"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.
I didn't sleep at all. Jim pretended for half an hour, then went over to a payphone on the wall of the cabin and made a call to Anna.
"How's she doing?" I asked when he got back.
"I didn't think you were asleep," he said.
"Nah. Boone's sleeping bag smells like Ben-Gay and hydrogen sulfide. So I'm lying here trying to imagine what kind of action he went out on where he got real sore muscles and made contact with that type of gas. And I'm waiting for the next bulletin from my colon."..
"She's fine," he said. "Went into Rochester today looking for wallpaper."
"Redoing your house?"
"Bit by bit, you know."
"That leads me to ask why you're here and not there."
"Beats me. This is a white man's screw up if ever there was one. But you helped me once and now I gotta help you."
"I release you from the obligation."
"You don't have anything to do with it. It's an internal thing, within me, you know. I have to stay with this a while longer or I won't have any self-respect. Besides, shit, it's kind of fun."
Boone got back a little before dawn, totally wired. He had hit every cafe in a twenty-mile radius, drunk a large coffee, and scooped up loose newspapers off the counter.
"He's at the Lumbermen's Festival," Boone said, "north of here, less than an hour."
"Staying there tonight?"
"Who the fuck knows, they don't put that kind of stuff in the newspaper."
"Going to be there all day?"
"Morning. Then to Nashua later. Looking at high-tech firms. With your pal Laughlin."
"How fitting." I was stirring through his damn newspapers with both arms. "You asshole, didn't you bring the comics?"
Boone was all hot to go straight to the Lumberman's Festival, but Jim persuaded him that we couldn't do much when it was still dark. I thought it was interesting that these Survival Game players went to the trouble to drive up here the night before and sleep in the parking lot-they must hit the trail at dawn.
Sure enough, a huge four-wheel-drive pickup pulled into the one RESERVED space at about 5:00 A.M. It was tall and black and equipped with everything you needed to drive through a blizzard or a nuclear war. A guy got out: not the stringy, hollow-eyed Vietnam vet I'd expected but a big solid older guy, more of the Korean generation. I heard people coming alive in the cars all around us.
Jim and I caught up with him while he was undoing the three deadbolts on the front door. "Morning," he said, ignoring me and taking a lot of interest in Jim. I knew he'd do that. That's why I'd persuaded Jim to get out of his warm sleeping bag and come up here with me.
"Morning," we said, and I added, "you guys get an early start up here."
He pressed his lips together and beamed. There are certain people who are just genetically made to get up at four in the morning and wake everyone else up. They usually become scoutmasters or camp counselors. "Interested in the Survival Game?"
"I've got this friend named Dolmacher who's told me all about it," I said.
"Dolmacher! Hoo-ee! That guy is a demon! Surprised I didn't see his car out there." He led us into the cabin, turned on the lights, and fired up a kerosene space heater. Then he hit the switch on his coffee maker. I caught Jim looking at me wryly. This was the kind of guy who put the coffee grounds and water in his Mr. Coffee the night before so all he had to do was switch it on in the morning. A natural leader.
"Is Dolmacher pretty good at this?" Jim said.
The guy laughed. "Listen, sir, if we gave out black belts at this game, he'd be, I don't know, fifth or sixth dan. He's got me completely bamboozled." The guy sized Jim up and nodded at him. "Course, you might have better luck."
"Yeah," Jim said, "my fifteen years as a washing machine repairman have really honed my instincts."
The guy laughed heartily, taking it as a friendly joke. "You ever done this kind of thing before?"
"Just bow hunting," Jim said. Which was news to me. I thought he'd killed all that venison with his big fancy rifle.
"Well, that's real similar, in a lot of ways. You have to get close, because you're using a short-range weapon. And that means you have to be smart. Like Dolmacher."
I suppressed a groan. In this company, Dolmacher was probably considered an Einstein.
"I thought you used guns," Jim said.
"Handguns. And they're all CO2-powered. So the effective range is pretty short. Here."
He unlocked a gun cabinet full of largish pistols. He showed us where the CO2 cartridge went in, and then showed us the ammunition: a squishy rubber ball, marble-sized, full of red paint.