This hauled T.R. down out of his Ozymandian reverie. He gave her a sharp look that made her glad she wasn’t sitting across the table from him in a boardroom. “You’re talking about Brazos RoDuSh.”
“Yes, I was reminded of it the other day.”
“You’re not an activist investor,” he said, with a diagnostic air. Then he brightened. “You don’t read the annual report!” He was just kidding around now.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, Brazos RoDuSh has been out of the sulfur business since my granddad got kicked out of Cuba in the 1960s! It’s all New Guinea copper and gold nowadays.” He looked around theatrically as if he were about to let her in on a fascinating secret. “Speaking of which, your man Red told me about his friends. The Boskeys.”
“Rufus?”
“Yeah. So I hired the Boskeys to make a little side trip, as long as they’re helping folks out down south of Sugar Land. That’s the old stomping grounds of Brazos Mining, you know!”
“The sulfur domes along the coast.”
“Exactly! I asked ’em if they wouldn’t mind swinging by a certain
location, see if any of the old relics and souvenirs was bobbin’ around in the floodwater.”
“That seems . . . unlikely.”
“Just kidding, it’s all in a storage locker. And they got divers.”
Others had begun to gravitate toward them. T.R. turned to face them and raised his voice. “By-product of oil refineries,” he said, using the German-influenced pronunciation of “oil” common in Texas.
They began to stroll along the base of the pile. Other members of the group fell in with them. “Old oilmen like my granddad used to taste the stuff.”
“Taste!?” Very rarely, Saskia felt unsure in her command of the English language. Maybe this was some colloquialism?
T.R. grinned and pantomimed sticking a finger down into something and then lifting it to his mouth. “Literally taste. If the oil was sweet, it was low-sulfur. Sour crude, on the other hand, needs extra refining to take the sulfur out, so it sells at a discount. There’s a lot of sour in the Gulf, especially down Mexico way. Anyway, I been buyin’ it up.”
“No kidding!”
“Plenty more to be had in Canada. Tar sands oil is sow . . . ER!” He got a look on his face as if he had just tasted some and squinted up to the sharp peak of the sulfur cone. “This pile ain’t getting any bigger. That’s as high as that conveyor can reach.” Following his gaze, Saskia was able to see the muzzle of a long industrial conveyor reaching out over the pile from a source blocked from view on the harbor side of the operation.
Like any other port, this one had an abundance of railroad tracks, with innumerable spur lines reaching out to individual terminals. One such ran behind the sulfur pile. On its back side, as they could now see, the geometric perfection of the cone had been marred by an end loader that was chewing away at it, gouging out sulfur near ground level, touching off avalanches higher up. The end loader trundled across broken pavement for a short distance and dumped the sulfur into a hopper at ground level. Angling up from that was a conveyor that carried a thick flume of yellow
powder to a height where it spewed forth into an open-top hopper car. A queue of those stood along the track, already full and ready to roll. Only one of them wasn’t full of sulfur, and at the rate the loader and conveyor were going, it soon would be. “Still just purely at a demonstration, proof-of-concept scale,” T.R. remarked, apparently to preempt any possible objections along the lines of this isn’t stupendously vast enough, you need to think big!
Saskia deemed it unlikely that anyone would actually lodge such a complaint. She knew her way around epic-scale geoengineering projects and colossal port facilities better than anyone on the planet. Even by Dutch standards, T.R. was definitely running an operation to be reckoned with.
Their perambulation had brought them to a folding table that had been set up in the open by T.R.’s staff. Above it was a pop-up canopy to protect them from whichever prevailed at the moment: merciless sun or drowning torrential rain. At the moment it happened to be the former. Plastic water bottles were passed out. The table supported a propane camp stove, some laboratory glassware, and a plastic bin containing an assortment of safety goggles. Waving off a diligent aide who wanted him to don protective eyewear, T.R. grabbed a glass beaker about the size of a coffee mug, walked over to the sulfur pile, and scooped up a sample of the yellow powder. Most of that he then dumped back out so that the beaker contained no more than a finger’s width of S. Meanwhile an aide was lighting a burner on the stove. T.R. carried the beaker over and set it over the pale blue flame. In just a few moments the lower part of the sample, in contact with the glass, changed its appearance, becoming liquid and smooth. T.R. turned the heat to a lower setting and picked up a pistol-grip thermometer. He aimed this down into the beaker, pulled the trigger, looked at the digital display. He gave it a little stir with a glass rod.