“With all the other players in this industry. Of course, you can say anything you want about this meeting, after you've left, but we'll just deny it. And all it will do is give a slight edge to our competitors.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let's get this shit over with. We're all busy people. You guys have been working on some kind of genetically engineered bug that deals with the organic chlorine problem.”
“Actually, yes,” said Dolmacher.
“I'd guess you got yourselves some time on a Cray supercomputer, or something, and did some kind of heavy quantum mechanics, worked out a rough numerical-solution Hamiltonian for chlorine, devised some kind of transition state between covalent and ionic, figured out a way to introduce an electron into those chlorines to make them ionic again. Some reaction that could be carried out by a string of genetic material - what do you call it?”
“A plasmid,” Laughlin said.
“A plasmid that could be introduced into a bacterium and therefore reproduced in unlimited quantities. And now you want to get approval to use this thing to clean up toxic waste spills. Turn all that covalent chlorine back into salt.”
“Sheesh,” Dolmacher said, and not for the first time.
“You want a job, S.T.?” Laughlin said.
“I could use one. Need to replace my computer.”
“That's a shame.”
“Yeah. The' Mafia sent a hardware engineer around to bust it.”
For once, Laughlin had nothing to say. He was just a little rattled, or pissed. Probably thinking that he'd been kind of stupid, here and there, along the way.
“You should buy one of the new ones,” Dolmacher said. “With the 80386 processor. Hottest thing going.”
“You bastards. You already did it, didn't you?”
Laughlin checked his Rolex. “Let me see. Two weeks, three days, and about four hours. It took you that long to figure it out?”
“Took your magic bug and dumped it into the Harbor. Ate those PCBs right up. Turned them into salt.”
Laughlin shrugged. He had his eyebrows way up on his forehead now, up there in the zone of total innocence. “Is there some problem with that?”
“Tell me. How long since Dolmacher put this bug together for you? A month or two? When I talked to him at the yacht club, he wasn't finished with it yet. He said he was working on the Holy Grail, not finished with it.”
“Something like that.”
“Jeez, S.T., chill out.”
“How much testing did you do on that bug before you put it into the environment?”
Laughlin shrugged. “Wasn't necessary.”
“I think the EPA would disagree.”
“Don't insult my intelligence by talking about them.”
I snorted. “Alas, we agree, Laughlin. But didn't you even think about the dangers?”
He grinned. He had me. “What dangers? The bug eats covalent chlorine compounds, S.T. That's its food. When it's eaten them all - when the Harbor is perfectly toxin-free - it starves to death. End of bug.”
“Yeah, I get the secret message loud and clear. If I go out there and try to get evidence - to find some of these bugs and blow your company away - I won't find zip. They're all dead.”
“Which is fine, isn't it? Because we don't want genetically engineered bugs in the environment.”
“And we don't want PCBs either,” Dolmacher reminded us.
Laughlin smirked at Dolmacher behind his back.
“You guys went out and stopped pollution, huh?” I said, beating him to it.
“We stopped pollution. No PCBs left in the Harbor. No bugs either. No evidence to harm our company. The only person who's screwed is you, S.T.”
Suddenly Dolmacher turned nasty. “Yeah, S.T., you're screwed.”
“Everywhere except in bed,” Laughlin added.
“Laughlin, my man,” I said, “I didn't realize it was going to be that kind of fight.”
He dropped into a boxing stance, waved his guard around, snapped a big meaty right hook into thin air. “Fight's over,” he said. “First-round knockout. Ever do any boxing, S.T.?”
“Nope. I prefer to kill helpless animals.”
Dolmacher cleared his throat with a sound like pebbles rattling in a can. “What we're hoping is that we can get you on our side.”
“That's not what we were going to say, Dolmacher,” Laughlin said. “We were going to say, 'What we're trying to demonstrate is that We're already on the same side.'”
“You and us,” Dolmacher continued, right in stride.
“Lumpy, you ever get your boss up there for the Survival Game?” I asked. “I could slip you some dum-dums.”
“It's a stupid game,” Laughlin said. Dolmacher looked a little wounded.
“All your boss's ammo is on the bottom of the Harbor,” I said. “In his chrome-plated revolver.”
“I got a new one,” Laughlin said, “even bigger. To protect myself from terrorists.”
“How's your son?” I asked. “The Poyzen Boyzen fan. He been spending a lot of time on the Nautilus lately?”
“Christopher lacks the maturity for a concerted power-building program,” Laughlin said, showing a little tension.
“I'll say. He and I had a chat, out there on that big mound of garbage in the Harbor, where he hangs out with the rest of the Junior Achievement League. How old is he - fourteen, fifteen?”
“Seventeen.”
“Oh. Well, I was impressed with him. He throws a mean beer bottle.”
“Thank you.”
“What's his ambition, then? Arsonist?”
Laughlin started for me, quick little boxer's steps. I just sat there. Harder to punch a guy's face when it's down around your waist.
“Think about lawyers, Laughlin,” I said. He did, and he stopped.
“Let's get to the end of this,” I said, “because we're both about to kill each other. You want me, noted eco-asshole Sangamon Taylor, to come out and say that your PCB-eating bug is a good thing. That it should be rushed into general use right away.”
“All of which is the God's truth,” Dolmacher said.
“Before you ever used that bug, you knew I might fuck it up for you. You heard from Christopher that I was hanging out on Spectacle Island, and you were afraid that I'd discover the old Basco transformers leaking PCBs there.”