Athabasca by Alistair MacLean Read Free Book Online Page A

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