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 1013 joules! Straight into mercurium! We created, for 2.3-37 of 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.
Q shook his head. “I need a vacation,” he said into the Canadian darkness.
We wouldn’t be able to raise Jacques on the dictascope for another twenty-seven minutes, so we all marched back down into the bunker, where we sat upon upturned thorium drums and shot the breeze. Mansoor described the appearance of the moon, seen from the rooftops of Islamabad, on one particular night of his boyhood, an image that still moved him, yet eluded description—“not saffron, not tamarind, lighter than orange peel”—while I entertained my first notions of life after this project. Already, I could see Q and myself on vacation in Acapulco, sipping Mooseheads on the beach, while the rhythms of the swaying palms and surf blended into the singsong of Mansoor’s memory, “the color of spiced butter, near melting, but textured and pewtery, like old lacquer, or perhaps the yellow base of a parrot’s beak, where it disappears into the violet of its feathers.”
Q started telling a story about the old days, about doing research back before fancy instruments. I hung on his every word, so rapt I didn’t notice he’d accidentally lifted my thermos off the floor.
“We worked on instinct, letting our balls be our guide,” Q was saying as he unscrewed the lid to my flatworm experiment. “In the days before electron microscopes, logarithms were our eyes. We didn’t need particle accelerators when our guts told us that nutrinos existed.” Then he lifted the thermos of liquid nitrogen to his mouth. He drank, turned blue, and we lost him, right there in the bunker.
“Give us room,” I yelled as I prepared to revive him. Mansoor held back Scotty, already weeping as he reached to touch Q’s sleeve. Vu was in hysterics, but they all left the bunker so I could get to work. I placed Q’s body in one of the long thorium drums. Next, I filled the drum with warm water. Then I gave Q lots of love.
It didn’t work. I couldn’t bring him back. There was only an expression of beautiful inquiry in Q’s eyes, a look suggesting he’d witnessed what lay ahead — warmth, light, acceptance — perhaps my truest proof of sympathy’s existence.
Alone, I wept in a way that did not redden my eyes or crack my face. It was a sadness that expressed itself only as a rattle in my lungs, a strange twitch to my fingers, and it is a weeping that never stopped. This sorrow settled in, became such a bunk mate that I forgot its source. Convinced I had asthma, arthritis, anything, it wasn’t until a decade later, when I ran across a photo of Q in a top-secret folder that I knew I wept yet. At the back of the file, I saw Q’s real name: Randolph.
The guys returned to console me, but I waved them off. There was nothing to do but get back to work. In three short days, Jacques would safely float down to the biggest party Ontario had ever seen. Mulroney had already ordered the beer. Until then, we owed that little fur trapper our best. It’s what Q would’ve wanted.
“Allo, allo,” we heard over the speaker. “C’est Jacques. Dites-moi, mes amis.”
We looked at each other. Dr. Q was the only one who’d spoken French.
Mansoor grabbed my arm. “Just repeat whatever the heck he says.”
“Quel ciel! J’observe les cometes et le systeme solaire.”
I grabbed the handset while Vu checked Jacques’s position. “Solaire,” I said.
We all watched for Jacques’s green blip as Vu fired up the dictascope.
When the screen warmed up, Jacques’s blip was way off course.
“Wouldn’cha know he missed the moon,” Vu said, “by about a heck of a lot, eh.”
“Make you now an around turn,” I said to Jacques. “U-turn.”
“Oui,” he said. “Espace resemble l’uterine. L’acte du creation est tres evident.”
Vu grabbed the handset. “Look here, Jacques, you better return, eh.”
“Retournez?”
Mansoor gave it a go. “Use the stick, Jacques. Time for the baton of joy.”
We then lost radio contact with him for about five minutes.
Despite the unnerving radio silence, Jacques’s green blip did slowly begin to turn back toward the moon, except now he was forced to land on the dark side. Scotty grabbed a slide rule for some quick extrapolation. His fingers whirred, then stopped cold. “He’s used too much fuel in the turn around. He’ll never make it home.”