Adam Johnson - Emporium

Vu crossed the room with an overflowing scooper.

“Easy, easy,” we all said. Vu was dragging his feet on the carpet, and if one spark of static electricity were to hit the mercurium— sayonara.

At L-minus twelve hours, we shaved Jacques. We told him it was to reduce heat inside the suit, but honestly, we didn’t know why we were doing it. It just seemed like the right idea. Science is about following your instincts, and I guess we didn’t want to take any chances.

It was somber in the room. You could smell the ozone from Scotty’s shears as they bogged in mats of hair. Jacques sat on a stool, occasionally raising his eyes to the ceiling as if the hum of the buzzer was the drone of propellers that were at that moment, we all knew, high over Canada on a mission to deliver her.

When Scotty was done with the straight razor, there was nothing to do but marvel. Jacques only weighed thirty-eight kilos, and he’d lost a lot of volume without the body hair, but he was grand, the most perfect male specimen I’d ever seen. Lithe and symmetrical, his pectoral muscles fanned across ribs that undulated beneath a brawny torso. About his genitals, I won’t even speak.

For dinner, Jacques requested a moose patty, which he took alone, with red wine. Then we all walked out into the icefield to wait for her. The whole idea rattled me, a woman falling from the sky to take hold of one of us. Mulroney had assured us she was the leader of an elite canando unit — she was the best woman they had.

Above, the Milky Way swung its galactic fist at nothing, while the moon, searing and steamy, seemed ruled by convection. When stars twinkled, going dark for a moment, I wondered if a highaltitude drop plane was passing overhead. Under a black parachute, was she swooping toward us? We stomped our feet for warmth. Our breath plumed. I swore I heard the faint, gargly cry of a faraway wolf.

At last we heard it, the whistling of parachute cord. Then I felt the growing shadow of her black silk, and she was upon us. The canando unclasped her harness before she reached the ground, so she was in pure free-fall the last ten meters.

She hit, rolled, and leapt up aiming a red flashlight and a pistol. She wore bulky, bullet-resistant body armor and light-amplifying goggles. She must have been 195 centimeters tall! Before we could say anything, we were engulfed by a lufting cloud of black as her parachute drifted down on us.

With the gun barrel, she lifted the chute off our heads. She let her teeth show, like graphite in the dark. Her black name patch read “Lt. Braun.”

“Which man is Jacques?” she asked.

We didn’t say shit.

“Qui homme est Jacques?” she demanded.

We all shrank back. The poor bastard, I thought.

But Jacques stepped forward. “C’est moi,” he said.

“Bien,” she said. “Commençons.”

Lt. Braun holstered her weapon and then adjusted a dial on her amber-glowing watch. She reached down and unsnapped an insulated panel covering her groin. Removing this panel revealed that her body armor was crotchless, and we all stood watching her vagina steam in the Arctic night.

“Stop this madness!” I shouted.

It was too late. Jacques had seen her yeasty pubis, and was already stripping his clothes. Naked, hairless, vibrating white in the moonlight, he ran toward her. She caught him midstride. Together they climbed into the cab of the Sno-Cat and dieseled off into the distance, leaving us to hoof it home.

“Cigar?” Mansoor offered, smiling.

The next morning, Jacques walked back into camp like a gunslinger. His breath had reached a new dimension. I told Q that we’d need to initiate a complete physical and scrubdown, but Q said no, there wasn’t time.

“Think of the microbes,” I pleaded, but Q was right. It was go-time.

On the horizon, we saw Lt. Braun launch a large reflective balloon that hung in the Arctic night, tethered by an elastic cord to her harness. Moments later, a small jet approached. It caught the balloon with a tail hook — and snatch! — she was gone.

I did a last-minute rundown of the checklist while Jacques suited up. It seemed like we’d thought of everything: reentry was going to be hot, but luckily we had tons of old asbestos from the glacier station’s insulation. As far as water was concerned, I’d developed a catheter filter that worked rather nicely. To produce oxygen, Jacques would need only drop a couple methyline tablets into a jar of hydroferric acid, shake briskly, and then get that lid off quick, or look out.

Mansoor, who was pretty handy with the brush and palate, whipped off a few watercolors to document the top-secret launch. Jacques posed with Dr. Q, both giving the thumbs-up. Then he crouched down beside the mercurium cells, where he tipped his helmet and smiled. Finally, Jacques mounted the canopy and spoke to us:

“Observez la lune. Il n’y a pas de lune. Le tigre, dans l’arctique, finelment, est une illusion. Son grandes dents ne mange pas le corps. Son attaque ne cause pas la mort. Je suis un homme. Je ne suis pas un homme.”

With that, Jacques entered the capsule. Scotty armed the rotary locks, swung the door shut, and then caulked the joints.

The moment had finally arrived. I took the battery out of the Sno-Cat and we all went down into the bunker. Below the permafrost, our breath billowed in the light of the handhelds. Q gave the nod and Scotty pulled the cord that dumped the thorium 247 into the now-glowing mercurium cells. Mansoor counted backward on that fancy-ass watch of his.

At zero, I connected the wires, triggering a switch that activated the giant magnets. The positively charged protons were pulled off to the right, while the negatively charged electrons veered left, leaving a perfect beam of thorium neutrons. We’re talking 10 13joules! Straight into mercurium! We created, for 2.3 -37of a second, one kilo of pure saturnium, the first production of a theoretical element in the history of the earth. For a moment of perfection, we’d echoed the creation of the universe.

There was a hell of a bang, and we knew the ground above us was molten glass. We counted to one hundred, then ran up top in our yellow suits to check things out. Everything was glowing, but when my eyes adjusted, and I turned my red goggles toward the launch sight, there was nothing. I couldn’t believe Jacques was gone. We searched the sky. Nothing. I found myself thinking, was he really up there? But I knew where he was: traveling twenty kilometers per second inside a halo of flame.

Was he burning alive? Did he forget his compass? We’d sent along every gram of equipment the nodule could lift: there were twin solar-powered com links, bulky arm-mounted units that weighed nearly three kilos each, without the four-hectogram antennae. He took an asbestos-lined PCV suit with a backpack oxy-recirc unit, and a handheld echo-locator to navigate the craters, together nearly sixty kilos. We sent Jacques’s favorite snowshoes (six kilograms for the pair) in case the moon’s surface was unstable. There was an entrenchment tool, a rope ladder, a horizon finder, all pretty serious weight. At four dekagrams, Jacques brought a box of sixty leakproof Baggies for his elimination and masturbation. Said and done, Jacques would hump nearly ninety-seven kilos of gear with him, though this was the moon, with.165 gravity, so nothing would be a burden, really.

And, unbeknownst to us at launch time, Jacques had brought his grandfather’s twenty-kilogram bear trap, which was enough weight to send the nodule seven thousand kilometers off course, causing Jacques to miss the moon entirely.

Slowly, our dread lessened, and as I saw the smirks of victory spread across the faces of my colleagues, I realized that a welldeserved elation was building. We had done it, we’d really beat those Russian fags into space.