Grateful to be on stable ground, however temporarily, the chemist accepted a warmer change of clothes from one of the Canadian Forces officers, who then relayed word of his arrival to those aboard the Phoenix. They, like practically everyone who had helped Macadam wrestle the Plasroc the ten thousand miles from Adelaide, seemed genuinely excited hopeful with a touch of admiration that he was able to come along with his marvelous invention. After so many years of denial, Macadam had to admit he liked the attention.
The Villager arrived in the afternoon. Macadam and the Canadian Forces officer traveled down to the harbor and were waiting as the ugly vessel emerged from the fog and found a berth along the government dock. To Macadam, the main deck of the bizarre ship looked as though it had sustained several kamikaze attacks, and he cringed at the thought of his refined compound being pumped into her squalid hold.
“Is she supposed to look like that?” he asked the officer timidly.
“Gad, I hope not,” replied the officer.
The landing plank was lowered and the captain himself was the first one to disembark. He was a tall, sturdy man with an ample belly, broad shoulders, and a halfhearted attempt at a beard. He looked as though, in a pinch, he could simply pick up the boilers full of Plasroc and place them on the ship himself. The captain moved quickly and Macadam found himself taking a half step backward as he stopped in front of them. Not knowing exactly what to do, Macadam saluted. He had saluted a lot of people in the past two days, just in case.
“No need to salute me, Mr. Macadam,” the captain said. “I’m no civil servant.”
He glanced at the officer.
“No offense.”
They began with a quick tour of the ship and its storage tanks, piping, and dredges. Given this insight, some sense of intended function began to emerge from the apparently disjointed mountains of iron, pulleys, and pumps.
The captain recited a seemingly unending list of the Villager’s specifications.
“At full capacity we can dredge up to five thousand yards of soft sediment — or fifteen hundred of hard — at depths to three hundred feet. We can load at a rate of sixty thousand barrels an hour, with a fluid capacity in the hull of two hundred thousand barrels—”
“Barrels?” Macadam asked.
“Fifty-five gallons each, ten million gallons or more overall. What you actually get out of the tanks and the pumps, mind you, will depend on the viscosity of your chemicals. We’ve also got two auxiliary pump systems if you need ‘em.” The captain turned back to Macadam. “Any questions?”
The chemist was still staring around at the ship, his eyes unblinking.
“Just one,” he said, a nervous smile on his lips. “Is all this for me?”
The Plasroc was transferred to the Villager, then the unsightly vessel and its voluminous cargo rendezvoused with the icebreakers at the containment area the next morning. Following directions from the Phoenix, the ship drew alongside the containment pen strung between the Des Groseilliers and the Sovietsky Soyuz. A few minutes later, a motorized launch arrived carrying Zubov. He welcomed them to the effort and suggested he was “not exactly the boss around here, but as close as you’re gonna get at the moment.”
Seeing the haggard, exhausted look on the big man’s face, Macadam got his first real sense of the battle that had recently been waged across the breadth of the Arctic. His own efforts, in comparison, seemed as banal as those of a delivery boy.
Once the Villager’s dredging crew had been briefed on the size, type, and location of the area to be dredged, Zubov turned his attention to Macadam and the tanks of Plasroc.
“How will the Plasroc respond to cold weather?” Zubov wanted to know.
Cold was a relative term. The average temperature of the slick was thirty-eight degrees — insufferable for humans, balmy for the Thiouni, and murderous for the ice — while the air fluctuated between eighteen and minus ten degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the wind.
“I’ve done the calculations a dozen times,” Macadam replied, “and I think we’ll be fine.”
“What about dilution of the compound itself?” the captain asked.
“Dilution shouldn’t affect its viscosity or its integrity,” Macadam said. “It was designed with liquid wastes in mind, and a number of those are stored in containment reservoirs. I’ve mixed a more dilute solution to resist clogging your sprayers, and it should bond easily without losing much strength. We should be able to get a stable concretion without compromising the time required for the resin to harden.”
“That’s a lot of ‘shoulds,”” Zubov said. “What would it take to use a full concentration?”
“Warmer water, I suppose.”
Zubov turned to the Villager’s captain.
“Is there any way you can pump heated water over the slick first, then follow it with the Plasroc?”
The captain scratched at his beard.
“We can try it. The main system is full of the plastic crap — no offense, Professor — but the auxiliary systems are still free.”
“You’d need to pump clean water from outside the slick, then spray it out over the containment area,” Zubov recommended.
“Then it’d depend on the distance between the draw and the slick, between the good water and the bad.”
“Until we can get the ice down here and get the slick contained, we have to consider it all bad,” Zubov said.
The captain shook his head.
“If the Villager wasn’t already filled to the gills, I’d say screw all this fucking plastic — again, no offense, Professor. For the same effort, we could melt the hot ice and pump the slick straight into our hold.”
Zubov shook his head.
“Too dangerous, even discounting the fact that you would cook the guts of your lovely boat here. There’s no way you’d have enough capacity to take on the entire slick, and even if you were willing to make a dozen trips, I doubt anyone would open their doors to let you off-load the wastewater.”
The captain evaluated Zubov’s analysis of the situation, finally nodding in agreement.
“This is one shitty pickle you’ve got here.”
“Hopefully not for long,” Zubov said and clapped Macadam on the back.
They stepped into the Villager’s chart room and Zubov unrolled a map showing the most recent sediment profile of the region. His finger came to rest over a large shaded area marked silt clay Mix just outside the eastern terminus of Fury and Hecla Strait.
“The soliton threw our original plans all out of whack,” Zubov explained. “We lost hold of the slick before it entered the strait, so catching it coming out is our next option.” On the chart it was evident how the comparatively narrow channel of Fury and Hecla Strait — little more than ten miles across — would help direct the slick into a limited number of possible areas at the top of Foxe Basin.
“Until the ice arrives, this is where you can start dredging a deposit site for the bonded Plasroc,” Zubov said. “The geologists tell me that the clay will act as a natural sarcophagus.”
“It won’t really be needed,” Macadam said confidently, “but it’s always nice to have a second layer of containment.” He pulled out his calculator and derived an estimate for the final size of the sealed mass. The captain extrapolated this figure to the volume of sediment they would need to dredge and suggested the pit could be dug in another three days, maybe less.
“Let’s shoot for ‘less’ then,” Zubov asked. “Once the hot ice is driven into the containment pen, I don’t know how long we’ll be able to hold it there.”