"What did you find?" Ng says when she gets back into the van, peels off the mask.
"Needles. Mostly Hyponarxes. But there's also a couple of Ultra Laminars and some Mosquito twenty-fives."
"What does all this mean?"
"Hyponarx you can get at any Buy 'n' Fly, people call them rusty nails, they are cheap and dull. Supposedly the needles of poor black diabetics and junkies. Ultra Laminars and Mosquitos; are hip, you get them around fancy Burbclaves, they don't hurt as much when you stick them in, and they have better design. You know, ergonomic plungers, hip color schemes."
"What drug were they injecting?"
"Checkitout," Y.T. says, and holds up one of the vials toward Ng.
Then it occurs to her that he can't exactly turn his head to look.
"Where do I hold it so you can see it?" she says.
Ng sings a little song. A robot arm unfolds itself from the ceiling of the van, crisply yanks the vial from her hand, swings it around, and holds it in front of a video camera set into the dashboard.
The typewritten label stuck onto the vial says, just "Testosterone."
"Ha ha, a false alarm," Ng says. The van suddenly rips forward, starts heading right into the middle of the Sacrifice Zone.
"Want to tell me what's going on?" Y.T. says, "since I have to actually do the work in this outfit?"
"Cell walls," Ng says. "The detector finds any chemical that penetrates cell walls. So we homed in naturally on a source of testosterone. A red herring. How amusing. You see, our biochemists lead sheltered lives, did not anticipate that some people would be so mentally warped as to use hormones like they were some kind of drug. How bizarre."
Y.T. smiles to herself. She really likes the idea of living in a world where someone like Ng can get off calling someone else bizarre. "What are you looking for?"
"Snow Crash," Ng says. "Instead, we found the Ring of Seventeen."
"Snow Crash is the drug that comes in the little tubes," Y.T. says. "I know that. What's the Ring of Seventeen? One of those crazy new rock groups that kids listen to nowadays?"
"Snow Crash penetrates the walls of brain cells and goes to the nucleus where the DNA is stored. So for purposes of this mission, we developed a detector that would enable us to find cell wall-penetrating compounds in the air. But we didn't count on heaps of empty testosterone vials being scattered all over the place. All steroids - artificial hormones - share the same basic structure, a ring of seventeen atoms that acts like a magic key that allows them to pass through cell walls. That's why steroids are such powerful substances when they are unleashed in the human body. They can go deep inside the cell, into the nucleus, and actually change the way the cell functions.
"To summarize: the detector is useless. A stealthy approach will not work. So we go back to the original plan. You buy some Snow Crash and throw it up in the air."
Y.T. doesn't quite understand that last part yet. But she shuts up for a while, because in her opinion, Ng needs to pay more attention to his driving.
Once they get out of that really creepy part, most of the Sacrifice Zone turns out to consist of a wilderness of dry brown weeds and large abandoned hunks of metal. There are big heaps of shit rising up from place to place - coal or slag or coke or smelt or something.
Every time they come around a corner, they encounter a little plantation of vegetables, tended by Asians or South Americans. Y.T. gets the impression that Ng wants to just run them over, but he always changes his mind at the last instant and swerves around them.
Some Spanish-speaking blacks are playing baseball on a broad flat area, using the round lids of fifty-five-gallon drums as bases. They have parked half a dozen old beaters around the edges of the field and turned on their headlights to provide illumination. Nearby is a bar built into a crappy mobile home, marked with a graffiti sign: THE SACRIFICE ZONE. Lines of boxcars are stranded in a yard of rusted-over railway spurs, nopal growing between the ties. One of the boxcars has been turned into a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise, and evangelical CentroAmericans are lined up to do their penance and speak in tongues below the neon Elvis. There are no NeoAquarian Temple franchises in the Sacrifice Zone.
"The warehouse area is not as dirty as the first place we went," Ng says reassuringly, "so the fact that you can't use the toxics mask won't be so bad. You may smell some Chill fumes."
Y.T. does a double take at this new phenomenon: Ng using the street name for a controlled substance. "You mean Freon?" she says.
"Yes. The man who is the object of our inquiry is horizontally diversified. That is, he deals in a number of different substances. But he got his start in Freon. He is the biggest Chill wholesaler/retailer on the West Coast."
Finally, Y.T. gets it. Ng's van is air-conditioned. Not with one of those shitty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bonechilling Frigidaire blizzard blaster. It must use an incredible amount of Freon.
For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng's body. Y.T.'s driving around with the world's only Freon junkie.
"You buy your supply of Chill from this guy?"
"Until now, yes. But for the future, I have an arrangement with someone else."
Someone else. The Mafia.
They are approaching the waterfront. Dozens of long, skinny, single-story warehouses run parallel down toward the water. They all share the same access road at this end. Smaller roads run between them, down toward where the piers used to be. Abandoned tractor-trailers are scattered around from place to place.
Ng pulls his van off the access road, into a little nook that is partly concealed between an old red-brick power station and a stack of rusted-out shipping containers. He gets it turned around so it's pointed out of here, kind of like he is expecting to leave rapidly
"There's money in the storage compartment in front of you," Ng says.
Y.T. opens the glove compartment, as anyone else would call it, and finds a thick bundle of worn-out, dirty, trillion-dollar bills. Ed Meeses.
"Jeez, couldn't you get any Gippers? This is kind of bulky."
"This is more the kind of thing that a Kourier would pay with."
"Because we're all pond scum, right?"
"No comment."
"What is this, a quadrillion dollars?"
"One-and-a-half quadrillion. Inflation, you know."
"What do I do?"
"Fourth warehouse on the left," Ng says. "When you get the tube, throw it up in the air."
"Then what?"
"Everything else will be taken care of."
Y.T. has her doubts about that. But if she gets in trouble, well, she can always whip out those dog tags.
While Y.T. climbs down out of the van with her skateboard, Ng makes new sounds with his mouth. She hears a gliding and clunking noise resonating through the frame of the van, machinery coming to life. Turning back to look, she sees that a steel cocoon on the roof of the van has opened up. There is a miniature helicopter underneath it, all folded up. Its rotor blades spread themselves apart, like a butterfly unfolding. Its name is painted on its side: WHIRLWIND REAPER.