“Just a hypothesis,” I said. "All the stuff I was sampling was polycyclic. Carbon rings in various numbers and combinations. If our bugs knew how to make those rings, they could get a lot of energy that way. It takes energy to break up a six-pack of carbon, right? Which means that if you make a six-pack, you get some energy out of it. And if you use that energy to make some organic chlorine, and tack that chlorine onto the six-pack, you've just made some type of useful, but toxic, chemical. That's what I was seeing out by the CSO - all kinds of polycyclic-chlorine compounds.
"Anyway, say you're Laughlin, the guy running this sorry outfit. You didn't succeed in killing the environmentalist. He got away and he's been on the phone. The toxic information is spreading. There's no way to contain it. Your only choice is to destroy the credibility of that person. You have to put a stain on his character. And what's the worst stain a guy can have right now? Being linked to terrorism. So you blow up the guy's house and say it was a bomb factory. You put a mine on Pleshy's yacht, steal the guy's car, park it nearby and say he was trying to assassinate Big Daddy. Even if the guy survives, no one will ever believe him.
“Now let's say you're the infected employee, the zealot who has gotten infected with the PCB-eating bug. Dolmacher. You're smart, you know exactly what's happening, because you've been worrying about it. You tell your company that you've been infected and they say, 'Stay at home, Dolmacher, and we'll send you some antibiotics.' And they do. But they don't seem to work. And the company goes along day after day without announcing the extreme danger to the general public. You realize you've been set up. They've been sending you placebos. They're letting you die. And if they're willing to do that, maybe they're willing to assassinate you. You get intensely paranoid, you arm yourself. Some guy comes around from the company, God knows what for, and something goes wrong - he makes the mistake of threatening you and about a second later, he's wearing half a dozen slugs. So you hit the road. You get out of your house. You take one of your numerous guns, your electric Tazer, and start hitting drugstores and stealing mass quantities of antibiotics off the shelves.”
“And then what do you do?” Jim asked, sounding as though he already knew.
“That, my friends, is the sixty-thousand-dollar question, and I'm not a good enough detective to predict the answer.”
“This guy is a violence freak,” Boone observed.
I agreed and told them about the survival game.
“Up in New Hampshire, huh?” Jim said. “Sneaking around shooting at people. Did it occur to you that Pleshy's stumping New Hampshire at the moment?”
We just sat there, stunned.
“Time to roll on down that lonesome highway,” Boone said.
Zodiac
27
DOLLMACHER WASN'T THE TYPE to own Tupperware, but he did have a big half-gallon vat of some kind of margarine substitute in his fridge. I scooped all this unknown substance out onto his counter, ran the container under hot water to wash out the remains, sloshed some of his bleach around in there, and rinsed it. Then I dropped my 501s, squatted over the thing and deposited a sample. I put the lid on.
Borrowed a razor blade from Dolmacher's medicine chest, sterilized it, and cut one of my toes. Just a little cut. We got on the highway and followed the first series of HOSPITAL signs we saw, straight to the emergency room. I had Jim and Boone carry me in. We waited half an hour and then they came to look at me.
“Early this morning we were playing soccer down in Cambridge by the Charles River and I waded in after the ball and cut my foot,” I said. “Tried real hard to keep it clean, sterilized it and everything, but now, shit, I'm vomiting, got the shakes, my joints hurt like hell, diarrhea....”
They shut me up by sticking a thermometer in my mouth. The nurse left me alone for a while so I put the thermometer on the electric baseboard heater until it was up into the lethal range, then shook it down to about a hundred and four.
Same as before: they shot me full of killer antibiotics, and gave me some more in pill form. We went out to the car and I ate some. I'd borrowed some of Dolmacher's essential supplies: aquarium charcoal and laxative. I took a lot of both and rode in the back of the truck. Enough said about that. We drove around to Kelvin's house in Belmont, a little suburb just west of Cambridge.
Kelvin is a difficult person to describe. We had gone to college together, sort of. He had this way of drifting in and out of classes. I'm not sure if he even registered or paid tuition. It didn't matter to him because he didn't care to have grades, or credits, or a diploma. He was just interested in this stuff. If one day's lecture was boring, he walked out, wandered up and down the halls and maybe ended up sitting in the back of an astrophysics or medieval French seminar.
Later I found out that he was on a special scholarship program that the administration had set up to lure in the kinds of students who normally went to Harvard or MIT. The university waived all tuition and fees, and set up a special dorm on Bay State Road. It wasn't really an expensive program because they didn't have to pay any money out. They just avoided taking any in from these particular students. That was no loss, because without the program those students wouldn't have showed up anyway.
Kelvin only showed up when he felt like it. He got in on the first year of the program, in the stage where they still had a few bugs to work out of the system. They decided that Kelvin was one of the bugs. So after the first year they started clamping down, insisting that he register for some classes and make decent grades. He registered for freshman gut courses, devoted an hour a week to them and aced them. The rest of the time he was hanging out in the astrophysics seminars.