Zodiac

30

JIM AND I TURNED TAIL AND RAN . First we ran in a state of terror, but then, when we figured out that we weren't being followed, drew closer together and started to skip and leap through the air, whooping, laughing like loons, like high school kids who've just egged the principal's house. I wasn't thinking, yet, about Dolmacher spending the rest of his life in the booby hatch, out of reach.

Finally, toward the end, we ran very slowly and made moaning and puking noises. And when we found our way back to the trailhead, Boone was waiting for us. In a helicopter.

It was a news chopper from one of the Boston stations. Boone had agreed to trade an exclusive interview for a lift back down to Boston.

"I'm finished," Jim Grandfather said. "I'm all done with this crap."

He went over to his pickup, leaned against it and breathed. I stood with my hands on my knees and did the same.

"You know, for ten seconds," I said, "I was sure you had saved my life."

"So was I."

"Let's just say you did."

"I don't care."

"I have a question for you," I said. "If you'd been carrying a real arrow-a big-game arrow-would you have used it?"

Jim stood up straight and shrugged. His big coat fell off his shoulders and his quiver tumbled out of it. All the fishing arrows had been used, but there were three in there with wide, razor-sharp heads. "No," he said. "Too dangerous."

I laughed because I thought he was joking, but he wasn't.

"You've drawn my bow. If I used one of these, it would go all the way through Dolmacher's body, out the other side and kill one or two other people."

"Well, I'm glad."

"Yeah. Considering that he was shooting blanks, I'd have felt like kind of a prick."

Jim and I hugged for a while, something I never do with another man, then Boone came out and they shook hands. Jim got in his truck and drove away. The copter's engine started to rev up, so Boone and I had a few private moments while we walked back through the rotor wash.

"What did you know," I asked, "and when did you know it?"

Boone gaped at me for a second, then laughed. "Shit. You don't think I'd step between Fleshy and a bullet, do you?"

We both laughed. I wasn't really sure. I wasn't convinced that he could recognize Dolmacher's gun that quickly.

"I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent," he confessed. "Because then you're the only person in the world who can knock down the president and get away with it."

We climbed into the chopper and Boone started giving a prolonged, monosyllabic, "aw shucks" interview about why he had put another man's life before his own. He was claiming to be a Boston environmentalist named Daniel Winchester. I seized upon a catnap; it wasn't that far back to Boston. I was hoping they'd swing over the yacht club, because I wanted to look down into our slip and see if Wes had gotten out the other Zodiac yet. If so, I'd probably be ripping it off sometime soon. I was in luck; they took us back to Logan itself.

That was fine, since the Blue Line took us right in to the Aquarium stop. I was still too recognizable around the yacht club, so I had Boone saunter by there while I loitered at a McDonalds. I had one of those milkshakes that's made from sweetened Wonder Bread dough extruded by a pneumatic machine. This, perhaps, would serve as a buffer against the toxic waste inside my system.

When Boone emerged from traffic he wore a grin. The ' Zodiac was there, all right, but with a wimpy ten-horse motor, and even that was missing a few strategic parts. So before we did anything else, we prepared ourselves. At a marine supply place out on one of the piers we bought ourselves a fuel line, spark plugs and other small important items that Wes might have removed to make the Zodiac unstealable. Boone flaunted his stack of credit cards.

We rode the Green Line to Kenmore Square and hopped a bus out to Watertown Square. Then it was a two-mile walk to Kelvin's. My pant legs had turned into stiff tubes from being saturated with mud and then drying out, and at one point I had to climb down an embankment into some dead shrubs and broken glass and take a quick squat on the ground. While I was there I looked through my wallet and realized that all my credit cards belonged to a dead man. My transformation into a derelict was almost complete. Jim had been supporting me through that bad week in New Hampshire, but now I was back in Boston, with nothing except a wicked case of diarrhea.

"You should bow out too," I said. "Shit, you've got your opportunity now. You're a national hero. You can rehabilitate yourself, tell your story."

"I've been thinking about doing that," Boone confessed.

"Well don't be shy. I can get along without you."

"I know. But this is more interesting."

"Whatever." This was a useful word I'd picked up from Bart.

"I'll stick with it a little longer and see what's happening."

"Whatever."

I'd been going through a lot of laxatives, trying to flush out my colon. It seemed to be working, because the nausea and cramps had subsided. Maybe I could ease off a little, get

a Big Mac or something. Or if we could get to Hoa's, I could eat some steamed rice.

We got to Kelvin's just about twelve hours after our first, midnight visit. Since it was daylight, we came in the front door and got the full family welcome: dogs poking their muzzles into our balls, kids showing us their new toys, Kelvin's wife, Charlotte, fetching big tumblers of cranraz. All the kids were running around either naked or in diapers and pretty soon I joined them as Charlotte wouldn't let me out of the foyer without removing my pants. All I managed to hang on to was my colored jockey shorts and my t-shirt. Boone had to give up his socks and his shirt. All of it went into the laundry. We wandered half-naked down into the basement.

Charlotte's sister had decorated Kelvin's third-floor office just the way he wanted it-ergonomic furniture, a couple extra speakers wired into the main stereo, coffee maker, warm paneling. He went up there about an hour a week to write letters to his mother and balance the family checkbook. Then he spent about a hundred hours a week down here in this dank, dark, junk-filled basement. There was a workbench in the corner where he made stuff. There was a pool table in the middle where he relaxed. An old concrete laundry tub against one wall which he used as a urinal. He'd covered two entire walls with old blackboards he'd bought at flea markets. That was the only way he could think: on a blackboard, standing up. Sometimes it was long, gory strings of algebra, sometimes it was flowcharts from computer programs. Today there were a lot of hexagons and pentagons. Kelvin was doing organic chemistry, diagramming a lot of polycyclic stuff. Probably trying to figure out the energy balance of these bugs.

"Give up already?" he said, without turning around.

For once, I got to surprise him. "No. We found him."

"Really? How is he?"

"Leaking, but aware. I'm not sure what they're going to charge him with."

"That's for damn sure," Boone said. "They can't call it attempted murder."

Kelvin stood there watching us, then decided not to clutter his mind with an explanation. "I have some ideas on this," he said, sweeping his hand across the blackboards.

"Shoot."

"First of all, have you been following the news?"

"Look who's asking," I said. "You haven't heard about Fleshy?"

"Shit, we've been creating the news," Boone said.

"I mean the Boston news." Kelvin picked up a Herald that ' was sprawled on his pool table and flipped it over to expose the full-page headline.

HARBOR OF DEATH!

MIT PROF: TOXIC MENACE COULD "DESTROY ALL LIFE"

There was a picture of a heavy white man with his shirt off, showing a vicious case of chloracne.

"So they know about the bug," I said.

"Not exactly," Kelvin said. "A lot of people know of it, but it's not mentioned in there." He nodded at the Herald. "And in the Globe, as you might guess, it's just a farfetched speculation. Everyone thinks it's just a toxic waste spill."

"So why do they say that it could destroy all life?"

"To sell papers. If you read the article, you'll find that the quote was taken out of context. The MIT prof said it could destroy all life in Boston Harbor that happened to eat a large amount of it."

"Well, that's good," Boone said. "That's fine, from our point of view. We don't have to beg the media to cover it. The news is out."

Kelvin agreed. "It's really only a matter of time before the whole thing is exposed."

"Publicizing it isn't that important," I added. "The catastrophe's still going on. That's what we should worry about. Publicity doesn't kill the bug."

"Is that really you talking?" Boone said. "How do we kill the bug, Kelvin?"

"The chlorine-converting bug is an obligate anaerobe-" Kelvin said, then added for Boone's benefit, "-that means it has to live in an environment with no air in it."

"That's impossible," I said. "There's oxygen dissolved in the water. It wouldn't survive."

"Exactly. So they didn't make just the one bug. They made two of them. The other is an aerobe-it has to have some air to survive. Its metabolism doesn't hurt anything-it just uses lots of oxygen and creates a locally oxygen-poor region where its salt-eating buddy can live. The killer bug is a parasite on the aerobe. Or symbiotic, or one of those terms-I hate biology."

"Look, I know I'm no expert here," Boone said, "but every environmentalist knows that a lot of water doesn't have any air dissolved in it. Right? Polluted water, anything that's got undecayed garbage or shit in it, doesn't have air."

"Right," Kelvin said, "because the organisms that break those things down use up all the air in the process. The more sewage there is in the water-that is, the higher the Biochemical Oxygen Demand-the less oxygen is present. When Dolmacher and company designed this bug, they had a simulated ocean environment for it to work in. They probably used something like an aquarium full of aerated seawater. The symbiosis worked just fine in that environment.

"It didn't occur to them that this pair of bugs might end up in an environment in which there wasn't any air. They probably weren't thinking of using it in a totally uncontrolled fashion, around raw sewage-or if they were, they didn't think about the BOD. Even if they were aware of that problem, it didn't matter because management got to the bug before they could test it in that situation. It was released into the Harbor."

"Into a part of the Harbor where there ain't no dissolved oxygen-because of all the raw sewage," I said.

"And Spectacle Island. That's got to be one big oxygen-sucker," Boone said.

Kelvin nodded. "Which means that in those bad parts of the Harbor, most of the aerobes are dead. Nothing to breathe. But the chlorine bugs, the ones we're worried about, did fine, because they didn't need the aerobes-in that particular situation. But if a lot of oxygen were injected into their environment, they'd all die."

"So if the contaminated parts of the Harbor can be oxygenated, the l)ugs die," Boone said.

"How do you propose we oxygenate whole, big patches of the Harbor floor? Get a shitload of aquarium bubblers?" I

said. I was tired and I was wired. I was pissed and bouncing off the walls. Kelvin just stood there and took it calmly.

"Ozone. They use it at the sewage treatment plant. Put it on boats. Run tubes from the ozone supply down to the Harbor floor. Bubble the ozone through the sludge. GEE can't do it, it'll take a big governmental effort, but it can be done. The Harbor will stink like a privy for a few weeks, but when it's done, the bugs will be gone."

We enjoyed a moment of golden silence. Boone said, "Not much for us to do, then, is there?"

Kelvin shrugged. "There doesn't have to be. In this case, the governmental machinery might actually work."

Boone and I looked at each other and laughed.

"Kelvin," Boone said, "they can't even handle sewage treatment."

"Couple of days ago I called the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta," Kelvin said. "This was after Dolmacher had told me everything. I got through to one of their investigators. He'd heard all about this epidemic of chloracne in Boston. The local hospitals had already noticed it, especially City Hospital. So I explained the whole thing to them, about the genetically engineered bug."

I'm an asshole, I do it for a living, so this shouldn't surprise anyone: in a way, I resented Kelvin for this. He knew everything before I did. And he'd made the right phone call. I never thought of calling the Centers for Disease Control. He'd probably saved a lot of people. The real reason was probably this: I wouldn't have the chance to make the Big Revelation, to call the press and inform them, to be the ecoprophet.

"Every doctor on the Bay knows about it now. They've been treating it with activated charcoal-in gastric lavage and enemas-and with trimethoprim. And they just put out an alert late last night, not to eat any fish from the Harbor. That's what inspired those headlines."

"Doctors can't put out that kind of alert."

"Right. You see, all the state authorities are aware of the problem now. They're dealing with it. I already called them and told them about this oxygenation idea. I have the impression they're working on it."