Even Vu was snoring peacefully as I laid out my long johns for the morning and lined up my prebreakfast vitamins on the edge of the dresser. The last thing I saw before sleep was Jacques through my bunk window, half-naked out on the tundra, murmuring softly to the moon as he masturbated. His shoulders and chest, even through mats of hair, were perfectly defined. Neck craned, head back, he stroked himself in the lunar glow, a light just bright enough to illuminate the pearls of his semen, already half-frozen into globes, as they arced toward the snow.
In the morning, I decided it was best to ignore my feelings toward the studniks and get to work. Jacques could barely keep the hopper loaded. We were a dang fine team on average days, but now we were like mad robots. “Encore des lapins,” Dr. Q would yell to Jacques, as Scotty shaved for all he was worth.
Of course, it was hard to brag about the ray, considering we’d soon be needing human-sized targets. Privately, I saw the deathray as a necessary first step in the creation of a liferay. I had a theory about the true state of our universe, a theory so elegant and terrifying that I couldn’t even tell Dr. Q.
Basically, it goes like this, and stop me when you disagree: Matter doesn’t exist. “Things” are made of energy; atoms are really tiny packets of vibrating waves. The appearance of substance — of “weight” and “shape”—is simply a product of fluctuating frequency. Gravity also is a myth. Popular science would have us believe that bodies are magically attracted to each other by this invisible force. Don’t make me laugh. The real force at work here is something I call sympathy, an affinity between energies. In school, you may have been taught that love includes a rubbing of the genitals. Life, however, has hopefully proved this fleshy dance a lie. Love is our clearest manifestation of sympathy, a pulling of equal and opposite spirits. The moon is held in orbit by sympathy. The dancing poodle rolls a ball with sympathy. A man, finally, is only a beautiful, unwavering band of energy. If you could only harness this force.
That night, Secretary Mulroney was back.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “follow me.”
We tromped out to the Sno-Cat shed, a path Jacques shoveled by hand. The cold made me stiff and weary.
“Behold,” Mulroney said and rolled his eyes skyward. “What do you see?”
We turned our goggles toward the dark night above.
I didn’t get the point of the exercise. All I saw was our breath rolling upward in a column, my steam mingling with the others’, with Q’s.
“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.