“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.
“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.