Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

inputs and outputs and there’s no way to make those outputs disappear. You can try to eliminate them with another chemical reaction, but that’s going to have outputs also. You can try to hide them, but they have this way of escaping. The only rational choice is not to be a chemical crook in the first place. Become a chemical crook and you’re betting your future on the hope that there aren’t any chemical detectives gunning for you. That assumption isn’t true anymore.
    I don’t mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of them all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even admit that chlordane was dangerous.And if they don’t have the balls to take preventive measures, punitive action doesn’t even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don’t know what to do. They don’t even look for violators.
    I
do
look. Last year I went on an afternoon’s canoe trip in central Jersey, taking some sample tubes with me. I went home, ran the stuff through my chromatograph, and the result was over a million dollars in fines levied against several offenders. The supply-side economists made it this way: created a system of laissez-faire justice, with plenty of niches for aggressive young entrepreneurs, like me.
    A rubber-coated hand broke the water ahead of me and I cut the motor. Tom’s head emerged next to the Zodiac and he peeled back the Darth Vader mask to talk. His mouth was wide open and grimacing; he was surprised. “That is one big motherfucker.”
    â€œHow long?”
    â€œIt’s so long I can’t swim to the end of it. I’ll need a lift.”
    â€œAnd there’s black shit coming out of it?”
    â€œRight.” Tom placed the little video camera on the floor of the Zode. I picked it up, rewound the tape, put the camera to my face and started to replay the tape through the little screen in the view-finder. “Some shots of the diffusers,” Tom explained. “Each one is three and a quarter inches in diameter. The crossbar is three-eighths inch.”
    â€œNice job.”
    â€œWasn’t doing much when I showed up, then it started really barfing that stuff out.”
    â€œMorning shift. You missed the rush hour when you were down there. Let’s see.”
    Through the viewfinder I was looking at the smooth, unnatural curve of a large pipe on the seafloor. It was covered with rust, and the rust with hairy green crap. The camera zoomed in on a black hole in the side of the pipe; understandably, nothing was growing near that. Cutting across the center of the hole was a crossbar.
    â€œThis remind you of anything?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” he said.
    â€œLooks like the Greek letter theta. You know? The ecology symbol.” I held up a press release bearing GEE’s logo and he laughed.
    â€œI guess this means to hell with the secrecy fetish,” I said. “Hang on and I’ll take you out farther.”
    We worked our way offshore about a hundred yards at a time, then, and when we got bored and started thinking about lunch, a quarter mile at a time. The slope of the bottom was gentle and the water never got deeper than about fifty feet. I’d motor him out, following the pipe with my compass, and he’d drop off and swim down to see if it was still there. When Tom finally found the end of it, we were pretty close to our starting place on the little shrub-covered island. The fucking thing was a mile long.
    I hadn’t worked with him before, but Tom was good. When you dive for a living I guess it pays to be precise. I knew some other GEE divers who would have said, “Whoa, man, it’s a big fucking pipe, it’s, like, about this wide.” Tom was a fanatic, though, and