"The Blowfish got there ahead of schedule," the Boss said, "and we've got an extra project that needs doing."
"Forget it."
"It involves plugging a dioxin pipeline."
A good boss always knows how to dangle the right thing in front of your nose.
"And we'll pay your way. Debbie's going."
That meant I could go on the train, in a sleeper coach, with Debbie in there too.
I cruised home to pack, only to discover a little display was waiting for me. Someone had grabbed a stray neighborhood cat who hung around our home sometimes- Scrounger-and had beaten his skull in, then wrapped an unbent coat hanger around its neck and strung it up in front of the door.
I cut Scrounger down, carried him around to the side and threw him into the garbage, burying the carcass under some other trash so my housemates would be spared the sight. Out back, I noticed some spots of blood on the ground, and followed them straight to the murder weapon: a fist-size hunk of concrete, smeared with blood.
The house had been broken into through the back, and trashed. Not a thorough trashing, but a decent effort nevertheless. The TV was kicked in, as was my computer screen.
They'd even yanked up the bottom half of the computer, a separate box, and stomped on it a few times. A lot of food was strewn around the kitchen in the messiest way possible, and they'd poked a screwdriver into the tubes in the freezer and let all the freon evaporate.
And there was a black handprint on the door to my room, at about eye level.
Fake Mafia or real Mafia, I had no way of knowing. But I was damn tired and depressed; I just wanted out of town. My big scandal had turned into a bad joke. And now someone was getting violent. Game over, case closed.
17
IONIC CHLORINE'S EASY TO GET . It's in seawater, as Tom Akeis pointed out. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.
And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current-a stream of electrons-flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This process is called Chloralkali.
Simple enough. But to make industrial quantities of DDT, or PCBs, or solvents, or whatever it is you're shooting for, you need industrial quantities of chlorine. That takes a lot of electrical power. And if you want to manufacture a Niagara of chemicals, guess what? You need a Niagara-sized power source.
Hence Buffalo. Its blessing, the beautiful Falls, was also its curse. And even though the Falls were getting all broken down and full of rocks, all those chlorine compounds remained. We call it toxic waste. Without Chloralkali, toxic waste would hardly exist. The only hazardous waste that doesn't flow from that fountain is the heavy-metal variety, and heavy metals are a pretty small trickle in the toxic stream. Chloralkali, also known as Niachlor (Niagara + chlorine) is virtually synonymous with toxic waste.
Despite all my moaning and bitching, it's getting tougher to be a toxic polluter in this country. In the last three decades, especially since about 1974, the Chloralkali business has taken a nosedive, down by about forty percent. I'm shooting for a hundred.
Going after the chemical industry in Buffalo meant going after Boner Chemicals-which was like shooting ducks in a barrel while half a million people stood around cheering you on-and this time it was going to be even easier. We didn't have to use shotguns on those toxic ducks anymore, because a friend of ours in Albany was providing us with flamethrowers.
The EPA is so anemic, and this country so dirty, that they have to contract out a lot of their work. After the toxic catastrophe in Buffalo, they farmed some work out to a group of chemical consultants in Albany, similar to Mass Anal. In effect, that gave these consultants subpoena power over Boner, the sole cause of the catastrophe. They got to raid Boner's files and cart off the relevant maps and documents. They learned toxic secrets that would turn your blood to dioxin.
One of the consultants resigned because he wanted to build a geodesic-dome house and start his own computer software company. I think you know the kind of guy I'm talking about. He got involved with GEE. He no longer had any secret documents, but he knew how to operate a Xerox machine. When my train pulled into Albany on its way to Buffalo, he joined Debbie and me in our sleeper coach; we poured him a Screwdriver and talked about things to come. His name was Alan Reading.
Debbie and I had kept the bunks fastidiously folded away. We'd talked all the way from Boston to Springfield, paused so
I could read the last couple of days' Wall Street Journal, and were just getting into the terrible subject of Commitment when we pulled into Albany. We weren't exactly in a good mood.
We sat in the coach and studied a bunch of documents that Alan had illegally xeroxed. One was quite interesting: a map of the main Boner plant, showing in detail the boundary between Boner property and the public streets. There was an indentation in the boundary: a street that ran for half a block into Boner territory and then dead-ended. It was still public property, though it was surrounded on three sides by the plant. The only reason it existed was as a place to put a manhole. There was a sewer line running from the middle of boner Chemical out to Buffalo's general sewer system. This line ran along underneath the deadend street; at the end of that street, right up against the gate to Bonerland, was a manhole. Alan happened to know that at this very spot, Boner Chemical was dumping dioxins into the sewers.
"This is great stuff," I told him. "I have something you might want to read too." And I showed him the Journals. Seems as though another big corporate merger was in the offing. Basco was buying out Boner.
"Why on earth would anyone want to own it?" Alan mumbled. "It's a black hole."
"If it makes money on paper, for the first year, it must be a good investment."
Debbie had other things to concentrate on. Up at the Falls, she and the Blowfish people had some big splashy affair planned for the media, involving Canadians and Indians. It appeared that the Indians in upstate New York, the Seven Nations, continued to approve of us.
This wasn't always the way it worked. GEE scouts were always pursuing the Indians, asking to sleep in their teepees and groove on their most sacred ceremonies. You couldn't be cool in some GEE circles unless you'd seen the inside of a Lakota sweat lodge; it was like a fetish. Usually the Indians were tolerant, but not always. The night before, I'd been on the computer, poking around in GEE's international message system, and learned that one of our boys was in the hospital in Rapid City. He had been smoking the peace pipe with some Sioux and had taken it upon himself to put in some marijuana. So they broke his arm. Little misunderstandings like this were common, and I was always amazed when the Northeastern tribes showed any interest at all in working with us. They had as much to lose from being slowly poisoned by large corporations as anyone, I guess. Maybe more, since they tended to be fishermen or factory workers.