Zodiac_ The Eco-Thriller Part 1

Zodiac_ The Eco-Thriller.

by Neal Stephenson.

Zodiac-THE INMATES

1

ROSCOMMON CAMEand laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually pa.s.ses out on the shoulder of some freeway. My landlord and I have an arrangement. He charges me and my housemates little rent-by Boston standards, none at all-and in return we let him play fast and loose with our ecosystem. Every year at about this time he destroys my garden. He's been known to send workmen into the house without warning, knock out walls in the middle of the night, shut off the water while we shower, fill the bas.e.m.e.nt with unidentified fumes, cut down elms and maples for firewood, and redecorate our rooms. Then he claims he's showing the dump to prospective tenants and we'd better clean it up. p.r.o.nto.This morning I woke to the sound of little green pumpkins exploding under the tires of his station wagon. Then Roscommon stumbled out and tore down our badminton net. After he left, I got up and went out to buy a Globe. Wade Boggs had just twisted his ankle and some PCB-contaminated waste oil was on fire in Southie.When I got back, bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics-my favorite carcinogen by a long shot. Bartholomew was standing in front of the stove. With the level, cross-eyed stare of the involuntarily awake, he was watching a heavy-metal video on the TV. He was clenching an inflated Hefty bag that took up half the kitchen. Once again, my roommate was using nitrous oxide around an open flame; no wonder he didn't have any eyebrows. When I came in, he raised the bag invitingly. Normally I never do nitrous before breakfast, but I couldn't refuse Bart a thing in the world, so I took the bag and inhaled as deep as I could. My mouth tasted sweet and five seconds later about half of an o.r.g.a.s.m backfired in the middle of my brain.On the screen, poodle-headed rockers were strapping a cheerleader to a sheet of particle board decorated with a pentagram. Far away, Bartholomew was saying: "Poyzen Boyzen, man. Very hot."It was too early for social criticism. I grabbed the channel selector."No Stooges on at this hour," Bart warned, "I checked." But I'd already moved us way up into Deep Cable, where a pair of chaw-munching geezers were floating on a nontoxic river in Dixie, demonstrating how to push-start a comatose fish.Tess emerged from the part of the house where women lived and bathrooms were clean. She frowned against the light, scowling at our bubbling animal flesh, our cubic yard of nitrous. She rummaged in the fridge for some homemade yogurt. "Don't you guys ever lay off that stuff?""Meat or gas?""You tell me. Which one's more toxic?""Sangamon's Principle," I said. "The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide-a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol-nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms." '"So?""Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they'll do. It is my understanding, Tess, that you've been referring to me, about town, as a 'Granola James Bond'."Tess didn't give a f.u.c.k. "Who told you about that?""You come up with a cute phrase, it gets around.""I thought you'd enjoy it.""Even a horse's a.s.s like me can detect sarcasm.""So what would you rather be called?""Toxic Spiderman. Because he's broke and he never gets laid."Tess squinted at me, implying that there was a reason for both problems. Bart broke the. silence. "s.h.i.+t, man, Spider-man's got his health. James Bond probably has AIDS."I went outside and followed Roscommon's tire tracks through the backyard. All the pumpkins were destroyed, but I didn't care about these decoys. What could you do with a pumpkin? Get orange s.h.i.+t all over the house? The important stuff-corn and tomatoes-were planted up against fences or behind piles of rubble, where his station wagon couldn't reach.We'd never asked Roscommon if we could plant a garden out here in the Largest Yard in Boston. Which, because it wasn't supposed to exist, gave him the right to drive over it. Gardens have to be watered, you see, and water bills are included in our nominal rent, so by having a garden we're actually ripping him off.There was at least an acre back here, tucked away in kind of a s.p.a.ce warp caused by Brighton's irrational street pattern. Not even weeds knew how to grow in this field of concrete and brick rubble. When we started the garden, Bartholomew and Ike and I spent two days sifting through it, putting the soil into our plot, piling the rest in cairns. Other piles were scattered randomly around the Largest Back Yard in Boston. Every so often Roscommon would dynamite another one of his holdings, show up with a rented dump truck, back across the garden, through the badminton net, and over some lawn furniture, and make a new pile.I just hoped he didn't try to stash any toxic waste back there. I hoped that wasn't the reason for the low rent. Because if he did that, I would be forced to call down a plague upon his house. I would evacuate his bank accounts, b.u.m his villages, rape his horses, sell his children into slavery. The whole Toxic Spiderman bit. And then I'd have to becomethe penniless alter ego, the Toxic Peter Parker. I'd have to pay real Boston rent, a thousand a month, with no s.p.a.ce for badminton.Peter Parker is the guy who got bit by the radioactive spider, the toxic bug if you will, and became Spiderman. Normally he's a nebbish. No money, no prestige, no future. But if you try to mug him in a dark alley, you're meat. The question he keeps asking himself is: "Do those moments of satisfaction I get as Spiderman make up for all the c.r.a.p I have to take as Peter Parker?" In my case, the answer is yes.In the dark ages of my life, when I worked at Ma.s.sachusetts a.n.a.lytical Chemical Systems, or Ma.s.s a.n.a.l for short, I owned your basic VW van. But a Peter Parker type can't afford car insurance in this town, so now I transport myself on a bicycle. So once I'd fueled myself up on coffee and Bart's baco-cinders-nothing beats an all-black breakfast-and read all the comics, I threw one leg over my battle-scarred all-terrain stump-jumper and rode several miles to work.Hurricane Alison had blown through the day before yesterday, trailed by h.e.l.lacious rainfall. Tree branches and lakes of rainwater were in the streets. We call it rainwater; actually it's raw sewage. The traffic signal at Comm Ave and Charlesgate West was fried. In Boston, this doesn't lead to heartwarming stories in the tabloids about ordinary citizens who get out of their cars to direct traffic. Instead, it gives us the excuse to drive like the Chadian army. Here we had two lanes of traffic crossing with four, and the two were losing out in a big way. Comm Ave was backed up all the way into B.U. So I rode between the lanes for half a mile to the head of the cla.s.s.The problem is, if the two drivers at the front of the line aren't sufficiently aggressive, it doesn't matter how tough the people behind them are. The whole avenue will just sit there until it collectively boils over. And horn honking wasn't helping, though a hundred or so motorists were giving it a try-When I got to Charlesgate West, where Comm Ave was cut off by the torrent pouring down that one-way four-Ianer, I found an underpowered station wagon from Maine at the head of one lane, driven by a mom who was trying to look after four children, and a vintage Mercedes in the other, driven by an old lady who looked like she'd just forgotten her own address. And half a dozen bicyclists, standing there waiting for a real a.s.shole to take charge.What you have to do is take it one lane at a time. I waited for a twenty-foot gap in traffic on the first lane of Charlesgate and just eased out into it.The approaching BMW made an abortive swerve toward the next lane, causing a ripple to spread across Charlesgate as everyone for ten cars back tried to head east. Then he throbbed to a halt (computerized antilock braking system) and slumped over on his horn b.u.t.ton. The next lane was easy: some Camaro-driving freshman from Jersey made the mistake of slowing down and I seized his lane. The a.s.shole in the BMW tried to cut behind me but half the bicyclists, and the biddy in the Benz, had the presence of mind to lurch out and block his path.Within ten seconds a huge gap showed up in the third lane, and I ate it up before Camaro could serve over. I ate it up so aggressively that some Clerk Typist II in a Civic slowed down in the fourth lane long enough for me to grab that one. And then the dam broke as the Chadian army mounted a charge and reamed out the intersection. I figured BMW, Camaro, and Civic could shut their engines off and go for a walk.Pedestrians and winos applauded. A young six-digit lawyer, hardly old enough to shave, cruised up from ten cars back and shouted out his electric sunroof that I really had b.a.l.l.s.I said, "Tell me something I didn't know, you f.u.c.king android from h.e.l.l."The Ma.s.s Ave Bridge took me over the Charles. I stopped halfway across to look it over. The river, that is. The river and the Harbor, they're my stock in trade. Not much wind today and I took a big whoof of river air in my nostrils, wondering what kind of c.r.a.p had been dumped into it, upstream, the night before. Which might sound kind of primitive, but the human nose happens to be an exquisitely sensitive a.n.a.lytical device. There are certain compounds for which your schnozz is the best detector ever made. No machine can beat it. For example, I can tell a lot about a car by smelling its exhaust: how well the engine is tuned, whether it's got a catalytic converter, what kind of gas it b.u.ms.So every so often I smell the Charles, just to see if I'm missing anything. For a river that's only thirty miles long, it has the width and the toxic burdens of the Ohio or the Cuy-ahoga.Then through the MIT campus, through the milling geeks with the fifty-dollar textbooks under their arms. College students look so d.a.m.n young these days. Not long ago I was going to school on the other side of the river, thinking of these trolls as peers and rivals. Now I just felt sorry for them. They probably felt sorry for me. By visual standards, I'm the sc.u.m of the earth. The other week I was at a party full of Boston yuppies, the originals, and they were all complaining about the panhandlers on the Common, how aggressive they'd become. I hadn't noticed, myself, since they never panhandled me. Then I figured out why: because I looked like one of them. Blue jeans with holes in the knees. Tennis shoes with holes over the big toes, where my uncut toenails rub against the toeclips on my bicycle. Several layers of t-s.h.i.+rts, long underwear tops, and flannel s.h.i.+rts, easily adjustable to regulate my core temperature. s.h.a.ggy blond hair, cut maybe once a year. Formless red beard, trimmed or lopped off maybe twice a year. Not exactly fat, but blessed with the mature, convex body typical of those who live on Thunderbird and Ding-Dongs. No briefcase, aimless way of looking around, tendency to sniff the river.Though I rode through MIT on a nice bike, I'd sprayed it with some cheap gold paint so it wouldn't look nice. Even the lock looked like a piece of s.h.i.+t: a Kryptonite lock all scarred up by boltcutters. We'd used it to padlock a gate on a toxic site last year and the owners had tried to get through using the wrong tools.In California I could have pa.s.sed for a hacker, heading for some high-tech company, but in Ma.s.sachusetts even the hackers wore s.h.i.+rts with b.u.t.tons. I pedalled through hacker territory, through the strip of little high-tech shops that feed off MIT, and into the square where my outfit has its regional office.GEE, the Group of Environmental Extremists. Excuse me: GEE International. They employ me as a professional a.s.shole, an innate talent I've enjoyed ever since second grade, when I learned how to give my teacher migraine headaches with a penlight. I could cite other examples, give you a tour down the gallery of the broken and infuriated authority figures who have tried to teach, steer, counsel, reform, or suppress me over the years, but that would sound like boasting. I'm not that proud of being a congenital pain in the a.s.s. But I will take money for it.I carried my bike up four flights of stairs, doing my bit for physical fitness. GEE stickers were plastered on the risers of the stairs, so there was always a catch phrase six feet in front of your eyes: SAVE THE WHALES and something about the BABY SEALS. By the time you made it up to the fourth floor, you were out of breath, and fully indoctrinated. Locked my bike to a radiator, because you never knew, and went in.Tricia was running the front desk. Flaky but nice, has a few strange ideas about phone etiquette, thinks I'm all right. "Oh, s.h.i.+t," she said."What?""You won't believe it.""What?""The other car.""The van?""Yeah. Wyman.""How bad?""We don't know yet. It's still sitting out on the shoulder."I just a.s.sumed it was totalled, and that Wyman would have to be fired, or at least busted down to a position where he couldn't so much as sit in a GEE car. A mere three days ago he had taken our Subaru out to buy duet tape, and in a parking lot no larger than a tennis court, had managed to ram a concrete light-pole pedestal hard enough to total the vehicle. His fifteen-minute explanation was earnest but impossible to follow; when I asked him to just start from the beginning, he accused me of being too linear.Now he'd trashed our one remaining s.h.i.+tbox van. The national office would probably hear of it. I almost felt sorry for him."How?""He thinks he s.h.i.+fted into reverse on the freeway.""Why? It's got an automatic transmission.""He likes to think for himself.""Where is he now?""Who knows? I think he's afraid to come in.""No. You'd be afraid to come in. I might be afraid. Wyman won't be afraid. You know what he'll do? He'll come in fresh as a daisy and ask for the keys to the Omni."Fortunately I'd taken all the keys to the Omni, other than my own, and hammered them into slag. And whenever I parked it, I opened the hood and yanked out the coil wire and put it in my pocket.You might think that the lack of coil wire or even keys would not stop members of the GEE strike force, Masters of Stealth, Scourge of Industry, from starting a car for very long. Aren't these the people who staged their own invasion of the Soviet Union? Didn't they sneak a supposedly disabled, heavily guarded s.h.i.+p out of Amsterdam? Don't they skim across the oceans in high-powered Zodiacs held together with bubble gum and bobby pins, coming to the rescue of innocent marine mammals?Well sometimes they do, but only a handful have those kinds of talents, and I'm the only one in the Northeast office. The others, like Wyman, tend to be ex-English majors who affect a hysterical helplessness in the face of things with moving parts. Talk to them about cams or gaskets and they'll sing you a protest song. To them, yanking out the Omni's coil wire was black magic."And you got three calls from Fotex. They really want to talk to you." "What about?""The guy wants to know if they should shut their plant down today."The day before, talking to some geek at Fotex, I'd mumbled something about closing them down. But in fact I was going to New Jersey tomorrow to close someone else down, so Fotex could keep dumping phenols, acetone, phthalates, various solvents, copper, silver, lead, mercury, and zinc into Boston Harbor to their heart's content, at least until I got back."Tell them I'm in Jersey." That would keep them guessing; Fotex had some plants down there also.I went back to my office, cutting across a barnlike room where most of the other GEE people sat among half-completed banners and broken Zodiac parts, drinking herbal teas and talking into phones:"500 ppm sounds good to me.""Don't put us on the back page of the Food section.""Do those breed in estuaries?"I wasn't one of those GEE veterans who got his start spraying orange dye on baby seals in Newfie, or getting beat senseless by Frog commandos in the South Pacific. I slipped into it, moonlighting for them while I held down my job at Ma.s.s a.n.a.l. Partly by luck, I broke a big case for GEE, right before my boss figured out what an enormous pain in the a.s.s I could be. Ma.s.s a.n.a.l fired, GEE hired. My salary was cut in half and my ulcer vanished: I could eat onion rings at IHOP again, but I couldn't afford to.My function at Ma.s.s a.n.a.l had been to handle whatever walked in the door. Sometimes it was genuine industrial espionage-peeling apart a running shoe to see what kinds of adhesives it used-but usually it amounted to a.n.a.lyzing tap water for the anxious yuppies moving into the center of Boston, closet environmentalists who didn't want to pour aromatic hydrocarbons into their babies any more than they'd burn 7-Eleven gasoline in their Saabs. But once upon a time, this guy in a running suit walked in and got routed to me; _ anyone who wasn't in pinstripes got routed to me. He was brandis.h.i.+ng an empty Doritos bag and for a minute I was afraid he wanted me to check it for dioxins or some other granola nightmare. But he read my expression. I probably looked skeptical and irritated. I probably looked like an a.s.shole."Sorry about the bag. It was the only container I could find on the trail.""What's in it?""I'm not sure."Predictable answer. "Approximately what's in it?""Dirt. But really strange dirt."I took the Doritos bag and emptied it out all over the comics page of the Globe. I love the comics, laughing out loud when I read them, and everyone thinks I'm a simpleton. The runner let out kind of a little snort, like he couldn't believe this was how I did chemistry. It looks impressive to pour the sample into a fresh Pyrex beaker, but it's faster to spread it out over Spiderman and Bloom County. I pulled the toothpick out of my mouth and began to pop the little clods apart. But that was just for the h.e.l.l of it, because I already knew what was wrong with this dirt. It was green-and purple and red and blue. The runner knew that, he just didn't know why. But I had a pretty good idea: heavy-metal contamination, the kind of really nasty stuff that goes into pigments. "You jogging in hazardous waste dumps, or what?" I asked. "You're saying this stuff's hazardous?" "f.u.c.k, yes. Heavy metals. See this yellow clump here? Gotta be cadmium. Now, cadmium they tested once as a poison gas, in World War I. It vaporizes at a real low temperature, six or seven hundred degrees. They had some people breathe that vapor." "What does it do?" "Gangrene of the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es."The jogger inhaled and s.h.i.+fted his pair away from my desk. One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time. "Where?""Sweetvale College. Right on campus. There's a wooded area there with a pond and a running trail."I, a B.U. graduate, was trying to imagine this: a college campus that had trees and ponds on it."This is what it looks like," the guy continued, "the dirt, the pond, everything." "Colored like this?" "It's psychedelic."Despite being a chemist, I refuse psychedelics these days on the grounds that they violate Sangamon's Principle. But I understood what he was getting at.So the next day I got on my bike and rode out there and d.a.m.ned if he wasn't right. At one end of the campus was this weedy patch of forest, sticking out into a triangle formed by some of the Commonwealth's more expensive suburbs. It wasn't used much. That was probably just as well because the area around the pond was a heavy-metal sewer, and I ain't talking about rock and roll. Rainbow-colored, a little like water with gasoline floating on it, but this wasn't superficial. The colors went all the way down. They matched the dirt. All the colors were different and-forgive me if I repeat myself on this point-they all caused cancer.From my freshman gut course in physical geography at Boston University, I knew d.a.m.n well this wasn't a natural pond. So the only question was: what was here before?Finding out was my first gig as a toxic detective, and the only thing that made it difficult was my own jerk-a.s.s fumbling in the public library. I threw myself on the mercy of Esmerelda, a black librarian of somewhere between ninety and a hundred who contained within her bionic hairdo all knowledge, or the ability to find it. She got me some old civic doc.u.ments. Sure enough, a paint factory had flourished there around the turn of the century. When it folded, the owner donated the land to the university. Nice gift: a square mile of poison.I called GEE and the rest was history. Newspaper articles, video bites on the TV news, which didn't look that great on my black-and-white; state and federal clean-up efforts, and a web of lawsuits. Two weeks later GEE asked me to a.n.a.lyze some water for them. Within a month I was chained to a drum of toxic waste on the State house steps, and within six, I was Northeast Toxics Coordinator for GEE International.My office was the size of a piano crate, but mine nonetheless. I wanted a computer on my desk, and none of the other GEE honchos would risk sharing a room with one. Computers need electrical transformers, some of which are made with PCBs that like to vaporize and ooze out of a computer's ventilation slots, causing miscarriages and other foul omens. The boss gave me his office and moved into the big barnlike room.The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our "office manager," started painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them to toxic fumes millions of times more concentrated than what I was getting from my computer. But they didn't notice because they're used to paint. They paint things all the time. Same deal with the stuff they spray on their underarms and put into their gas tanks. Gomez wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn't let him.Esmerelda, ever vigilant, had shot me a bunch of greasy xeroxes from the microfilm archives. They were articles from the Lighthouse-Republican of Blue Kills, N.J., a small city halfway down the Jersey Sh.o.r.e which was shortly to feel my wrath. It was the kind of newspaper that was still running Dennis the Menace in the largest available size. A Gasoline Alley, Apartment 3-G, and Nancy kind of paper.The articles were all from the sports section. Sports, as in hunting and fis.h.i.+ng, which take place outdoors, which is where the environment is. That's why environmental news is in the sports section.Esmerelda had found me four different articles, all written by different reporters (no specialist on the staff; not considered an important issue) on vaguely environmental subjects. A local dump leaching c.r.a.p into an estuary; a freeway project that would trash some swamp land; mysterious films of gunk on the river; and concerns about toxic waste that could be coming from a plant just outside of town, operated by a large corporation we shall refer to as the Swiss b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Along with the Boston b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, the Napalm Droids, the Plutonium Lords, the Hindu Killers, the Lung a.s.sa.s.sins, the Ones in Buffalo, and the Rhine-Rapers, they were among the largest chemical corporations of a certain planet, third one out from a certain mediocre star in an average spiral galaxy named after a candy bar.Each of the articles was 2500 words long and written in the same style. Clearly, the editor of the lighthouse-republican ruled with an iron hand. Local residents were referred to as Blukers. Compound sentences were discouraged and the inverted-pyramid structure rigorously followed. The PR flacks who worked for the Swiss b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were referred to by the old-fas.h.i.+oned term "authorities," rather than the newer and s.e.xier "sources."My only worry was that maybe this editor was so f.u.c.king old and decrepit that he was already dead, or even retired. On the other hand, it seemed he was a dyed-in-the-wool "sportsman," a type traditionally long-lived, unless he'd spent too much time slos.h.i.+ng around in a particular toxic swamp. Esmerelda, accustomed to my ways, had sent a xerox of the most recent masthead, which didn't show any changes. The senior sports editor was Everett "Red" Grooten and the sports-page editor was Alvin Goldberg.Raucous laughter probably sounded from my office. Tricia hung up on Fotex's PR director and shouted "S.T., what are you doing in there?" Called the florist and had them send the usual to Esmerelda. Cranked up my old PCB-spitter and searched my files. "Fish, marine, sport, Mid-Atlantic, effects of organic solvents on." "Estuaries, waterfowl populations of, effects of organic solvents on." These were old boilerplate paragraphs I'd written long ago. Mostly they referred to EPA studies or recent research. Every so often they quoted a "source" at GEE International, the well-known environmental group, usually me. I directed the word processor to do a search-and-replace to change "source" to "authority."Then I pulled up my press release about what the Swiss b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were pumping into the waters off Blue Kills, which my gas chromatograph and I had discovered during my last trip down there. Threw it into the center of the piece and then composed a hard-hitting topic sentence in basic d.i.c.k-and-Jane dialect, no compound sentences, announcing that Bluker sportsmen might be the first ones to feel the effects of the "growing toxic waste problems" centered on the Swiss b.a.s.t.a.r.ds' illegal dumping. Hacked it all into an inverted-pyramid shape, and ended up with 2350 words. Put on a final paragraph, the lowly capstone of the pyramid, mentioning that some people from GEE International, the well-known environmental group, might be dropping by Blue Kills any day now.Opened up my printer and put in a daisy wheel that produced a typeface that went out of style in the Thirties. Printed the article up on some unpretentious paper, stuck it in an envelope along with some standard GEE photos of dead flounder and two-headed ducks, suitable for the Lighthouse-Republican's column width. Federal Expressed it to one Red Grooten at his home address, because I had this idea that maybe he didn't stop by the office all that often. So this fine lady was lending us the Omni, no strings attached, and paying the insurance as well. We didn't even know who she was.Normally an Omni is a piece of s.h.i.+t, an econ.o.box with a 1.6-liter engine. But for a higher sticker price you can get an Omni GLH, which has aerodynamic trim and 2.2 liters and, for a few hundred more, an Omni GLH Turbo, which has all of that plus a turbocharger. GLH, by the way, stands for Goes Like h.e.l.l. Honest. When the blower is singing, the engine puts out as much power as a small V8. Add big fat racing tires and alloy wheels and you have yourself a poor man's Porsche, the most lethal weapon ever developed for the Boston traffic wars. Sure, spend three times as much and you could get a car that goes a little faster, but who is seriously going to thrash a vehicle that costs that much? Who'll risk denting it? But if it's an Omni, who cares?I popped in the coil wire, a detail that Gomez richly appreciated-he made sure I knew it too-and we blew out of there. First we had to unload a lot of junk from out of the back to make room for what we were going to strip off the van: the two containers of hydraulic cement had to go. If I felt the urge to plug a pipe between here and Everett, I'd have to fulfill it later. The big, long roll of nylon banner material, the rappelling harness and climbing ropes, an extra outboard-motor gas tank, a Zodiac inflation pump, and the traveling chemistry lab we jettisoned. The laptop computer for tapping into the GEE International databases. The $5000 gas chromatograph. My big magnets. The Darth Vader Suit. We packed it all into the trunk of Gomez's Impala so we wouldn't have to haul it up to the fourth floor.We'd hired Gomez after I'd inadvertently gotten him canned from his previous job as a minimum wage rent-a-cop at one of the state office buildings. Unfortunately for his breed, I make my living by making people like him look like jerks. For weeks we'd been trying to make an appointment with a honcho in the state environmental agency, and he wouldn't even answer our letters.Shortly before Christmas, I dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit and had Tricia and Debbie (one of our interns) dress up as elves. I forged an ID card, complete with a mug shot of Saint Nick and an address at the North Pole, stuffed my Santa sack full of GEE leaflets, and we blew right pastGomez; he was really in the Christmas spirit. We hit on an Untergruppen-secretary who pa.s.sed us on up to an Uber-gruppen-secretary, then three floors up to a Sturmband-secretary, then ten more floors on up to Thelma, the Ubersturmgruppenfuhrer-sectetary, and that poor lady didn't even blink. She led us right into Corrigan's office, the place we'd been trying to penetrate for three months, without even the courtesy of a nasty letter."Ho ho ho," I said, and I was sincere. "Well, Santy Claus!" said Corrigan, that poor jacka.s.s. "What you got there?""I've got a surprise for you, you naughty boy! Ho ho ho!" In the corner of my eye I could see beams of high-energy light sweeping down the hall as the Channel 5 minicam crew stormed past Thelma's vacant desk."What kind of surprise," he said. I upended my pillowcase and treated him to a propaganda blizzard just as the cameraman centered his crosshairs on Corrigan's forehead. We not only got him to agree to a meeting, but also got the agreement broadcast throughout the Commonwealth -just about the only way to make an environmental appointee keep his word. Corrigan hasn't been very nice to me since then, but I did make Thelma's Christmas card list.Anyway, Gomez got fired for accepting my fake ID. We ended up hiring him to do jobs here and there around the office. Nothing illegal. When it came to finding things that needed fixing or painting he was an enterprising guy. To watch him find loose stair treads and peeling paint was to see free enterprise in action. Not unlike my own job.

2

WYMAN CALLED. Wyman, the Scourge of Cars. He wanted the keys to the Omni so that he could drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to see his girlfriend, who was about to leave for Nicaragua. For G.o.d's sake, she could be bayoneted by contras and he'd never see her again. "Where's the van, Wyman?""I'm not telling you until I get the keys to the Omni." So I hung up and called the Metro Police, who told me: on the shoulder, westbound lanes, Revere Beach Parkway, near the bridge over the Everett River. Due to be towed at any moment. I hung up when they asked for my name, grabbed my toolbox and headed out.Gomez heard the wrenches cras.h.i.+ng against the insides of the toolbox, fired the last half of his whole-wheat croissant into the "noncompostable nonrecyclables" wastebasket, where it belonged, and intercepted me at the top of the stairs. "Got a job?""Sure. What the f.u.c.k, come on."The van was right where Wyman had left it, in the dirtiest, the most dangerous, the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Boston. I'm not talking about crack dealers, tenements, or minority groups here. The neighborhood isn't Roxbury. It's the zone around the Mystic River where most of New England's heavy industry is located. It's split fifty-fifty between Everett and Charlestown. I spend a lot of my time up here. Most of the "rivers" feeding into the Mystic are drainage ditches, no more than a couple of miles long. The nation's poisoners congregate along these rivers and p.i.s.s into them. In my Zodiac I have visited them personally, smelled their yellow, brown, white, and red waters, and figured out what they're made of.We could see Wyman's footprints wandering out across the mud flats next to the Everett River, heading for a side street that might lead him to a telephone. I already knew the name of the street: Alkali Lane. We could see the place where he got a whiff of something, maybe, or got close enough to read the name of the street, then spun around and loped back to the nontoxic shoulder, obsessively wiping his Reeboks on the dead ragweed. From there, he'd hitchhiked.Gomez stripped the van in much the same way that a Sioux would dismantle a buffalo. I just concentrated on getting the wheels off, with their brand-new, six-hundred-dollar set of radials that Wyman was going to abandon - a free gift from GEE to a randomly chosen junkyard. I also made sure we got our manhole-lifting tool, which is to me what a keychain is to a janitor. Gomez got the battery, electronic ignition box, ca.s.sette player, sheepskin, jack, lug wrenches, tire chains, half case of Ray-Lube, spare fan belt, alternator, and three gallons of gasoline. He was going after the starter when I officially p.r.o.nounced the van dead.We took the license plates so we could prove to the insurance company that we weren't driving it anymore, and then I removed the Thermite from the glove compartment. It's wise to keep some handy in case you need to weld some railroad rails together. The van's serial number was stamped on its parts and body in three places, all of which I'd noted down, so I put Thermite on each and ignited them with my cigar. Instant slag. Like a Mafia hitter chopping the fingertips off a corpse.The identification numbers were still smoking as we climbed back into the Omni. But immediately a vehicle pulled up behind us, a Bronco II with too many antennas and a flas.h.i.+ng light on the roof."f.u.c.king rent-a-cop," Gomez said. From being one himself, he'd become sensitized to the whole absurd concept.I walked back so I could read the sign on the Bronco's door: BASCO SECURITY. I knew them well. They owned everything on Alkali Lane and most of the Everett River. In fact, if you stepped off the shoulder of the parkway, you were on their property. Then your shoes would dissolve."Morning," said the rent-a-cop, who, like Gomez, was young and skinny. They never had the authority belly of a true Boston cop."Morning," I said, sounding like a man in a hurry, "Can I help you?"He was looking at a picture of me from what looked startlingly like a dossier. Also included were photographic representations of my boss, and of a jerk named Dan Smirnoff, and one I hadn't seen in a while, a fugitive named Boone."Sangamon Taylor?""You got a warrant somewhere. Hey! You aren't a real cop at all, are you?""We got some witnesses. A bunch of us security guards been over there on the main building, watching you here. Now, we know this van.""I know, we're old pals.""Right. So we recognized it when it stopped here last night. And we watched you stripping it. And maybe f.u.c.king with the VIN?""Look. If you want to ha.s.sle me, just go to your boss and say, 'pH'. Just tell him that.""P-H? Isn't that something they put in shampoo?""Close enough. Tell him 'pH thirteen'. And for your sake, get a different job. Don't go out there, into those flats, patrolling around. You understand? It's dangerous.""Oh, yeah," he said, highly amused. "Big criminal element down there.""Exactly. The board of directors of Basco. The Fleshy family. Don't let them kill again."Back at the Omni, Gomez said, "What'd you tell him?""pH. Went here last week and tested their pH and it was thirteen.""So?""So they're licensed for eight. That means they're putting s.h.i.+t into the river that's more than two times the legal limit.""s.h.i.+t, man," Gomez said, scandalized. That was another good thing about Gomez. He never got jaded.And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the s.h.i.+t coming out of fiasco's pipe was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed. The difference between pH 13 and pH 8 was five, which meant that pH 13 was ten to the fifth power-a hundred thousand times-more alkaline than pH 8. That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pa.s.s you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken. But if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably outraged.

3

I HAD GOMEZ DROP ME OFF in Harvard Square so I could eat birdseed and tofu with a reporter from The Weekly. Ditched my cigar. Then I went in to this blond-wood extravaganza, just off the square, allowed the manager to show me her nostrils, and finally picked out Rebecca sitting back in the corner."How's the Granola James Bond?"I nearly unleashed my Toxic Spiderman rap but then remembered that some people actually admired me, Rebecca among them, and it was through admiration and James Bond legends that we got things like free cars and anonymous toxic tips. So I let it drop. Rebecca had picked the sunniest corner of the room and the light was making her green eyes glow like traffic lights and her perfume volatilize off the skin. She and I had been in the sack a few times. The fact that we weren't going to be there in the near future made her a hundred thousand time - oops - more than twice as beautiful. To distract myself, I growled something about beer to a waiter and sat down."We have-" the waiter said, and drew a tremendously deep breath."Genesee Cream Ale.""Don't have that, sir.""Beck's." Because I figured Rebecca was paying."The specialty is sparkling water with a twist," Rebecca said."I need something to wash the Everett out of my mouth.""Been out on your Zode?""Zodiac to you," I said. "And no, I haven't."We always began our conversations with this smart-a.s.sed c.r.a.p. Rebecca was a political reporter and spent her life talking to mushmouths and blarney slingers. Talking to someone who would say "f.u.c.k" into a tape recorder was like benzedrine to her. There was also an underlying theme of flirtation-"Hey, remember?" "Yeah, I remember." "It was all right, wasn't it?" "Sure was.""How's Project Lobster?""Wow, you prepared for this interview. It's fine. How's the paper?""The usual. Civil war, insurrection, financial crisis. But everyone reads the movie reviews.""Instead of your stuff?""Depends on what I'm digging up.""And what's that?"She smiled, leaned forward and observed me with cunning eyes. "Fleshy's running," she said."Which Fleshy? Running from what?""The big Fleshy.""The Groveler?""He's running for president.""s.h.i.+t. End of lunch. Now I'm not hungry.""I knew you'd be delighted.""What about fiasco? Doesn't he have to put all that c.r.a.p into a blind trust?""It's done. That's how I know he's running. I have this friend at the bank."The Fleshy family ran Basco - they'd founded the company - and that made them the number one polluters of Boston Harbor. The poisoners of Vietnam. The avant-garde of the toxic waste movement. For years I'd been trying to tell them how deep in s.h.i.+t they were, sometimes pouring hydraulic cement into their pipes to drive the point home.This year, the Pleshy-in-charge was Alvin, a.k.a. the Groveler, an important member of the team of management experts and foreign policy geniuses that brought us victory in Vietnam.Rebecca showed me samples of his flacks' work: "Many environmentalists have overreacted to the presence of these compounds..." not chemicals, not toxic waste, but compounds "... but what exactly is a part per million?" This was followed by a graphic showing an eyedropper-ful of "compounds" going into a railway tank car of pure water."Yeah. They're using the PATEOTS measuring system on you. A drop in a tank car. Sounds pretty minor. But you can twist it the other way: a football field has an area of, what, forty-five thousand square feet. A banana peel has an area of maybe a tenth of a square foot. So the area of the banana peel thrown on the football field is only a couple of parts per million. But if your field-goal kicker steps on the peel just as time is expiring, and you're two points down ...""PATEOTS?""Haven't I told you about that?""Explain.""Stands for Period At The End Of This Sentence. Remember, back in high school the hygiene pamphlets would say, 'a city the size of Dallas could get stoned on a drop of LSD no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.' A lot easier to visualize than, say, micrograms.""What does that have to do with football?""I'm in the business of trying to explain technical things to Joe Six-pack, right? Joe may have the NFL rulebook memorized but he doesn't understand PCBs and he doesn't know a microgram from c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s. So a microgram is about equal to one PATEOTS. A part per million is a drop in a railway tank car - that's what the chemical companies always say, to make it sound less dangerous. If all the baby seals killed last year were laid end to end, they would span a hundred football fields. The tears shed by the mommy seals would fill a tank car. The volume of raw sewage going into the Harbor could fill a football stadium every week.""Dan Smirnoff says you're working together now."Some beer found its way into my sinuses. I had to give it to Rebecca: she knew her s.h.i.+t.Smirnoff was the whole reason for this conversation. All this c.r.a.p about Fleshy and tank cars was just to get me loosened up. And when I went into my PATEOTS rap, she knew I was ready to be goosed in the 'nads. How many times had I given her my patented PATEOTS rap? Two or three at least. I like a good story. I like to tell it many times. By now she knew: talk to S.T. about eyedroppers and tank cars and he'll fly off the handle. Once I got flying on any toxic theme, she could slip in one tough question while my guard was down, watch my hairy and highly expressive face for a reaction, and glimpse the truth. Or find a basis for all her darkest suspicions."Smirnoff's one of these people I have to have contact with. Like a prison guard has to have contact with a certain number of child molesters.""You'd put him in that category?""No, he's not crafty enough. He's just p.i.s.sed off and very full of himself.""Sounds familiar.""Yeah, but I have a reason to be arrogant. He doesn't.""Patti Bowen at NEST says...""Don't tell me. Smirnoff went to her and said, 'Hey, I'm putting a group together, a direct-action group, more hardhitting than GEE, and Sangamon Taylor is working with me.""That's what Patti Bowen said.""Yeah, well Smirnoff got ahold of me the other day - you understand, I just hung up on the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, because I don't want the FBI to even imagine him and me on the same line - so he tracked me down in the food co-op when I was cutting fish. And he said, 'Patti Bowen and me are working together on a hard-hitting direct-action group, nudge nudge wink wink.' So I waved my boning knife at him and said, 'Listen, pusswad, you are toxic, and if you ever call me, ever call GEE, ever come within ten feet of me again, I'll take this and gut you like a tuna.' Haven't heard from him since.""Is that your position? That he's a terrorist?""Yeah."Rebecca started writing that down, so I added slowly and distinctly, "And we're not.""So he's the same as Hank Boone, in your opinion."I had to squirm. "Morally, yes. But no one's really like Boone."Boone had this thing about whaling s.h.i.+ps. He liked to sink them. He was a founder of GEE and hero of the Soviet invasion, but he'd been kicked out seven years ago. Off the coast of South Africa he had filled a Zodiac full of C-4, lit the fuse, pointed it at a pirate whaler, and jumped off at the last minute. The whaler went to the bottom and he went to hide out in some weepy European social democracy. But he kept dropping out of sight and whaling s.h.i.+ps kept digging craters on the floors of the seven seas."Boone's effective. Smirnoff is just pathetic.""You admire Boone.""You know I can't say that. I sincerely don't like violence. Honest to G.o.d.""That's why you threatened Smirnoff with a knife.""Second-degree. It's premeditated violence I can't stand. Look. Boone isn't even necessary. The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses."Rebecca sat back with those green eyes narrowed to slits, and I knew some sort of profound observation was coming down the pipeline. "I didn't think you were scared of anything, but Smirnoff scares you, doesn't he?""Sure. Look, GEE rarely does illegal things and we never do violent things. The worst we do is a little property damage now and then - and only to prevent worse things. But even so, we're bugged and tapped and tailed. The FBI thinks I'm Carlos the f.u.c.king Jackal. And we never talk about anything over the phone. 'Regular professionals.' But that clown Smirnoff is trying to organize an openly terroristic group - over the f.u.c.king telephone! He's about as shrewd as your brain-damaged Lhasa Apso. s.h.i.+t! I wonder if we could sue him for defamation, just for mentioning our name.""I'm not a lawyer.""I could definitely see a defamation suit, though, if a news organization tried to connect us in any way."She was more amused than furious. I knew she would be; she thinks I'm cute when I'm angry. After you've f.u.c.ked a man on a Zodiac in the middle of Boston Harbor on your lunch hour, it's hard to distance yourself from him, say what you want about objectivity and ethics."S.T., I am stunned. Did you really just threaten The Weekly?""No, no, not at all. I'm just trying to express how important it is that we are kept separate from him and Boone in the public mind. And as soon as we're done I'm going to drop a dime on one of our earnest young ecolawyers and see if we can sue the c.r.a.p out of him."She smiled. "I don't want to connect you. There is no real connection. But I am interested in the topic. I mean, the Ike Walton League fades into the Sierra Club fades into GEE fades into NEST....""Right, and then Smirnoff, then Boone, then al-Fatah. And I think Basco and Fotex are down there somewhere. It's a dangerous premise, babe. You have to draw a definite line between us and Smirnoff. Or even NEST.""You're not allowed to call me babe.""It's a deal. You can call me anything but a terrorist."

4

I TOOK THE T into the middle of Boston and cut across the North End to a particular yacht club. Mostly it was run by lifestyle slaves who were studying to be Brahmins, but there were a couple of old vomit-stained tour boats that ran out of there, one fis.h.i.+ng boat, and it was the home base for GEE Northeast's nautical forces. They'd donated a small odd-shaped berth, a little trapezoid of greasy water caught between a couple of piers, for the same reason that someone else gave us the Omni. Upstairs we had a locker for our gear, and that's where I headed, driving up the blood pressures of all the deck-shoed, horn-rimmed twits waiting to be let into the dining room. I cruised past and didn't even turn around when some high-pitched jerk issued his challenge."Say! Excuse me? Sir? Are you a member of this club?" It happens every so often, mostly with people who've just spent their Christmas bonuses on members.h.i.+ps. I don't even react. Sooner or later they learn the ropes.But something was familiar about that G.o.dd.a.m.n voice. I couldn't keep myself from turning around. And there he was, standing out from that suntanned crowd like a dead guppy in a tropical aquarium, tall and slack-faced and not at all sure of himself. Dolmacher. When he recognized me, it was his nightmare come to life. Which was only fair since he was one of my favorite bad dreams."Taylor," he sneered, ill-advisedly making the first move."Lumpy!" I shouted. Dolmacher looked down at his fly as his companions mouthed the word behind his back. Grinning yuppie hyenas that they were, I knew that I had renamed Dolmacher for his career.The implications did not penetrate and he sauntered forward a step. "How are things, Taylor?""I'm having the time of my life. How about you, Dolmacher? Pick up a new accent since we left B.U.?"His soon-to-be ex-a.s.sociates began to file their teeth."What's on the agenda for today, Sangamon? Come to plant a magnetic limpet mine on an industrialist's yacht?"This was vintage Dolmacher. Not "blow up" but "plant a magnetic limpet mine on." He cruised bookstores and bought those big picture books of international weapons systems, the ones always remaindered for $3.98. He had a whole shelf of them. He went up on weekends and played the Survival Game in New Hamps.h.i.+re, running around in the woods shooting paint pellets at other frustrated elements."Yachts are made out of fibergla.s.s, Dolmacher. A magnetic mine wouldn't stick.""Still sarcastic, huh, S.T.?" He p.r.o.nounced the word as if it were a mental illness. "Except now you're doing it professionally.""Can I help it if the Groveler lacks a sense of humor?""I don't work for Basco any more.""Okay, I'm stunned. Whom are you working for?""Whom? I'm working for Biotronics, that's whom."Big deal. Biotronics was a wholly owned subsidiary of Basco. But the work was impressive."Genetic engineering. Not bad. You work with the actual bugs?""Sometimes."Dolmacher dropped his guard the minute I started asking him about his job. No change at all since our days at B.U. He was so astounded by the coolness of Science that it acted on him like an endorphin."Well," I said, "remember not to pick your nose after you've had your hands in the tank, and enjoy your lunch. I've got samples to take." I turned around."You should come to work for Biotronics, S.T. You're far too intelligent for what you're doing."I turned back around because I was p.i.s.sed off. He had no idea how difficult... but then I noticed him looking sincere. He actually wanted me to work with him.The old school ties, the old dormitory ties, they're resilient. We'd spent four years at B.U. talking at each other like this, and a couple years more on opposite sides of the toxic barricades. Now he wanted me to rearrange genes with him. I guess when you've come as far as he had, you feel a little lonely. Way out there on the frontiers of science, it hurts when a former cla.s.smate keeps firing rock salt into your b.u.t.t."We're working on a process you'd be very interested in," he continued. "It's like the Holy Grail, as far as you're concerned.""Dolmacher, party of four?" demanded the maitre d'."If you ever want to talk about it, I'm in the book. North Suburban. Living in Medford now." Dolmacher backed away from me and into the dining room. I just stared at him.Up at our locker I picked up an empty picnic cooler. My deal with the cook was that he'd fill it up with free ice if I told him a dirty joke, a transaction that went smoothly. Then out and across the docks to our little grease pit.The tide was out so I had to use the rope ladder to get down into the Zodiac. As soon as you drop below the level of the pier, the city and the sun disappear and you're dangling in a jungle of algae-covered pilings, like Tarzan sliding down a vine into a swamp.It's not doing a Zodiac justice to call it an inflatable raft. A Zodiac has design. It has hydrodynamics. It's made to go places. The inflatable part is horseshoe-shaped. The bend of the horseshoe is in front, and it's pointed; the p.r.o.ngs point backwards, tapering to cones. The floor of the craft is made of heavy interlocking planks and there's a transom in back, to keep the water out and to hold the motor. If you look at the bottom of a Zodiac, it's not just flat. It's got a hint of a keel on it for maneuverability.Not a proper hull, though. Hull design is an advanced science. In the days of sail it was as important to national security as aerodynamics are now. A hull was a necessary evil: all that s.h.i.+p down under the water gave you lots of drag but without it the rest of the s.h.i.+p wouldn't float.Then we invented outboard motors and all that science was made irrelevant by raw power. You could turn a bathtub into a high-performance speedboat by bolting a big enough motor on it. When the throttle's up high, the impact of the water against the bottom of the hull lifts it right up out of the water. It skims like a skipping rock and who gives a f.u.c.k about hydrodynamics. When you throttle it down, the vessel sinks into the water again and wallows like a hog.This is the principle behind the Zodiac, as far as I can tell. You take a vessel that probably weighs less than its own motor, you radio the control tower at Logan Airport and you take off.We had a forty-horse on this puppy - a donation - and I'd never dared to throttle it up past about twenty-five percent of maximum. Remember that a VW Bug has an engine with less than thirty horsepower. When you hit running speed in this Zode, if the water's not too rough, the entire boat rises from the water. The only wet part is the screw.It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land, there's the Omni, but all these slow cars get in the way. There's public transit - the T - but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water nothing stops you, and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or ca.n.a.ls.Contrary to what every bonehead believes, the land surface has been stretched out and expanded by civilization. Look at any downtown city: what would be a tiny distance on a backpacking trip becomes a transcontinental journey. You spend hours traveling just a few miles. Your mental map of the city grows and stretches until things seem far away. But get on a Zodiac, and the map snaps back into place like a rubber sheet that has been pulled out of shape. Want to go to the airport? Zip. It's right over there. Want to cross the river? Okay, here we are. Want to get from the Common to B.U., two miles away, during rush hour, right before a playoff game at Fenway Park? Most people wouldn't even try. On a Zodiac, it's just two miles. Five minutes. The real distance, the distance of Nature. I'm no stoned-out naturehead with a twelve-string guitar, but that's a fact.The Mercury was brand-new, not even broken in. Some devious flack at the outboard motor company had noticed that our Zodiacs spent a lot of time in front of TV cameras. So we get all our motors free now, in exchange for being our extroverted selves. We wear them out, sink, burn and break them; new ones materialize. I hooked up the fuel line, pumped it up, and the motor caught on the first try. The stench of the piers was sliced by exhaust. I dropped it to a tubercular idle, s.h.i.+fted into forward, and started snaking out between the pilings. If I wanted to commit suicide here, I could just twitch my hand and I'd be slammed into a barnacled tree trunk at Mach 1.Then out into a finger of water that ran between piers. The piers were actually little piers attached to big piers, so out into a bigger finger of water that ran between the big piers, then into the channel, and from there to a tentacle of the Harbor that fed the channel.At some point I was ent.i.tled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many s.h.i.+t-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of c.r.a.p, my hometown. Boston Harbor is my baby. There are biologists who know more about its fish and geographers who have statistics on its s.h.i.+pping, but I know more about its dark, carcinogenic side than anyone. In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single G.o.dd.a.m.n pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their secrets to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting that the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the water line, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt.In a waterproof chest I keep a number of big yellow stickers: NOTICE. THIS OUTFALL is BEING MONITORED ON A REGULAR BASIS BY GEE INTERNATIONAL. IF IN VIOLATION OF EPA REGULATIONS, IT MAY BE PLUGGED AT ANY TIME. FOR INFORMATION CALL: (then, scribbled into a blank s.p.a.ce, and always the same), SANGAMON TAYLOR (and our phone number).Even I can't believe how many violators I catch with these stickers. Whenever I find a pipe that's deliberately unmarked, whose owners don't want to be found, I slap one of these stickers up nearby. Within two weeks the phone rings."GEE," I say."Sangamon Taylor there?""He's in the John right now, can I have him call you back?""Uh, okay, yeah, I guess so.""What did you want to talk to him about?""I'm calling about your sticker.""Which one?""The one on the Island End River, about halfway up?""Okay." And I dutifully take their number, hang up, and dial right back.Ring. Ring. Click. "h.e.l.lo, Chelsea Electroplating, may I help you?"Case closed.A few years of that and I owned this Harbor. The EPA and the DEQE called me irresponsible on odd-numbered days and phoned me for vital information on even-numbered ones. Every once in a while some agency or politician would announce a million-dollar study to track down all the c.r.a.p going into the Harbor and I'd mail in a copy of my report. Every year The Weekly published my list of the ten worst polluters:(1)Bostonians (feces)(2-3)Basco and Fotex, always fighting it out for number two, (you name it)(4-7)Whopping defense contractors (various solvents)(8-10)Small but nasty heavy-metal dumpers like Derinsov Tanning and various electroplaters.The Boston sewage treatment system is pure Dark Ages. Most of the items flushed down metropolitan toilets are quickly shot into the Harbor, dead raw. If you go for a jog on Wollaston Beach, south of town, when the currents are flavorful, you will find it glistening with human t.u.r.ds. But usually they sink to the bottom and merge.Today I was out on the Zodiac for two reasons. One: to get away from the city and my job, just to sit out on the water. Two: Project Lobster. Number one doesn't have to be explained to anyone. Number two has been my work for the last six months or so.Usually I do my sampling straight out of pipes. But no one's ever satisfied. I tell them what's going in and they say, okay, where does it end up? Because currents and tides can scatter it, while living things can concentrate it.Ideally I'd like to take a chart of the Harbor and draw a grid over it, with points s.p.a.ced about a hundred yards apart, then get a sample of what's on the sea floor at each one of those points. a.n.a.lysis of each sample would show how much bad s.h.i.+t there was, then I'd know how things were distributed.In practice I can't do that. We just don't have the resources to get sampling equipment down to the floor of the Harbor and back up again, over and over.But there's a way around any problem. Lobstermen work the Harbor. Their whole business is putting sampling devices - lobster traps - on the floor of the sea and then hauling them back up again carrying samples - lobsters. I've got a deal with a few different boats. They give me the least desirable parts of their catch, and I record where they came from. Lobsters are somewhat mobile, more so than oysters but less than fish. They pretty much stay in one zone of the Harbor. And while they're there, they do a very convenient thing for me called bioconcentration. They eat food and s.h.i.+t it out the other end, but part of it stays with them, usually the worst part. A trace amount of, say, PCBs in their environment will show up as a much higher concentration in their livers. So when I get a lobster and figure out what toxins it's carrying, I have a pretty good idea of what's on the floor of the Harbor in its neighborhood.Once I get my data into the computer, I can persuade it to draw contour maps showing the dispersion pattern of each type of toxin. For example, if I'm twisting Basco's d.i.c.k at the moment, I'll probably look at PCBs. So the computer draws all the land areas and blacks them out. Then it begins to shade in the water areas, starting out in the Atlantic, which is drawn in a beautiful electric blue. You don't have to look at the legend to know that this water is pure. As we approach Boston, the colors get warmer, and warmer. Most of the harbor is yellow. In places we see rings of orange, deepening toward the center until they form angry red boils cl.u.s.tered against the sh.o.r.e. Next to each boil I write a caption: "Basco Primary Outfall." "Basco Temporary Storage Facility." "Basco-owned Parcel (under EPA Investigation)." "Parcel Owned by Basco Subsidiary (under EPA Investigation)." Translate this into a 35-mm slide, take it to a public hearing, draw the curtains and splash it up on a twenty-foot screen - wild, an instant lynch mob. Then the lights come up and a brand-new Basco flack comes out, fresh from B.U. or Northeastern, and begins talking about eyedroppers in railway tank cars. Then his company gets lacerated by the media.This is the kind of thing I think about when buzzing around, looking for Gallagher the lobsterman.Sometimes I had this daydream where a big-time c.o.ke runner from Miami got environmentally conscious and donated one of his Cigarette boats. It wasn't going to happen - not even c.o.ke dealers were that rich. But I thought about it, read the boating magazines, dreamed up ways to use one. And right now on the channel between Charlestown and Eastie, two miles north, I could see a thirty-one foot Cigarette just sitting there on the water. It's kind of like what my Zodiac would look like if it had been built by defense contractors: way too big, way too fast, a hundred times too expensive. The larger models have a cabin in front, but this didn't even have that comfort. It was open-c.o.c.kpit, made for nothing in the world but dangerous speed. I'd seen it yesterday, too, sitting there doing nothing. I wondered if it would be terribly self-important if I attributed its presence to mine. The worst Fotex plant was up that way, and maybe they were antic.i.p.ating a sneak attack.Implausible. If their security was that good, they'd know that our a.s.sault ketch, the Blowfish, was off the coast of New Jersey, homing in on poor unsuspecting Blue Kills. Without it we didn't have enough Zodiacs, or divers, to stage a pipe-plugging raid on Fotex. So maybe this was some rich person working on a suntan. But if he owned a boat that could do seventy miles an hour, why didn't he take it off that syphilitic channel? He was on the Mystic, for G.o.d's sake.I caught up with the Scoundrel off the coast of Eastie, not far from the artificial plateau that made up the airport. These guys were the first to join Project Lobster, and hence my favorites. Initially none of the lobstermen trusted me, afraid that I'd ruin their business with my statements of doom. But when the Harbor got really bad, and people started talking about banning all fish from the area, they started to see I was on their side. A clean Harbor was in their own best interests.Gallagher should have been extra tough, because I had a tendency to rag on the subject of Spectacle Island. This was not a true island but a mound of garbage dumped in the Harbor by an ancestor of his, a tugboat operator who'd been lucky enough to get the city's garbage-hauling concession in the 1890s. But, as Rory explained many times and loudly, those were the Charlestown Gallaghers, the rich, arrogant, semi-Anglicized branch. Sometime back in the Twenties, some Gallagher's nose had gotten splintered in a wedding brawl or something, thus creating the rift between that branch and Rory's - the Southie Gallaghers, the humble farmers of the sea."Attention all crew, we have a long-haired invironmintl at ten o'clock, prepare to be boarded," Rory called, his Southie accent thick as mustard gas. All these guys talked that way. Their "ar" sounds could shatter reinforced concrete.I'd been to a couple of games with them; we'd sit up there in the bleachers and inhale watery beer and throw cigars to the late, lamented Dave Henderson. They couldn't not be loud and boisterous, so they gave me s.h.i.+t about my hair, which didn't even come down to my collar. I could take a few minutes of this, but then I needed to go to a nice sterile shopping mall and decompress."Aaaay, we got some beauties for you today, Cap'n Taylor, some real skinny oily ones."."Going to the game tonight, Rory?""A bunch of us are, yeah. Why, you wanna go?""Can't. Going to Jersey tomorrow.""Jersey! Shees.h.!.+" All the buys on the boat went "shees.h.!.+" They couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to go to that place.They tossed me a couple of half-dead lobsters and showed me where they'd trapped them on the chart. I jotted the locations down and put the bugs on ice. Later, when I got back, I'd have to dismantle them and run the a.n.a.lysis.We traded speculation on what Sam Horn might do against the Yanks. These guys were Negro-haters all, and their heroes were gigantic black men with clubs, a contradiction I wasn't brave enough to point out.I went to handle the most depressing part of my job. Poor people get tired of welfare cheese after a while and start looking for other sources of protein. For example, fish. But poor people can't charter a boat to go out and catch swordfish, so they fish