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.
10
THAT WAS THE LAST SLEEP I 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.
The rent-a-dicks were lurking nearby in an open boat. There was no need for stealth, so we just warmed up the Mercury and let them eat our wake. We were quickly out of sight, and it's hard to track by sound when your own motor is blatting away ten feet behind you. Headed north, just to give them the wrong idea, then doubled back and homed in on the end of the diffuser.
I can dive if I have to, but it's not my thing. This time we needed lots of divers, though, and in any case the principle had to be tested. Arty saved me from certain embarrassment and possible demise by pointing out that I'd hooked up my tubes wrong. As we got them fixed, Fisk winked at me. "From here on out," he said, "I'm an objective journalist, sort of."
"Funny you should say that, since I'm about to commit a criminal act. Sort of." And I fell off the Zodiac.
After a certain amount of aimless swimming around, I located the diffuser. It wasn't putting much out right now, so I couldn't follow the black cloud. And Tom was right, the current was powerful, and a greenhorn like me would end up in Newark if he didn't keep swimming south.
But I had some big old magnets, things that would grip with a force of a hundred pounds, and I'd brought one along. Once I found the diffuser, I slapped the magnet on and tied myself to that with some rock-climbing webbing. This way I could plant my flippers and lean back against the tug of the rope while I worked.
From here on in it was just a problem of industrial engineering. How many holes could we plug per diver per hour, and how could we make it go faster? The key was to assemble the bowl/gasket/bolt/wingnut contraptions in the Zodiacs and hand them to the divers as they were needed.
The plug fit better than I deserved. There would be some leakage owing to the curvature of the pipe, but the diffuser's ability to emit toxic substances would be cut down to a thousandth of the norm. It was easy to hook the curved end of the bolt under the crossbar and twirl the wingnut down to tighten it. I took my time and estimated how far we could pretighten the wingnuts in the Zodiacs so that the divers wouldn't have to spend cumulative hours twisting them down.
Then I smeared some pipe cement over the threads. Hopefully it would harden up and prevent the wingnuts from being removed.
Not bad. I pretightened the wingnut on another assembly, checked my watch, swam to the next hole, and plugged it. That took five minutes. Five minutes per hole meant five hundred diver-minutes. They'd spend half their time farting around with air tanks and other friction, so we needed a thousand diver-minutes, or something like sixteen diver-hours. If we wanted to do it in four hours, we'd need four divers.
When I broke the water, our objective journalist was in a truly passionate clinch with Artemis. His fault. I'd made a
point of waving my light around to warn them. When making love to granola commandos, leave your eyes open. They broke apart and I pretended to be looking the other way.
"I'm in luck," I said. "We only need four divers. And we happen to have four, besides me-so I can stay on top. Where I belong."
Artemis dunked me for that. Then we went back to the Blowfish, which blazed with light and cast a heavenly garlic smell across the water. Jim was up cooking-it had to be Jim, whose passion for garlic was fine by me.
"I'm not trying to sound, like, militaristic," I announced to the tofu-eating multitude, "but we have a go, Houston."
Everyone said "all right" and some raised an herbal toast. Now that these people were used to me, they were getting into the project. The prospect of destroying a mile-long toxic waste diffuser-hell, destroying anything a mile long-was a fiendish temptation.
"You want to call the plant, then?" Jim asked.
"I figure, as soon as we're done eating, we go over there and start. We've got two divers here and two at the TraveLodge and they'll be meeting us in half an hour. So once we get it working smoothly, get all those initial bugs worked out-"
"The part of the operation where we look like assholes," Debbie said, translating.
"-correct, we shut down the plant. That'll take about thirty seconds on the phone. Then we start the carnival." With Fisk present, I wasn't going to get any more explicit than that.
It all went pretty well, except that Fisk suddenly admitted, when the Blowfish was halfway there, that he had a gram of coke in his photographer's vest. He decided to fess up when he noticed that we all went through one another's clothing, looking for anything that could be construed as a drug or weapon; for obvious reasons we always did this when we were likely to get busted. And once Fisk owned up, I felt guilty and admitted to a square of blotter acid in my wallet which, since it was on a Boston Public Library card I didn't think would ever be noticed. But guilt is guilt.
LSD is a violation of Sangamon's Principle. It's a complicated molecule and hence makes me nervous. But sometimes you get in situations so awful, or so physically taxing, that nothing else will penetrate.
So the library card was burned, its ashes scattered, and Fisk's coke went up certain noses. We attacked our task with renewed vigor.
The TraveLodge people showed up a little late and we hustled them off to work. I hung out on shore, watching the media and authorities gather. They took pictures of me inflating a child's large wading pool. Hard to look like a commando when you're doing that; we'd have to get us a pump. I have to get the toxics off the bottom of the sea and onto the cathode-ray tubes of the public in order for this kind of gig to work and, because the diffuser was completely hidden, this wouldn't be easy. All we had to show was a bunch of scuba divers jumping into the water with salad bowls and toilet parts and coming back up without them. So about the time all our media were in place, I took a Zode out and borrowed Tom from the salad-bowl operation. We went out to the Blowfish, picked up a portable pump and motored back in toward shore. Tom swam down to the diffuser and put the pump's intake hose into a diffuser hole, and I hauled the Zode up onto the beach and dragged the pump's output hose into the wading pool. Minicams clustered like flies on a muffin. I'd chosen a pool with a nice bright yellow bottom, so the Swiss Bastards' black sludge hit it with a nice mediapathic splash.