Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  “Okay, you’re asking me: why is chlorine so incredibly toxic in dioxin and not in table salt?”

  “I guess that’s what I’m asking.”

  “Two reasons. First, what it’s attached to. That biphenyl or dibenzodioxin structure—the twelve-pack—dissolves easily in fat. Once it gets into your body fat, it never leaves.”

  “That’s what they said about the Agent Orange, that it sits in your body forever.”

  “Right. That’s the first bad thing. The second bad thing is, the chlorine there is in covalent form, it’s got the normal number of electrons, whereas the chlorine in salt is in ionic form. It’s got an extra electron. The difference is that covalent chlorine is more reactive, it has these big electron clouds that can fuck up your chromosomes”. And it slips right through your cell membranes. Ionic chlorine doesn’t—the cell membranes are made to stop it.”

  “So the six-packs are like the vehicle, the gunboat, and the chlorines are like the soldiers with the machine guns who ride on it.”

  “Yeah, and the electrons are their ammunition. They ride up and down the river—your bloodstream—and slip into your cells and shoot up your chromosomes. The difference between that and table salt is that table salt is inorganic, ionic chlorine—soldiers without a boat, with no ammunition—and this other stuff is organic, covalent chlorine—bad stuff.”

  Tom sat back, raised his eyebrows. “Well then, if you think I’m going to go down there, forget it.”

  “Look, that’s fine, and I don’t blame you, but let me just say that I’m as paranoid as anyone and I went down there. I’m pretty sure we can do this without getting contaminated.”

  “I’ll do other diving but I won’t go to the bottom. I got enough of this shit in my body already.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I phoned Esmerelda. After this was over we’d have to give her an honorary membership in the group. If GEE was like the Starship Enterprise, then I was Scotty and she was Spock.

  We had an extremely pleasant chat about her granddaughter’s brand new pink dress, which had involved roughly a hundred manhours of shopping, and about the weather and the Sox. Standing in the library, she spoke quietly, and I always found my own voice dwindling to a whisper during these conversations. It was like talking to an important Japanese warlord. You had to hem and haw and nibble around the edges for a few hours, just to be polite, before you got to the point.

  “There’s some kind of intern working there, a woman, working with The Weekly?”

  “Yes. She had a little trouble threading the microfilm machines but now she’s doing just fine.”

  “If someone ever invents a self-threading microfilm machine, half you guys are going to be out of a job. No offense to you.”

  “How can I help you, S.T.?”

  “If that woman comes up with anything really interesting, could you shoot me a copy?”

  “About Mr. Pleshy?”

  “You know it.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Something with photos in it. That always makes them nervous. Would you mind?”

  “Certainly not. Is there anything else?”

  “No. Just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “Have fun, S.T.” That’s how she always said goodbye to me. She must have some queer ideas about my job.

  The next day we organized, and the day after that we did it. With another diver from the Boston office I swam around scooping muck into sample jars. We’d hand them off to Tom, who’d relay them up to the Zodiac, where Debbie was waiting. That way we wouldn’t have to decompress every time we had a full load of samples. Debbie was our navigator, using landmarks on shore to judge our position and mark down roughly where each sample came from. We could plot the results later on. If the PCB concentration increased sharply in one direction, that would give us a clue as to where the source was. If we were really lucky, we’d be able to track it down, probably to a few barrels on the bottom.

  The ultimate success would be to find some barrels with PCB still in them, and to get some photos. We couldn’t salvage them ourselves, but the EPA probably could and, more important, they probably would. We could save the Harbor a lot of grief and we might find evidence that would lead us to the criminals.

  I didn’t want Debbie sitting out there alone on a Zodiac. We knew the Pöyzen Böyzen people had a boat, and they seemed to know a hell of a lot about who we were and where we hung out. So we looked through our donor list and found a couple of yacht owners, then convinced them that it really would be fun to spend a day bobbing around in the Harbor, showing the flag. We hoisted another Toxic Jolly Roger, persuaded Tanya’s black-belt squeeze to join up, and ferried a few media people out from Castle Island Park. Rebecca came, as did the starving freelancer and the reporter from the Globe. So far it was background.

  We started roughly where I’d taken my first sample and worked our way outwards, covering about half a square mile of the Harbor floor. We ended up with thirty-six peanut butter jars full of raw sewage, and some very sore muscles.

  There’s one advantage of hanging out with groovsters: they give good massage. A couple of hours of massage, beer, nitrous oxide, and Stooges after a day of diving—nothing could beat it.

  The next day we began to run the samples and got semidisastrous results. Disastrous for me—we weren’t reading any PCBs at all. This was unbelievable—there had to be contamination inside the machine—and the whole operation went on hold for two days while I took the gas chromatograph apart, piece by piece, cleaned each one, and put it back together. Pure joy.

  Then I started to test the samples again. No one had stuck around for the two days of cleaning, so by this time I was working alone. No matter, I got exactly the same goddamn results. The level of PCBs in these samples was no different from those taken anywhere else in the Harbor.

  As we headed south, in the direction of Spectacle Island, the concentration dropped rapidly—not what I’d expected—and to the north of Spectacle we couldn’t get any PCB readings at all. It was totally virgin.

  The Granola James Bond, the Toxic Spiderman, had fucked up. I’d overreacted to some oily lobsters, seen a guy with excema and called it chloracne. Then I’d gotten a bad sample, or run it wrong, and rushed the gig.

  It was hard to believe, but I had no choice. The only other possibility was that the culprits had somehow hoovered up the PCBs while I was shuffling papers. But that kind of a Cecil B. DeMille operation would have cost billions.

  It happens. Seen from the laboratory, the universe looks a lot more complicated than it does in your neat mental blueprints. But this time it really burned my ass. Debbie could have helped, but I didn’t give her a chance. To be lonely and pissed feels better. So after I’d gone through the burning embarrassment, the denial and the anger, I got down into some serious depression.

  It was raining, cool for the season, and I wandered drunkenly until I hit an obstacle: a huge, overdressed throng in the marketplace. On a sunny weekend this wouldn’t have been unusual, but today it was a little out of place. Then I saw the banners, the buttons, all the cheap, shimmering detritus of a political campaign, and heard The Groveler’s voice ringing dingily out of some big speakers.

  These were just the groundlings out here. Bostonians practice idolatry in their politics—Curley, Kennedy, O’Neill, now Pleshy. Inside were the bigshots, the power structure of so-called liberal Massachusetts politics. All the people who bleated about cleaning up the Harbor until they discovered that people like Pleshy were responsible for making it dirty.

  This was too disgusting to witness, so I turned on my heel and headed across into Government Center. A couple of Secret Service types were watching me; one had stopped to buy a soft pretzel on the curb, and when I went past him we nodded at each other.

  At a phone booth I called the Boss collect, and told him I had to get the fuck out of town, that I needed a vacation.

  “You deserve it,” he said.

 
; “GEE deserves it,” I said. “I’m so into my job that I’m fucking up.

  Thank God Project Lobster was over with and I could say goodbye to skeptical lobstermen. They’d never let me forget this one. Busting into the middle of a ball game in Fenway to give them dire, unbelievable warnings, then showing up a week later and taking it all back; exactly the image I’d been fighting all along.

  I remembered Hoa’s busboy giving me that sneer, that duck-squeezer look, and decided to eat Chinese for a while.

  “Where are you going on vacation?” the Boss asked.

  “Shit, I don’t know, just hang around town.”

  “How about Buffalo?”

  “Buffalo?”

  “Why not?” he said, sounding terribly innocent.

  “Let me tell you a story about Buffalo. Last time I drove through there was in the middle of a windstorm. Huge, record-setting windstorm. Sixty-miles-an-hour winds in broad daylight. It was clear, but there was so much dust in the air that the light turned all brown, you know? And you couldn’t even stand outside because the wind was picking up goddamn rocks, little pebbles, and flinging them through the air like hailstones. And I got to this place on the way to the bridge, in between a couple of embankments with big petrochemical tanks on either side of the road. Your basic industrial Mordor. The embankments acted like a wind tunnel and they were picking up coal dust off a huge pile beside the highway and so I was driving downhill through this thick, black, sulfurous cloud, sticks and stones hailing down against my windshield, caught between a couple of semis carrying gasoline, and I said to myself, shit, I accidentally took the off-ramp to Hell.”

  “The Blowfish got there ahead of schedule,” the Boss said, “and we’ve got an extra project that needs doing.”

  “Forget it.”

  “It involves plugging a dioxin pipeline.”

  A good boss always knows how to dangle the right thing in front of your nose.

  “And we’ll pay your way. Debbie’s going.”

  That meant I could go on the train, in a sleeper coach, with Debbie in there too.

  I cruised home to pack, only to discover a little display was waiting for me. Someone had grabbed a stray neighborhood cat who hung around our home sometimes—Scrounger—and had beaten his skull in, then wrapped an unbent coat hanger around its neck and strung it up in front of the door.

  I cut Scrounger down, carried him around to the side and threw him into the garbage, burying the carcass under some other trash so my housemates would be spared the sight. Out back, I noticed some spots of blood on the ground, and followed them straight to the murder weapon: a fist-size hunk of concrete, smeared with blood.

  The house had been broken into through the back, and trashed. Not a thorough trashing, but a decent effort nevertheless. The TV was kicked in, as was my computer screen. They’d even yanked up the bottom half of the computer, a separate box, and stomped on it a few times. A lot of food was strewn around the kitchen in the messiest way possible, and they’d poked a screwdriver into the tubes in the freezer and let all the freon evaporate.

  And there was a black handprint on the door to my room, at about eye level.

  Fake Mafia or real Mafia, I had no way of knowing. But I was damn tired and depressed; I just wanted out of town. My big scandal had turned into a bad joke. And now someone was getting violent. Game over, case closed.

  17

  Ionic chlorine’s easy to get. It’s in seawater, as Tom Akers pointed out. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.

  And it’s just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current—a stream of electrons—flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This process is called Chloralkali.

  Simple enough. But to make industrial quantities of DDT, or PCBs, or solvents, or whatever it is you’re shooting for, you need industrial quantities of chlorine. That takes a lot of electrical power. And if you want to manufacture a Niagara of chemicals, guess what? You need a Niagara-sized power source.

  Hence Buffalo. Its blessing, the beautiful Falls, was also its curse. And even though the Falls were getting all broken down and full of rocks, all those chlorine compounds remained. We call it toxic waste. Without Chloralkali, toxic waste would hardly exist. The only hazardous waste that doesn’t flow from that fountain is the heavy-metal variety, and heavy metals are a pretty small trickle in the toxic stream. Chloralkali, also known as Niachlor (Niagara + chlorine) is virtually synonymous with toxic waste.

  Despite all my moaning and bitching, it’s getting tougher to be a toxic polluter in this country. In the last three decades, especially since about 1974, the Chloralkali business has taken a nosedive, down by about forty percent. I’m shooting for a hundred.

  Going after the chemical industry in Buffalo meant going after Boner Chemicals—which was like shooting ducks in a barrel while half a million people stood around cheering you on—and this time it was going to be even easier. We didn’t have to use shotguns on those toxic ducks anymore, because a friend of ours in Albany was providing us with flamethrowers.

  The EPA is so anemic, and this country so dirty, that they have to contract out a lot of their work. After the toxic catastrophe in Buffalo, they farmed some work out to a group of chemical consultants in Albany, similar to Mass Anal. In effect, that gave these consultants subpoena power over Boner, the sole cause of the catastrophe. They got to raid Boner’s files and cart off the relevant maps and documents. They learned toxic secrets that would turn your blood to dioxin.

  One of the consultants resigned because he wanted to build a geodesic-dome house and start his own computer software company. I think you know the kind of guy I’m talking about. He got involved with GEE. He no longer had any secret documents, but he knew how to operate a Xerox machine. When my train pulled into Albany on its way to Buffalo, he joined Debbie and me in our sleeper coach; we poured him a Screwdriver and talked about things to come. His name was Alan Reading.

  Debbie and I had kept the bunks fastidiously folded away. We’d talked all the way from Boston to Springfield, paused so I could read the last couple of days’ Wall Street Journal, and were just getting into the terrible subject of Commitment when we pulled into Albany. We weren’t exactly in a good mood.

  We sat in the coach and studied a bunch of documents that Alan had illegally xeroxed. One was quite interesting: a map of the main Boner plant, showing in detail the boundary between Boner property and the public streets. There was an indentation in the boundary: a street that ran for half a block into Boner territory and then dead-ended. It was still public property, though it was surrounded on three sides by the plant. The only reason it existed was as a place to put a manhole. There was a sewer line running from the middle of Boner Chemical out to Buffalo’s general sewer system. This line ran along underneath the dead-end street; at the end of that street, right up against the gate to Bonerland, was a manhole. Alan happened to know that at this very spot, Boner Chemical was dumping dioxins into the sewers.

  “This is great stuff,” I told him. “I have something you might want to read too.” And I showed him the Journals. Seems as though another big corporate merger was in the offing. Basco was buying out Boner.

  “Why on earth would anyone want to own it?” Alan mumbled. “It’s a black hole.”

  “If it makes money on paper, for the first year, it must be a good investment.”

  Debbie had other things to concentrate on. Up at the Falls, she and the Blowfish people had some big splashy affair planned for the media, involving Canadians and Indians. It appeared that the Indians in upstate New York, the Seven Na
tions, continued to approve of us.

  This wasn’t always the way it worked. GEE scouts were always pursuing the Indians, asking to sleep in their teepees and groove on their most sacred ceremonies. You couldn’t be cool in some GEE circles unless you’d seen the inside of a Lakota sweat lodge; it was like a fetish. Usually the Indians were tolerant, but not always. The night before, I’d been on the computer, poking around in GEE’s international message system, and learned that one of our boys was in the hospital in Rapid City. He had been smoking the peace pipe with some Sioux and had taken it upon himself to put in some marijuana. So they broke his arm. Little misunderstandings like this were common, and I was always amazed when the Northeastern tribes showed any interest at all in working with us. They had as much to lose from being slowly poisoned by large corporations as anyone, I guess. Maybe more, since they tended to be fishermen or factory workers.

  A donated car was waiting for us in Buffalo, a half-devastated Subaru with loose speakers dangling out of the door panels and eco-stickers all over the windows. I dropped Alan and Debbie off at the marina where the Blowfish was parked. They were having a party for local supporters and I couldn’t bear the thought of it. Sometimes, actually, I do feel like having fun, pretending to be charming, putting on my suit with the toxic tennis shoes, regaling local environmentalists with war stories, describing the variety of crap they have in their tap water. But other times, like now, I just wanted to drive around in the dark and look for trouble.

  We were going to be plugging a few pipes here, I knew that much. Pipe-plugging technology is pretty well established by now. For pipes less than about four feet across, you just stack bags of cement in them. The cement swells up and gets hard.

  If the pipe gets any larger, you have to plug it with a disk of some kind. But that’s hard to do if any significant amount of crap is pouring out of the pipe, because it obviously tends to force the disk out. So you have to use a butterfly plug, which was invented by one of our people in Boston who has since gone into the computer biz. You cut the disk in half down the middle and fold the halves together, pointing them upstream, like the wings of a butterfly. You install it in that position and then release the sides of the disk. The pressure hits them and they slam open, sealing against the walls of the pipe. Then you can add extra devices to complicate removal if you really want to be an asshole. For example, you can clamp the plug on with C-clamps, then saw off the screws.