So the computer draws all the land areas and blacks them out. Then it begins to shade in the water areas, starting out in the Atlantic, which is drawn in a beautiful electric blue. You don't have to look at the legend to know that this water is pure. As we approach Boston, the colors get warmer, and warmer. Most of the harbor is yellow. In places we see rings of orange, deepening toward the center until they form angry red boils clustered against the shore. Next to each boil I write a caption: "Basco Primary Outfall." "Basco Temporary Storage Facility." "Basco-owned Parcel (under EPA Investigation)." "Parcel Owned by Basco Subsidiary (under EPA Investigation)." Translate this into a 35-mm slide, take it to a public hearing, draw the curtains and splash it up on a twenty-foot screen- wild, an instant lynch mob. Then the lights come up and a brand-new Basco flack comes out, fresh from B.U. or Northeastern, and begins talking about eyedroppers in railway tank cars. Then his company gets lacerated by the media.

This is the kind of thing I think about when buzzing around, looking for Gallagher the lobsterman.

Sometimes I had this daydream where a big-time coke runner from Miami got environmentally conscious and donated one of his Cigarette boats. It wasn't going to happen- not even coke dealers were that rich. But I thought about it, read the boating magazines, dreamed up ways to use one. And right now on the channel between Charlestown and Eastie, two miles north, I could see a thirty-one foot Cigarette just sitting there on the water. It's kind of like what my Zodiac would look like if it had been built by defense contractors: way too big, way too fast, a hundred times too ex-pensive. The larger models have a cabin in front, but this didn't even have that comfort. It was open-cockpit, made for nothing in the world but dangerous speed. I'd seen it yesterday, too, sitting there doing nothing. I wondered if it would be terribly self-important if I attributed its presence to mine. The worst Fotex plant was up that way, and maybe they were anticipating a sneak attack.