing.

  In half an hour, the Blowfish would pull into view, and earnest GEE employees would begin examining the riverbanks downstream for signs of toxicity. If they were lucky they’d find a two-headed duck. Even if they found nothing, the fact that they went looking would be reported.

  Tom and I were converging, slowly and quietly, on the real objective.

  7

  Much of New Jersey’s coast is protected from the ocean by a long skinny barrier beach that runs a mile or two offshore. In some places it joins to the mainland, in some it’s wide and solid, and in other places (off Blue Kills, for example) it peters out into islands or sandbars.

  “Kill” is Dutch for “creek.” What we have here is a short, fat river that spreads out into a network of distributaries and marshes when it reaches the sea. The kills are braided together along an estuary that’s supposed to be a wildlife refuge.

  The estuary was north of us. The town of Blue Kills and the little principality of Blue Kills Beach were built on higher and dryer ground on its south side. The whole area was semiprotected from the Atlantic by a dribble of isles and sandbars. We were out on the toxic lagoon enclosed behind them.

  I’d been studying my LANDSAT infrared photos so I knew where to find a shrub- and tree-covered island pretty close to our target, about a mile off Blue Kills Beach. We beached the Zodiac among the usual clutter left behind by teen beer-chugging expeditions. Tom checked his gear and climbed into the Darth Vader Suit.

  Normally divers wear wet suits, which are thick and porous. Water gets through them, the body warms the water up, they insulate you. But you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that when you are screwing around with toxic waste. So the Darth Vader Suit was built around a drysuit, which is waterproof. I’d added a facemask made from diving goggles, old inner tubes, a patching kit, and something called Tennis Shoe Repair Goo. When you wrestled it down over your face, the scuba mouthpiece fit into the proper orifice and there was kind of a one-way valve over your nose so you could breathe out. When it was put on correctly, it would protect you from what you were swimming through, at least for a little while.

  Tom didn’t like drysuits but he wasn’t arguing. Before he put it on, we protected the parts of his skin that would be uncomfortably close to leaks or seams in the Darth Vader Suit. There’s a silicone sealant that’s made for this kind of thing—Liquid Skin. Smear it on and you’re semiprotected. The suit goes on over that. We equipped him with a measuring tape, a scuba notepad, and an underwater 8-mm video camera.

  “Just one thing. What’s coming out of this sucker?”

  “Amazing things. They’re making dyes and pigments back in there. So you have your solvents. You have your metals. And lots of weird, weird phthalates and hydrazines.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Don’t drink it. And when you’re done, take a nice swim out here, where the water’s cleaner.”

  “This kind of shit always bugs me.”

  “Look at it this way. A lot of toxins are absorbed through the lungs. But you’ve got a clean air supply in those tanks. A lot more get in through your skin. But there’s not enough solvents in that diffuser, I think, to melt the suit.”

  “That’s what they told us about Agent Orange.”

  “Shit.” There was no reason for me to be astonished. I just hadn’t thought of it before. “You got sprayed with that stuff?”

  “Swam through the shit.”

  “You were a SEAL?”

  “Demolition. But the Viet Cong didn’t have much of a navy so it was mostly blue-collar maintenance. You know, cleaning dead buffaloes out of intake pipes.”

  “Well, this stuff isn’t like Agent Orange. No dioxin involved here.”

  “Okay. You’ve got your paranoia and I’ve got mine.”

  We were being paranoid. I’d already admitted it. After our midnight ride through Brighton he had a pretty good idea of how my mind worked.

  “I don’t care if they see me checking out their pipe on the surface, Tom. I don’t even care if they recognize me. But if they see a diver, that’s a giveaway. Then they know they’re in trouble. So just bear with me.”

  So he climbed into the water and I towed him, submerged, to a place where the water turned black. Then I cut the motor. He thumped on the bottom of the Zode.

  I gave him a minute to get clear, then restarted the motor and just idled back and forth for a few minutes. I already had pretty good maps, but this was a chance to embellish them, note down clumps of trees, docking facilities, hidden sandbars, and media-support areas. About half a mile south was a public pier belonging to a state park; then, moving north, there was a chainlink fence running down to the water, separating park land from the Swiss Bastards’ right-of-way. A few hundred feet past that was another fence and then some private property, some old retired-fishermen’s homes.

  The Swiss Bastards’ right-of-way was deceptively wooded. When the wind came up a little, the trees sighed and almost covered the rush-hour roar of the parkway. Just out of curiosity, I took the Zode closer to shore and scanned the trees with binoculars. One of the rent-a-cops loitering back there was giving himself away by his cigarette smoke. Or, knowing the habits of rent-a-cops, maybe it was oregano somebody had sold him as reefer.

  I knew what direction the pipe ran, so I could follow it inland using my compass, trace its path under some swampy woods and crackerbox developments, out to the parkway, a couple of miles inland. Then a forest of pipes rose up behind the real forest. Whenever the wind blew the right way, I got a whiff of organic solvents and gaseous byproducts. The plant was just coming alive with the morning shift, the center of the traffic noise. Tomorrow I’d make a phone call and shut it all down.

  The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it’s easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger.

  No chemical crime is perfect. Chemical reactions have inputs and outputs and there’s no way to make those outputs disappear. You can try to eliminate them with another chemical reaction, but that’s going to have outputs also. You can try to hide them, but they have this way of escaping. The only rational choice is not to be a chemical crook in the first place. Become a chemical crook and you’re betting y
our future on the hope that there aren’t any chemical detectives gunning for you. That assumption isn’t true anymore.

  I don’t mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of them all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don’t have the balls to take preventive measures, punitive action doesn’t even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don’t know what to do. They don’t even look for violators.

  I do look. Last year I went on an afternoon’s canoe trip in central Jersey, taking some sample tubes with me. I went home, ran the stuff through my chromatograph, and the result was over a million dollars in fines levied against several offenders. The supply-side economists made it this way: created a system of laissez-faire justice, with plenty of niches for aggressive young entrepreneurs, like me.

  A rubber-coated hand broke the water ahead of me and I cut the motor. Tom’s head emerged next to the Zodiac and he peeled back the Darth Vader mask to talk. His mouth was wide open and grimacing; he was surprised. “That is one big motherfucker.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s so long I can’t swim to the end of it. I’ll need a lift.”

  “And there’s black shit coming out of it?”

  “Right.” Tom placed the little video camera on the floor of the Zode. I picked it up, rewound the tape, put the camera to my face and started to replay the tape through the little screen in the view-finder. “Some shots of the diffusers,” Tom explained. “Each one is three and a quarter inches in diameter. The crossbar is three-eighths inch.”

  “Nice job.”

  “Wasn’t doing much when I showed up, then it started really barfing that stuff out.”

  “Morning shift. You missed the rush hour when you were down there. Let’s see.”