Emporium

by Adam Johnson

“I don’t see a damn thing,” Scotty said.

  “Ah,” Jacques said. “La lune.”

  “Through these lenses,” Q said, “the moon glows a ghostly pink.”

  The moon did seem pink. A shiver went through me.

  Mulroney continued. “A communist moon looms, gentlemen. Our Yukon team believes the Reds are building giant engines in preparation for a moon launch. I don’t need to tell you the grave military implications of that.”

  I pulled my collar up. There was no wind. A nameless feeling rose in me. Everything had changed, but I did not know how or why. The Canadian starscape above seemed foreign and strange.

  “Naturally, we’ve had our own secret moonshot team,” Mulroney said. “Alpha team has been testing experimental fuels in the Arctic. Yesterday, however, a blue flash was reported in northern Canada, and then communications were lost. We fear the worst. As of now, the deathray is shelved. Men, you are the new Alpha team.”

  “We’ll have to rise to the challenge,” Q assured Mulroney.

  Jacques could tell by our faces that everything had changed. He looked to Dr. Q. “Voulez-vous encore des animaux?” he asked.

  “Non, mon petit ami,” Q told him. “Nous sommes fini avec les animaux.”

  Jacques eyed again the heavens. “Quel noir,” he said. “Quel infini obscurité.”

  And thus began our nine-week odyssey to beat those Russian faggots to the moon. We upgraded to Level 5 Security, which meant an eleven-hundred-kilometer move north to a remote glacier tracking station. Now our supplies would be dropped at night by black parachute, and we were only allowed to bring one personal effect. Scotty was torn between his bagpipes and the veterinary shears he had come to love. Vu had no such qualms. He spent his last night before heading north to cold country ironing his Edmonton Oilers goalie uniform, while Jacques polished his grandfather’s giant bear trap, an iron contraption with jaws big and menacing as cross-inductor struts.

  Dr. Q stared endlessly at his bookcase before deciding on a leather-bound edition of Wuthering Heights. For me, there was no question. How could I leave my flatworms behind? I didn’t really have a plan to revive them, but there’s no shortcuts in science. I figured I’d put them in a bowl of warm water and give them lots of love. If that didn’t work, I’d switch to liquid hydrogen, and, as a last ditch, I could always go back to E. coli.

  We were like kids, wide-eyed as we kept saying the moon to each other. We were making a moonshot, I thought as I funneled my mixture of worms and liquid nitrogen into a thermos for the trip. I almost didn’t notice Jacques ducking out through the side doors that led to the thorium dump.

  I followed him, walking a few paces behind, on the same course we had taken the night before. Something was bothering him. We walked single file, silently, Jacques dragging his grandfather’s enormous bear trap. What struck me was the cold. In the name of freedom and peace, we were going to beat the Reds to the moon, yet it was just as cold as the night before. It occurred to me suddenly, like a calving glacier, that my years of work on the deathray were over, and without result.

  We wandered aimlessly, it seemed to me, from icefield to icefield, until Jacques felt somehow satisfied and stopped. He began digging and clawing his way through the permafrost. One patch of ice looked like any other in my book. A storm was rising from the northwest. That’s what I was thinking about, the cold ahead.

  Jacques dug a sack of moose jerky from the tundra. Then he uncovered his speed sled, something I hadn’t seen him on in a while. Most trappers I’d read about in the Encyclopedia Canadia used dog teams, but Jacques rode a tiny sled he called a “luge,” which you drove with your feet. It was more like a cookie sheet mounted on knives. Up and down the hills, it was the fastest thing you ever saw, simply a blur.

  Jacques placed his bear trap and jerky on the luge, and we moved on. At the first of the traps we’d set the night before, Jacques crouched down before a rabbit. He let the little guy go, saying “au revoir” as it hobbled away.

  Jacques only came to my sternum, but traces of pain in his eyes made him appear large and noble. The wind blew him down. He stood up again.

  What was making him so sad, I wanted to know.

  “Au revoir,” Jacques said to each of the animals he freed. When we reached the edge of the glaciers, where the crevasses made trapping impossible, Jacques turned to me. “Au revoir,” he said.

  It sounded like he was saying “old river,” but with French, you never can tell. I tried to approximate his mother tongue as best I could. “Are you leave now? Go you where?” I asked.

  Jacques nodded toward the ice behind him, while his hands described the outlines of mountains beyond. I figured this was where he’d look for that old river. Jacques was born to be an explorer, and I’ll admit I was jealous of the way he’d brave the world on his own, how he took years of loneliness and cold until, by chance, he stumbled upon the path of another human heart. I wasn’t made of such strong elements, it occurred to me. It sparked another little truth to rise. The reason I was so happy about the moon project was because now, I wouldn’t have a chance to screw up the next phase of the deathray. I’d made a small string of mistakes, early in my career, including one that made a real mess of things at the Saskatoon Linear Particle Accelerator. Some equipment was damaged, and it still haunted me. There was a reason I was working out here in a desert of cold, instead of at prestigious labs like the Manitoba Institute of Technology.

  “Vous aimez votre voyage à la lune,” Jacques said. He climbed atop a block of ice, placed his hands on his hips.

  “Je suis fini avec petits animaux. Je desire le grand et savage loup polaire, ou le tigre du Siberia, qui est blanc est musculaire. Tres feroce. Tres violent.”

  Jacques hopped down and gathered his traps. I stood dumbly as he mounted his “luge.” I closed my eyes when rocketed off into the dark and cold.

  We determined that Dr. Q was too fragile to make the eleven-hundred-kilometer trip north. He was dropped in by black parachute with a CIA advance team, while Vu and I towed the enrichment gear and mercurium cells on a special sled Scotty had welded. Scotty followed in the Sno-Cat behind, pulling the giant magnets.

  The journey was long and painful. Vu kept reliving hockey’s great moments, and he didn’t spare the glory. If he said “ya betcha” one more time. Deep down, I think something else was upsetting me. I half hoped I’d encounter another little fur trapper when we reached the Glacier Lab because I already missed Jacques.

  From the Sno-Cat, I called Dr. Q on the scramble phone. The encryption caused a lot of static, so Q sounded like he was out in the middle of nowhere. It was clear we’d have to enlarge the team to make a moon shot. We needed to build a flight simulator, and that was no easy feat. You had to configure all your own ergonomic systems, devise lots of small controls, as well as be a wizard with an eight millimeter projector.

  “The best simulator person out there is Nell Connelly,” I said. Nell was a wild prototype theorist who was prone to bursts of emotion.

  “I know, I know,” Q said.

  “Any team would be proud to have her.”

  “Certainly,” Q acknowledged. “Of course.”

  I was in near whiteout conditions, the mercurium we towed kept melting the ice right out from under us, and Vu had only made it to the ’36 Olympics, in which the Nazis cheated their way to hockey gold by freezing the rink’s ice out of sugar water, a move whose syrupy result was to slow any skate not made from superior German steel. It was dark, the phone was crackly, but I sensed Q and I were communicating on that higher level Jacques and I sometimes achieved.

  “In my gut,” Q said, “I feel Nell’s red hair might be a distraction to the team.”

  “I second that motion, sir.”

  So it was that by the time I reached the Glacier Lab, Q had chosen Mansoor, my nemesis from the Saskatoon project, to come aboard as the new simulator man.

  Mansoor was the first person I saw when we arrived at the tiny outpost. I barely knew
I’d arrived, the cab windows had so sheeted over, but I could smell his Royal Lyme toilet water in the air.

  “Ah, brilliant to see my old chum from Saskatoon,” he said, opening my door.

  Mansoor had been raised under British rule, which was why he wore those hideous blue socks. I eyed his thin mustache, dark brows, and took his hand to help me down. Mansoor fancied himself a ladies’ man, and though you couldn’t help finding him devilishly handsome, he was forever going on about exploits with coeds from Calgary to Moosonee.

  We trudged toward the warming hut, Mansoor patting my back the whole way, but before I had a chance to tell him to keep his distance, I noticed something, out in the snow. There was a large, shiny crater in the darkness, and I suddenly knew the Alpha team had met its end, here, in a cone of blue vapor.

  At Q’s planning meeting, we all sat at a large table that had once acted as the nerve center for the Canadian Emergency Glacier Tracking Network, or CEGTN, for short. Color-coded thumbtacks were everywhere. Seven clocks, each set to a Canadian time zone, ticked on the wall above us.

  We decided Vu would switch from targeting to navigation—he’d build those tricky atomic gyros. As a thermodynamic specialist, I was the natural choice for propulsion. Q would sew the reentry parachutes. With Mansoor building the flight simulator, and Scotty hammering out the capsule, we figured we’d finish ahead of schedule.

  As far as the launch strategy was concerned, a sustained burn would, ideally, be the way to go. You couldn’t argue with liquid fuel; it gave you control and timing, though it also bogged you down with a huge, multistage fuselage and some real headaches in the engine department. In the end, it wasn’t worth it. We were going rocketless, and we’d need to cook up that nasty load of saturnium after all. This was going to be a proton elevator to the heavens, governed by nuclear gyroscopics.

  Dr. Q stood. He’d been doing a lot of math lately, I could tell. There was a glow about him that hypnotized me. He announced his initial calculations: the launch was going to take out much of central Canada, and depending on the winds, northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The EMP alone was going to knock every duck out of the sky for twenty-five hundred kilometers. Q also predicted an eighty-five percent chance of a tsunami off the coast of Chile, something we’d just have to accept.

  Mansoor didn’t wait long to rear his ugly head. I drew up the cooking schedule, and in an effort toward nobility, I gave myself KP detail the first night. I wanted to try my hand at Italian, and maybe wow the guys. It was just Scotty, myself, and our new Urdu brother.

  Folding a napkin, Mansoor said, “So how have been your days since Saskatoon?”

  I wasn’t sitting for this treatment. “You mean since I broke the Linear Accelerator by loading fluorine instead of bromine in the atom smasher?”

  “I thought Boris Kladnikov broke the atom smasher.”

  “You know dang well it was me.”

  “An honest mistake, I’m sure,” Mansoor said. “All halides look alike to me.”

  “As project engineer,” Scotty butted in, “I need to know if you’ve got a problem with bromine.”

  Oh, that scorched me, it scorched me. How could I hate bromine? I even kept a sack of it handy as a fire retardant. In a pinch, it also makes a good pesticide, and a quick mixing with any isolinear alkali yields a whopper of a tear gas.

  “You just watch your back,” I said to Mansoor.

  Vu arrived late, grabbed a bread stick, and looked suspiciously at the Chianti. He said, “Pass the cacciatori, could’ja, and some-a them there noodles, eh.”

  I lost it. “It’s Mac-a-ro-ni, an ancient food product invented by the Venetians.”

  Scotty had to add his. “Yes,” he said, “the Venetians also invented grapeshot, land mines, and the incendiary grenade.”

  “They gave us syphilis, too,” Mansoor threw in.

  “Speak for yourself,” I told him.

  In these early days, Dr. Q developed a device to perform long arithmetic. He called this box an “algebrator,” and with it, the nodule would basically fly itself. No more working a steering wheel with one hand and a slide rule with the other.

  The time came for me to begin preparing the nuclear propulsion assembly, which required long hours in a full-containment suit. I used a lot of tongs. Loneliness was my worst enemy, and whole days would pass in which I saw no one—I’d emerge from the nuclear shed to find everyone asleep. There was no remedy. But the work was too dangerous to cry-baby about feelings. Most of weapons development is monkey see, monkey do, but the party stops when you get to the actinide series of the periodic table. If you could simply whip a rhombohedral element like samarium into an orthohombic like proactinium, then everyone would be doing it. You don’t just sprinkle protons around and slap on electron shells. Try dicking with the fusal enthalpy of a polonium isotope and see if it will let you tiptoe out of the room when things go south. The ol’ lead apron won’t save you then.

  Late at night, I’d sneak into Dr. Q’s room and warm my hands over the algebrator’s tubes, breathe deep its ozony breath. Whispering, I’d ask, what lay ahead? Did happiness wait for me? Regarding my fate, the algebrator held its silence. The fastest mathematical device in the world would not say. I’d admire the neat rows of toggles, let the copper coils ionize the hair on my arms, and then wander off to my quiet bunk.

  The command nodule was the first hardware component to be finished, and when Scotty debuted it, we drank Mooseheads all the way around. Dr. Q put some Latin music on the reel-to-reel, and Vu killed us with his cancan. I did a merengue with Dr. Q, and I tell you, I was zany, I wasn’t myself. It must have been the bubbles in the beer. Palm to palm, we held our arms high, poised and steady, while below, our hips flashed like solid-state diodes—one two three, cha—and I was feeling quite heady. I let Q lead.

  But then, in the conga line, I had to endure the wafting smells of gin and starch coming off Mansoor, while Vu’s sweaty hands on my shoulders brought me down to earth. As we snaked around the heli-arc welder and acetylene torches—cha, our legs would fly in unison—I began to wonder which one of us would be making the moonshot. Dr. Q was too important, Scotty was prone to drink, and of course, I had my allergies. Secretly, I was for sticking Vu in the darn thing.

  Just then, Mansoor led the conga line up to the command nodule and stopped in front of the canopy. The capsule was beautiful: anodized alloy frame, gold-plated com links, fireproof Perspex windows all around. The tiny nodule’s infrastructure alone contained fifty kilometers of wiring, enough that Scotty had to train two snow ferrets to pull the cables through the complex web of conduits.

  Mansoor opened the hatch and moved to step inside like he owned the thing, like he had just crowned himself moon pilot. Part of me really wanted Mansoor to go, except for the fact that there was an outside chance the whole dang thing might work, that he might make it to the moon and return a hero. But Mansoor couldn’t squeeze in through the hatch. None of us could, not even Vu! Scotty had made the nodule too small. When we cornered him behind the central shop-vac unit, his desperate margarita eyes passed over all of us. “There must be something wrong with my slide rule,” he said. “It could have happened to anybody.”

  Furious, Dr. Q called an emergency meeting, right there in our sombreros. Mulroney listened in on the scramble phone. “What we need,” Q said, “is a candidate who can withstand intense G forces, high levels of radiation, and long periods of cold and dark. He must be able to entertain himself and also be under 150 centimeters tall.”

  Mulroney assured us the CIA would find our man, so there was nothing left to do but get back to work and trust in Canadian Intelligence.

  Three nights later, Mulroney was back. I was shaken out of a dream about submarines: when I raised my periscope, I could see Jacques on the shoreline, racing his luge up and down the hills in a perfect sine wave.

  “Gentlemen,” Mulroney announced. “I present your Canadanaut.”

  “Canadanaut?” I asked. “What the heck are
you talking about?”

  “It means ‘Canada-voyager,’” Mulroney said. “The boys in PR cooked it up.”

  Mulroney then pushed forward a tiny, emaciated man with a skin condition. He was blindfolded and probably drugged.

  Dr. Q asked him his discipline. Aeronautics? Vector Analysis?

  “I’m an English teacher from Edmonton,” he squeaked.

  I nearly laughed up my cocoa.

  Vu rushed him. “Did the Oilers make the Stanley Cup playoffs?” he asked.

  Such was our seclusion. But this guy didn’t know anything.

  I walked over and poked him in the chest. He almost fell down. What a puss. I didn’t even want to know his name. How were we going to beat those Communauts into space with a bookworm at the wheel? Did I have to remind everyone of the grave military implications of failure?

  Dr. Q and I decided to get right to work, right there in our nightshirts. The first thing we did was irradiate our Canadian hero with uranium isotopes. I set the dial at 500. Q shrugged, so I cranked it up to 650 rads, a dose that made our subject turn pink and swelly. The procedure also loosened his teeth, and the diarrhea would not stop. As if you could fly to the moon with a case of the dribbles riding shotgun. On the master clipboard, Q marked his radiation tolerance as “moderate.”

  Next, we stuck him in the centrifugal chamber, an event that pulled his arms out of his sockets, and that was it, we were back to scratch.

  I was relieved that our so-called “Canadanaut” was gone, but something was still bothering me. All day, the numbers wouldn’t add up, and I kept spilling the hydroxinum crystals. What I wouldn’t have given for one rabbit to calm my nerves. This mission wasn’t about Canada. This flight was about one man, leaving the world of men, making a sacrifice for the love of mankind. It seemed to me that our pilot should be called a “man-voyager,” or Homonaut, a name that suggested fellowship and unity.

  At dinner that night, it was Scotty who snapped. “I’m tired of all these military figures telling us what to do.” He slammed his fork down. “The whole point of this enterprise is exploration. I say our man is a Star Jockey and should be referred to as such. In a certain sense, we’re all Star Jockeys.”