Miles Harvey makes this 4,500-word story of a single Superfund site resonate not only with human character and horror, but with policy implications. He makes the aging eccentric fluorine chemist Edward Tyczkowski come off a bit like Doc Brown in "Back to the Future" -- except that he is playing with chemical weapons in his backyard shed instead of time machines. When EPA's attention was finally called to Tyczkowski's Rock Hill, Tennessee, chemical junkyard in the year 2000, it was strewn with some 7,000 drums and gas cylinders, many unlabeled, leaking, and rusting. Among the contents found was the chemical warfare agent PFIB. Tyczkowski had actually been doing work as a contractor for Department of Defense chemical weapons programs. DOD told Harvey that security at such facilities was the contractor's responsibility -- not DOD's. Had a terrorist known the agents were there, he or she could have walked in and helped themselves to lethal quantities. Harvey does not miss the fact that security was first provided by experienced EPA emergency removal teams -- although the government's first policy choice today has been to leave chemical security to an unregulated industry and the Department of Homeland Security (see http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/23/armageddon/ or http://www.rollingstone.com/features/nationalaffairs/featuregen.asp?pid=2834).