"How long?"
"It's so long I can't swim to the end of it. I'll need a lift."
"And there's black shit coming out of it?"
"Right." Tom placed the little video camera on the floor of the Zode. I picked it up, rewound the tape, put the camera to my face and started to replay the tape through the little screen in the viewfinder. "Some shots of the diffusers," Tom explained. "Each one is three and a quarter inches in diameter. The crossbar is three-eighths inch."
"Nice job."
"Wasn't doing much when I showed up, then it started really barfing that stuff out."
"Morning shift. You missed the rush hour when you were down there. Let's see."
Through the viewfinder I was looking at the smooth, unnatural curve of a large pipe on the seafloor. It was covered with rust, and the rust with hairy green crap. The camera zoomed in on a black hole in the side of the pipe; understandably, nothing was growing near that. Cutting across the center of the hole was a crossbar.
"This remind you of anything?"
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Looks like the Greek letter theta. You know? The ecology symbol." I held up a press release bearing GEE's logo and he laughed.
"I guess this means to hell with the secrecy fetish," I said. "Hang on and I'll take you out farther."
We worked our way offshore about a hundred yards at a time, then, and when we got bored and started thinking about lunch, a quarter mile at a time. The slope of the bottom was gentle and the water never got deeper than about fifty feet. I'd motor him out, following the pipe with my compass, and he'd drop off and swim down to see if it was still there. When Tom finally found the end of it, we were pretty close to our starting place on the little shrub-covered island. The fucking thing was a mile long.
I hadn't worked with him before, but Tom was good. When you dive for a living I guess it pays to be precise. I knew some other GEE divers who would have said. "Whoa, man, it's a big fucking pipe, it's, like, about this wide." Tom was a fanatic, though, and came up with pages of measurements and diagrams.
We hung out on the island for an hour, savored a couple of beers, and talked it over.
"The holes are all the same size," he said. "Spaced a little over fifty feet apart. That tape measure is just an eighteen-footer, so I had to be kind of crude."
"All on the same side of the pipe?"
"Alternating sides."
"So if the thing is about a mile long ... that works out to something like a hundred three-inch holes we have to plug up."
"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.