"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."
8
HE DUMPED HIS GEAR into 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.
But it wasn't a dead person they were looking at. It was a dead dolphin.
"Hey, S.T., come to help this poor guy out?"
A geezer had snuck up on me. No one I knew. He'd probably seen me at the civic association meeting I'd attended the month before. A lot of these retirees keep an eye on the tube, read the papers every day, go to the meetings.
It seemed an odd thing for him to say, so I moved forward to the front row and took a closer look. The dolphin wasn't dead, just close to it. Its tail was oscillating weakly against the sand.
"I wish I knew the first thing about it," I mumbled. A couple of young muscleheads decided they did know about it. One of them grabbed the dolphin's tail, hoping to drag it back to the water. Instead, its skin peeled back like the wrapper on a tray of meat. I turned around and walked as fast as I could in the other direction. People were screaming and vomiting behind me.
"Looks like another victim of you-know-what," the old guy was saying. I looked over to see him matching me stride for stride. There wasn't much to say, so I checked him out. We were talking appendectomy from long ago and a fairly recent laparotomy. Exploratory surgery, maybe. His tubes seemed okay; probably a nonsmoker. I gave him fifteen years; if he'd worked at the plant, five years.
"Didn't know I had a name around here," I said.
He grinned, shook his head, and converged on me, chortling silently. He was laughing, but swallowing it. A born conspirator. "Oh, those guys hate you. They hate your guts up there!" He allowed himself an audible laugh. "Where you guys have your headquarters?"
Exactly the kind of information I hate to give out. "Somewhere out there," I said, "on a boat."
"Uh huh. What do you do when someone wants to get a hold of you?"
"Got a cellular phone in our car."
"Oh yeah. For the media. That's smart. You give 'em all your number then."
"Yeah, you know, on the press releases."
"Hey! You got one of those? I'm kind of a news junkie, you know, get the Times and the Post every morning; got a satellite dish behind the house and I'm always following it, got a shortwave....".
I had a few press releases folded up in my pocket, always carried them with me, so I handed one to the guy and also gave him a GEE button that he thought was hilarious.
"Where's a good hardware store?" I said. A trivial question for him to answer, but priceless for me.
"What kind of stuff you looking for?" he asked, highly interested. He had to establish that I deserved to have this information. Blue Kills probably had a dozen mediocre ones, but every town has one really good hardware store. Usually it takes about six years to find it.
"Not piddley-shit stuff. I need some really out-of-the-way stuff. ..."
He cut me off; I'd showed that I had some taste in hardware, that I had some self-respect. He gave me directions.
Then, what the hell, he gave me a ride to the damn place. Dropped me off in the parking lot. Drove me in his Cadillac Seville with the Masonic calipers welded to the trunk lid. This guy was a goddamn former executive. With an obvious grudge.
"You know Red?" I said on the way over.
Dave Hagenauer (according to the junk mail on his dashboard) laughed and thwacked his maroon naugahyde steering wheel. "Red Grooten? I sure as hell do. How the hell do you know Red?"
"Old fishing buddies?" I asked, ignoring the question.
"Oh, hunting, fishing, you name it. We been going out for a long time. Course the most we do now is a little fishing, you know, plunking off a boat."
"Not in the North Branch I hope."
He whistled silently and glinted his eyes at me, Aqua-Velva blue. "Oh, no. I've known about that place for a long time. Shit no."
By that time we were at the store. "Stay out of trouble!" he said, and he was still laughing when I slammed the door.
Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. I strike up conversations with the oldest people who work there, we talk about machine vs. carriage bolts and whether to use a compression or a flare fitting. If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything and they ask a lot of stupid questions in the process. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.
So in the first couple of minutes I had to blow off two zesty young clerks. It's easy for me now, I just mumble about something very technical, using terms they don't understand. Pretending to know what I mean, they direct me off toward another part of the store. Young clerks like to use a zone coverage, whereas the oldtimers prefer a loose man-to-man, so you can wander and think, pick up an armload of items, frown, turn around, put them all back and start over again.
I did a lot of that. After half an hour, an old clerk orbited by, just to be courteous, to establish that I wasn't a shoplifter. "Anything I can help with?" he asked understandingly.
"It's a long, long story," I said, and that put him at ease. He went back to coffee and inventory and I took another swing down the plumbing aisle, visions of theta-holes dancing in my head.
What we had here was your basic hard-soft dilemma. I needed something soft that would form itself to the gentle curve of the pipe and make a toxic-waste-tight seal. But it had to have enough backbone that the pressure wouldn't destroy it. Two laps around the Best Hardware Store in Blue Kills had demonstrated that no single object would do the trick. Now I was trying to break it down, one problem at a time.