Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  She did, but nothing better than what I’d already seen. There was another copy of that same picture. The intern had also discovered a vague little article from the late Sixties saying that Basco had put some “junk machinery” on the floor of the Harbor, giving the usual feeble excuse.

  “They claim that this junk was going to become a habitat for marine life. You don’t buy that?”

  Bless her, she did know how to blow my lid. “Rebecca, goddammit, since the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of its shit into the ocean has claimed that it was going to become a habitat for marine life. It’s the goddamn ocean, Rebecca. That’s where all the marine life is. Of course it’s going to become a habitat for marine life.”

  “You think those things pose an environmental hazard today?”

  “Nothing compared to those transformers. I’ve got Basco in my crosshairs, Rebecca.”

  “I don’t think I can print that in the paper, S.T.”

  “I just don’t have any ammunition in my magazine.”

  “Look. Do you want to do the article? S.T. on Pleshy?”

  “Can’t. Not yet. Have to figure out what’s going on.” I leaned forward and looked ponderous. “If I seem a little stressed out, well… the FBI is after me.”

  “You’re kidding, S.T.!”

  “Recess. I’ll get back to you when Basco’s in the grave.”

  When I’d gotten back from that lovely chat with Laughlin and Dolmacher, there’d been a message waiting for me, a worried message from Gallagher’s wife. It was still early enough in the day to catch him on his boat, and I needed an excuse to get out on the water. I persuaded Rebecca to drive me downtown, got on the Zodiac, and buzzed around to Gallagher’s berth in Southie. He was still out on the water somewhere. So I persuaded one of the neighboring boats to hail him on the CB, and in about twenty minutes I was screaming flat-out across calm water to intercept the Scoundrel, which was just returning from the Bay.

  They recognized me at a distance, since I’m the only one who travels in that way, and cut their engines so I could come up alongside.

  “Jeez! You guys run into an oil slick?” I said when I got close enough to talk. Maybe it was the late-afternoon light, but they were all dark, greyish looking. They mumbled some kind of defiant, bullshit response. They sounded tired. I tossed one of them my bow line and then they helped me scramble on board.

  They all stood around and stared at me, quieter than they’d ever been, sunk, depressed. The reason their skin was dark was that they were covered with chloracne.

  “You guys have been into some bad chowder,” I said in a weak murmur, but Gallagher, skipper of the plague ship Scoundrel, held up his hands and cut me off.

  “Listen. Listen, S.T., we stopped setting our traps there. I swear to God we haven’t touched any of them oily lobsters.”

  When was this damn thing going to start making any sense? Why did I feel like such an asshole? “You absolutely didn’t eat any of those oily ones?”

  “Only Billy. The guy you saw at Fenway.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Fine. He felt real sick and took a couple days off, stopped eating lobster.”

  Billy came up from belowdecks. He was pristine. A little residual scabbing from his old case of chloracne.

  “But you guys have been eating lobster and you got sick.”

  “Yeah. Real bad, just in the last couple of days. So we switched to Big Macs.”

  “Good.”

  “But it’s getting worse anyway. When I left this morning, S.T., I was okay, I really was. But now I feel like shit.”

  “The lobsters that you ate since the last time I talked to you—”

  “Goddamn it, S.T., I’m telling you the God’s truth. We looked at them all real careful and they didn’t smell oily, they didn’t taste oily.”

  “Where’d you get ’em?”

  “All over the Harbor. Mostly Dorchester Bay.”

  That didn’t help me at all. Dorchester Bay was a pocket of water below South Boston, ringed with sewer overflows—CSOs—but not much industry. It was three or four miles east-southeast of the area I’d been concentrating on.

  “Have you pulled up any traps that were oily?”

  “Yeah. We put one down near Spectacle, just as a test, you know. See, S.T., we’re starting to become invironmintles. Pulled it up this morning. Check this out, S.T.”

  I knew it had to be bad because they had just chucked the whole thing into a Hefty bag and left it out on the fantail. I pulled it open and looked. There was no lobster in there, but the trap was still glistening with oil. It had all dripped off the trap and run down into one corner of the bag where I could grab it and squish it around and feel it through the plastic. Oily, but transparent. This trap had been dipped in PCBs.

  This was orders of magnitude worse than the lobster Tanya had found—the lobster had just had a few drops of the stuff, built up slowly over time.

  There was more to this business, but I had no idea what. Each new piece of evidence directly contradicted the last.

  Billy ate oily lobsters and got poisoned. When he stopped eating them he got better. Fine. But the rest of the crew never did. They got poisoned anyway. They stopped eating them but it didn’t help. Where were they getting PCBs?

  “The only thing I can think is that you’re absorbing them from traps like this one,” I said. “You didn’t try burning anything, did you? Any old traps or ropes?”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Beats me. But let me just warn you that PCBs don’t burn. They just turn into dioxin and escape into the air.” Maybe someone was running a clandestine toxic waste incinerator in Southie. I just don’t know.

  “Activated charcoal,” I said. “Go home and buy some aquarium charcoal. Grind it up fine, heat it up, and eat it. Give yourself an enema.”

  It took me a while to make them believe that. “Or you could grind up some briquets very fine. Don’t use the self-lighting kind.”

  “Yeah, we’re not dumb micks, S.T.”

  “Sorry. Ever hear of an activated charcoal filter? The carbon grabs onto organic molecules, anything that’s reactive, and holds it long enough for your body to get rid of it.”

  Gallagher laughed. “Okay. I’ll tell my wife we’re getting an aquarium. Just what I need, more frickin’ fish.”

  By the time I got the Zode back downtown, filled the gas tanks, made it back to the office, loaded myself down with diving equipment, got it all back to the yacht club and hit the water again it was dark and a little bit foggy. Which was fine by me. I was a little dark and foggy myself; I didn’t even know what I was going to look for, or where.

  The oily trap—now, that was evidence. No gas chromatograph was needed, just my trusty schnozz. It contradicted the evidence from the gas chromatograph at the university but, by now, contradictions seemed par for the course. I was willing to believe the most recent piece of evidence to drift past me.

  I’d gotten Gallagher to show me, on a chart, exactly where he’d pulled that trap. A quarter-mile north of Spectacle Island, in sort of a depression in the sea floor. I could go down into it and look for puddles of oil. For fifty-five-gallon drums or old Basco transformers. We’d already sampled the area, though, and found nothing at all.

  What would that prove anyway? It wouldn’t help with the real mysteries—why my analysis was all fucked up; why Gallagher was sick.

  Maybe it wasn’t PCBs at all. Maybe some other form of organic chlorine, that didn’t taste oily, didn’t show up in our analysis. That was the only plausible way for those guys to get poisoned. I could be dealing with two separate problems here: a busted transformer dumped thirty years ago by Basco, causing oily traps, and some other kind of subtle, nasty waste-dumping, something really new and vicious. New technologies were being invented all the time out on Route 128, and new forms of toxic waste along with them. Maybe someone was using the CSO system to get rid of their corporate shit—flushing it down the
toilet during heavy rains, knowing it would immediately overflow into the Harbor and never be noticed down at the sewage treatment plants. It was coming from one of Dorchester Bay CSOs and contaminating lobsters in that area.

  That was the thing to look for, then. Take a sample from Dorchester Bay and analyze it. Analyze it every which way, look for every damn thing under the sun: bromine and fluorine and the other compounds that could mimic chlorine. If nothing else, it would help me rule out this new hypothesis. And if I found something, I could trace it to a particular CSO, and then I had the criminals by the balls. Each CSO drains a specific set of toilets in a specific part of town. By lifting the right manhole covers, paying a lot of attention to my sewer maps, I could trace the trail right back to the perpetrator.

  This strategy had another advantage as well: I wouldn’t have to dive as deep. Diving just isn’t my thing. Under normal conditions it’s scary enough, but diving at night, in murky water, with no backup—that was fucking stupid. I was only doing it because I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax until I did something. So I anchored my Zodiac a hundred feet off the shore and worked from there.

  First I just found the bottom and nosed around some. In front of me was a CSO that had littered the bottom with condoms, toilet paper and other sewage for at least half a mile out. Behind me, I suspected, was a huge PCB spill. In between was total confusion: lobsters saturated with poison, bottom sludge that was utterly clean, clean-looking lobsters that gave massive doses of chloracne to the people who ate them.

  There was a lobster crawling on an old oil drum right in front of me. I gave the drum a poke with my knife and it crumbled; there couldn’t be anything in there. Then the lobster and I did hand-to-hand combat. I pretended it was Laughlin. Couldn’t smell it or taste it, but I had enough time to chop it open and find its liver.

  It had no liver, just sacs of oil, like the one Tanya had found. I scooped its viscera into a jar and took it with me. Maybe it was PCBs, maybe something completely different. So I swam into the shallow water and mucked around a little, breaking the water every so often to get my bearings, until I’d located the CSO pipe. Thank God it wasn’t raining.

  Having taken a good jarful of sludge from right under the pipe, I surfaced, trod water and studied the shoreline. I needed to know which CSO I was dealing with here, triangulating off the positions of U. Mass, South Boston High, Summer Street, and other landmarks. When I was convinced I could pin this place down on a map, I decided to call it a day.

  While I was heading for the Zodiac I heard a propeller, or maybe more than one, and that bothered me because when I broke the water earlier, I hadn’t been able to see any running lights. Somebody was nearby, using the fog to hide, and I had to guess he was hiding from me.

  So I started one very slow orbit, and that’s how I found the Cigarette. Sitting there with its motor idling, just far enough away that I couldn’t see it from the Zode. It could see me because it was running dark. But the lights on my boat would splash against the surrounding fog and make it impossible for me to see them.

  What now? I could try to get a close look at them. But they might have a negative attitude about that. Somehow I didn’t relish my chances if they decided to chase me down. Besides, I was running out of air, and I couldn’t stay underwater that much longer.

  I could abandon the Zode and swim to shore on the surface, but why abandon ten thousand bucks worth of GEE equipment? These guys were just watching me. And they’d been watching me for a long time. I’d even provoked them once before, and all they did was run away. I didn’t burn down my house when the FBI bugged it, did I?

  So the only sensible idea was to go back to the Zode and proceed normally. But that’s exactly what they were expecting me to do. It irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I’m forced to do exactly what’s expected. But when you run out of air, you run out of air.

  The best tactic was stealth. I swam back under the surface, broke the water on the far side of the Zode, in case they were using infrared, and started to take my stuff off while remaining in the water. My one concession to paranoia was dropping some gear: I just let the empty tank sink to the bottom because hauling it up into the Zode would be noisy and time consuming. Same with the clanky weight belt. It was just some chunks of lead and a nylon strap.

  The problem was that I had to haul myself up into the boat. I weighed more than all that other crap together. Getting over the side of the Zode wasn’t like hopping over a fence. It was more like sumo wrestling in a pool filled with Crisco.

  So I tried to be quiet about it until I accidently made a godawful amount of noise, and then I just tried to be quick about it. And at about the same time, I heard the Cigarette’s engines rev up, heard it being thrown into gear. That scared the shit out of me and I waddled to the back of the Zode and began hauling on the ripcord, trying to start up the outboard. I hauled on it like a maniac about three times, felt something pop in my back, and then the Cigarette materialized like a ghost, shiny and blue and slippery, and I finally got to look at the owners. They were wearing ski masks. One of them was driving and the other was staring at me through unnaturally large binoculars. These were high-tech, Route 128 thugs: they had me on infrared. The driver’s eyes glinted pale blue; Kleinhoffer or Dietrich. The other one set his binocs down and aimed a gun at me.

  I remembered having tried to pistol-shoot at Jim Grandfather’s, noticing how hard it actually was, after having watched TV and movies my whole life, to actually hit something with a handgun. These guys were on a small boat and so was I. I didn’t figure they were going to nail me with one shot. Which didn’t prevent me from being scared shitless; when I saw the gun, I fell back on my ass, tipping the whole Zode up. The Cigarette overshot me and had to turn around for another pass.

  That gave me time to notice a little surprise they’d left behind: a pair of small darts stuck into the side of my Zodiac, and they were sputtering at me, throwing off a transparent bluish light. I’d heard about this from Dolmacher. It was a Tazer. If I hadn’t fallen back, those darts would be stuck in my skin and that electrical charge would be running through my nervous system. And I’d be unconscious, or wishing I was, long enough for them to rev up and run over me in their Cigarette at about eighty miles an hour. Sorry, officer, it was foggy.

  The wake of the Cigarette was throwing the Zode around like a teeter-totter. Something heavy smashed into my foot. It was our big nautical strobe light. So when the Cigarette cruised by me for the second attempt, I turned the strobe on, held it over my head like a basketball, and made a three-point jump shot right into their cockpit.

  “Nice second effort, boys!” I hollered. The light had half-blinded me, too, but I didn’t need perfect vision to start the motor. They needed it to take a shot at me.

  Time for another try at the motor. This time I did it right: set the throttle on start and choked it. Three more hauls on the ripcord and it started.

  Then it died. I put the choke back in and hauled once more, getting a good start. I had to lean way over to shift it into forward gear and that’s how I got tossed out of the boat.

  Kleinhoffer and Dietrich weren’t total losers. While they were clearing the purple spots out of their vision they could buzz me and throw me around with their thousand-horsepower wake. It had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I had gotten the Zode into forward gear, but I got tangled up with the throttle handle when I was tumbling out, so now the motor was cocked all the way over to one side. It was puttering around in tight little circles, a little faster than I could swim. The Cigarette came around once more and I had to assume that Old Deadeye was using his infrared specs. If it had been calm they would have seen me instantly, but tonight, thank God, it was a little choppy.

  The immediate problem was that my throat and nose were full of water and I hated to draw attention to myself by coughing and sneezing it out. So I tucked my head under the surface, blew some of it out and swallowed the rest. Yummy. Then I didn’t have any air in m
y lungs so I had to come up and breathe.

  My turn for a break. The Zodiac was spiraling in my direction. I just tried to present a small target, to look like a wave, and to dog-paddle toward it. The Cigarette was tearing back and forth, trying to locate my head with its propellers.

  This went on maybe ten minutes. Between trying to breathe, trying to hide, coping with the tsunami wakes of the Cigarette and trying to get closer to the Zodiac, it was hard to keep track of time.

  The Zodiac’s bow rope brushed over my leg and I grabbed it. That was a nice reminder: if I let it trail behind me, it would get caught in the propeller. What other useful tips had Artemis given me? One thing for damn sure: take it reasonably easy; don’t give it full throttle right off the bat or it would just do a backflip and toss me into the Harbor again.

  Finally I got the prow of the Zodiac right up in my face, waited for the Cigarette to overshoot me, then threw myself up over the nose and into the boat. That was the theory, anyway. In reality it took a little longer than that so, as I was crawling on my hands and knees back toward the outboard, I looked up and saw the Cigarette cruising by me, slow and methodical, and I saw that Tazer gun pointed in my direction.

  The gun didn’t make any sound. I didn’t even know I was hit until I felt a hot buzzing sensation in the arm of my wetsuit. But that was all I felt.

  “You assholes,” I shouted, “it’s a rubber suit!”

  Artemis would have been proud: I throttled it up slowly, establishing a stable attitude in the water. Then I ripped it open and blew right past the bow of the Cigarette. It was choppy, but not that bad, and I was aiming for Zodiac nirvana here: the boat airborne, just the screw in the water. At that speed, the water might as well be asphalt. The Cigarette slices through it, the Zodiac just skitters—like being dragged down a cobblestone street by forty rabid mustangs.