Adam Johnson - Emporium

“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.