Adam Johnson - Emporium

“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.”