"I'll let you in the back door. We can talk in the basement," Kelvin said, after it had burned down to ash.
We went into his basement, which was mostly full of electrical and electronic stuff. We sat around on stools and I put the sealed margarine tub up on his workbench. There was a naked light bulb hanging above it which filled the container with yellow light; the toxic turd cast a blunt shadow against the flower-patterned sides.
"Good. Dolmacher brought me a sample but he'd already weakened it pretty badly with antibiotics."
"How do you know this one isn't weak?" I asked.
"It's well formed. If you were taking the kind of antibiotics that are effective against Ecoli, you'd have diarrhea."
Boone and Jim exchanged grins. "Looks like we came to the right place," Boone said.
He was right. When it came to pure science, Boone and Jim had no idea what I was talking about. But Kelvin was as far ahead of me as I was of them.
"I'm sorry to come around at this time of night," I said, "but ... well, correct me if I'm wrong, but we are talking about the end of the world here, aren't we?"
"That's what I asked Dolmacher. He said he wasn't sure. It may be a little too simple-minded to make the extremist possible assumption-that it'll convert all the salt in the earth's oceans to polychlorinated biphenyls."
"Does Dolmacher know how to kill this bug?"
Kelvin smiled. "Probably. But he wasn't speaking in complete sentences. Had some undried blood on his pantlegs."
"Damn, Kelvin, you should have made him sit down and talk."
"He was armed," Kelvin said, "and he showed up during Tommy's birthday party."
"Oh."
"Anything can be killed. You could dump huge amounts of toxins into the Harbor and poison it. But there's a Catch-22 involved. If you aren't Basco, you don't have the resources necessary for such a big project. And if you are Basco, you don't want to use such obvious methods because ... because of people like you, S.T."
"Thanks. I feel a lot better."
"Of course, now that you're dead, maybe they'll loosen up a little."
"So what did Dolmacher come here for? Just to give you some warning T'
"Yes. And he phoned two days ago, between holding up drugstores. He managed to find some trimethoprim and that seems to kill the bug pretty effectively."
"So why not dump a shitload of that into the Harbor?" Jim asked.
"We don't have a sufficient shitload," Kelvin said. "No, I don't think that antibiotics are the answer. They are large, complex molecules, you know. Totally against Sangamon's Principle."
"Kelvin, I am honored."
"It's hard to assemble big complicated molecules in Harbor-sized quantities. The only way to do that is through genetic engineering-turning bacteria into chemical factories. That is exactly what we're competing against, an army of little poison factories-but we don't have an army. There is no rival bug making trimethoprim. So we have to find the equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Something simple and devastating."
Here, Kelvin seemed to find something interesting in what he'd just said. "That's actually an idea," he said. "If the infection got totally out of hand, we might have to save the world by detonating some nukes in the Harbor. We'd lose Boston but it would be worth it."
At this point Jim and Boone had moved back into the shadows and were just watching Kelvin's performance open-mouthed. We heard the soles of someone's Dr. Dentons scraping against the linoleum upstairs, and then light spilled down the steps from the living room.
"Kelvin?" said a five-year-old kid, "can I have some cranraz?"
"Yes, honey. Use your She-Ra mug," Kelvin said.
"Cranraz?" Boone asked.
"Cranberry-raspberry juice," Kelvin explained. "I like this house, so let's not think in terms of nuclear weapons right off the bat. That was just supposed to be an analogy. We need to find some chemical susceptibility that these things have. And your sample here should make that a lot easier. I wish I had a better lab, though."
I told him how to get in touch with Tanya and Debbie. That should get him into the nice labs at the university. Kelvin's kid wandered down the steps holding the She-Ra mug,
and Kelvin had him sit on his lap. The kid held the mug to his face like a gas mask and made rhythmic slurping noises, watching us.
"Do those people know you're alive?"
"Probably not. Hey, Kelvin. Did you know that I was? Were you surprised to see me?"
He frowned. "I was kind of wondering when your body was going to wash ashore. I didn't think you were that much of an asshole-to go out on the ocean without an exposure suit."
"Thanks."
"But are Tanya and Debbie to be told that you're alive?"
"Sure, as long as you don't do it over the phone, or in one of their cars, in their houses, in the lab...."
"If you're worried about electronic surveillance, just say so."
"Fine. I am."
"Okay. I'll hand them a note."
"Kelvin, you are so-" I was going to say fucking, but the kid was looking at me "-eminently practical."
"Would you like to assist me in this project?"
"I wouldn't be able to go to the lab. Hell, we were sitting in an alley behind the Pearl and I almost got recognized."
"You're paranoid, S.T.," Jim said.
"I'm alive, too," I said.
Kelvin said, "You've got as much experience with these new species as anyone."
"You're saying there's more than one?"
"One that binds up oxygen in the water to create an anaerobic environment. Another that makes benzenes and phenyls, eats salt and poops toxic waste. The second one is a parasite on the first."
"Dolmacher's not such a dick-brain after all. He's the one we really need."
"Dolmacher is' not available to us."
"We have this crazy idea. We think we can find him. If we can do that, maybe we can calm him down, get him to cooperate on killing the bug."
"I think he was headed northwards, when I saw him."
"How did you get that, Sherlock? Was he wearing mukluks?"
"He borrowed my map of New Hampshire."
Great. Now Kelvin was going to be a coconspirator in an assassination attempt. I didn't mention that to him. He probably knew. Dolmacher had no guile.
"One more thing," Kelvin said, after he'd ushered us out to the driveway. "Did you blow up that speedboat last week?"
"Yeah, that was me." .
He smiled. "I thought so."
"Why?"
"Because it was right next to the Tea Party Ship. The birthplace of the direct-action campaign."
"Good luck, Kelvin."
"Happy hunting." He and his kid stood there on their nice Belmont street, holding hands and waving to us, as we drove away.
28
THIS DOLMACHER GUY had no sense of personal responsibility. We needed him, damn it. Never thought I'd say that about Dolmacher, but we did. He'd invented the fucking bugs, nursed them, grown them, knew all about their life cycles, what they needed in the way of food and temperature and pH. If we made him settle down, if we grilled him, we could find out a simple way to massacre those bacteria. But no. He had to go up to the land of orange hats to seek revenge on Fleshy. And probably get killed in the process.
We headed north. It was 1:00 A.M. on a Friday night. Within a couple of hours we'd found Survival Game headquarters-a fairly new log cabin built up against some private forest. As we were pulling around into a parking space, our headlights swept through the cockpits of several parked cars, mostly beaters from the Seventies, and we caught brief silhouettes of men in baseball caps sitting up to look at us. Jim and I unrolled some sleeping bags on the ground, quietly, and went to sleep. Boone drove out to scavenge some newspapers and see if he could figure out Pleshy's schedule for the next couple of days.