We rode the Green Line to Kenmore Square and hopped a bus out to Watertown Square. Then it was a two-mile walk to Kelvin's. My pant legs had turned into stiff tubes from being saturated with mud and then drying out, and at one point I had to climb down an embankment into some dead shrubs and broken glass and take a quick squat on the ground. While I was there I looked through my wallet and realized that all my credit cards belonged to a dead man. My transformation into a derelict was almost complete. Jim had been supporting me through that bad week in New Hampshire, but now I was back in Boston, with nothing except a wicked case of diarrhea.

"You should bow out too," I said. "Shit, you've got your opportunity now. You're a national hero. You can rehabilitate yourself, tell your story."

"I've been thinking about doing that," Boone confessed.

"Well don't be shy. I can get along without you."

"I know. But this is more interesting."

"Whatever." This was a useful word I'd picked up from Bart.

"I'll stick with it a little longer and see what's happening."

"Whatever."

I'd been going through a lot of laxatives, trying to flush out my colon. It seemed to be working, because the nausea and cramps had subsided. Maybe I could ease off a little, get

a Big Mac or something. Or if we could get to Hoa's, I could eat some steamed rice.

We got to Kelvin's just about twelve hours after our first, midnight visit. Since it was daylight, we came in the front door and got the full family welcome: dogs poking their muzzles into our balls, kids showing us their new toys, Kelvin's wife, Charlotte, fetching big tumblers of cranraz. All the kids were running around either naked or in diapers and pretty soon I joined them as Charlotte wouldn't let me out of the foyer without removing my pants. All I managed to hang on to was my colored jockey shorts and my t-shirt. Boone had to give up his socks and his shirt. All of it went into the laundry. We wandered half-naked down into the basement.

Charlotte's sister had decorated Kelvin's third-floor office just the way he wanted it-ergonomic furniture, a couple extra speakers wired into the main stereo, coffee maker, warm paneling. He went up there about an hour a week to write letters to his mother and balance the family checkbook. Then he spent about a hundred hours a week down here in this dank, dark, junk-filled basement. There was a workbench in the corner where he made stuff. There was a pool table in the middle where he relaxed. An old concrete laundry tub against one wall which he used as a urinal. He'd covered two entire walls with old blackboards he'd bought at flea markets. That was the only way he could think: on a blackboard, standing up. Sometimes it was long, gory strings of algebra, sometimes it was flowcharts from computer programs. Today there were a lot of hexagons and pentagons. Kelvin was doing organic chemistry, diagramming a lot of polycyclic stuff. Probably trying to figure out the energy balance of these bugs.

"Give up already?" he said, without turning around.

For once, I got to surprise him. "No. We found him."

"Really? How is he?"

"Leaking, but aware. I'm not sure what they're going to charge him with."

"That's for damn sure," Boone said. "They can't call it attempted murder."

Kelvin stood there watching us, then decided not to clutter his mind with an explanation. "I have some ideas on this," he said, sweeping his hand across the blackboards.

"Shoot."

"First of all, have you been following the news?"

"Look who's asking," I said. "You haven't heard about Fleshy?"

"Shit, we've been creating the news," Boone said.

"I mean the Boston news." Kelvin picked up a Herald that ' was sprawled on his pool table and flipped it over to expose the full-page headline.

HARBOR OF DEATH!

MIT PROF: TOXIC MENACE COULD "DESTROY ALL LIFE"

There was a picture of a heavy white man with his shirt off, showing a vicious case of chloracne.

"So they know about the bug," I said.

"Not exactly," Kelvin said. "A lot of people know of it, but it's not mentioned in there." He nodded at the Herald. "And in the Globe, as you might guess, it's just a farfetched speculation. Everyone thinks it's just a toxic waste spill."

"So why do they say that it could destroy all life?"

"To sell papers. If you read the article, you'll find that the quote was taken out of context. The MIT prof said it could destroy all life in Boston Harbor that happened to eat a large amount of it."

"Well, that's good," Boone said. "That's fine, from our point of view. We don't have to beg the media to cover it. The news is out."

Kelvin agreed. "It's really only a matter of time before the whole thing is exposed."

"Publicizing it isn't that important," I added. "The catastrophe's still going on. That's what we should worry about. Publicity doesn't kill the bug."

"Is that really you talking?" Boone said. "How do we kill the bug, Kelvin?"

"The chlorine-converting bug is an obligate anaerobe-" Kelvin said, then added for Boone's benefit, "-that means it has to live in an environment with no air in it."

"That's impossible," I said. "There's oxygen dissolved in the water. It wouldn't survive."

"Exactly. So they didn't make just the one bug. They made two of them. The other is an aerobe-it has to have some air to survive. Its metabolism doesn't hurt anything-it just uses lots of oxygen and creates a locally oxygen-poor region where its salt-eating buddy can live. The killer bug is a parasite on the aerobe. Or symbiotic, or one of those terms-I hate biology."

"Look, I know I'm no expert here," Boone said, "but every environmentalist knows that a lot of water doesn't have any air dissolved in it. Right? Polluted water, anything that's got undecayed garbage or shit in it, doesn't have air."

"Right," Kelvin said, "because the organisms that break those things down use up all the air in the process. The more sewage there is in the water-that is, the higher the Biochemical Oxygen Demand-the less oxygen is present. When Dolmacher and company designed this bug, they had a simulated ocean environment for it to work in. They probably used something like an aquarium full of aerated seawater. The symbiosis worked just fine in that environment.

"It didn't occur to them that this pair of bugs might end up in an environment in which there wasn't any air. They probably weren't thinking of using it in a totally uncontrolled fashion, around raw sewage-or if they were, they didn't think about the BOD. Even if they were aware of that problem, it didn't matter because management got to the bug before they could test it in that situation. It was released into the Harbor."

"Into a part of the Harbor where there ain't no dissolved oxygen-because of all the raw sewage," I said.

"And Spectacle Island. That's got to be one big oxygen-sucker," Boone said.

Kelvin nodded. "Which means that in those bad parts of the Harbor, most of the aerobes are dead. Nothing to breathe. But the chlorine bugs, the ones we're worried about, did fine, because they didn't need the aerobes-in that particular situation. But if a lot of oxygen were injected into their environment, they'd all die."

"So if the contaminated parts of the Harbor can be oxygenated, the l)ugs die," Boone said.

"How do you propose we oxygenate whole, big patches of the Harbor floor? Get a shitload of aquarium bubblers?" I

said. I was tired and I was wired. I was pissed and bouncing off the walls. Kelvin just stood there and took it calmly.

"Ozone. They use it at the sewage treatment plant. Put it on boats. Run tubes from the ozone supply down to the Harbor floor. Bubble the ozone through the sludge. GEE can't do it, it'll take a big governmental effort, but it can be done. The Harbor will stink like a privy for a few weeks, but when it's done, the bugs will be gone."