“You haven’t worried about such things before. An investigator is supposed to be cold, clinical, detached.”
“That’s about other people’s oil. This is our oil. Massive responsibilities. Awesome decisions at the highest levels.”
“We were talking of Jim Brady.”
“I still am.”
“You think we should have him up here?” “I do.”
“So do I. Must be why I raised the subject. Let’s go call him.”
Three
Jim Brady, that passionate believer in leanness, keenness, fitness and athleticism for his field operatives, stood five feet eight in his elevator shoes and turned the scales at around 240 pounds. Never a believer in travelling light, he brought with him on the flight from Houston not only his attractive, blond wife, Jean, but also his positively stunning daughter Stella, another natural blond, who acted as his secretary on these field trips. He left Jean behind at the hotel in Fort McMurray, hut kept Stella with him in the minibus that Sanmobil had sent to ferry him out to the plant.
The first impression he made on the hard men of Athabasca was less than favorable. He wore a superbly cut dark-gray business suit — it had to be well cut even to approximate a frame as spherical as his — a white shirt and a conservative tie. On top of these indoor clothes, however, he wore two woolen overcoats and a vast beaver coat, the combined effect being to render his vertical and horizontal dimensions approximately equal. He sported a soft felt hat the same color as his suit, but this too was almost invisible, anchored by a gray woolen scarf that passed twice over the crown and under his chins.
“Well I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed. His voice was muffled by the ends of the scarf, tied across his face just below the eyes, which were the only part of him that could be seen. Even so, it was clear to his companions that he was impressed.
“This sure is something. You boys must have a lot of fun digging away here and building these nice little ol’ sand castles.”
“That’s one way of putting it, Mr. Brady.” Jay Shore spoke with restraint. “Not much, perhaps, by Texas standards, but it’s still the biggest mining operation in the history of mankind.”
“No offence, no offence. You don’t expect a Texan to admit there’s something bigger and better outside his own state?” One could almost feel him bracing himself for a handsome admission. “That beats anything I’ve ever come across.”
“That” was a dragline, but a dragline such as Brady had never seen before. A dragline is essentially an engine housing with a control cabin that operates a crane like boom. The boom is hinged and swivelled at the base of the engine housing, and so can be both raised and lowered and swung from side to side. Control is achieved by cables from the engine housing which pass over a massive steel super-structure and reach out to the tip of the boom. Another cable, passing over the tip of the boom, supports a bucket which can be lowered to scoop up material, raised again and then swung to one side to dump its load.
“Biggest thing that ever moved on earth,” said Shore.
“Move?” Stella said.
“Yes, it can move. Walks, shuffles would be a better word, on those two huge shoes at the base, step by step. You wouldn’t want to enter it for the Kentucky Derby — it takes seven hours to travel a mile. Not that it’s ever required to travel more than a few yards at a time. Point is, it gets there.”
“And that long nose…” she said.
“The boom. The comparison most generally used is that it’s as long as a football field. Wrong — it’s longer. From here the bucket doesn’t look all that big, but that’s only because everything is dwarfed out of perspective. It scoops up eighty cubic yards at a time or enough to fill a two-car garage. A large two-car garage. The dragline weighs sixty-five hundred tons — about the same as a light-medium cruiser. Cost? About thirty million dollars. Takes fifteen to eighteen months to build — on the site, of course. There are four of them, and between them they can shift up to a quarter of a million tons a day.”
“You win. This is a boomtown.” Brady said. “Let’s get inside. I’m cold.” The other four — Dermott, Mackenzie, Shore and Brinckman, the security chief-looked at him in mild astonishment. It seemed impossible that a man so extravagantly upholstered and insulated, both naturally and otherwise, could possibly feel even cool, but if Brady said he was cold, he was cold.
They clambered into the minibus, which if a bit short on other creature comforts, did at least have heaters in excellent condition. Also in excellent condition was the girl who sat down in the back seat, lowered her parka hood, and beamed at them. Brinckman was much the youngest of the men, and had not paid much attention to Stella. Now he touched the rim of his fur cap and lit up like a lamp. His enthusiasm was hardly surprising, for the white fur parka made her as cuddly looking as a polar bear cub.
“Wanna’ dictate anything, Dad?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Brady grunted. Once safely sheltered from the vicious cold, he undid the ends of the scarf that concealed his face. Somewhere in the distant past there must have been signs of the character that had driven him from the back streets of poverty to his present millions, but years of gracious living had eradicated all trace of them. Bone structure had vanished under a fatty accumulation which had left him without a crease, line or even the hint of crow’s feet. It was a fat, spoiled face like a cherub’s. With one exception: There was nothing cherubic about the eyes. They were blue, cool, appraising and shrewd.
He looked through the window at the dragline. “So that’s the end of the line.”
“The beginning of it,” Shore said. “The tar sands may lie as deep as fifty feet down. The stuff above, the overburden, is useless to us — gravel, clay, muskeg, shale, oil-poor sand — and has to be removed first of all.” He pointed to an approaching vehicle. “Here’s some of that rubbish being carried away now — it’s been excavated by another dragline on a new site.
“To impress you further, Mr. Brady, those trucks are also the biggest in the world. A hundred and twenty-five tons empty, payload of a hundred and fifty, and all this on just four tires. But, you will admit, they are some tires.”
The truck was passing now, and they were indeed some tires; to Brady, they looked at least ten feet high and proportionately bulky. The truck itself was monstrous — twenty feet high at the cab and about the same width, with the driver mounted so high as to be barely visible from the ground.
“You could buy a very acceptable car for the price of one of those tires,” Shore said. “As for the truck itself, if you went shopping for one at today’s prices, you wouldn’t get much change from three quarters of a million.” He spoke to his driver, who started up and moved slowly off.
“When the overburden is gone, the same dragline scoops up the tar sand — as the one we’ve just looked at is doing now — and dumps it in this huge pile we call a windrow.” A weird machine of phenomenal length was nosing into the pile. Shore pointed and said, “A bucket-wheel reclaimer — there’s one paired with every dragline. Four hundred and twenty-eight feet long. You can see the revolving bucket wheel biting into the windrow. With fourteen buckets on a forty-foot-diameter wheel, it can remove a fair tonnage every minute. The tar sands are then transported along the spine of the reclaimer — the bridge, we call it — to the separators. From there — ”
Brady interrupted, “Separators?”
“Sometimes the sands come in big, solid lumps as hard as rock, which could damage the conveyor belts. The separators are just vibrating screens that sort out the lumps.”
“And without the separators the conveyor belts could be damaged?”
“Certainly.”
“Put out of commission?”
“Probably. We don’t know. It’s never been allowed to happen yet.”
“And then?”
“The tar sands go into the travelling hoppers you see there. They drop the stuff onto the conveyor belt, and off it goes to the processing plant. After that — ”
“One minute.” It was Dermott. “You have a fair amount of this conveyor belting?”
“A fair bit.”
“How much exactly?”
Shore looked uncomfortable. “Sixteen miles.” Dermott stared at him and Shore hurried on. “At the end of the conveyor system radial stackers direct it to what are called surge piles — -just really storage dumps.”
“Radial stackers?” said Brady. “What are they?”
“Elevated extensions of the conveyor belts. They can rotate through a certain arc to direct the tar sands to a suitable surge pile. They can also feed bins that take the sands underground to start the processes of chemical and physical separation of the bitumen. The first of those processes — “