Free Zodiac by Neal Stephenson Page B

lot more get in through your skin. But there’s not enough solvents in that diffuser, I think, to melt the suit.”
    â€œThat’s what they told us about Agent Orange.”
    â€œShit.” There was no reason for me to be astonished. I just hadn’t thought of it before. “You got sprayed with that stuff?”
    â€œSwam through the shit.”
    â€œYou were a SEAL?”
    â€œDemolition. But the Viet Cong didn’t have much of a navy so it was mostly blue-collar maintenance. You know, cleaning dead buffaloes out of intake pipes.”
    â€œWell, this stuff isn’t like Agent Orange. No dioxin involved here.”
    â€œOkay. You’ve got your paranoia and I’ve got mine.”
    We
were
being paranoid. I’d already admitted it. After our midnight ride through Brighton he had a pretty good idea of how my mind worked.
    â€œI don’t care if they see me checking out their pipe on the surface, Tom. I don’t even care if they recognize me. But if they see a diver, that’s a giveaway. Then they know they’re in trouble. So just bear with me.”
    So he climbed into the water and I towed him, submerged, to a place where the water turned black. Then I cut the motor. He thumped on the bottom of the Zode.
    I gave him a minute to get clear, then restarted the motor and just idled back and forth for a few minutes. I already had pretty good maps, but this was a chance to embellish them, note down clumps of trees, docking facilities, hidden sandbars, and media-support areas. About half a mile south was a public pier belonging to a state park; then, moving north, there was a chainlink fence running down to the water, separating park land from the Swiss Bastards’ right-of-way. A few hundred feet past that was another fence and then some private property, some old retired-fishermen’s homes.
    The Swiss Bastards’ right-of-way was deceptively wooded. When the wind came up a little, the trees sighed and almost covered the rush-hour roar of the parkway. Just out of curiosity, I took the Zode closer to shore and scanned the trees with binoculars. One of the rent-a-cops loitering back there was giving himself away by his cigarette smoke. Or, knowing the habits of rent-a-cops, maybe it was oregano somebody had sold him as reefer.
    I knew what direction the pipe ran, so I could follow it inland using my compass, trace its path under some swampy woods and crackerbox developments, out to the parkway, a couple of miles inland. Then a forest of pipes rose up behind the real forest. Wheneverthe wind blew the right way, I got a whiff of organic solvents and gaseous byproducts. The plant was just coming alive with the morning shift, the center of the traffic noise. Tomorrow I’d make a phone call and shut it all down.
    The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it’s easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger.
    No chemical crime is perfect. Chemical reactions have