Zodiac by Neal Stephenson Page B

boat. There was no need for stealth, so we just warmed up the Mercury and let them eat our wake. We were quickly out of sight, and it’s hard to track by sound when your own motor is blatting away ten feet behind you. Headed north, just to give them the wrong idea, then doubled back and homed in on the end of the diffuser.
    I can dive if I have to, but it’s not my thing. This time we needed lots of divers, though, and in any case the principle had to be tested. Arty saved me from certain embarrassment and possible demise by pointing out that I’d hooked up my tubes wrong. As we got them fixed, Fisk winked at me. “From here on out,” he said, “I’m an objective journalist, sort of.”
    â€œFunny you should say that, since I’m about to commit a criminal act. Sort of.” And I fell off the Zodiac.
    After a certain amount of aimless swimming around, I located the diffuser. It wasn’t putting much out right now, so I couldn’t follow the black cloud. And Tom was right, the current was powerful,and a greenhorn like me would end up in Newark if he didn’t keep swimming south.
    But I had some big old magnets, things that would grip with a force of a hundred pounds, and I’d brought one along. Once I found the diffuser, I slapped the magnet on and tied myself to that with some rock-climbing webbing. This way I could plant my flippers and lean back against the tug of the rope while I worked.
    From here on in it was just a problem of industrial engineering. How many holes could we plug per diver per hour, and how could we make it go faster? The key was to assemble the bowl/gasket/bolt/wingnut contraptions in the Zodiacs and hand them to the divers as they were needed.
    The plug fit better than I deserved. There would be some leakage owing to the curvature of the pipe, but the diffuser’s ability to emit toxic substances would be cut down to a thousandth of the norm. It was easy to hook the curved end of the bolt under the crossbar and twirl the wingnut down to tighten it. I took my time and estimated how far we could pretighten the wingnuts in the Zodiacs so that the divers wouldn’t have to spend cumulative hours twisting them down.
    Then I smeared some pipe cement over the threads. Hopefully it would harden up and prevent the wingnuts from being removed.
    Not bad. I pretightened the wingnut on another assembly, checked my watch, swam to the next hole, and plugged it. That took five minutes. Five minutes per hole meant five hundred diver-minutes. They’d spend half their time farting around with air tanks and other friction, so we needed a thousand diver-minutes, or something like sixteen diver-hours. If we wanted to do it in four hours, we’d need four divers.
    When I broke the water, our objective journalist was in a truly passionate clinch with Artemis. His fault. I’d made a point of waving my light around to warn them. When making love to granola commandos, leave your eyes open. They broke apart and I pretended to be looking the other way.
    â€œI’m in luck,” I said. “We only need four divers. And we happen to have four, besides me—so I can stay on top. Where I belong.”
    Artemis dunked me for that. Then we went back to the
Blowfish
, which blazed with light and cast a heavenly garlic smell across the water. Jim was up cooking—it had to be Jim, whose passion for garlic was fine by me.
    â€œI’m not trying to sound, like, militaristic,” I announced to the tofu-eating multitude, “but we have a go, Houston.”
    Everyone said “all right” and some raised an herbal toast. Now that these people were used to me, they were getting into the project. The prospect of destroying a mile-long toxic waste diffuser—hell, destroying
anything
a mile long—was a fiendish temptation.
    â€œYou want to call the plant, then?” Jim asked.
    â€œI figure, as soon as we’re done eating, we go over