Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

videotape machine at the station.
    â€œTomorrow?”
    â€œYeah. We’ll start real early in the morning, but this is going to be a long operation. All day long.”
    â€œWhere?”
    I told him how to get to Blue Kills Beach and gave him a xeroxed handout we prepared for the Fourth Estate—tips on how to protect and use your camera on a rocking Zodiac and that sort of thing. I also tossed him a videotape, stock footage of GEE frogmen working off of Zodiacs, plugging pipes.
    â€œThanks,” he said, “I’ll copy this and get it back to you.”
    â€œKeep it. We’ve got others.”
    â€œOh, thanks!” He hefted the videotape and did a doubletake on it. “Jesus! This is three-quarter inch!” Then he gave me a sly wink and promised to see me tomorrow.
    In the Omni, Debbie was on the phone to a reporter who’d been sent here from one of the New York papers. He’d be more portable than a minicam crew, shrewder, harder to manipulate and a lot more fun to hang out with.
    We and the reporter—a round grizzled type named Fisk—and the
Blowfish
and the truck from the hardware store and a Lincoln with two rent-a-dicks all converged on Blue Kills Beach. I considered trying to hide our purchases from the dicks, but even if they saw what we had, they’d never anticipate our plan.
    The driver from the hardware store was severely rattled. He was just a sixteen-year-old, probably doing his part-time on his way to being an artillery loader at Fort Dix. His dad probably worked at the plant. He’d never seen men with hair before.
    â€œYou know anything about outboards?” I asked him by way of male bonding. We got into a long rap about whether I needed to check the carburetor on one of our Mercs. Artemis got involved and soon the kid relaxed completely. He allowed as how he’d never seen such big motors on such small boats and she took him for a ride while we unloaded the truck. When he came back, half drenched with salt water, phthalates and hydrazines, he thought we were pretty cool. Andthat’s fine, because we were pretty cool—Artemis is, anyway—and it wouldn’t be fair for him to go away with the wrong impression. We take people for rides while the chemical companies lay off their cancerous dads, and sooner or later they decide on their own who the good guys are.
    Several of the
Blowfish
crew wanted to do laundry and bathe in real tubs, so Debbie and I handed over the keys to the Omni and the honeymoon suite, after I talked to them briefly about dipsticks and redlines. Then we headed out to sea on the
Blowfish
.
    I sat down on the foredeck with Fisk, who accepted one of my illegal cigars. We smoked and drank beer and traded environmental stories for a bit, then I showed him the pictures of the theta-holes, sketched the diffuser, laid out the whole gig.
    He was interested, but not overly. “I figured you had something big planned,” he said, “but my main reason for coming was this.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThis
,” he said, and swept his arms out wide. Then I noticed that we were sprawling on the deck of one very fine handmade wooden ketch, on the open ocean, under a golden afternoon sky, cooled by the breeze and warmed by the sun, sailing along strongly and quietly, smoking fine Cuban cigars.
    â€œOh, yeah,” I said. “Fringe benefit.”
    Over dinner it came out that this was Captain Jim’s birthday. Tanya had brought out some kind of politically incorrect cake, buried an inch deep in frosting, with a crude picture of a ketch on top. Debbie took the opportunity to give him something she’d been meaning to give him anyway.
    She’d put in a lot of time on banner duty. More time than anyone should. She had a knack for visual thinking, Debbie did, and we knew it. These days she just sketched them out and canvassers—our student gnomes—did the sewing. One of her better efforts was a big