We started roughly where I'd taken my first sample and worked our way outwards, covering about half a square mile of the Harbor floor. We ended up with thirty-six peanut butter jars full of raw sewage, and some very sore muscles.

There's one advantage of hanging out with groovsters: they give good massage. A couple of hours of massage, beer, nitrous oxide, and Stooges after a day of diving-nothing could beat it.

The next day we began to run the samples and got semi disastrous results. Disastrous for me-we weren't reading any PCBs at all. This was unbelievable-there had to be contamination inside the machine-and the whole operation went on hold for two days while I took the gas chromatograph apart, piece by piece, cleaned each one, and put it back together. Pure joy.

Then I started to test the samples again. No one had stuck around for the two days of cleaning, so by this time I was working alone. No matter, I got exactly the same goddamn results. The level of PCBs in these samples was no different from those taken anywhere else in the Harbor.

As we headed south, in the direction of Spectacle Island, the concentration dropped rapidly-not what I'd expected- and to the north of Spectacle we couldn't get any PCB readings at all. It was totally virgin.

The Granola James Bond, the Toxic Spiderman, had fucked up. I'd overreacted to some oily lobsters, seen a guy with excema and called it chloracne. Then I'd gotten a bad sample, or run it wrong, and rushed the gig.

It was hard to believe, but I had no choice. The only other possibility was that the culprits had somehow hoovered up the PCBs while I was shuffling papers. But that kind of a Cecil B. De Mille operation would have cost billions.

It happens. Seen from the laboratory, the universe looks a lot more complicated than it does in your neat mental blueprints. But this time it really burned my ass. Debbie could have helped, but I didn't give her a chance. To be lonely and

pissed feels better. So after I'd gone through the burning embarrassment, the denial and the anger, I got down into some serious depression.

It was raining, cool for the season, and I wandered drunkenly until I hit an obstacle: a huge, overdressed throng in the marketplace. On a sunny weekend this wouldn't have been unusual, but today it was a little out of place. Then I saw the banners, the buttons, all the cheap, shimmering detritus of a political campaign, and heard .The Groveler's voice ringing dingily out of some big speakers.

These were just the groundlings out here. Bostonians practice idolatry in their politics-Curley, Kennedy, O'Neill, now Pleshy. Inside were the big shots, the power structure of so-called liberal Massachusetts's politics. All the people who bleated about cleaning up the Harbor until they discovered that people like Pleshy were responsible for making it dirty.

This was too disgusting to witness, so I turned on my heel and headed across into Government Center. A couple of Secret Service types were watching me; one had stopped to buy a soft pretzel on the curb, and when I went past him we nodded at each other.

At a phone booth I called the Boss collect, and told him I had to get the fuck out of town, that I needed a vacation.

"You deserve it," he said.

"GEE deserves it," I said. "I'm so into my job that I'm fucking up."

Thank God Project Lobster was over with and I could say goodbye to skeptical lobstermen. They'd never let me forget this one. Busting into the middle of a ball game in Fenway to give them dire, unbelievable warnings, then showing up a week later and taking it all back; exactly the image I'd been fighting all along.

I remembered Hoa's busboy giving me that sneer, that duck-squeezer look, and decided to eat Chinese for a while.

"Where are you going on vacation?" the Boss asked.

"Shit, I don't know, just hang around town."

"How about Buffalo?"

"Buffalo?"

"Why not?" he said, sounding terribly innocent.

"Let me tell you a story about Buffalo. Last time I drove through there was in the middle of a windstorm. Huge, record-setting windstorm. Sixty-miles-an-hour winds in broad daylight. It was clear, but there was so much dust in the air that the light turned all brown, you know? And you couldn't even stand outside because the wind was picking up god' damn rocks, little pebbles, and flinging them through the air like hailstones. And I got to this place on the way to the bridge, in between a couple of embankments with big petrochemical tanks on either side of the road. Your basic industrial Mordor. The embankments acted like a wind tunnel and they were picking up coal dust off a huge pile beside the highway and so I was driving downhill through this thick, black, sulfurous cloud, sticks and stones hailing down against my windshield, caught between a couple of semis carrying gasoline, and I said to myself, shit, I accidentally took the off-ramp to Hell."

"The Blowfish got there ahead of schedule," the Boss said, "and we've got an extra project that needs doing."

"Forget it."

"It involves plugging a dioxin pipeline."

A good boss always knows how to dangle the right thing in front of your nose.

"And we'll pay your way. Debbie's going."

That meant I could go on the train, in a sleeper coach, with Debbie in there too.

I cruised home to pack, only to discover a little display was waiting for me. Someone had grabbed a stray neighborhood cat who hung around our home sometimes- Scrounger-and had beaten his skull in, then wrapped an unbent coat hanger around its neck and strung it up in front of the door.

I cut Scrounger down, carried him around to the side and threw him into the garbage, burying the carcass under some other trash so my housemates would be spared the sight. Out back, I noticed some spots of blood on the ground, and followed them straight to the murder weapon: a fist-size hunk of concrete, smeared with blood.

The house had been broken into through the back, and trashed. Not a thorough trashing, but a decent effort nevertheless. The TV was kicked in, as was my computer screen.

They'd even yanked up the bottom half of the computer, a separate box, and stomped on it a few times. A lot of food was strewn around the kitchen in the messiest way possible, and they'd poked a screwdriver into the tubes in the freezer and let all the freon evaporate.

And there was a black handprint on the door to my room, at about eye level.

Fake Mafia or real Mafia, I had no way of knowing. But I was damn tired and depressed; I just wanted out of town. My big scandal had turned into a bad joke. And now someone was getting violent. Game over, case closed.

IONIC CHLORINE'S EASY TO GET . It's in seawater, as Tom Akeis pointed out. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.

And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current-a stream of electrons-flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This process is called Chloralkali.

Simple enough. But to make industrial quantities of DDT, or PCBs, or solvents, or whatever it is you're shooting for, you need industrial quantities of chlorine. That takes a lot of electrical power. And if you want to manufacture a Niagara of chemicals, guess what? You need a Niagara-sized power source.