Y.T. doesn’t get down to Long Beach very much, but when she does, she will do just about anything to avoid the Sacrifice Zone. It’s an abandoned shipyard the size of a small town. It sticks out into San Pedro Bay, where the older, nastier Burbclaves of the Basin—unplanned Burbclaves of tiny asbestos-shingled houses patrolled by beetle-browed Kampuchean men with pump shotguns—fade off into the foam-kissed beaches. Most of it’s on the appropriately named Terminal Island, and since her plank doesn’t run on the water, that means she can only get in or out by one access road.
Like all Sacrifice Zones, this one has a fence around it, with yellow metal signs wired to it every few yards.
SACRIFICE ZONE
WARNING. The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone. The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value.
And like all Sacrifice Zone fences, this one has holes in it and is partially torn down in places. Young men blasted out of their minds on natural and artificial male hormones must have some place to do their idiotic coming-of-age rituals. They come in from Burbclaves all over the area in their four-wheel-drive trucks and tear across the open ground, slicing long curling gashes into the clay cap that was placed on the really bad parts to prevent windblown asbestos from blizzarding down over Disneyland.
Y.T. is oddly satisfied to know that these boys have never even dreamed of an all-terrain vehicle like Ng’s motorized wheelchair. It veers off the paved road with no loss in speed—ride gets a little bumpy—and hits the chain-link fence as if it were a fog bank, plowing a hundred-foot section into the ground.
It is a clear night, and so the Sacrifice Zone glitters, an immense carpet of broken glass and shredded asbestos. A hundred feet away, some seagulls are tearing at the belly of a dead German shepherd lying on its back. There is a constant undulation of the ground that makes the shattered glass flash and twinkle; this is caused by vast, sparse migrations of rats. The deep, computer-designed imprints of suburban boys’ fat knobby tires paint giant runes on the clay, like the mystery figures in Peru that Y.T.’s mom learned about at the NeoAquarian Temple. Through the windows, Y.T. can hear occasional bursts of either firecrackers or gunfire.
She can also hear Ng making new, even stranger sounds with his mouth.
There is a built-in speaker system in this van—a stereo, though far be it from Ng to actually listen to any tunes. Y.T. can feel it turning on, can sense a nearly inaudible hiss coming from the speakers.
The van begins to creep forward across the Zone.
The inaudible hiss gathers itself up into a low electronic hum. It’s not steady, it wavers up and down, staying pretty low, like Roadkill fooling around with his electric bass. Ng keeps changing the direction of the van, as though he’s searching for something, and Y.T. gets the sense that the pitch of the hum is rising.
It’s definitely rising, building up in the direction of a squeal. Ng snarls a command and the volume is reduced. He’s driving very slowly now.
“It is possible that you might not have to buy any Snow Crash at all,” he mumbles. “We may have found an unprotected stash.”
“What is this totally irritating noise?”
“Bioelectronic sensor. Human cell membranes. Grown in vitro, which means in glass—in a test tube. One side is exposed to outside air, the other side is clean. When a foreign substance penetrates the cell membrane to the clean side, it’s detected. The more foreign molecules penetrate, the higher the pitch of the sound.”
“Like a Geiger counter?”
“Very much like a Geiger counter for cell-penetrating compounds,” Ng says.
Like what? Y.T. wants to ask. But she doesn’t.
Ng stops the van. He turns on some lights—very dim lights. That’s how anal this guy is—he has gone to the trouble to install special dim lights in addition to all the bright ones.
They are looking into a sort of bowl, right at the foot of a major drum heap, that is strewn with litter. Most of the litter is empty beer cans. In the middle is a fire pit. Many tire tracks converge here.
“Ah, this is good,” Ng says. “A place where the young men gather to take drugs.”
Y.T. rolls her eyes at this display of tubularity. This must be the guy who writes all those antidrug pamphlets they get at school.
Like he’s not getting a million gallons of drugs every second through all of those gross tubes.
“I don’t see any signs of booby traps,” Ng says. “Why don’t you go out and see what kind of drug paraphernalia is out there.”
She looks at him like, what did you say?
“There’s a toxics mask hanging on the back of your seat,” he says.
“What’s out there, toxic-wise?”
“Discarded asbestos from the shipbuilding industry. Marine antifouling paints that are full of heavy metals. They used PCBs for a lot of things, too.”
“Great.”
“I sense your reluctance. But if we can get a sample of Snow Crash from this drug-taking site, it will obviate the rest of our mission.”
“Well, since you put it that way,” Y.T. says, and grabs the mask. It’s a big rubber-and-canvas number that covers her whole head and neck. Feels heavy and awkward at first, but whoever designed it had the right idea, all the weight rests in the right places. There’s also a pair of heavy gloves that she hauls on. They are way too big. Like the people at the glove factory never dreamed that an actual female could wear gloves.
She trudges out onto the glass-and-asbestos soil of the Zone, hoping that Ng isn’t going to slam the door shut and drive away and leave her there.