THE CANADANAUT
I was pouring liquid argon into a bowl of flatworms when Secretary Mulroney arrived at our lab. He’d flown through the perpetual dark and taken a Sno-Cat thirteen kilometers from a tiny icefield landing strip before snowshoeing blind along frozen lifelines. I was doing some side research on reanimation, and the worms had just begun to crackle and flip in the Pyrex when Mulroney pushed his way through our storm-proof doors, his war medals glowing amber in the light of the heaters.
Mulroney had never come out to our Tundra Lab before, so it was clear something big was up, something far too important to risk using the scramble phone. He stomped his boots and grabbed a pair of red UV goggles — we’d been having problems with gamma rays. Scotty lowered his L-7 analyzer and groaned. Vu killed the dyno-burner and spit on the floor. But I wasn’t going to piss and moan. I believed in what we were doing. We hadn’t bathed since Boxing Day — that’s how serious we were. We all turned to Dr. Q for a reaction.
Dr. Q lifted his head slightly, bringing his eyes to bear on our surprise visitor, as if he knew right there that we were about to begin the greatest scientific odyssey in the history of Canadian weapons development. I looked at Q’s eyes, red through the lenses, and then packed my worms into the deep freeze for a week’s vacation, at which point I hoped to revive them.
“Gentlemen, I have an announcement,” Mulroney said, but as his eyes adjusted to our lab’s bright lights, he began to take in the deathray, something he’d never seen in person. He ran his eyes along the chrome transducer manifolds and walked agape down all seven meters of the glass charging tube, humming pink inside with energy. When he neared the radial accelerators, all the metal buttons flew off his jacket and raced for the field dampener, where they stuck in unison. That’s living with giant magnets.
“My word,” Mulroney said. “It’s enormous. It’s magnificent.”
Even as secretary of the Canadian Intelligence Agency, he’d probably never seen more than a rough sketch from Dr. Q. That’s how secret this was. Our supplies were dropped at night by multiprop transports, and we had no contact with the outside world. I wouldn’t even know Q’s real name until after the nitrogen accident, until it was too late.
Mulroney stood at the control panel and admired all the switches and relays. It was clear this was the CIA’s baby, and we were just building it. Mulroney could pull the plug anytime he felt like, and he didn’t have to look far for reasons. First, we were way behind on the deathray — not to mention overbudget. This was 1963, and Canada was tightening its belt. Then we’d wasted a whole year on microwaves, like fools. Finally, we lost half the lab in the rabbit fire. Thank God for Jacques, or the mercurium cells might have burned, and then foof! — good night Canada. But the problems were never ending. We’d get the targeting system running, and then there’d be trouble in beam modulation-land. We’d tune the spectrum stabilizer, and the ni-cad core would degrade (just the smell of cadmium can still turn my stomach). Dr. Q had to invent Level IV polymers just to make the O-rings. Invent them! There was no deathray book. We were writing it.
Mulroney levered the flux controller. He tugged the ropes that opened the exhaust cowling. Certainly he was envisioning a day when brave young Ottawans picked commies off of Siberian tanks with backpack versions of our ray. But I saw the deathray as a tool for peace. We had a chance to make a difference. I mean the whole reason we were building the deathray was so that we’d never have to use it. That’s what I was thinking when Mulroney’s eyes landed on the big red button.
Vu looked like he was about to shout a warning as Mulroney reached to press it, but it wouldn’t have done a lick of good anyway. Vu’s accent was indecipherable, simply maddening.
The important thing was to stay calm. Start hyperventilating, and you’re sunk.
As soon as Mulroney’s fingers touched the button, the copper windings began to crackle green-blue, and Jacques jumped up from the hatch over the flash corrector. He’d been taking a nap in the overload chamber.
“Mon Dieu,” Jacques said. “Attemptez-vous me morter?”
Jacques wore buckskin trapper’s pants, birch bark boots, and a skunk fur hat. He was the hairiest man any of us had ever seen, and Mulroney winced at his breath, ten meters away.
I’d been feeling uncomfortable since Mulroney’s arrival. Jacques was liable to begin masturbating at any moment, and the secretary was the first guest we’d had in years. Jacques called his penis “le baton de joie,” which Q said translated roughly as “stick of joy.” Without warning and whenever the fancy struck him, Jacques would stand, announce “temps pour le baton,” and head for the Sno-Cat shed.
But there was no time to explain any of this to Mulroney. The button had been pushed, and once she was charged, you couldn’t stop. What if the core degraded? What if the mercurium cells lost matrix? It was all theoretical at that point, and we weren’t waiting around to find out.
There was only about twenty seconds to get a target for that beam. We had dozens of rabbits, but they weren’t shaved, and we couldn’t risk another fire.
Luckily Q took charge. “Scotty,” he commanded, “check the shaved rabbit bin.”
Normally Q wasn’t much of an authority figure. People didn’t take him seriously because of his grooming and posture, but as the huge platinum charging plates began to rattle, Scotty snapped to it. He plucked out the last shaved rabbit — dazed and razor-burned — and tossed it to Vu, who sent it sailing off to Jacques. You could hear the rabbit’s teeth chatter as Jacques caught it by the scruff. It is a haunting sound, if you know it.
Jacques moved with deft perfection. He climbed the aft transducer and wormed his way through the hatch until we could only see his tiny feet above the fire wall. Jacques was born to load the rabbit hopper. He was the only one small enough to squeeze into the parabolic targeting chamber. On top of that, he could tolerate incredible amounts of radiation. One time, Scotty absentmindedly left a dish of strontium 90 on the counter, and Jacques, thinking it was table salt (we iodize our own), sprinkled it on his meat. Afterward, Dr. Q scoped his chest, and the rads were off the chart, but Jacques was unfazed, felt nada.
The deathray was warming to full charge, and I knew what was next. Honestly, there was something cold and brutish about the deathray that I didn’t like. When her pink power tube heated up and began to vibrate, it gave me the chills. Then there was what lay ahead for the bunny. The first rabbit fire was a real wake-up call. I’d been telling myself the deathray’s subjects would just “disappear.” But the animals were terrifying when they burst, simply pyroclastic. Someday the subjects would be human. Were a man, sufficiently hairy, to be subjected to that beam — I shuddered at the thought. As for the fire, Q calculated that we hadn’t been adjusting for the fur resonance, a frequency that always eluded us, and we were forced, finally, to begin shaving them, which I took as a kind of defeat. You can’t shave a man on the battlefield.
The ray let out a brief, piercing whine, and then we all winced at the ghastly sound of our erupting subject.
Mulroney, semi-impressed, got back to business.
“Gentlemen, you have been in scientific seclusion for some time now, and it has become necessary to inform you that a couple years back, the communists launched a fixed orbiting vehicle into the upper atmosphere. Canadian Intelligence believes they named it ‘Studnik.’”