Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  “Happy hunting.” He and his kid stood there on their nice Belmont street, holding hands and waving to us, as we drove away.

  28

  This Dolmacher guy had no sense of personal responsibility. We needed him, damn it. Never thought I’d say that about Dolmacher, but we did. He’d invented the fucking bugs, nursed them, grown them, knew all about their life cycles, what they needed in the way of food and temperature and pH. If we made him settle down, if we grilled him, we could find out a simple way to massacre those bacteria. But no. He had to go up to the land of orange hats to seek revenge on Pleshy. And probably get killed in the process.

  We headed north. It was 1:00 A.M. on a Friday night. Within a couple of hours we’d found Survival Game headquarters—a fairly new log cabin built up against some private forest. As we were pulling around into a parking space, our headlights swept through the cockpits of several parked cars, mostly beaters from the Seventies, and we caught brief silhouettes of men in baseball caps sitting up to look at us. Jim and I unrolled some sleeping bags on the ground, quietly, and went to sleep. Boone drove out to scavenge some newspapers and see if he could figure out Pleshy’s schedule for the next couple of days.

  I didn’t sleep at all. Jim pretended for half an hour, then went over to a payphone on the wall of the cabin and made a call to Anna.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked when he got back.

  “I didn’t think you were asleep,” he said.

  “Nah. Boone’s sleeping bag smells like Ben-Gay and hydrogen sulfide. So I’m lying here trying to imagine what kind of action he went out on where he got real sore muscles and made contact with that type of gas. And I’m waiting for the next bulletin from my colon.”

  “She’s fine,” he said. “Went into Rochester today looking for wallpaper.”

  “Redoing your house?”

  “Bit by bit, you know.”

  “That leads me to ask why you’re here and not there.”

  “Beats me. This is a white man’s screwup if ever there was one. But you helped me once and now I gotta help you.”

  “I release you from the obligation.”

  “You don’t have anything to do with it. It’s an internal thing, within me, you know. I have to stay with this a while longer or I won’t have any self-respect. Besides, shit, it’s kind of fun.”

  Boone got back a little before dawn, totally wired. He had hit every café in a twenty-mile radius, drunk a large coffee, and scooped up loose newspapers off the counter.

  “He’s at the Lumbermen’s Festival,” Boone said, “north of here, less than an hour.”

  “Staying there tonight?”

  “Who the fuck knows, they don’t put that kind of stuff in the newspaper.”

  “Going to be there all day?”

  “Morning. Then to Nashua later. Looking at high-tech firms. With your pal Laughlin.”

  “How fitting.” I was stirring through his damn newspapers with both arms. “You asshole, didn’t you bring the comics?”

  Boone was all hot to go straight to the Lumberman’s Festival, but Jim persuaded him that we couldn’t do much when it was still dark. I thought it was interesting that these Survival Game players went to the trouble to drive up here the night before and sleep in the parking lot—they must hit the trail at dawn.

  Sure enough, a huge four-wheel-drive pickup pulled into the one reserved space at about 5:00 A.M. It was tall and black and equipped with everything you needed to drive through a blizzard or a nuclear war. A guy got out: not the stringy, hollow-eyed Vietnam vet I’d expected but a big solid older guy, more of the Korean generation. I heard people coming alive in the cars all around us.

  Jim and I caught up with him while he was undoing the three deadbolts on the front door. “Morning,” he said, ignoring me and taking a lot of interest in Jim. I knew he’d do that. That’s why I’d persuaded Jim to get out of his warm sleeping bag and come up here with me.

  “Morning,” we said, and I added, “you guys get an early start up here.”

  He pressed his lips together and beamed. There are certain people who are just genetically made to get up at four in the morning and wake everyone else up. They usually become scoutmasters or camp counselors. “Interested in the Survival Game?”

  “I’ve got this friend named Dolmacher who’s told me all about it,” I said.

  “Dolmacher! Hoo-ee! That guy is a demon! Surprised I didn’t see his car out there.” He led us into the cabin, turned on the lights, and fired up a kerosene space heater. Then he hit the switch on his coffee maker. I caught Jim looking at me wryly. This was the kind of guy who put the coffee grounds and water in his Mr. Coffee the night before so all he had to do was switch it on in the morning. A natural leader.

  “Is Dolmacher pretty good at this?” Jim said.

  The guy laughed. “Listen, sir, if we gave out black belts at this game, he’d be, I don’t know, fifth or sixth dan. He’s got me completely bamboozled.” The guy sized Jim up and nodded at him. “Course, you might have better luck.”

  “Yeah,” Jim said, “my fifteen years as a washing machine repairman have really honed my instincts.”

  The guy laughed heartily, taking it as a friendly joke. “You ever done this kind of thing before?”

  “Just bowhunting,” Jim said. Which was news to me. I thought he’d killed all that venison with his big fancy rifle.

  “Well, that’s real similar, in a lot of ways. You have to get close, because you’re using a short-range weapon. And that means you have to be smart. Like Dolmacher.”

  I suppressed a groan. In this company, Dolmacher was probably considered an Einstein.

  “I thought you used guns,” Jim said.

  “Handguns. And they’re all C02-powered. So the effective range is pretty short. Here.”

  He unlocked a gun cabinet full of largish pistols. He showed us where the C02 cartridge went in, and then showed us the ammunition: a squishy rubber ball, marble-sized, full of red paint.

  “This thing hits you and ploosh! You’re marked. See, totally nonviolent. It’s a game of strategy. That’s why Dolmacher’s so good at it. He’s a master strategist.”

  We told the guy that we’d get back to him. When we got back to the parking lot, Boone was standing in a semicircle of awed survivalists, explaining how to defeat a Doberman Pinscher in single combat without hurting it.

  “Nice to see you’re getting back to your old self,” I told him, when we finally dragged him back into the truck.

  “Those guys are troglodytes,” he said. “Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle.”

  “Maybe we should start an institute on nonviolent terrorism.”

  “Catchy. But if it’s not violent, there’s no terror involved.”

  “Boone, you sound like those guys. There’s more to life than firepower. I think it’s possible to create some terror just by confronting people with their own sins.”

  “What’s your problem, you grow up Catholic or something? Nobody gives a shit about their sins anymore. You think those corporate execs worry about sin?”

  “Well, they’ve poisoned people, they’ve broken the law, and when I show them up in the media, they get real bothered by it.”

  “That’s just because it’s bad for business. They don’t really feel guilty.”

  By now Jim had us out on the highway. He pointed the silver Indian’s face northwards and depressed the accelerator.

  “How about Pleshy?” Boone said. “You think he feels guilty? You think he’s scared? Shit no.”

  “They’re still human beings, Boone. I’ll bet he’s scared shitless. He created a disaster.”

  “Yeah, he’s showing all the symptoms of a man paralyzed with fear,” Boone said, consulting one of his newspapers. “Let’s see, ten o’clock, ax-throwing competition. Ten-thirty, grand marshal of logrolling contest. He’s running sacred all right.”

  “What do you expect him to do, run to Boston and hide? Look Boone, the guy is slick.
He’s got his gnomes working on the problem. Like Laughlin. Shit, I wonder what that bastard Laughlin’s up to. Pleshy’s job is to go around looking brave. But if someone confronted him, right in front of the TV cameras …”

  Boone and I locked eyes for about a quarter of a mile, until Jim got nervous and started looking over at us. “You guys are nuts,” he said, “you’ll get popped. Or shot.”

  “But at the very least he’d break a sweat,” I said.

  “I’ll buy that,” Boone said.

  “And we could publicize the whole thing.” I was remembering my last action in New Hampshire—at the Seabrook nuclear site, years ago. We all got arrested, never made it onto the site. Some of us even got the crap beat out of us. But we got it on the news. And the reactor was still sitting there, uncompleted, a decade later.

  “You’d have to get real close,” Jim said. “Secret Service, you know.”

  “They’ll be totally loose,” Boone said. “What do they have to worry about? A dwarf like Pleshy—nobody even remembers the guy’s name—early in the campaign, at an ax-throwing contest in New fuckin’ Hampshire. Shit, if I was going to assassinate him, this is when I’d do it.”

  We found Dolmacher’s car easily enough. The Lumbermen’s Festival was staged in one of the many postage-stamp state parks scattered around New Hampshire, and there just weren’t that many ways to get into it. We knew he wasn’t going to park his car conspicuously, or illegally. He was going to park it like a proper Beantown leaf-peeper and then he was going to fade into the woods. And that was exactly what he’d done. We found it at a roadside camping/picnicking area, near the head of a nature-appreciation trail.

  “Very clever,” Jim said. “No one would expect him there.”

  I looked in the windows but didn’t see much. One pharmaceuticals bottle, half-hidden under the seat. No ammo belts or open tubes of camouflage paint. Dolmacher was taking a remarkably buttoned-down approach to this totally insane mission.

  Maybe the bugs could affect your brain. The media had been speculating all week that my contact with toxic wastes had fried my cerebral cortex, turned me into a drooling terrorist. I felt pretty calm, but Dolmacher had gotten a much worse dose, and was less stable to begin with. He hadn’t turned into a raving maniac. He was acting more like the psychotics you read about in the newspapers: calm, methodical, invisible.

  Jim was sitting in the truck, messing around with something, and Boone was watching intently. I went over, stood on the running board, and looked. Jim had pulled one of his homemade bows out from behind the seat.

  “This is the Nez Percé model,” he explained. “See, the limbs are strengthened with a membrane that comes from the inside of a ram’s horn. They used bighorn sheep, but I get by using domesticateds.”

  “What the fuck are you going to do with that, Jim?”

  “What the fuck are you going to do when you catch Dolmacher, S.T.? Remember? Your gun’s on the bottom of that lake.”

  “Wasn’t planning on shooting him anyway.”

  “You’re a real prize, you know that? What do you think we’re doing here? It’s my understanding that we’re going after a psycho with a gun.”

  “Only because we have to have his knowledge. We won’t have that if we fill him full of arrows.”

  “You underestimate me, S.T.” Jim pulled a bundle of arrows out from behind the seat. The shafts were straight and smooth, feathers at the back as usual, but without heads.

  “Fishing arrows,” Boone said.

  Jim nodded and held one up for me. One short barb stuck backwards from the point, and a short perpendicular piece was lashed to the shaft about three inches behind that.

  “This keeps it from going all the way through the fish, the barb keeps it from pulling out. Now, a game arrow, with the big head, that kills by severing a lot of blood vessels. The animal bleeds to death. But this will just stick into a big animal and annoy him.”

  I guess I still looked skeptical.

  “Look, the guy said Dolmacher has a black belt in this game. If you think he’s going to let us sneak up close enough to pluck the gun out of his hand, you’re nuts.”

  “Okay. But if the Secret Service comes after us, you have to toss all that crap into the bushes.”

  “Obviously. Hell, this isn’t for assassinations anyhow. It’s the equivalent of a C02 gun with paint pellets.”

  29

  Boone insisted that he was the one. “Hell, you just tried to blow the guy up a week ago,” he kept pointing out. “Your face is a 3-D wanted poster. They’ll pop you. But everyone’s forgotten about me. Unless Pleshy’s secretly in the whaling business.”

  I couldn’t argue with any of that. We agreed that Jim and I were going to hike up the trail and Boone was going to take the truck. He would swing around to the site of the Lumbermen’s Festival and scope out the place. There wasn’t any point in planning this out, because it was all random. If Pleshy happened to walk past him, he’d take the opportunity to stand up and state his case, get some media glare on Pleshy’s reaction. If it was impossible to get near Pleshy, he’d forget about that, head for the back of the crowd and look for a tall, pale, psychotic nerd with his hand in his coat.

  “Maybe we should call the cops and tell them Dolmacher’s out there,” Jim said at the last minute.

  This was not an idea that had occurred to me. Frankly, if Pleshy ate a few bullets it was okay with me. I was worried about Dolmacher—probably the only guy in the world who knew how to stop this impending global catastrophe. He could easily get shot in the bargain. Even if he didn’t, they’d truck him off to the loony bin where he wouldn’t be of any use.

  “Screw Pleshy. We have to coopt Dolmacher.”

  “If we warn them, they’ll step up their security,” Boone said. “We won’t be able to get close to Pleshy.”

  “We have plenty of time to chase down Dolmacher,” Jim explained. “And if we give the cops a complete description, they’ll spend all their effort looking for him. That’ll make it easier for anyone who doesn’t look like Dolmacher to get close.”

  “Jim’s right,” Boone said. “If this all falls apart and we get popped, and Dolmacher gets found, they’ll want to know why we didn’t warn them. They’ll say we’re all working together. If we warn them, we’re set up as good guys.”

  So we drove half a mile down the road to a gas station with a payphone, and I called the cops. We decided it should be me, because whatever I said would get recorded, and it would look good if we had this proof that I was terribly concerned about Pleshy’s welfare.

  “I can’t give my identity because I’m being framed for a crime I didn’t commit,” I said, “and which only an asshole would think I really did—” Boone kicked me in the leg “—but this should help prove my innocence. I think an attempt is going to be made on Alvin Pleshy’s life today at the Lumbermen’s Festival.” And I gave a complete description of Dolmacher, emphasizing all the ways he didn’t look like Boone, and there were plenty of those.

  “Uh… okay. Okay. Okay,” the woman at the police station kept murmuring, all through the conversation. Definitely the shy type. Not equipped for presidential assassinations.

  Finally, then, Boone dropped us off at the trail and headed around for the Festival.

  Here I was totally incompetent, so I just followed Jim. He was wearing a kind of bulky, tattered overcoat that he kept in his truck for purposes like changing the oil. He had his bow underneath. It looked kind of stupid, but anything was better than brandishing a primitive weapon around the SS. He was half-running down the trail in kind of a crouch, keeping his head turned to one side. I was glad he knew bowhunting, that would help us. But I got to thinking about Dolmacher’s black belt in survivalism, and I wondered just how clever and paranoid he was. There was only a mile, maybe a mile-and-a-half, of forest between us and the festival site: across some flats, up a ridge, down the other side. He had plenty of time. Wouldn’t it make sense to go in a ways, then double back on the trail to se
e if we were being followed?

  Naah. Who would follow him, why would he worry?

  Because he’d been holding up drugstores. Maybe someone had gotten his license plate number. Maybe—I was just putting myself in his shoes, here—maybe his car had been noticed and they were sending in the cops.

  How would cops do it? A frontal assault. Dozens of men, spaced a few feet apart, combing the whole area. He couldn’t gun them all down.

  Well, maybe he could, if he had a silenced weapon. And I wouldn’t put it past Dolmacher to own a silencer, or even a submachine gun. He’d always had an obsession for Uzis and MAC-10s and such in college; this had clearly continued into his wiser years, and now, God help him, he had enough income to supply an arsenal.

  Poor Dolmacher. All that priceless knowledge, that world-saving information about the bug, attached to a stunted personality. If we could stop him—not if damn it, we were going to stop him—we’d have to deal with that personality for the next several days. A grim prospect either way.

  Next question: what would he do if a couple of individuals came after him? First of all, they’d never find him without a dog. Jim knew a few things about tracking, but I doubted he was that good. If they did find him, they’d be in danger. Witness Bathtub Man.

  Where the hell was Jim, anyway? I’d looked away and then he was gone. I went on for a few yards and stopped. Wouldn’t be very smart to call out his name. There was kind of a gap in the foliage along the trail, so I stepped into it, wandered a few yards into the forest, and there he was, pissing on a tree.

  “He probably came this way,” Jim said.

  “I don’t get it. How can you tell?” I’ve never understood trackers.

  He shrugged, continuing what was turning out to be an epic piss. “I can’t tell. But the festival is off in this direction. There’s an obvious opening in the trees here, it’s just the easiest way to go. There are some tracks right there that look pretty fresh.”

  He nodded and I looked. The ground was wet and kind of muddy. Someone’s size 13s had definitely passed through here. Not that Dolmacher was that tall. His wrists and ankles were like broomsticks. But his hands and feet belonged on a pro basketball player. Whoever it was, he’d been wearing those heavy-duty Vibram-soled running shoes that affluent people nowadays used instead of ten-ton waffle-stompers. Good traction combined with light weight.