The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our "office manager," started painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them to toxic fumes millions of times more concentrated than what I was getting from my computer. But they didn't notice because they're used to paint. They paint things all the time. Same deal with the stuff they spray on their underarms and put into their gas tanks. Gomez wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn't let him.

Esmerelda, ever vigilant, had shot me a bunch of greasy xeroxes from the microfilm archives. They were articles from the Lighthouse-Republican of Blue Kills, N.J., a small city halfway down the Jersey Shore which was shortly to feel my wrath. It was the kind of newspaper that was still running Dennis the Menace in the largest available size. A Gasoline Alley, Apartment 3-G, and Nancy kind of paper.

The articles were all from the sports section. Sports, as in hunting and fishing, which take place outdoors, which is where the environment is. That's why environmental news is in the sports section.

Esmerelda had found me four different articles, all written by different reporters (no specialist on the staff; not considered an important issue) on vaguely environmental subjects. A local dump leaching crap into an estuary; a freeway project that would trash some swamp land; mysterious films of gunk on the river; and concerns about toxic waste that could be coming from a plant just outside of town, operated by a large corporation we shall refer to as the Swiss Bastards. Along with the Boston Bastards, the Napalm Droids, the Plutonium Lords, the Hindu Killers, the Lung Assassins, the Ones in Buffalo, and the Rhine-Rapers, they were among the largest chemical corporations of a certain planet, third one out from a certain mediocre star in an average spiral galaxy named after a candy bar.

Each of the articles was 2500 words long and written in the same style. Clearly, the editor of the lighthouse-republican ruled with an iron hand. Local residents were referred to as Blukers. Compound sentences were discouraged and the inverted-pyramid structure rigorously followed. The PR flacks who worked for the Swiss Bastards were referred to by the old-fashioned term "authorities," rather than the newer and sexier "sources."

My only worry was that maybe this editor was so fucking old and decrepit that he was already dead, or even retired. On the other hand, it seemed he was a dyed-in-the-wool "sportsman," a type traditionally long-lived, unless he'd spent too much time sloshing around in a particular toxic swamp. Esmerelda, accustomed to my ways, had sent a xerox of the most recent masthead, which didn't show any changes. The senior sports editor was Everett "Red" Grooten and the sports-page editor was Alvin Goldberg.

Raucous laughter probably sounded from my office. Tricia hung up on Fotex's PR director and shouted "S.T., what are you doing in there?" Called the florist and had them send the usual to Esmerelda. Cranked up my old PCB-spitter and searched my files. "Fish, marine, sport, Mid-Atlantic, effects of organic solvents on." "Estuaries, waterfowl populations of, effects of organic solvents on." These were old boilerplate paragraphs I'd written long ago. Mostly they referred to EPA studies or recent research. Every so often they quoted a "source" at GEE International, the well-known environmental group, usually me. I directed the word processor to do a search-and-replace to change "source" to "authority."

Then I pulled up my press release about what the Swiss Bastards were pumping into the waters off Blue Kills, which my gas chromatograph and I had discovered during my last trip down there. Threw it into the center of the piece and then composed a hard-hitting topic sentence in basic Dick-and-Jane dialect, no compound sentences, announcing that Bluker sportsmen might be the first ones to feel the effects of the "growing toxic waste problems" centered on the Swiss Bastards' illegal dumping. Hacked it all into an inverted-pyramid shape, and ended up with 2350 words. Put on a final paragraph, the lowly capstone of the pyramid, mentioning that some people from GEE International, the well-known environmental group, might be dropping by Blue Kills any day now.

Opened up my printer and put in a daisy wheel that produced a typeface that went out of style in the Thirties. Printed the article up on some unpretentious paper, stuck it in an envelope along with some standard GEE photos of dead flounder and two-headed ducks, suitable for the Lighthouse-Republican's column width. Federal Expressed it to one Red Grooten at his home address, because I had this idea that maybe he didn't stop by the office all that often. So this fine lady was lending us the Omni, no strings attached, and paying the insurance as well. We didn't even know who she was.

Normally an Omni is a piece of shit, an econobox with a 1.6-liter engine. But for a higher sticker price you can get an Omni GLH, which has aerodynamic trim and 2.2 liters and, for a few hundred more, an Omni GLH Turbo, which has all of that plus a turbocharger. GLH, by the way, stands for Goes Like Hell. Honest. When the blower is singing, the engine puts out as much power as a small V8. Add big fat racing tires and alloy wheels and you have yourself a poor man's Porsche, the most lethal weapon ever developed for the Boston traffic wars. Sure, spend three times as much and you could get a car that goes a little faster, but who is seriously going to thrash a vehicle that costs that much? Who'll risk denting it? But if it's an Omni, who cares?

I popped in the coil wire, a detail that Gomez richly appreciated-he made sure I knew it too-and we blew out of there. First we had to unload a lot of junk from out of the back to make room for what we were going to strip off the van: the two containers of hydraulic cement had to go. If I felt the urge to plug a pipe between here and Everett, I'd have to fulfill it later. The big, long roll of nylon banner material, the rappelling harness and climbing ropes, an extra outboard-motor gas tank, a Zodiac inflation pump, and the traveling chemistry lab we jettisoned. The laptop computer for tapping into the GEE International databases. The $5000 gas chromatograph. My big magnets. The Darth Vader Suit. We packed it all into the trunk of Gomez's Impala so we wouldn't have to haul it up to the fourth floor.

We'd hired Gomez after I'd inadvertently gotten him canned from his previous job as a minimum wage rent-a-cop at one of the state office buildings. Unfortunately for his breed, I make my living by making people like him look like jerks. For weeks we'd been trying to make an appointment with a honcho in the state environmental agency, and he wouldn't even answer our letters.

Shortly before Christmas, I dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit and had Tricia and Debbie (one of our interns) dress up as elves. I forged an ID card, complete with a mug shot