“Don’t worry, Phil, you will be again.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Here’s the deal. I want to buy your company. Or rather, I want you to buy your company, all the shares you can lay hands on, quietly, over the next year, so you won’t run up the price. I’ll bankroll you.”
Phil Guthrie cocked an eyebrow at him.
“You’re a friend, Rip. You both are. I don’t diddle my friends. When I tell you to stay away from Texas-Southern, I’m telling you as a friend.”
“Next,” said Forte, “I want you to start a little collection–warrants for the purchase of other pipeline stock, preferably of companies whose right-of-way runs through wheatlands and big cattle spreads. I want you to put together a pipeline network that will blanket the Republic of Texas. That’s first priority. After that, the Midwest, everywhere from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. I can put up to $1.5 billion into that little enterprise.”
“You’re kidding me, Rip. The word is out that your
banks pulled the plug on you. From what I hear, you’d be smart to climb in that jalopy there and join me in my fascinating flight from foreclosure. Why, there isn’t enough oil being pumped in Texas today to fill Texas-Southern, let alone the network you’re talking about.” “Who said anything about oil?”
An hour later, when Texas had absorbed all the heat it could stand for the day and was beginning to throw it back at the sky, Forte and Mark Medina were in a helicopter winging their way south. Some miles to the northeast of Corpus Christi, Forte pointed down to a small, almost landlocked body of water.
“Know what that is, Mark?”
“Sure, Matagorda Bay.”
“Nope. That’s where I’m going to berth my iceberg.”
Mark Medina snorted and looked at Forte sideways. “How big will that berg be, Rip?”
“Texas big. About 1.6 by 3.2 kilometers–five times the size of the Salvation.”
“And how thick?
“About 230 meters–750 feet.”
“That makes you as thick as the berg, if you think you are going to get that berg into Matagorda Bay, unless you drag it on wheels.” He pointed to the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico beyond the Matagorda Peninsula. “There’s the continental shelf, Rip. It slopes downward gradually. It starts at around ten meters deep near shore and is still only a hundred meters below the surface a hundred kilometers out into the gulf, before it drops off into water deep enough to float a berg that thick.”
“The trouble with you and Phil Guthrie,” said Forte, pulling the chopper around in a tight turn and heading down the coast, “is that you’re thinking in traditional terms. This iceberg business is a whole new ball game.”
A case in point, Forte pointed out, was getting the iceberg into Matagorda Bay. This aspect of the Triple Eye project alone would be by far the biggest earth-moving job in history. Enormous, undreamed-of quantities of sand and mud would have to be shifted. In shallow areas, conventional dipper dredges using grab buckets would haul up the spoil, to be moved by relays of barges until it was beyond the edge of the projected channel. In deeper areas, hydraulic dredges with 4.5-meter suction pipes moving behind rotary cutters would bring the overburden to the surface, to be carried away by floating slurry pipelines.
Mark Medina heard him out and shook his head.
“Do you have any idea of how much spoil you’d have to shift? Millions of cubic meters.”
“Correction, billions. We’ve got to gouge out a 220-meter-deep trench through the shelf, which itself has a mean depth of 70 meters below the surface, in order to reach Matagorda Bay. The melt en route to Texas will, of course, make the berg ride higher in the water. The channel must be two kilometers wide, with sloping sides to accommodate possible cave-ins. The mud and sand that must be removed will come to 26 billion tons.”
“Enough to fill a lot of sandboxes.”
“To be more precise,” said Forte, “it will be the equivalent of ten thousand Great Pyramids. On the other hand, the pharaohs used slaves. You will use machines.”
“I will use. Oh, I see.”
“Of course,” said Forte, “that will be only the beginning of your labors.” He eased the chopper around in a slow turn.
“For starters, Matagorda Bay must be dredged out deep enough to take the berg. That means continuing the trench right up to the shoreline. But once the berg’s docked, it will have to be isolated from the gulf’s seawater by an impermeable gate. Then we can begin melting operations with no worry about contamination.”
Mark Medina shook his head disbelievingly.
“What you’re saying is, we have to build a dam about a mile across and as high as the Eiffel Tower. Furthermore, we must be able to move it aside so the iceberg can be floated to its basin, and then move it back again, and what you been smoking lately, Rip?”
“I warned you it was a largish problem, Mark. The dam idea is out, of course. Instead, we build floating caissons in two-hundred-meter-long sections and anchor them off Palacios in the northern part of the bay. Basically, they’ll be huge compartmented trapezoidal boxes with
massive internal bracing. When the berg is tied up in its basin, we move the caissons into place, lock them together in a solid line, and flood ’em. They sink, forming a watertight bulwark against the sea. We pump out the basin’s salt water the berg is floating on. The berg melts, and the pure water is pumped to the farms and ranches and cities of Texas and the Midwest through all those pipeline networks Phil Guthrie is going to bust his ass putting together for us.
“By the time that berg is completely melted, we’ll have brought another north, ready to tow into position. We flood the basin, tow the five floating caissons out of the way, and repeat the cycle. What could be simpler?”
Mark Medina groaned. Here was the big ugly Texan talking blithely about not one but two of the greatest construction projects undertaken since the building of the Great Wall of China. And he, Mark Medina, was going to have to scour the Gulf and Atlantic coasts for dredges, and recruit thousands of men, and build a shipyard in which the monster caissons could be constructed, and a small city to house the workers. He pointed out these home truths to the dreamer piloting the helicopter.
“But that’s part of the plan, don’t you see, Mark? Of course you’re going to have to recruit tens of thousands of men to do the job. There are ten times that many out of work in the republic, and they’ll come a-runnin’. Not only will we get the hungriest workers and put a dent in the unemployment problem, we’ll inject huge amounts of money into the economy and, above all, bring our people something that poor old Lepoint couldn’t: salvation.”
“You make it sound possible,” said Mark Medina bitterly.
“And you made me do the impossible when I worked for you. Now that Joe Mansour has bought control of both our companies and is calling the tune, you and I are going to dance to it.”
Medina sighed.
“Cheer up, Mark,” said Forte. “I’ve given you all the bad news. Now comes the good news, the details.”
“Like?”
“Well, there’s the matter of the batteries of centrifugal pumps we’ll need to remove the seawater from the basin fast.”
Medina scowled.
“And then we have to give some thought as to the best shroud to put over the berg once it’s in place. That berg will contain the freshest, purest water in the northern hemisphere: no acid rain, no refinery particulates, no prairie dust, no bird droppings. We’re going to keep it that way. And the shroud, being airtight, will not only prevent the water evaporating, but its greenhouse effect will accelerate melting.”
“Shrouds I like. I’ll be needing one for myself about then. Kindly proceed with the details.”
“Well, we’ll have to construct feeder pipelines to link up with Guthrie’s network after he’s run pigs through them and flushed them out. And then there’s the transmission network, high-tension lines and substations and the like.”
“To bring in power to run this operation, you mean.”
“No, no, Mark–get out the power we’re going to generate, to the consumer.”
“So now we’re in the power business, huh?”
“We’re in everything. The power comes from ocean thermal energy conversion units. They’re about the size of an apartment house. They take advantage of the temperature differential, in this case the hot Texas sun and the ice-cold berg, to generate electricity. There’s going to be a big market for electricity now that crude production has dropped off. The twenty-six OTECs we need are going to produce enough electricity to light every house from here to Amarillo.”
Mark Medina took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.