She bent down and took a pinch of the yellow powder between her fingers. It was finer than table salt, less so than flour.
Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia was more than normally technical-minded by the standards of European royalty, and in the defense of her country she had put a career’s worth of effort into studying climate change. She had read the word “sulfur” a million times in scientific papers and conference proceedings. She knew its atomic number, its atomic weight, and its symbol. She was accustomed to the fact that Brits spelled it with a “ph” and Yanks with an “f,” and she knew its cognomens such as brimstone. Yet in all that time she had rarely seen sulfur and never touched it. A school chemistry lab might have a teaspoon of sulfur in a labeled test tube, so that children could say they had once seen it. But that was a very different experience from standing at the base of this . . . this industrial art project. As a sort of childish experiment she stood facing it and tried to position her head so that sulfur was the only thing she could see. Every rod and cone in her retinas maxed out on “yellow.” She brought a pinch of it close to her nose for a sniff.
“It don’t stink,” said T.R., who had drawn up alongside her. “This is pure enough that you’re not gonna get that rotten egg smell too bad.”
“It doesn’t dissolve in the rain?”
“Nope, water runs right through it,” T.R. said. He took a step back, extended his arms, and gave it the full Ozymandias. “Sulfur!” he proclaimed, in the same tone that a conquistador might have said “Gold!” “The stone that burns!” Then he added, “S!,” which Saskia knew was an allusion to its symbol on the periodic table. “We so rarely see or touch an actual element, you know. Nitrogen and oxygen in the air? Those are diatomic molecules and not the element itself. Aluminum, sure—but that’s always an alloy. Iron, sometimes—but usually steel, another alloy. Mercury in an old thermometer, maybe. Helium in a balloon. But here’s the real deal, Your Majesty. Two hundred thousand tons of an element. About a year’s supply, for our project.”
Saskia had gotten over the sheer visual power of the thing and begun to wonder about practicalities. “Did all this come from our mutual investment?”
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.
Within a minute’s time the entire sample had melted into a reddish-yellow fluid. T.R. let them see the reading on the thermometer. It was nothing impressive. “The point of all this is just that S has a very low melting point. You can melt it at a cookie-baking temp in your oven. Handling a fluid at that temp is easy. You don’t need weird science lab shit, just plain old metal pipes from Home Depot and some insulation to keep it from freezing up.” He picked up a pair of tongs and used it to lift the beaker off the flame. He took a few steps away from the sulfur pile and then dumped the yellow fluid out onto bare pavement, forming a little puddle. “And behold, it burns,” he said. He had fished a cigar lighter—a finger-sized blowtorch—from his pocket. He flicked it on, bent down with a grunt, and touched its flame to the edge of the yellow puddle. It readily caught fire, not with an explosive fwump like petrol, but more like wax or oil. “It don’t burn like crazy, mind you, but it totally burns. Steer clear of the smoke.” He’d had the presence of mind to perform this little demonstration downwind of them, so the plume of vapor boiling off the flame was moving away.