Despite all my moaning and bitching, it's getting tougher to be a toxic polluter in this country. In the last three decades, especially since about 1974, the Chloralkali business has taken a nosedive, down by about forty percent. I'm shooting for a hundred.
Going after the chemical industry in Buffalo meant going after Boner Chemicals - which was like shooting ducks in a barrel while half a million people stood around cheering you on - and this time it was going to be even easier. We didn't have to use shotguns on those toxic ducks anymore, because a friend of ours in Albany was providing us with flamethrowers.
The EPA is so anemic, and this country so dirty, that they have to contract out a lot of their work. After the toxic catastrophe in Buffalo, they farmed some work out to a group of chemical consultants in Albany, similar to Mass Anal. In effect, that gave these consultants subpoena power over Boner, the sole cause of the catastrophe. They got to raid Boner's files and cart off the relevant maps and documents. They learned toxic secrets that would turn your blood to dioxin.
One of the consultants resigned because he wanted to build a geodesic-dome house and start his own computer software company. I think you know the kind of guy I'm talking about. He got involved with GEE. He no longer had any secret documents, but he knew how to operate a Xerox machine. When my train pulled into Albany on its way to Buffalo, he joined Debbie and me in our sleeper coach; we poured him a Screwdriver and talked about things to come. His name was Alan Reading.
Debbie and I had kept the bunks fastidiously folded away. We'd talked all the way from Boston to Springfield, paused so I could read the last couple of days' Wall Street Journal, and were just getting into the terrible subject of Commitment when we pulled into Albany. We weren't exactly in a good mood.
We sat in the coach and studied a bunch of documents that Alan had illegally xeroxed. One was quite interesting: a map of the main Boner plant, showing in detail the boundary between Boner property and the public streets. There was an indentation in the boundary: a street that ran for half a block into Boner territory and then deadended. It was still public property, though it was surrounded on three sides by the plant. The only reason it existed was as a place to put a manhole. There was a sewer line running from the middle of boner Chemical out to Buffalo's general sewer system. This line ran along underneath the deadend street; at the end of that street, right up against the gate to Bonerland, was a manhole. Alan happened to know that at this very spot, Boner Chemical was dumping dioxins into the sewers.
“This is great stuff,” I told him. “I have something you might want to read too.” And I showed him the Journals. Seems as though another big corporate merger was in the offing. Basco was buying out Boner.
“Why on earth would anyone want to own it?” Alan mumbled. “It's a black hole.”
“If it makes money on paper, for the first year, it must be a good investment.”
Debbie had other things to concentrate on. Up at the Falls, she and the Blowfish people had some big splashy affair planned for the media, involving Canadians and Indians. It appeared that the Indians in upstate New York, the Seven Nations, continued to approve of us.
This wasn't always the way it worked. GEE scouts were always pursuing the Indians, asking to sleep in their teepees and groove on their most sacred ceremonies. You couldn't be cool in some GEE circles unless you'd seen the inside of a Lakota sweat lodge; it was like a fetish. Usually the Indians were tolerant, but not always. The night before, I'd been on the computer, poking around in GEE's international message system, and learned that one of our boys was in the hospital in Rapid City. He had been smoking the peace pipe with some Sioux and had taken it upon himself to put in some marijuana. So they broke his arm. Little misunderstandings like this were common, and I was always amazed when the Northeastern tribes showed any interest at all in working with us. They had as much to lose from being slowly poisoned by large corporations as anyone, I guess. Maybe more, since they tended to be fishermen or factory workers.
A donated car was waiting for us in Buffalo, a half-devastated Subaru with loose speakers dangling out of the door panels and ecostickers all over the windows. I dropped Alan and Debbie off at the marina where the Blowfish was parked. They were having a party for local supporters and I couldn't bear the thought of it. Sometimes, actually, I do feel like having fun, pretending to be charming, putting on my suit with the toxic tennis shoes, regaling local environmentalists with war stories, describing the variety of crap they have in their tap water. But other times, like now, I just wanted to drive around in the dark and look for trouble.
We were going to be plugging a few pipes here, I knew that much. Pipe-plugging technology is pretty well established by now. For pipes less than about four feet across, you just stack bags of cement in them. The cement swells up and gets hard.