Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How long?"

"It's so long I can't swim to the end of it. I'll need a lift."

"And there's black shit coming out of it?"

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

"Nice job."

"Wasn't doing much when I showed up, then it started really barfing that stuff out."

"Morning shift. You missed the rush hour when you were down there. Let's see."

Through the viewfinder I was looking at the smooth, unnatural curve of a large pipe on the seafloor. It was covered with rust, and the rust with hairy green crap. The camera zoomed in on a black hole in the side of the pipe; understandably, nothing was growing near that. Cutting across the center of the hole was a crossbar.

"This remind you of anything?"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Looks like the Greek letter theta. You know? The ecology symbol." I held up a press release bearing GEE's logo and he laughed.

"I guess this means to hell with the secrecy fetish," I said. "Hang on and I'll take you out farther."

We worked our way offshore about a hundred yards at a time, then, and when we got bored and started thinking about lunch, a quarter mile at a time. The slope of the bottom was gentle and the water never got deeper than about fifty feet. I'd motor him out, following the pipe with my compass, and he'd drop off and swim down to see if it was still there. When Tom finally found the end of it, we were pretty close to our starting place on the little shrub-covered island. The fucking thing was a mile long.

I hadn't worked with him before, but Tom was good. When you dive for a living I guess it pays to be precise. I knew some other GEE divers who would have said. "Whoa, man, it's a big fucking pipe, it's, like, about this wide." Tom was a fanatic, though, and came up with pages of measurements and diagrams.

We hung out on the island for an hour, savored a couple of beers, and talked it over.

"The holes are all the same size," he said. "Spaced a little over fifty feet apart. That tape measure is just an eighteen-footer, so I had to be kind of crude."

"All on the same side of the pipe?"

"Alternating sides."

"So if the thing is about a mile long ... that works out to something like a hundred three-inch holes we have to plug up."

"It's a big job, man. Why did they build it that way, anyhow? Why not have your basic huge pipe, just barfing the stuff out?"

"They used to think this was the answer. Diffusion. There's a strong current up the shore here."

"I noticed."

"The same current that created this island we're on, and all the barrier beaches. They figured if they could spread their pollution out across a mile of that current, it would more or less disappear. Besides, a big barfing pipe is mediapathic."

"And you're sure it's illegal?"

"In about six different ways. That's why I want to close it down."

"Think you can bluff them?"

"What do you mean?"

"Call them up, say, 'This is GEE, we're going to shut off your diffuser, better close down the plant.' "

"Anywhere else I could, but they wouldn't go for it here. They know how hard this thing would be to plug up. Besides, I want more than a bluff. I want to stop pollution."

He grinned. So did I. It was a catch phrase we repeated when frustrated by a hopeless task: "I want to stop pollution, man!"

"So what do we do? Postpone it?"

"Naah." I started to rewind the tape for the third time. "Necessity is the mother."

HE DUMPED HIS GEARinto the Zode and we headed up the shore to rendezvous with the Blowfish. It was easy to find, as it turned out, since they'd set off some huge military surplus smoke bombs near the dump. Gluttons for attention, I guess.

I had Tom drop me off. It was time to do some ruminating, and that wouldn't be possible in the groovy chaos of the Blowfish. They'd all be exhilarated by the gig, they'd want to talk too much, and I wanted to think. So we brought the Zodiac right up on the public beach. I waded to shore in my underwear, the only bather present who was smoking a cigar, and put my clothes on once I reached the beach. Normally guys in their underwear attract a lot of attention, but none of the kids and oldsters who were here noticed. They were all gathered in a clump a hundred feet down the beach, staring at something on the ground. I figured someone had stroked out while swimming. It was ghoulish, but I walked down there anyway to have a look.