“Jacques is an explorer,” Q pointed out. “He’s never even seen money.”
“There’s another issue,” Mulroney said. “I don’t think the boys down in PR would see many photo opportunities with Jacques, and then there’s his breath.”
We considered Jacques’s features in the laboratory light, his curling nose hair, those wax-filled ears. For the first time, I noticed the patches of ringworm.
“At least let’s see how he does in the flight simulator,” I pleaded.
Mulroney shrugged. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”
We put Jacques in the flight simulator, and it didn’t go well. There were precious few days before launch, and Jacques had never seen a steering wheel before, let alone a clutch.
“Would the Canadanaut please focus his attention on the movie,” Mansoor would say. “Please if the Canadanaut would push each button that lights.”
Mansoor was pushing it with the phony manners. Plus, he kept calling Jacques a “Cuh-nad-un-ot” instead of the obvious “Can-uh-duh-nut.” The way Mansoor said it, Canada had nothing to do with it. It was like Canada didn’t even exist to him.
During the exercise in which Jacques was to navigate a simulated asteroid field, he kept jerking his legs and leaning in the chair, until finally, he fell flat on the floor. Using the powers of scientific deduction, I concluded that Jacques was attempting to fly the nodule the same way he steered his “luge.”
“You’re going to have to rig this nodule to be operated with the feet,” I told Scotty, which was the wrong thing to say. I was about to eat a crutch when Mansoor had a stroke of brilliance.
“I’ll go you one better, old fellow,” Mansoor said and began constructing an ergonomic navigation system based on Jacques’s “baton de joie.” On the dash, Mansoor mounted a single, protruding stick that controlled both direction and velocity. Where Jacques pointed it, in theory, the nodule would follow.
It wasn’t until the day before launch that we got the green light from Ottawa on Jacques. Dr. Q delivered the news while we were transferring fresh mercurium from the minibreeder to the charging cylinders. He entered the clean room, donned a surgical mask and shower cap, and then gave us the big thumbs-up. We were glad the mission wasn’t scrubbed, but nobody was going to put on pointed hats and toot horns in front of four vats of brewing mercurium. I held the containment lids open while Vu and Scotty extracted the liquid core with long-handled skimmers. Talk about trust.
But Q had another announcement. “Jacques leaves in less than eighteen hours,” he said, “and I’ve decided, according to custom, he should receive sexual gratification before departing on this perilous voyage.”
I could only see Q’s eyes, so I wasn’t sure if he was having us on or what. “A joke’s a joke,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”
“I’ve already spoken to Mulroney,” Q said. “The CIA is dropping a woman tonight. I took the liberty of ordering cigars for the rest of us.”
I looked at Mansoor, whose head wrap bulged strangely under his cellophane clean suit. “You had a hand in this, I’m sure,” I told him.
“It’s tradition,” Mansoor said. “You can’t send a man to his… to the moon, without knowing a woman.”
“Tradition?” I was so excited my voice cracked. “No one’s ever done this before. We launch in the morning, and you want to send our pilot into a stressful and unknown situation? Why don’t we also tattoo him and teach him to fire walk?”
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.