“I’m going to kick your ass, junior,” the burly fellow said.
“No you’re not,” said Twenty-Nine Words, throwing down his flag. “It’s only fair to warn you, I’ve been trained by one of the greatest martial arts masters in all Kurdistan. If you try to lay a hand on me I’ll have to club you with a rubber fish.”
The burly fellow tried to lay a hand on him. Twenty-Nine Words easily sidestepped the attack and, true to his word, swatted the angry seaman with a flexible purple trout. The burly fellow took a pratfall in the whipped cream. On the Turner Soap Opera Network he took two pratfalls, one live and one in slow-motion replay.
Another deckhand charged, and another. Twenty-Nine Words trouted them both. Then all the remaining crew members rushed him in a body, and for a moment it looked as though a rugby scrum had broken out on the deck. Twenty-Nine Words stepped out calmly from behind the mob of men and women and walked away whistling while they pummeled one another.
He had stopped to wave at the cameras when a hatch slammed open and Beardsley Stepanik, the hyperactive ship’s steward, raced on deck wielding a flare gun. “All right,” Beardsley screamed, drawing a shaky bead, “freeze it right there, you tree-hugger!”
“Relax,” Twenty-Nine Words said, plucking something from beneath his bear skin. With a snap of the wrist he flicked what looked like a snowball at Beardsley; even in super slow-motion it was hard to follow the snowball’s mid-air metamorphosis, but when Beardsley looked down at himself he saw that an Arctic bunny had landed on his chest. A stuffed Arctic bunny, with sharp toenails that had been dipped in liquid euphoria.
“Aw, hey.” A sensual warmth spread across Beardsley’s chest, up into his arms and down his legs into his toes. Abruptly in love with the whole world, penguins especially, he tossed his flare gun overboard and crouched down in the whipped cream, smoothing great armfuls of it into his hair. “Aw, wow.” He looked up at Twenty-Nine Words and smiled. “You know, kid, you’re beautiful, that’s what you are.”
“I’m indigenous,” said Twenty-Nine Words. “And you’re not so bad yourself.”
“Go to commercial,” said Philo.
The Coup de Grâce
Captain Chance Baker of the South Furrow watched Twenty-Nine Words’s antics through the meringue-splattered windows of the pilothouse. A quiet man in anger, he said nothing, just sipped lukewarm coffee and thought about how good it would feel to turn hard to port and run all twenty thousand tons of his icebreaker full speed over the Yabba-Dabba-Doo. Even if he could have mustered full speed from his dying engines he wouldn’t have tried this, though, because he knew he was outmatched: the yellow smile faces peering out at him from every monitor screen on the bridge told him that, as did the balalaika music that greeted him when he attempted to use the radio. Trying to ram the submarine and failing would only aggravate his feelings of impotence, and then he might be forced to punch out his first mate, who was asking stupid questions.
“What are we gonna do, skipper?” the mate said, as Beardsley Stepanik blew them kisses from the deck.
“Why not roll out the cannon?” Captain Baker suggested.
“But we don’t have any cannon.”
“Then they’ve got us by the balls, don’t they? Now shut up and leave me alone.”
The ship-to-ship holographic communicator beeped. The incoming transmission had been masked to make the caller transparent except for his outline (vague), his eyes (green), and his shirt (Hawaiian and loud).
“Captain Baker?” he introduced himself. “This is Philo Dufresne of the Yabba-Dabba-Doo.”
“Can’t say I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” the captain said. “You calling to tell me to abandon ship?”
“Nothing personal, Captain. We’re running an ecotage promotional video right now, but when we come back live we’re going to be sinking you, and it would help me a lot if you’d order your people to the lifeboats.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then I’ll send more crew to board you in strength and put you all in lifeboats by force . . . but first I’ll dress you up in a gorilla suit.” This was a bluff. Not the part about the gorilla suit—Philo had three of those in stock—only the notion that he had time to effect a full takeover of the ship. By now CNN would have picked up the broadcast feed, thereby alerting the military, and the Ronald Reagan Air Force Base in Trenton would be scrambling all available anti-submarine craft. But Captain Baker didn’t call him on it.
“All right,” he said. “You win. But Dufresne?”
“Yes?”
“You know my name without asking, you probably also know I used to command a destroyer in the navy. When I get back to port I’m going to offer myself cheap to any company that wants to put me in charge of a combat vessel. Then I’m going to come looking for you. Understood?”
“Understood. I’d better warn you, though, Harry Gant’s a pacifist. Only good thing I can say about him. Over and out.”
Morris Kazenstein had the last word on the broadcast. He stood on the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s launch deck wearing a star-and-moon-speckled wizard’s hat and a set of fake-nose-and-moustache glasses. “Hey world,” he said, “time for another visit with Mr. Science. Today we’re going to do an experiment in kinetic energy transfer. This”—he pointed to a long cylindrical track that had risen out of the hull beside him—“is an electromagnetic railgun, a scaled-down model of the very same device the Republicans use to protect the White House from nuclear attack. And this”—he held up a hefty deli sausage—“is twenty pounds of kosher salami. Now what we’re going to do is accelerate the salami to Mach 9 and see what happens to the bow of that ship over there, OK? Kids, please don’t try this at home without your parents’ supervision . . .”
The Review
“Any comments?” Harry Gant asked his crisis-reduction team as they watched the sinking of the South Furrow on the conference room video screen. Gant was sitting with his back to the table, and with his expression hidden it was difficult for the more self-promoting members of the group to read his mood and tailor a proper response. Unsurprisingly, Whitey Caspian—known to his peers in the Public Opinion Department as Prince Motor Tongue—was the first to speak up.
“It probably wasn’t a real salami,” Whitey said.
“What’s that?”
“It probably wasn’t real,” Whitey repeated. He was six-foot-three, blond, and built like a decathlon champion but undercut any comparison to Adonis with his choice of horn-rimmed glasses and tartan bow tie. “Even a kosher salami probably couldn’t withstand that kind of acceleration.”
“You have the brains of a radish,” Vanna Domingo hissed. But Harry Gant was laughing. He swung around to face them and brought his hands together in applause. “That’s great,” he said. “That’s better than great, it’s brilliant.”
Clayton Bryce from Creative Accounting cleared his throat and asked: “What’s brilliant, Mr. Gant?”
“The whole thing,” Gant said, gesturing at the video screen. “What Whitey just said. That’s all the media are going to be talking about. I can already imagine the follow-up interview on CNN: ‘Tell us, Professor Newton, what are the practical aspects of firing salami from a railgun?’ Not to mention Ætna Insurance’s reaction when we file our claim. ‘Help us, Ætna, the wicked pirate Dufresne torpedoed us with deli meat!’”
Vanna Domingo couldn’t believe his tone. “You admire that bastard!”
“Dufresne? Of course I admire him. Hell, I wish I could hire him.”
“He just destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of your property.”
“He just out-advertised me, that’s what he did. You’ve seen the public reaction. He’s got first-graders out in Kansas learning to word process just so they can write me nasty letters. Home recordings of his raids are the hottest item in amateur video. If he were a corporation instead of a criminal he’d be in the Fortune 500 by now. He’s a genuine American hero.”
“He’s evil,” Vanna Domingo insisted. “We sh
ould take the insurance money from that ship he just sank and hire a mercenary fleet to track him down. With torpedoes and depth charges . . .”
Gant held up his hands. “No physical violence,” he said. “Mercenaries, depth charges, all that G.I. Joe nonsense, it goes against the free-market tradition. Besides, I don’t like it.”
“But he’s using violence against this corporation, against you, so why—”
“That’s different. Dufresne’s brand of violence is . . . creative. All right, I’ll grant you, violence is violence, he’s probably a bald-faced anarchist at heart, but if I were a bald-faced anarchist at heart, I can only hope that I would be capable of designing a battle plan as artistic as the one we just witnessed. Not a single fatality, no serious injuries, and those rabbit things that kid was throwing, you could probably put those in stores around Christmastime and start a whole new fad. Pure genius.
“The point is, though, we’re not anarchists, we’re democratic capitalists, and that means we leave warfare to the government. Which reminds me, what does the Pentagon have to say?”
“Nothing encouraging,” said C. D. Singh, who was Gant’s liaison in Washington. “They’re either really scared or really embarrassed, but either way they’ve got no official comment. Maybe they’ll be luckier today, but my inside sources tell me that all previous sea hunts have failed to turn up even a trace of the sub, no matter how quickly anti-submarine forces arrive on the scene. That degree of stealth just isn’t possible for a pack of radical environmentalists operating on their own, but neither the C.I.A. nor the F.B.I.’s Un-Un-American Activities Division has uncovered any evidence linking Dufresne to a foreign power.”
“So theoretically,” Gant said, “the pirates can’t be getting away with what they’ve been getting away with.”
“Yes sir. Which means, from a military intelligence standpoint, that the Yabba-Dabba-Doo doesn’t exist.”
“Doesn’t exist!” Vanna was beginning to change color. “Doesn’t exist! It was just on millions of television screens, what more proof do they want?”
“They’re being cautious, that’s all,” C. D. Singh said. “And to be frank, Mr. Gant, we haven’t raised nearly the stink we’re capable of, considering the wealth of this corporation.”
“Well tell me something,” Gant said. “What would the navy or the Air Force do to Dufresne if they could find him?”
“Force him to surrender, if possible. Turn him and his crew over to the F.B.I., put the submarine in dry dock and dissect it for its secrets. Or if he wouldn’t give up, sink him.”
“And good riddance,” said Vanna.
“Hmm,” said Gant. “I wonder what the first-graders in Kansas would say about that.”
“I can’t speak for the Kansas schoolchildren,” C. D. Singh replied, “but I can tell you what the president is saying right now. His offer to sanction operations in Antarctica was contingent on our keeping the scandal to a minimum, which would have been difficult even without this interference. I expect his representative will be calling within the hour to withdraw support.”
Gant shrugged. “That I’m not worried about. To tell the truth, the idea of drilling for oil at the South Pole never excited me much.”
“Well it should,” Clayton Bryce said, suddenly angry. “We need the revenue. And the reason we need the revenue is that mile-high buildings aren’t profitable. Babel is a money sink; our great-grandchildren will be ready for retirement by the time it starts earning in the black, if it ever does. The Minaret is barely paying for itself, the Phoenix hasn’t come close to breaking even, and yet here we are saddling ourselves with enough negative cash flow to last out the century.”
“But think of it, Clayton,” Gant replied, dismissing petty financial concerns with another shrug. “A tower stretching a mile into the sky. I can’t imagine a more remarkable human achievement. The tallest building in the history of the world.”
“And if it bankrupts us?”
“Oh, hell, we won’t go bankrupt. We’ll think up some new products to help finance it. And we don’t have to give up on Antarctica, either, if you really think it’s necessary. C. D. can contact some of the other Treaty nations, get an axis going.”
“That could take years, Mr. Gant . . .”
“Let it take years. I plan to be around for another forty or fifty, myself. I can wait.”
“. . . and there’s going to be insistence that something be done about Dufresne before any deals are struck.”
“Well getting back to Dufresne, then . . . what about economic warfare? That kind of violence I can live with. How much progress have we made figuring out who’s funding these people?”
Clayton shook his head. “No progress,” he said.
“None?”
“We’ve followed up rumors that Dufresne’s being bankrolled by terrorists or rival corporations, that he owns a diamond mine in Africa or a coca plantation in South America, that he’s a former junk bond trader who decided to go straight. We’ve even checked allegations that he’s being backed by the Trilateral Commission. None of it pans out.”
“Well keep trying,” Gant said. “And you, Vanna, get the Public Opinion gang together and—”
“This is ridiculous,” Vanna interrupted him. “Millions lost on that icebreaker. Who knows how many more millions—billions—lost in potential profits from Antarctica. All this from just one raid by that bastard, but what do you want to do? Launch an advertising campaign against him. Break his piggy bank. Shake a finger at him. Why can’t we just kill him?”
“No,” Gant said, making it final. “Philo Dufresne embodies the spirit that built this country, and you don’t kill a person like that. You either co-opt him or humble him. And you do that by using even more American ingenuity than he’s used on you.”
“This sounds like a very expensive brand of patriotism,” C. D. Singh observed.
“It’s my brand of patriotism,” Gant replied. “And this is my corporation, so my brand of patriotism wins. Now I don’t want to hear any more talk about killing. We’ll beat Dufresne, but we’ll beat him in the right way. Next order of business.”
Still red-faced, Vanna Domingo consulted her Electric Clipboard. “Next item is a point of information about your ex-wife. It has to do with that big fish that popped up at the Technical School earlier this morning. Our follow-up security check has discovered that Joan Fine was on the other end of the explosion. Her intended target seems to have been the fish, not you.”
“Is she all right?” Gant leaned forward, more alert than he’d been all morning. “She’s not dead, is she?”
“Not dead,” said Vanna, and thought: I only wish. “A Department of Sewers rescue team found her in a dry tunnel and took her to East River General. She was conscious and apparently unhurt—a few scratches, nothing more—but they want to keep her for observation. Also, the superintendent of sewers has released a statement claiming that the entire incident was a mass hallucination.”
“There’s another man I’d like to hire. Make a note, Vanna: I want the number of Joan’s room at the hospital and a schedule of the visiting hours.”
Vanna looked at him. “You can’t visit her. She betrayed this corporation. She’s anathema.”
“Calm down, Vanna. I’d like to send her a get-well card, that’s all.”
“But she’s unhurt.”
“Just get me the room number, Vanna.”
“Yes sir.”
There was a knock at the door to the conference room. The director of Phoenix Visitor Services stuck his head in. “Very sorry to disturb you, Mr. Gant,” he said, “but there’s a bit of an emergency . . .”
Gant sighed. “What is it now?”
“I just got a call from Crowd Control down in the lobby. Did you by any chance order two thousand pizzas?”
3
Almost no one is aware that for more than two hundred years New York water tasted so foul that horses would not drink it, was so impure that disease decimated the populatio
n every other year, so expensive that the poor went without it and the streets were filled with filth, its sources so widely scattered that periodic fires wiped out four or five hundred houses at a clip.
—Robert Daley, The World Beneath the City
1914: Walking to Flatbush
The Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam would have been skeptical to hear that their rough little town on the Hudson—after a name change, two switches in nationality, and countless vain exercises in imaginative plumbing—would ultimately gain a reputation for having some of the tastiest drinking water of any city in the world. The British and newly minted Americans who came after them probably wouldn’t have believed it either, though they let themselves be rooked again and again by con men promising relief from tainted wells. Even Aaron Burr joined in the shell game: his Manhattan Company water utility was a financial success (clearing enough profit to underwrite Burr’s presidential campaign and found the Chase Manhattan Bank) but a practical failure (service was terrible and did nothing to alleviate poor sanitation conditions that caused regular outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera).
New York finally started importing its water, first by aqueduct from Westchester, and later, when the immigrant population explosion had taxed that supply to its limit, from dams in the faraway Catskill Mountains. Publie Works engineers and laborers (many of them only recently arrived from Italy) dug a tunnel from the Catskills to the Hill View Reservoir in Yonkers, then bored south through the bedrock under the Harlem River to bring the water into the city proper. The last segment of the tunnel was blasted open on January 11, 1914, and an incidental consequence of its completion was that it made possible one of the most peculiar marathons in city history: an underground hike of a hundred and twenty miles, from the Catskill Mountains to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.