We all looked at each other. Mulroney continued.
“Now, gentlemen, our remote Saskatchewan sensing station is picking up high levels of iridium emissions in the upper atmosphere.”
We all paused in reflection.
“Iridium?” Vu asked.
God, his accent.
“I bet it’s blowing in from Russia,” I said.
Scotty, ever the critic, dismissed it as a solar anomaly. “It’s just a corona playing hell with the Van Allen belts.”
“Ya, but that’s about a heck of a place to find iridium, don’t’cha know,” Vu countered. “We’re talkin’ about some pretty big dispersion forces, eh.”
We all looked at Dr. Q. He closed his eyes and lifted a hand. It made me stop breathing.
He began patting his pockets, searching for a slide rule. I gave him mine. His thick fingers worked feverishly before me, his class ring winking in the moonlight. He asked me to remember the polynomial VX2 — 5VX + 3V2, and I repeated it over and over in my head, lucky to be the scratch pad of greatness. At last, Q stopped, turned grave. He and Secretary Mulroney exchanged a dark look.
“These are venting particulates from spent fuel,” Q said. “The Russians are testing a new engine. A tremendous engine.”
“Our worst fears have been confirmed, gentlemen,” Mulroney said and then raced out into the cold to deliver the news to Ottawa.
I didn’t have much of an appetite at dinner that night. Scotty’s pot pies weren’t even worth the meter of floss they cost me, and Vu was driving me crazy that danged puck. Dr. Q, my polestar, was lost in thought.
I grabbed my storm overalls and thermos and went for a walk on the ice fields. A man wouldn’t last ten minutes up here without a thermos. It must have been minus fifty Kelvin out. Many nights, too many, I would get lonely and walk the vast sheets of ice that swept up to the abandoned meteorology station where we worked. There was something wrong with me, but I didn’t know what. Months of continual dark and cold would get me turned around. I’d ask myself, did I graduate top of my class for this? For my dissertation, I created the world’s first Gas Amplified Stimulator of Emissions of Radiation. And here I was, in the cold and dark. I mean, one day I wanted to get married and settle down. I’ve always loved casserole, and Vu was continually screwing up the laundry. A base of operations would free me up to do lots of pure research. For now, though, Q needed me.
That night, I crunched through the drifting banks with my head leaned back. I stared into the night, imagining a whole sky full of Russian studniks, their brassy chests shining boastfully down on me, and I wished I had a GASER big enough to blast every one of them.
On the horizon, I spotted Jacques dragging his traps toward the glaciers, and I trudged after him. He and I had sort of become pals over time. Jacques had been using this old station as a base camp for trapping, and when our team arrived, I was the one who discovered him sleeping among the rotting weather balloons. He leapt up with a thin knife, and in his third-grade French, boasted that he was five feet tall, that I had better look out. I thought he was a barbarian because he seemed to have little knowledge of the metric system. Though he was clearly lying about his height, it was his breath I will never forget — a yellow cloud of vibrating spirochetes rising from the tarry saucepits of hollow tooth sockets.
Hygiene aside, Jacques and I sort of fell in together. True, he was a trapper, and I was a man who needed lots of small animals, but it was more than that. I didn’t know a dang word of French, yet we had an amazing ability to understand each other. We had both lived in the dark and cold, knew what it meant to be cut off from mankind, from warmth and companionship.
Ahead, Jacques’s snowshoes went still in the ice drifts.
He turned and beckoned me. “Bon soir, mon grand ami. Allons-y.”
Jacques handed me the bunny sack, and we set off into the dark, tromping side by side through snow so new it squeaked under us. How Jacques found his way, or even his traps in this absolute and featureless dark, I’ll never know, and tonight I didn’t even try. There was a beauty to this region of Canada that you came to know only through exile, and as we walked, I tried to look no further than the ghostly flicker of our little subjects struggling ahead. It was easier to focus on the little things — the rusty springs, the hempy smell to the burlap bag — because if you let yourself feel the shock of the snow around you, the depth of the black above, you’d be forced to consider the degree to which you truly belonged to this universe. Jacques, with his knotty arms and racked torso, would muscle open the iron hinges of a trap, I’d unwrap the bunny sack, and we’d stave our new guest home before moving on.
I needed to relax, but couldn’t. The thought that the Ruskies were up to some new monkey business really got my mind spinning. The deathray was about to take a great leap forward, and as the beam man, it all rested on my shoulders. The next step was to ditch our relatively weak thorium 232 fuel and begin processing the most theoretical of elements. We were going to push the edge of the periodic table. A demon lurked out past the end of row seven, beyond nobelium and lawrenciuim, beyond the mere unstable and volatile theoretical elements. We called this demon saturnium, and Q’s calculations showed it would burst into phenomenal radioactive decay the moment it was created. It would be my job to harness this bitch.
On certain nights, when the moon was full, Jacques would bait his traps with salt. This we did tonight, and the whole world appeared elementaclass="underline" the driven snow was unbonded calcium, the sky was dark as manganese. Our shoe prints filled with somber cobalt the moment we moved on, and ahead, the moraines of receding glacier heads seemed to glow with the lithial blue of radium. We worked slow and sure, measuring our breath between traps, places where we’d chip the old, frozen blood from the pressure plate before Jacques trigger-set a chunk of rock salt that, in this platinum light, was ten shades whiter than snow.
Of course, Jacques got all the salt he wanted from our supply shed, but in years past, when he could scrape no sodium from the thermal vents around Terminal Geyser, he would ejaculate on his traps, letting the semen freeze to the trigger pan. With this sel d’homme, or “man salt,” he could catch any minx or fox, even the elusive arctic beaver — all specimens sure to carry nasty diseases, if you asked me.
Using my hands, I gestured to Jacques that, because of sodium’s single electron valance and limited oxidizing potential, it was impossible for it to produce a smell that might be detectable by an animal. How could an odorless element work as bait?
The old trappers, Jacques gestured, still say the moon is made of salt. He pulled a salt lick from his pack and held it aloft. Animals can live alone in the cold and dark, he continued, but this they need. This is what makes them howl for the moon.
It was difficult to understand him with those mittens on, but it didn’t take much to get across the idea of “need” to me. Love felt like some cruel Canadian joke. The bunnies were white. The icefields were white. The sky, endlessly aflurry, was blind with white. Through a kind of pantomime, I asked Jacques how the heck animals even found each other in such a place.
“Dans le froid absolu de l’Arctique, avec le cammoflage parfait?” He shrugged. “Je ne sait pas.”
I wondered, where was my casserole? Where was my slice of the Canadian pie? Wind howled through my parka. I shook my head. “Sorry, but no parlez,” I told him.
It was a long walk home in the snow, and I arrived to find Q asleep in front of the thermal circulator. I felt the urge to sit with him in the warmth, imagine his dreams as I’d done on so many nights, but it was late. I spread a quilt over his lap, and with my little finger, wiped a faint line of dribble from his cheek.