Neal Stephenson - Zodiac

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Zodiac: The Eco-thriller

Neal Stephenson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Neal Stephenson issues from a clan of rootless, itinerant hard-science and

engineering professors. He began his higher education as physics major, then

switched to geography when it appeared that this would enable him to scam more

free time on his university's mainframe computer. When he graduated and

discovered, to his perplexity, that there were no jobs for inexperienced

physicist-geographers, he began to look into alternative pursuits such as

working on cars, agricultural labour and writing novels. His first novel, The

Big U, was published in 1984 and vanished without trace. Zodiac: The Eco-

thriller is his second novel. On first coming out in 1988 it quickly developed

a cult following among water-pollution-control engineers and was enjoyed,

though rarely bought, by many radical environmentalists. The highly successful

Snow Crash was written between 1988 and 1991, as the author listened to a

great deal of loud, relentless, depressing music. It was followed by the

equally successful The Diamond Age. Most of his novels are available in Roc.

Neal Stephenson lives in Seattle.

SIGNET

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA

Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the USA by Bantam by arrangement with the Atlantic Monthly

Press 1988

Pint published in Great Britain in Signet 1997

13579108642

'Dirty Water' by Ed Cobb. Copyright O Equinox Music, 1965. All rights

reserved. Used by permission

Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A mere acknowledgment doesn't fully reflect the contribution made by Marco

Paul Johann Kaltofen; a spot on the title page would be more fitting.

In the category of plain old, but deserved, acknowledgments, it should be

mentioned that the hard-boiled fiction of James Crumley got me going on this

project; people who like this one should buy his books. Joe King put me on the

hard-boiled trail with a well-timed recommendation. Jackson Schmidt read and

corrected the manuscript with an attention to fine detail I would not have

expected even if I had been paying him. My agents, Liz Darhansoff, Abby

Thomas, and Lynn Pleshette, gave useful suggestions and then scorched the

earth with their zeal, despite blaming me for a sudden aversion to eating

lobsters and swimming in the Hudson. Gary Fisketjon edited it closely and

intelligently, once again proving his more-than-casual acquaintance with the

novel-a 250-year-old art form.

Jon Owens, Jon Halper, Jackson Schmidt, Steve Horst, and Chris Doolan all said

or did things that got blended in. My wife, Dr. Ellen Lackermann, helped with

the medical research, and refrains from becoming too despondent over my

spending eight to sixteen hours a day welded to a Macintosh. Finally, Heather

Matheson read the manuscript and told me that the main character was an

asshole-confirming that I was on the right track.

TO ELLEN

Down by the river, Down by the banks of the River Charles

That's where you'll find me

Along with lovers, muggers and thieves

Well I love that dirty water,

Oh Boston, you're my home.

-THE INMATES

ROSCOMMON CAME and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time

I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some

freeway. My landlord and I have an arrangement. He charges me and my

housemates little rent-by Boston standards, none at all-and in return we let

him play fast and loose with our ecosystem. Every year at about this time he

destroys my garden. He's been known to send workmen into the house without

warning, knock out walls in the middle of the night, shut off the water while

we shower, fill the basement with unidentified fumes, cut down elms and maples

for firewood, and redecorate our rooms. Then he claims he's showing the dump

to prospective tenants and we'd better clean it up. Pronto.

This morning I woke to the sound of little green pumpkins exploding under the

tires of his station wagon. Then Roscommon stumbled out and tore down our

badminton net. After he left, I got up and went out to buy a Globe. Wade Boggs

had just twisted his ankle and some PCB-contaminated waste oil was on fire in

Southie.

When I got back, bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house with

gas-phase polycyclic aromatics-my favorite carcinogen by a long shot.

Bartholomew was standing in front of the stove. With the level, cross-eyed

stare of the involuntarily awake, he was watching a heavy-metal video on the

TV. He was clenching an inflated Hefty bag that took up half the kitchen. Once

again, my roommate was using nitrous oxide around an open flame; no wonder he

didn't have any eyebrows. When I came in, he raised the bag invitingly.

Normally I never do nitrous before breakfast, but I couldn't refuse Bart a

thing in the world, so I took the bag and inhaled as deep as I could. My mouth

tasted sweet and five seconds later about half of an orgasm backfired in the

middle of my brain.

On the screen, poodle-headed rockers were strapping a cheerleader to a sheet

of particle board decorated with a pentagram. Far away, Bartholomew was

saying: "Poyzen Boyzen, man. Very hot."

It was too early for social criticism. I grabbed the channel selector.

"No Stooges on at this hour," Bart warned, "I checked." But I'd already moved

us way up into Deep Cable, where a pair of chaw-munching geezers were floating

on a nontoxic river in Dixie, demonstrating how to push-start a comatose fish.

Tess emerged from the part of the house where women lived and bathrooms were

clean. She frowned against the light, scowling at our bubbling animal flesh,

our cubic yard of nitrous. She rummaged in the fridge for some homemade

yogurt. "Don't you guys ever lay off that stuff?"

"Meat or gas?"

"You tell me. Which one's more toxic?"

"Sangamon's Principle," I said. "The simpler the molecule, the better the

drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous

oxide-a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol-nine. Past that, you're

talking lots of atoms." '

"So?"

"Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they'll do.

It is my understanding, Tess, that you've been referring to me, about town, as

a 'Granola James Bond'."

Tess didn't give a fuck. "Who told you about that?"

"You come up with a cute phrase, it gets around."

"I thought you'd enjoy it."

"Even a horse's ass like me can detect sarcasm."

"So what would you rather be called?"

"Toxic Spiderman. Because he's broke and he never gets laid."

Tess squinted at me, implying that there was a reason for both problems. Bart

broke the. silence. "Shit, man, Spider-man's got his health. James Bond

probably has AIDS."

I went outside and followed Roscommon's tire tracks through the backyard. All

the pumpkins were destroyed, but I didn't care about these decoys. What could

you do with a pumpkin? Get orange shit all over the house? The important

stuff-corn and tomatoes-were planted up against fences or behind piles of

rubble, where his station wagon couldn't reach.

We'd never asked Roscommon if we could plant a garden out here in the Largest

Yard in Boston. Which, because it wasn't supposed to exist, gave him the right

to drive over it. Gardens have to be watered, you see, and water bills are

included in our nominal rent, so by having a garden we're actually ripping him

off.

There was at least an acre back here, tucked away in kind of a space warp

caused by Brighton's irrational street pattern. Not even weeds knew how to

grow in this field of concrete and brick rubble. When we started the garden,

Bartholomew and Ike and I spent two days sifting through it, putting the soil

into our plot, piling the rest in cairns. Other piles were scattered randomly

around the Largest Back Yard in Boston. Every so often Roscommon would

dynamite another one of his holdings, show up with a rented dump truck, back

across the garden, through the badminton net, and over some lawn furniture,

and make a new pile.

I just hoped he didn't try to stash any toxic waste back there. I hoped that

wasn't the reason for the low rent. Because if he did that, I would be forced

to call down a plague upon his house. I would evacuate his bank accounts, bum

his villages, rape his horses, sell his children into slavery. The whole Toxic

Spiderman bit. And then I'd have to becomethe penniless alter ego, the Toxic

Peter Parker. I'd have to pay real Boston rent, a thousand a month, with no

space for badminton.

Peter Parker is the guy who got bit by the radioactive spider, the toxic bug

if you will, and became Spiderman. Normally he's a nebbish. No money, no

prestige, no future. But if you try to mug him in a dark alley, you're meat.

The question he keeps asking himself is: "Do those moments of satisfaction I

get as Spiderman make up for all the crap I have to take as Peter Parker?" In

my case, the answer is yes.

In the dark ages of my life, when I worked at Massachusetts Analytical

Chemical Systems, or Mass Anal for short, I owned your basic VW van. But a

Peter Parker type can't afford car insurance in this town, so now I transport

myself on a bicycle. So once I'd fueled myself up on coffee and Bart's baco-

cinders-nothing beats an all-black breakfast-and read all the comics, I threw

one leg over my battle-scarred all-terrain stump-jumper and rode several miles

to work.

Hurricane Alison had blown through the day before yesterday, trailed by

hellacious rainfall. Tree branches and lakes of rainwater were in the streets.

We call it rainwater; actually it's raw sewage. The traffic signal at Comm Ave

and Charlesgate West was fried. In Boston, this doesn't lead to heartwarming

stories in the tabloids about ordinary citizens who get out of their cars to

direct traffic. Instead, it gives us the excuse to drive like the Chadian

army. Here we had two lanes of traffic crossing with four, and the two were

losing out in a big way. Comm Ave was backed up all the way into B.U. So I

rode between the lanes for half a mile to the head of the class.

The problem is, if the two drivers at the front of the line aren't

sufficiently aggressive, it doesn't matter how tough the people behind them

are. The whole avenue will just sit there until it collectively boils over.

And horn honking wasn't helping, though a hundred or so motorists were giving

it a try-When I got to Charlesgate West, where Comm Ave was cut off by the

torrent pouring down that one-way four-Ianer, I found an underpowered station

wagon from Maine at the head of one lane, driven by a mom who was trying to

look after four children, and a vintage Mercedes in the other, driven by an

old lady who looked like she'd just forgotten her own address. And half a

dozen bicyclists, standing there waiting for a real asshole to take charge.

What you have to do is take it one lane at a time. I waited for a twenty-foot

gap in traffic on the first lane of Charlesgate and just eased out into it.

The approaching BMW made an abortive swerve toward the next lane, causing a

ripple to spread across Charlesgate as everyone for ten cars back tried to

head east. Then he throbbed to a halt (computerized antilock braking system)

and slumped over on his horn button. The next lane was easy: some Camaro-

driving freshman from Jersey made the mistake of slowing down and I seized his

lane. The asshole in the BMW tried to cut behind me but half the bicyclists,

and the biddy in the Benz, had the presence of mind to lurch out and block his

path.

Within ten seconds a huge gap showed up in the third lane, and I ate it up

before Camaro could serve over. I ate it up so aggressively that some Clerk

Typist II in a Civic slowed down in the fourth lane long enough for me to grab

that one. And then the dam broke as the Chadian army mounted a charge and

reamed out the intersection. I figured BMW, Camaro, and Civic could shut their

engines off and go for a walk.

Pedestrians and winos applauded. A young six-digit lawyer, hardly old enough

to shave, cruised up from ten cars back and shouted out his electric sunroof

that I really had balls.

I said, "Tell me something I didn't know, you fucking android from Hell."

The Mass Ave Bridge took me over the Charles. I stopped halfway across to look

it over. The river, that is. The river and the Harbor, they're my stock in

trade. Not much wind today and I took a big whoof of river air in my nostrils,

wondering what kind of crap had been dumped into it, upstream, the night

before. Which might sound kind of primitive, but the human nose happens to be

an exquisitely sensitive analytical device. There are certain compounds for

which your schnozz is the best detector ever made. No machine can beat it. For

example, I can tell a lot about a car by smelling its exhaust: how well the

engine is tuned, whether it's got a catalytic converter, what kind of gas it

bums.

So every so often I smell the Charles, just to see if I'm missing anything.

For a river that's only thirty miles long, it has the width and the toxic

burdens of the Ohio or the Cuy-ahoga.

Then through the MIT campus, through the milling geeks with the fifty-dollar

textbooks under their arms. College students look so damn young these days.

Not long ago I was going to school on the other side of the river, thinking of

these trolls as peers and rivals. Now I just felt sorry for them. They

probably felt sorry for me. By visual standards, I'm the scum of the earth.

The other week I was at a party full of Boston yuppies, the originals, and

they were all complaining about the panhandlers on the Common, how aggressive

they'd become. I hadn't noticed, myself, since they never panhandled me. Then

I figured out why: because I looked like one of them. Blue jeans with holes in

the knees. Tennis shoes with holes over the big toes, where my uncut toenails

rub against the toeclips on my bicycle. Several layers of t-shirts, long

underwear tops, and flannel shirts, easily adjustable to regulate my core

temperature. Shaggy blond hair, cut maybe once a year. Formless red beard,

trimmed or lopped off maybe twice a year. Not exactly fat, but blessed with

the mature, convex body typical of those who live on Thunderbird and Ding-

Dongs. No briefcase, aimless way of looking around, tendency to sniff the

river.

Though I rode through MIT on a nice bike, I'd sprayed it with some cheap gold

paint so it wouldn't look nice. Even the lock looked like a piece of shit: a

Kryptonite lock all scarred up by boltcutters. We'd used it to padlock a gate

on a toxic site last year and the owners had tried to get through using the

wrong tools.

In California I could have passed for a hacker, heading for some high-tech

company, but in Massachusetts even the hackers wore shirts with buttons. I

pedalled through hacker territory, through the strip of little high-tech shops

that feed off MIT, and into the square where my outfit has its regional

office.

GEE, the Group of Environmental Extremists. Excuse me: GEE International. They

employ me as a professional asshole, an innate talent I've enjoyed ever since

second grade, when I learned how to give my teacher migraine headaches with a

penlight. I could cite other examples, give you a tour down the gallery of the

broken and infuriated authority figures who have tried to teach, steer,

counsel, reform, or suppress me over the years, but that would sound like

boasting. I'm not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will

take money for it.

I carried my bike up four flights of stairs, doing my bit for physical

fitness. GEE stickers were plastered on the risers of the stairs, so there was

always a catch phrase six feet in front of your eyes: SAVE THE WHALES and

something about the BABY SEALS. By the time you made it up to the fourth

floor, you were out of breath, and fully indoctrinated. Locked my bike to a

radiator, because you never knew, and went in.

Tricia was running the front desk. Flaky but nice, has a few strange ideas

about phone etiquette, thinks I'm all right. "Oh, shit," she said.

"What?"

"You won't believe it."

"What?"

"The other car."

"The van?"

"Yeah. Wyman."

"How bad?"

"We don't know yet. It's still sitting out on the shoulder."

I just assumed it was totalled, and that Wyman would have to be fired, or at

least busted down to a position where he couldn't so much as sit in a GEE car.

A mere three days ago he had taken our Subaru out to buy duet tape, and in a

parking lot no larger than a tennis court, had managed to ram a concrete

light-pole pedestal hard enough to total the vehicle. His fifteen-minute

explanation was earnest but impossible to follow; when I asked him to just

start from the beginning, he accused me of being too linear.

Now he'd trashed our one remaining shitbox van. The national office would

probably hear of it. I almost felt sorry for him.

"How?"

"He thinks he shifted into reverse on the freeway."

"Why? It's got an automatic transmission."

"He likes to think for himself."

"Where is he now?"

"Who knows? I think he's afraid to come in."

"No. You'd be afraid to come in. I might be afraid. Wyman won't be afraid. You

know what he'll do? He'll come in fresh as a daisy and ask for the keys to the

Omni."

Fortunately I'd taken all the keys to the Omni, other than my own, and

hammered them into slag. And whenever I parked it, I opened the hood and

yanked out the coil wire and put it in my pocket.

You might think that the lack of coil wire or even keys would not stop members

of the GEE strike force, Masters of Stealth, Scourge of Industry, from

starting a car for very long. Aren't these the people who staged their own

invasion of the Soviet Union? Didn't they sneak a supposedly disabled, heavily

guarded ship out of Amsterdam? Don't they skim across the oceans in high-

powered Zodiacs held together with bubble gum and bobby pins, coming to the

rescue of innocent marine mammals?

Well sometimes they do, but only a handful have those kinds of talents, and

I'm the only one in the Northeast office. The others, like Wyman, tend to be

ex-English majors who affect a hysterical helplessness in the face of things

with moving parts. Talk to them about cams or gaskets and they'll sing you a

protest song. To them, yanking out the Omni's coil wire was black magic.

"And you got three calls from Fotex. They really want to talk to you." "What

about?"

"The guy wants to know if they should shut their plant down today."

The day before, talking to some geek at Fotex, I'd mumbled something about

closing them down. But in fact I was going to New Jersey tomorrow to close

someone else down, so Fotex could keep dumping phenols, acetone, phthalates,

various solvents, copper, silver, lead, mercury, and zinc into Boston Harbor

to their heart's content, at least until I got back.

"Tell them I'm in Jersey." That would keep them guessing; Fotex had some

plants down there also.

I went back to my office, cutting across a barnlike room where most of the

other GEE people sat among half-completed banners and broken Zodiac parts,

drinking herbal teas and talking into phones:

"500 ppm sounds good to me."

"Don't put us on the back page of the Food section."

"Do those breed in estuaries?"

I wasn't one of those GEE veterans who got his start spraying orange dye on

baby seals in Newfie, or getting beat senseless by Frog commandos in the South

Pacific. I slipped into it, moonlighting for them while I held down my job at

Mass Anal. Partly by luck, I broke a big case for GEE, right before my boss

figured out what an enormous pain in the ass I could be. Mass Anal fired, GEE

hired. My salary was cut in half and my ulcer vanished: I could eat onion

rings at IHOP again, but I couldn't afford to.

My function at Mass Anal had been to handle whatever walked in the door.

Sometimes it was genuine industrial espionage-peeling apart a running shoe to

see what kinds of adhesives it used-but usually it amounted to analyzing tap

water for the anxious yuppies moving into the center of Boston, closet

environmentalists who didn't want to pour aromatic hydrocarbons into their

babies any more than they'd burn 7-Eleven gasoline in their Saabs. But once

upon a time, this guy in a running suit walked in and got routed to me; _

anyone who wasn't in pinstripes got routed to me. He was brandishing an empty

Doritos bag and for a minute 1 was afraid he wanted me to check it for dioxins

or some other granola nightmare. But he read my expression. I probably looked

skeptical and irritated. I probably looked like an asshole.

"Sorry about the bag. It was the only container I could find on the trail."

"What's in it?"

"I'm not sure."

Predictable answer. "Approximately what's in it?"

"Dirt. But really strange dirt."

I took the Doritos bag and emptied it out all over the comics page of the

Globe. I love the comics, laughing out loud when I read them, and everyone

thinks I'm a simpleton. The runner let out kind of a little snort, like he

couldn't believe this was how I did chemistry. It looks impressive to pour the

sample into a fresh Pyrex beaker, but it's faster to spread it out over

Spiderman and Bloom County. I pulled the toothpick out of my mouth and began

to pop the little clods apart. But that was just for the hell of it, because I

already knew what was wrong with this dirt. It was green-and purple and red

and blue. The runner knew that, he just didn't know why. But I had a pretty

good idea: heavy-metal contamination, the kind of really nasty stuff that goes

into pigments. "You jogging in hazardous waste dumps, or what?" I asked.

"You're saying this stuff's hazardous?" "Fuck, yes. Heavy metals. See this

yellow clump here? Gotta be cadmium. Now, cadmium they tested once as a poison

gas, in World War I. It vaporizes at a real low temperature, six or seven

hundred degrees. They had some people breathe that vapor." "What does it do?"

"Gangrene of the testicles."

The jogger inhaled and shifted his pair away from my desk. One of the

problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic

horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients

label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time. "Where?"

"Sweetvale College. Right on campus. There's a wooded area there with a pond

and a running trail."

I, a B.U. graduate, was trying to imagine this: a college campus that had

trees and ponds on it.

"This is what it looks like," the guy continued, "the dirt, the pond,

everything." "Colored like this?" "It's psychedelic."

Despite being a chemist, I refuse psychedelics these days on the grounds that

they violate Sangamon's Principle. But I understood what he was getting at.

So the next day I got on my bike and rode out there and damned if he wasn't

right. At one end of the campus was this weedy patch of forest, sticking out

into a triangle formed by some of the Commonwealth's more expensive suburbs.

It wasn't used much. That was probably just as well because the area around

the pond was a heavy-metal sewer, and I ain't talking about rock and roll.

Rainbow-colored, a little like water with gasoline floating on it, but this

wasn't superficial. The colors went all the way down. They matched the dirt.

All the colors were different and-forgive me if I repeat myself on this point-

they all caused cancer.

From my freshman gut course in physical geography at Boston University, I knew

damn well this wasn't a natural pond. So the only question was: what was here

before?

Finding out was my first gig as a toxic detective, and the only thing that

made it difficult was my own jerk-ass fumbling in the public library. I threw

myself on the mercy of Esmerelda, a black librarian of somewhere between

ninety and a hundred who contained within her bionic hairdo all knowledge, or

the ability to find it. She got me some old civic documents. Sure enough, a

paint factory had flourished there around the turn of the century. When it

folded, the owner donated the land to the university. Nice gift: a square mile

of poison.

I called GEE and the rest was history. Newspaper articles, video bites on the

TV news, which didn't look that great on my black-and-white; state and federal

clean-up efforts, and a web of lawsuits. Two weeks later GEE asked me to

analyze some water for them. Within a month I was chained to a drum of toxic

waste on the State house steps, and within six, I was Northeast Toxics

Coordinator for GEE International.

My office was the size of a piano crate, but mine nonetheless. I wanted a

computer on my desk, and none of the other GEE honchos would risk sharing a

room with one. Computers need electrical transformers, some of which are made

with PCBs that like to vaporize and ooze out of a computer's ventilation

slots, causing miscarriages and other foul omens. The boss gave me his office

and moved into the big barnlike room.

The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our "office manager," started

painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them to toxic fumes

millions of times more concentrated than what I was getting from my computer.

But they didn't notice because they're used to paint. They paint things all

the time. Same deal with the stuff they spray on their underarms and put into

their gas tanks. Gomez wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn't let him.

Esmerelda, ever vigilant, had shot me a bunch of greasy xeroxes from the

microfilm archives. They were articles from the Lighthouse-Republican of Blue

Kills, N.J., a small city halfway down the Jersey Shore which was shortly to

feel my wrath. It was the kind of newspaper that was still running Dennis the

Menace in the largest available size. A Gasoline Alley, Apartment 3-G, and

Nancy kind of paper.

The articles were all from the sports section. Sports, as in hunting and

fishing, which take place outdoors, which is where the environment is. That's

why environmental news is in the sports section.

Esmerelda had found me four different articles, all written by different

reporters (no specialist on the staff; not considered an important issue) on

vaguely environmental subjects. A local dump leaching crap into an estuary; a

freeway project that would trash some swamp land; mysterious films of gunk on

the river; and concerns about toxic waste that could be coming from a plant

just outside of town, operated by a large corporation we shall refer to as the

Swiss Bastards. Along with the Boston Bastards, the Napalm Droids, the

Plutonium Lords, the Hindu Killers, the Lung Assassins, the Ones in Buffalo,

and the Rhine-Rapers, they were among the largest chemical corporations of a

certain planet, third one out from a certain mediocre star in an average

spiral galaxy named after a candy bar.

Each of the articles was 2500 words long and written in the same style.

Clearly, the editor of the lighthouse-republican ruled with an iron hand.

Local residents were referred to as Blukers. Compound sentences were

discouraged and the inverted-pyramid structure rigorously followed. The PR

flacks who worked for the Swiss Bastards were referred to by the old-fashioned

term "authorities," rather than the newer and sexier "sources."

My only worry was that maybe this editor was so fucking old and decrepit that

he was already dead, or even retired. On the other hand, it seemed he was a

dyed-in-the-wool "sportsman," a type traditionally long-lived, unless he'd

spent too much time sloshing around in a particular toxic swamp. Esmerelda,

accustomed to my ways, had sent a xerox of the most recent masthead, which

didn't show any changes. The senior sports editor was Everett "Red" Grooten

and the sports-page editor was Alvin Goldberg.

Raucous laughter probably sounded from my office. Tricia hung up on Fotex's PR

director and shouted "S.T., what are you doing in there?" Called the florist

and had them send the usual to Esmerelda. Cranked up my old PCB-spitter and

searched my files. "Fish, marine, sport, Mid-Atlantic, effects of organic

solvents on." "Estuaries, waterfowl populations of, effects of organic

solvents on." These were old boilerplate paragraphs I'd written long ago.

Mostly they referred to EPA studies or recent research. Every so often they

quoted a "source" at GEE International, the well-known environmental group,

usually me. I directed the word processor to do a search-and-replace to change

"source" to "authority."

Then I pulled up my press release about what the Swiss Bastards were pumping

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Zodiac:TheEco-thrillerNealStephensonABOUTTHEAUTHORNealStephensonissuesfromaclanofrootless,itineranthard-scienceandengineeringprofessors.Hebeganhishighereducationasphysicsmajor,thenswitchedtogeographywhenitappearedthatthiswouldenablehimtoscammorefreetimeonhisuniversity'smainframecomputer.Whenhegradua...

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