Adam Johnson - Emporium

Mulroney levered the flux controller. He tugged the ropes that opened the exhaust cowling. Certainly he was envisioning a day when brave young Ottawans picked commies off of Siberian tanks with backpack versions of our ray. But I saw the deathray as a tool for peace. We had a chance to make a difference. I mean the whole reason we were building the deathray was so that we’d never have to use it. That’s what I was thinking when Mulroney’s eyes landed on the big red button.

Vu looked like he was about to shout a warning as Mulroney reached to press it, but it wouldn’t have done a lick of good anyway. Vu’s accent was indecipherable, simply maddening.

The important thing was to stay calm. Start hyperventilating, and you’re sunk.

As soon as Mulroney’s fingers touched the button, the copper windings began to crackle green-blue, and Jacques jumped up from the hatch over the flash corrector. He’d been taking a nap in the overload chamber.

“Mon Dieu,” Jacques said. “Attemptez-vous me morter?”

Jacques wore buckskin trapper’s pants, birch bark boots, and a skunk fur hat. He was the hairiest man any of us had ever seen, and Mulroney winced at his breath, ten meters away.

I’d been feeling uncomfortable since Mulroney’s arrival. Jacques was liable to begin masturbating at any moment, and the secretary was the first guest we’d had in years. Jacques called his penis “le baton de joie,” which Q said translated roughly as “stick of joy.” Without warning and whenever the fancy struck him, Jacques would stand, announce “temps pour le baton,” and head for the Sno-Cat shed.

But there was no time to explain any of this to Mulroney. The button had been pushed, and once she was charged, you couldn’t stop. What if the core degraded? What if the mercurium cells lost matrix? It was all theoretical at that point, and we weren’t waiting around to find out.

There was only about twenty seconds to get a target for that beam. We had dozens of rabbits, but they weren’t shaved, and we couldn’t risk another fire.

Luckily Q took charge. “Scotty,” he commanded, “check the shaved rabbit bin.”

Normally Q wasn’t much of an authority figure. People didn’t take him seriously because of his grooming and posture, but as the huge platinum charging plates began to rattle, Scotty snapped to it. He plucked out the last shaved rabbit — dazed and razor-burned — and tossed it to Vu, who sent it sailing off to Jacques. You could hear the rabbit’s teeth chatter as Jacques caught it by the scruff. It is a haunting sound, if you know it.

Jacques moved with deft perfection. He climbed the aft transducer and wormed his way through the hatch until we could only see his tiny feet above the fire wall. Jacques was born to load the rabbit hopper. He was the only one small enough to squeeze into the parabolic targeting chamber. On top of that, he could tolerate incredible amounts of radiation. One time, Scotty absentmindedly left a dish of strontium 90 on the counter, and Jacques, thinking it was table salt (we iodize our own), sprinkled it on his meat. Afterward, Dr. Q scoped his chest, and the rads were off the chart, but Jacques was unfazed, felt nada.

The deathray was warming to full charge, and I knew what was next. Honestly, there was something cold and brutish about the deathray that I didn’t like. When her pink power tube heated up and began to vibrate, it gave me the chills. Then there was what lay ahead for the bunny. The first rabbit fire was a real wake-up call. I’d been telling myself the deathray’s subjects would just “disappear.” But the animals were terrifying when they burst, simply pyroclastic. Someday the subjects would be human. Were a man, sufficiently hairy, to be subjected to that beam — I shuddered at the thought. As for the fire, Q calculated that we hadn’t been adjusting for the fur resonance, a frequency that always eluded us, and we were forced, finally, to begin shaving them, which I took as a kind of defeat. You can’t shave a man on the battlefield.

The ray let out a brief, piercing whine, and then we all winced at the ghastly sound of our erupting subject.

Mulroney, semi-impressed, got back to business.

“Gentlemen, you have been in scientific seclusion for some time now, and it has become necessary to inform you that a couple years back, the communists launched a fixed orbiting vehicle into the upper atmosphere. Canadian Intelligence believes they named it ‘Studnik.’”

We all looked at each other. Mulroney continued.

“Now, gentlemen, our remote Saskatchewan sensing station is picking up high levels of iridium emissions in the upper atmosphere.”

We all paused in reflection.

“Iridium?” Vu asked.

God, his accent.

“I bet it’s blowing in from Russia,” I said.

Scotty, ever the critic, dismissed it as a solar anomaly. “It’s just a corona playing hell with the Van Allen belts.”

“Ya, but that’s about a heck of a place to find iridium, don’t’cha know,” Vu countered. “We’re talkin’ about some pretty big dispersion forces, eh.”

We all looked at Dr. Q. He closed his eyes and lifted a hand. It made me stop breathing.

He began patting his pockets, searching for a slide rule. I gave him mine. His thick fingers worked feverishly before me, his class ring winking in the moonlight. He asked me to remember the polynomial VX 2— 5VX + 3V 2, and I repeated it over and over in my head, lucky to be the scratch pad of greatness. At last, Q stopped, turned grave. He and Secretary Mulroney exchanged a dark look.

“These are venting particulates from spent fuel,” Q said. “The Russians are testing a new engine. A tremendous engine.”

“Our worst fears have been confirmed, gentlemen,” Mulroney said and then raced out into the cold to deliver the news to Ottawa.

I didn’t have much of an appetite at dinner that night. Scotty’s pot pies weren’t even worth the meter of floss they cost me, and Vu was driving me crazy that danged puck. Dr. Q, my polestar, was lost in thought.

I grabbed my storm overalls and thermos and went for a walk on the ice fields. A man wouldn’t last ten minutes up here without a thermos. It must have been minus fifty Kelvin out. Many nights, too many, I would get lonely and walk the vast sheets of ice that swept up to the abandoned meteorology station where we worked. There was something wrong with me, but I didn’t know what. Months of continual dark and cold would get me turned around. I’d ask myself, did I graduate top of my class for this? For my dissertation, I created the world’s first Gas Amplified Stimulator of Emissions of Radiation. And here I was, in the cold and dark. I mean, one day I wanted to get married and settle down. I’ve always loved casserole, and Vu was continually screwing up the laundry. A base of operations would free me up to do lots of pure research. For now, though, Q needed me.

That night, I crunched through the drifting banks with my head leaned back. I stared into the night, imagining a whole sky full of Russian studniks, their brassy chests shining boastfully down on me, and I wished I had a GASER big enough to blast every one of them.

On the horizon, I spotted Jacques dragging his traps toward the glaciers, and I trudged after him. He and I had sort of become pals over time. Jacques had been using this old station as a base camp for trapping, and when our team arrived, I was the one who discovered him sleeping among the rotting weather balloons. He leapt up with a thin knife, and in his third-grade French, boasted that he was five feet tall, that I had better look out. I thought he was a barbarian because he seemed to have little knowledge of the metric system. Though he was clearly lying about his height, it was his breath I will never forget — a yellow cloud of vibrating spirochetes rising from the tarry saucepits of hollow tooth sockets.