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.
32
It's pretty obvious which warehouse we are looking for here. Fourth one on the left, the road that runs down toward the waterfront is blocked off by several shipping containers - the big steel boxes you see on the backs of eighteen-wheelers. They are arranged in a herringbone pattern, so that in order to get past them you have to slalom back and forth half a dozen times, passing through a narrow mazelike channel between high walls of steel. Guys with guns are perched on top, looking down at Y.T. as she guides her plank through the obstacle course. By the time she makes it out into the clear, she's been heavily checked out.
There is the occasional light-bulb-on-a-wire strung around, and even a couple of strings of Christmas-tree lights. These are switched on, just to make her feel a little more welcome. She can't see anything, just lights making colored halos amid a generalized cloud of dust and fog. In front of her, access to the waterfront is blocked off by another maze of shipping containers. One of them has a graffiti sign: THE UKOD SEZ: TRY SOME COUNTDOWN TODAY!
'What's the UKOD?' she says, just to break the ice a little.
'Undisputed King of the Ozone Destroyers,' says a man's voice. He is just in the act of jumping down from the loading dock of the warehouse to her left. Back inside the warehouse, Y.T. can see electric lights and glowing cigarettes. 'That's what we call Emilio.'
'Oh, right,' Y.T. says. 'The Freon guy. I'm not here for Chill.'
'Well,' says the guy, a tall rangy dude in his forties, much too skinny to be forty years old. He yanks the butt of a cigarette from his mouth and throws it away like a dart. 'What'll it be, then?'
'What does Snow Crash cost.'
'One point seven five Gippers,' the guy says.
'I thought it was one point five,' Y.T. says.
The guy shakes his head. 'Inflation, you know. Still, it's a bargain. Hell, that plank you're on is probably worth a hundred Gippers.'
'You can't even buy these for dollars,' Y.T. says, getting her back up. 'Look, all I've got is one-and-a-half quadrillion dollars.' She pulls the bundle out of her pocket.
The guy laughs, shakes his head, hollers back to his colleagues inside the warehouse. 'You guys, we got a chick here who wants to pay in Meeses.'
'Better get rid of 'em fast, honey,' says a sharper, nastier voice, 'or get yourself a wheelbarrow.'
It's an even older guy with a bald head, curly hair on the sides, and a paunch. He's standing up on the loading dock.
'If you're not going to take it, just say so,' Y.T. says. All of this chatter has nothing to do with business.
'We don't get chicks back here very often,' the fat bald old guy says. Y.T. knows that this must be the UKOD
