Another invited journalist asked a question that Saskia couldn’t quite hear. T.R. nodded. “The gun just lobs the shell up to the altitude we want—the stratosphere. About eighty thousand feet. Where sulfur does no harm—and much good. Now, at that point it’s just gonna fall straight back down unless we do something. We could just detonate it with an explosive charge and it would disperse the sulfur. Hopefully some of it would burn. That was actually plan A. But our aerospace engineers didn’t think that was fancy enough and so they ginned up the idea for a sulfur-burning engine that can keep the shell airborne for a little while. It’s got the worst performance characteristics you can imagine but we don’t care—it gives us a few minutes for the shell to remain at altitude and disperse the SO2 more widely where the jet stream can catch it and begin spreading it around. Then the shell runs out of fuel and glides to the ground and we try to catch it.”
T.R. drew the journalists’ attention to a feed from another camera, this one near the ground, aimed at a stretch of ranch property covered by nets stretched between poles. “This here is all there is to it,” T.R. said. “Same as you see at the circus. It’s a few miles from here, down toward the Rio Grande.”
There followed a few minutes’ futzing around with video feeds and camera angles that only gave a helter-skelter picture of what was going on. “The point,” T.R. eventually said, after his frustration had reached a crescendo and then collapsed in a farrago of basically humorous cursing and hat-throwing, “is that we are recycling the goddamn shells. We catch them in the net and toss them in the back of a truck and drive them back to the reloading facility. Providing jobs, good safe jobs, on the ground. Come out here if you want to see what I mean.”
Saskia and others followed as T.R. led the reporter out of the Beer Car and across a few meters of open ground to a flat area where another one of those ubiquitous pop-up sun canopies had been pitched. Beneath it, a giant bullet rested on a display stand. T.R. shooed a white hat out of the way in mid demo. “Most of the shell is hollow. Empty space. It’s a container for sulfur,” he said. “That being the entire point.” He patted its base, which was flat. “This here is just a sabot for the hydrogen to push against while it’s in the gun barrel. It falls off immediately and we retrieve it.” He yanked the sabot off and chucked it on the ground. Revealed was a conical hole penetrating into the middle of the shell. “The nozzle bell where combusted sulfur dioxide shoots out of the combustion chamber.” He walked around to the pointed nose of the bullet, and simply yanked it off. “Another disposable part. Falls off in the stratosphere, comes down like a badminton birdie. We find it and reuse it. Or not.” Revealed under the nose cone was another tapering hole, like the intake of a jet engine. “Where the air comes in.” He stepped back. By the removal of the sabot and the nose cone, the bullet had been transformed into a jet engine. “Now it can generate thrust by exhausting sulfur dioxide, which has the interesting side effect of saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars from the effects of global climate change. But from a strictly aerospace engineering point of view we have a problem, which is that it can’t generate nearly enough thrust to stay aloft for long.” He opened a hatch on the top of the shell to reveal a shallow but broad compartment just underneath, wrapping partway around the upper part of the shell’s cylindrical body. It was full of orange fabric. “This is too unwieldy to display here, so here’s a picture of what it looks like when it’s deployed.” He gestured toward a poster, mounted on a slab of foam core zip-tied to the canopy’s frame. It depicted one of those parasailing wings often seen towed behind speedboats in seaside resorts: a curved leading edge, a wing of taut fabric behind it, and a system of shroud lines converging on, and supporting, the payload. “This object deploys and gives it some appreciable L over D,” T.R. said, “which means it can stay aloft for a little while through a combination of running the engine and shedding altitude. The more sulfur it burns, the lighter it becomes. The farther it descends, the thicker the air. Both work in our favor. By the time the tank is empty, this thing is pretty damned airworthy and it can glide for a long ways. Even if it’s out over Mexico somewhere it can glide back and try to hit one of those nets.”
“Now I see why everything around here has nets stretched over it,” Saskia said, “what with all these sabots and nose cones and shells raining down out of the sky.”
“A certain kind of person would almost say God made West Texas for this,” T.R. said. “We got concentric circles drawn all over the map. Circular error probables—CEPs—for all that stuff. We know where shit’s gonna hit the ground. Sounding rockets give us the initial conditions. After that we track each shell to get an accurate picture of the upper-level winds. We can make stuff fall where there ain’t nothing to fall on save rocks and snakes.”
“It’s an expensive way to kill snakes!” some wag joked.
T.R. looked at him coolly. “Not if you figure in the appreciation of my Houston real estate portfolio.” His gaze shifted to Saskia. “Others can make similar calculations. Remember the figure I quoted earlier?”
“You’re a figure-quoting machine, T.R., you’ll have to be a bit more specific.”
“Over Houston. In the drone. What kind of money we talking? Remember? Anyone? One point seven five trillion dollars. That’s the value of all the real estate in greater Houston. Let’s say my buddies and I—the kinds of people who live in big houses on stilts along Buffalo Bayou—own one percent of it. That’s about twenty billion dollars’ worth of real estate. If the value declines by ten percent, that’s two billion in value that just went up in smoke. If it goes up by ten percent”—he turned and waved his arm in the general direction of the gun— “that alone pays for all this.”
“You’re altering the climate all over the world,” Bob translated, “to make a profit on a portfolio of real estate that is limited to Houston.”
“The numbers check out,” T.R. confirmed. “Those of y’all who don’t live in Houston may wish to make calculations of your own. ‘Sea level’ is the same everywhere.” He checked his watch. The afternoon was getting on. “Oh. And as long as I dragged y’all out here into the heat, don’t forget to collect your party favor.” T.R. indicated a solitary boxcar that had been parked on a nearby side track. A canopy had been set up next to it. Beneath that was a table staffed by a highly presentable young woman whose white cowboy hat made for an incongruous combo with the earthsuit that covered everything from her jawline down to her cowboy boots. Saskia, sans earthsuit, was nearing the limit of how long she could remain outdoors, but decided to venture over.
The boxcar looked as if it had been chosen specifically to stand as a visual emblem of decrepit Industrial Revolution tech. It looked like it had traveled a million miles during its career, survived a few derailments, and finally reached the end of the line. Rust was blooming through old faded graffiti. No part of it was flat or straight. It was full to overflowing with coal, and excess coal had spilled out on the ground all around it.
As Saskia drew closer to the blessed shade of the canopy, she saw a row of bell jars on the table, similar to the ones T.R. had displayed last night at dinner. Each sat on a wooden pedestal. Each contained a golden cube that Saskia would have mistaken for half a stick of butter had she not spent so much time in the last two days looking at, and talking about, sulfur.