Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

"Thanks, but I'm sure a journalist like you can understand there's more to GEE than just a bunch of clowns waving at the camera. We do serious work, too. Stuff that'll make for a real story-not just a piece of fluff."

What could I lose? His piece of fluff was already cued up in a videotape machine at the station.

"Tomorrow?"

"Yeah. We'll start real early in the morning, but this is going to be a long operation. All day long."

"Where?"

I told him how to get to Blue Kills Beach and gave him a xeroxed handout we prepared for the Fourth Estate-tips on how to protect and use your camera on a rocking Zodiac and that sort of thing. I also tossed him a videotape, stock footage of GEE frogmen working off of Zodiacs, plugging pipes.

"Thanks," he said, "I'll copy this and get it back to you."

"Keep it. We've got others."

"Oh, thanks!" He hefted the videotape and did a doubletake on it. "Jesus! This is three-quarter inch!" Then he gave me a sly wink and promised to see me tomorrow.

In the Omni, Debbie was on the phone to a reporter who'd been sent here from one of the New York papers. He'd be more portable than a minicam crew, shrewder, harder to manipulate and a lot more fun to hang out with.

We and the reporter-a round grizzled type named Fisk- and the Blowfish and the truck from the hardware store and a Lincoln with two rent-a-dicks all converged on Blue Kills Beach. I considered trying to hide our purchases from the dicks, but even if they saw what we had, they'd never anticipate our plan.

The driver from the hardware store was severely rattled. He was just a sixteen-year-old, probably doing his part-time on his way to being an artillery loader at Fort Dix. His dad probably worked at the plant. He'd never seen men with hair before.

"You know anything about outboards?" I asked him by way of male bonding. We got into a long rap about whether I needed to check the carburetor on one of our Mercs. Artemis got involved and soon the kid relaxed completely. He allowed as how he'd never seen such big motors on such small boats and she took him for a ride while we unloaded the truck. When he came back, half drenched with salt water, phthalates and hydrazines, he thought we were pretty cool. And that's fine, because we were pretty cool-Artemis is, anyway-and it wouldn't be fair for him to go away with the wrong impression. We take people for rides while the chemical companies lay off their cancerous dads, and sooner or later they decide on their own who the good guys are.

Several of the Blowfish crew wanted to do laundry and bathe in real tubs, so Debbie and I handed over the keys to the Omni and the honeymoon suite, after I talked to them briefly about dipsticks and redlines. Then we headed out to sea on the Blowfish.

I sat down on the foredeck with Fisk, who accepted one of my illegal cigars. We smoked and drank beer and traded environmental stories for a bit, then I showed him the pictures of the theta-holes, sketched the diffuser, laid out the whole gig.

He was interested, but not overly. "I figured you had something big planned," he said, "but my main reason for coming was this." "What?"

"This," he said, and swept his arms out wide. Then I noticed that we were sprawling on the deck of one very fine handmade wooden ketch, on the open ocean, under a golden afternoon sky, cooled by the breeze and warmed by the sun, sailing along strongly and quietly, smoking fine Cuban cigars. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Fringe benefit." Over dinner it came out that this was Captain Jim's birthday. Tanya had brought out some kind of politically incorrect cake, buried an inch deep in frosting, with a crude picture of a ketch on top. Debbie took the opportunity to give him something she'd been meaning to give him anyway.

She'd put in a lot of time on banner duty. More time than anyone should. She had a knack for visual thinking, Debbie did, and we knew it. These days she just sketched them out and canvassers-our student gnomes-did the sewing. One of her better efforts was a big square banner that we shackled to the top of a Fotex water tower one fragrant spring evening. It was simple: a skull and crossbones with the international circle/slash drawn over it in red.

Given the same assignment, I would have written a twenty-five-word manifesto with a little picture down in the corner. Debbie said the same thing with a picture. I was impressed. When drunk, I referred to it as the Toxic Jolly Roger. The next time I went down to my Zodiac, someone had been there and attached a little fiberglass pole to the transom, a segment of a fishing rod. A little hand-sewn nylon flag was flying from it: black, with the skull and crossbones in white and the circle/slash in red. That was when I knew this woman liked me.

Then she came up with the idea of making a big one for the Blowfish. For some reason, I had to help, so we went to fabric stores and I loitered among the heavy, manly fabrics in the canvas section and scared off business while she charged up yards of ripstop nylon on a credit card that turned out to be mine. Then we laid it all out on the floor of her living room and drew the patterns. She had to educate me in basic cloth facts: if you draw the pattern on a chunk of cloth that is stretched out of shape, the pattern will be messed up. Then we had to seal the edges against fraying by running them through a candle flame, filling the apartment with every toxic fume known to man; I could feel the dissolved brain cells dribbling out my ears. Debbie insisted that no operation connected with sewing could really be toxic. And finally we ran it through her fucking Singer. I just went to the other room and watched the static from the sewing machine tear across the screen of her television. I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.

So when we presented it to Jim, everyone applauded Debbie, and I just sat there like a turd on a platter. Then it was time for boy stuff. I cranked on the ship's generator and started ripping open boxes.

We drilled holes in bowls until 11 P.M., when I went to sleep. Debbie and I crammed ourselves into a berth meant for one. That was okay, since today was our first time. But in

a week or so we'd need a kingsize waterbed. Fisk hung out on the deck in a sleeping bag, drinking brandy and making Artemis laugh. Jim just curled up next to the tiller, looking at the stars and thinking about whatever a forty-five-year' old sea drifter thinks about. The Atlantic rocked us to sleep, even as it was killing some more dolphins. The Toxic Jolly Roger grinned down over one and all.

And I woke up in the middle of the night sweating and panting like a pesticide victim, Dolmacher's slack skull-face staring at me. It's the Holy Grail, as far as you're concerned.

"What are you thinking about?" Debbie asked.

I hate that fucking question. Didn't answer.

Up there, a couple hundred miles north of us, Dolmacher was up-I knew he was still awake, still at the lab at two in the morning-tinkering around with genes. Looking for the Holy Grail.

I'd never play with genes. Wouldn't touch them. Any molecule more complicated than ethanol is too scary for me; bigger than that and you never know what they'll do. But Dolmacher was fucking with them. And the thing of it was: I always got higher scores on exams than him. I'm smarter than Dolmacher.

THAT WAS THE LAST SLEEPI got for about twenty-four hours. At four in the morning, I got up, destroyed the rest of the cake and chased it down with two cans of Jolt. Got a scuba outfit all ready, tromped around on top of the boat to get people awake and moving, then got into the best Zode with Artemis and we took off. At the last minute Fisk woke up and joined us.