Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

I bought a hundred and ten toilet gaskets, nineteen salad bowl sets, fifteen three-foot-long threaded quarter-inch rods, a hundred and fifty wingnuts (we were sure to drop some), an extra vise, a chunk of lead pipe (for leverage when bending hooks into the rods), four hacksaws, some files, some pipe cement, and a couple of spare 5/16-inch drills for drilling through the bottoms of the bowls. Paid in cash and persuaded them to deliver it to the public dock at Blue Kills Beach at the close of the business day. Then I walked out into the bright Jersey sunlight, a free man. It was well past noon and time for a burger.

This place was a little out of the way, as good stores usually are, so I found a phone and dialed the number of the phone in our Omni.

All I could hear was Joan Jett, very loud, singing a song about driving around in New Jersey with the radio on. This was hastily turned down, then I heard the phone shuffling around in someone's hand, the roar of the road coming through the tinfoil walls of that little crackerbox and the coyote howl of the engine, doing at least five thousand RPM and approaching the redline.

"Shift!" I screamed, "Shift!"

"Shit!" Debbie answered. The phone dropped from her shoulder and bounced off something, probably the handbrake, then got crushed against the seat as she rammed the tranny into a higher gear. The engine calmed down. "Where the fuck is the horn," Debbie said dimly, then found it and described someone as a "rich bastard." Then, cut off in traffic, she had to downshift. I rummaged in my pocket for more change; this might take a while.

"Such a fucking right-handed car!" Debbie said. "The shift lever, the stereo, now the phone. What's the problem with the horn?"

"The whole middle part of the steering wheel is the horn button," I said.

"Oh, S.T. Stress. I love it. I adore stress."

"How'd it go?"

"Real fine. They gave up on the Kryptonites. Tried to send some boats up the channel to get us from that direction, but Jim blocked the deep part of the river with the Blowfish and they skragged one of their propellers on an old oil drum. One of theirs, probably."

"Wonderful. Very mediapathic."

"Didn't find any deformed birds but we got some trout with scuzz on their bodies. What did you find?"

"Toxic Disneyland. Want to come pick me up?"

I stayed on the phone and guided her on a hunt-and-miss expedition through the metropolitan area; did not hang up until the bumper of the Omni was in contact with my knees.

The grille was a crust of former insects, and waves of heat issued from the louver on the hood. As I checked the oil, she emerged to hover and squint, skeptically, at the engine.

"Master's degree in biology from Sweetvale, and you're driving around with a dry dipstick."

She couldn't believe what a jerk I was being, but that's okay, I even surprise myself sometimes. "What kind of macho crap is this?"

"You can call it macho, but^ if you redline it with no oil, it's going to go Chernobyl in the middle of the Garden State Parkway and we'll have to take the Green Tortoise home again."

She laughed. "Oh, fuck." We remembered half a dozen granola Green Berets, staggering onto a hippie bus at three in the morning wearing scuba gear and carrying a blown-up motorcycle.

I opened up the back and took out a couple of cans of oil. "You ever read The Tragedy of the Commons?"

"Environmental piece, I know that."

"Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up. It's the same deal with this."

"Okay, okay, I can make the connection."

"Putting oil into the Omni is another form of environ-mentalism."

I shoved the oil sprout into the can, immediately making a sexual connection in my own mind. Then I poked the spout into the proper hole on the Omni, and looked at her, smearing the oil around on my fingers. She was looking at me.

The TraveLodge maid barged in and found us dorking each other's brains out on the rug, right in front of the door. Above us, Debbie was being interviewed on the telly. For some reason we had turned on all the hot water taps in the bathroom and the place was boiling with steam; Debbie's interview, and her other sound effects from below, were half drowned out by the buzz of the Magic Fingers. She slammed the door on her way out. What the hell did they expect, giving us the honeymoon suite?

"If you're planning to stay more than one day, it's traditional to inform the hotel," I said when we were finished. Debbie didn't answer because she was laughing too hard.

IT WAS THREE O'CLOCK. Debbie called the front desk and told them we'd stay another day. Big surprise. We took a shower, then went down and hauled our CB out of the Omni and checked in with the mother ship. I told them that I had an idea for tomorrow that I'd like to bring up with them, and made arrangements to be picked up at the public dock at five.

Debbie and I had first run into each other when I was doing a full media splatter number on that toxic pond on the Sweetvale campus. It stirred up lot of interest among the student body, the idea that the green ivy of New England academe was just like algae growing on a rusty drum of industrial waste. They asked me to show up on campus and I went, foolishly expecting to be treated like a hero.

In fact, most of them were incredibly pissed off. They had pulled some blame-reversal thing where they felt the existence of toxic metals in their soil and swimming hole was somehow my fault. That if I'd kept my mouth shut, it would have been safe. This shouldn't have surprised me, because the ability to think rationally is pretty rare, even in prestigious universities. We're in the TV age now and people thinkby linking images in their brains. That's not always bad, but it led to some pretty ludicrous shit there at Sweetvale, and when some student leaders really started getting on my case in the media, I regrettably had to strip them naked, figuratively, before the toxic glare of the TV cameras. At some point during all that ugliness, Debbie found something decent either in me or GEE International and got involved with one or both of us, I'm not sure. We'd never been in the sack until now, but we'd both been considering it.

One of the New York City remote crews drifted by in their van, reminding me: we've got a media apocalypse to run tomorrow, and these guys don't even know it yet.

For that matter, neither did the victims. They'd been waiting for us to arrive for a month. Today we'd created a big noise and made them look like jerks. Now they were sitting back, holding meetings with their PR flacks, getting started on the damage control. That was awful, they were thinking, but now it's over, and we can stop the bleeding and pour some more death into the oceans.

Hardey-har-har. Tomorrow they'd need both hands just to hold their intestines in place. But we had to prep the media.

"Sangamon Taylor? Quite a show. Were you involved?"

This was one of the local media types, a classic horse's-ass TV reporter with a pneumatic haircut. He was winking at me, assuming that I was the man iri the moon suit.

"Wait until tomorrow," I said. "Then we'll have some great visuals for you."

"You're doing something else tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Not one of these media events, you understand. I mean, what we did today, I'm sure you can see that it was intended just to look kind of flashy on TV. No real news value."

Shock flashed over his face like a blue beam from a cop car, then he managed a grin. "I gathered that," he said, a few tones higher than his baseline anchortone. "You did a good job of it."