Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

"Listen, buddy, if you think that's just some little old pipe, you're wrong."

So I gave him a complete description of the pipe and what we were doing to plug it.

By this time the Omni's window had become kind of a TV screen for all the media to watch. I rolled the window down and turned the phone over to the "speaker" setting so that they could hear the whole conversation. On the whole, it was calm and professional, no fireworks. I go out of my way to be polite, and people entrusted with running huge chemical plants, unlike some of their bosses, tend to be in control of themselves. One techie to another. It's the flacks and executives who fly off the handle, because they have no understanding of chemistry. They don't imagine they might be wrong.

Half an hour later, our divers told me that nothing was coming out of the diffuser any more.

By that time I was the ringmaster of a full-scale media circus. Each crew had to be taken out on a Zodiac, given a thrilling ride through the surf, given a chance to videotape

our divers and to walk around on the Blowfish and nuzzle the ship's cat. Meanwhile, Debbie hung out on the beach to placate those who were waiting their turn, giving them interviews, telling jokes and war stories-and later, confronting the small army dispatched here by the corporation. Fortunately she was well cut out for that; dinky, tough, quick witted and exceedingly cute. Not the flummoxed rad/fem/les they were hoping for.

For a big outfit, the Swiss Bastards were pretty quick on their feet. They'd already xeroxed up their press releases, and they always had reams of prepackaged crap about eye-droppers in railway tank cars and the beneficent works of the chemical industry. You know: "These compounds are rapidly and safely dispersed into a concentrated solution of dihydrogen oxide and sodium chloride, containing some other inorganic salts. Sound dangerous? Not at all. In fact, you've probably gone swimming in it-this is just a chemist's way of describing salt water." This is precisely the sort of witticism that TV reporters love to steal and pass off as their own, granting their stories a cheery conclusion on which to cut back to the beaming anchordroids. It's much more upbeat than talking about liver tumors, and it's why we have to do this business with wading pools.

When I got back from taking a local TV reporter on his joyride, the suits were fully mobilized. They'd set up a folding table on the beach with their nicely forested property as a back-drop. Tactical error on my part! I should have strung a nice big banner out across that fence so they couldn't use it. We had a big roll of banner stuff in the Omni-green nylon cloth on a white backing-so I asked Debbie and Tanya if they could try to whip something up real quick.

They'd propped one end of their table up on some bundles of press releases, because the beach sloped toward the water, as beaches do. It was too much to hope that the incoming tide would undermine and topple it. I was tempted to speed that process up with the pump, but that would be openly juvenile and too close to actual assault. Their head flack was waddling around in the sand, which was pouring in over the tops of his hand-tooled dress shoes. They even had makeup people handy to spackle his trustworthy face.

To watch a big corporation throw its PR machine into action can be kind of imposing. I got scared the first couple of times, but fortunately I was with some GEE veterans who were old hands as trashing press conferences. You have to attack on two levels-challenging what the PR flacks are saying, and at the same time challenging the conference itself, shattering the TV spell.

I waved Artemis close in to shore. As soon as the Swiss flack started in with his prepared statement, I nodded at her and she cranked up her motor pretty loud, in neutral, forcing him to raise his voice. That's very important. They want to be media cool, like JFK, and if you make them shout they become media hot, like Nixon. I started thinking about five-o'clock shadows and how we could cast one on a flack's face. An idle inspiration that was probably too subtle for us.

The flack unleashed his poster about eyedroppers in tank cars. I ran to the Omni for my poster about banana peels on football fields. He talked about sodium chloride and dihydrogen oxide, and I countered that calling trinitrotoluene "dynamite" doesn't make it any safer. He showed a map of the plant, then of Blue Kills, showing where the big pipe ran underneath the city and out to this beach.

That was fine with me. If he wanted to show people how their toxic waste was passing under their homes, let him.

In fact, I couldn't figure out what the hell he was thinking. Why did he want to emphasize that? I started flipping through one of their press packets and found the same map, with their underground pipe highlighted. Exactly what they didn't want people to know.

Then the bastard drygulched me. He almost nailed me to the wall.

"By plugging up the diffuser at the end of this pipe, the GEE people are running the risk that the pipe will burst, somewhere back in here..." (pointing to a residential neighborhood) "....nd release these compounds into the soil. This should lay to rest any misconceptions about their concern for the people of Blue Kills. What these people are, pure and simple, is t-"

"What he's saying," I shouted, stepping up behind him and holding a salad bowl in the air, "is that this pipeline..."

I pointed to the map "... that's carrying tons of toxic waste under people's homes, is so fragile, so shoddily made and poorly maintained, that it's weaker than a contraption made from a salad bowl and a toilet part that we just whipped up on the spur of the moment."

I could see the guy deflate. He refused to turn around. "And if these compounds are as safe as he says, why is he worried about them getting into the soil? Why does he equate that threat with terrorism? That should tell you how safe it really is."

And, finally, I got to deliver my traditional coup de grace, namely, handing the flack a glass tumbler full of the awful black stuff and inviting him to drink it.

Sometimes I feel sorry for flacks. They don't have a clue about chemistry or ecology or any of the technical issues. They just have an official line they're told to repeat. My job is to get them fired. The first few times I did this, I felt great, like an avenging angel. Now I try to co-opt them. I go easy. I don't blow their brains out on-camera unless they get sleazy, attacking me or GEE. I've been responsible for a lot of people getting fired-security guards, PR flacks, engineers- and that's the most troublesome part of my job.

THE COPS SHOWED UP. All kinds of cops. Blue Kills cops, state police, coast guardsmen. It didn't much matter because we'd already plugged ninety-five of the holes.

All the cops stood in knots on the beach and argued about jurisdiction. What they came up with was this: several state troopers and Blue Kills policemen took a coast guard boat out to the Blowfish-which a trooper boarded, just to show the flag-and then their boat escorted us way around to the north and into a dock that was part of Blue Kills proper, not Blue Kills Beach.

It was a fun trip. The wind had come up and the Blue Kills cops, on that dinky CG boat, spent most of it doubled over the side, chucking their donuts. On the Blowfish, I chatted with Dick, the state trooper, a pretty affable guy of about forty. He asked me a lot of questions about the plant and why it was dangerous and I tried to explain.

"Cancer happens when cells go crazy and don't stop multiplying. That happens, basically, because their genetic code has gotten screwed up."

"Like nicotine or asbestos or something."

I glanced up and saw Tom Akers sidling over in our direction, listening to the conversation.