Until the Night

by Giles Blunt

  “You’re right. I’m just being—”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, Ron. Tell me the story. Tell me where all this comes from.”

  “The story. The story is about four young men. Four young men who did everything right. For a time. There was me, there was David Flint—it was David who called me just now—there was Frank Gauthier, and Keith Rettig. How we found each other, I don’t know. It was incredible luck.

  “I was robotic engineering with a special interest in software, David was robotics, but already had postgrad credits in electrical engineering, Frank was an ace in AI but also mechanical—a totally unique combination right there. And Keith was our finance guy. He had his accounting credentials before he was twenty, I think, before he got his MBA. Keith and Frank were roommates at one point—that’s how they met. And David and I had the same theologian for an adviser.”

  “Theologian?”

  “Artificial intelligence professor at U of T. We both hated him, but he was the top guy at the time. Anyway, the four of us just hit it off. There’s nothing like shared ambition to forge a friendship—especially in a field where teamwork is essential. Robotics, computers, AI—these are not mathematics, not fields where loners are likely to shine.

  “We knew we wanted to do something big, and we knew we wanted to do it together, we just didn’t know what it was. But around that time—this was the early eighties—it was becoming clear that miniaturization was going to be the dominant factor, the equivalent of natural selection, in technology. It was also becoming clear that space exploration was going to be unmanned.

  “David—aside from being an engineering genius—is a very political animal. Knows how to network and has a natural charm, which you know if you’ve met him. David developed good contacts at Caltech and through Caltech with NASA, and we knew for a certainty they were going to need remotely controlled vehicles, rovers, that would be light enough to transport, tough enough to withstand difficult terrain in extreme temperatures.

  “So we put our minds to it. We were like the four musketeers. I’m telling you, John, you may think I’m successful—a lot of people think I’m successful—and David and Frank same thing. But there isn’t a day goes by I don’t think of myself as a failure, and I’ll bet you anything it’s the same for David and Frank too. We are what we are, but together we could’ve been much, much more. I’d say Apple, but there’s something ultimately trivial about that company, something showbiz.

  “By this time, the three of us on the tech side were super hotshots. We all had incredible offers—incredible. I’m amazed we had the nerve to turn them down. But we decided to bet on ourselves. Keith hit the venture capital circuit—a deal with the devil if I ever heard one—but we didn’t want to deal with government at that point.”

  “But NASA and those places—surely they’d be pouring money into this themselves.”

  “They would—they would and they were. I know. We were just incredibly arrogant. We figured they didn’t have us, and therefore they couldn’t possibly come up with anything as good as we could. I mean, these were the people that were trying to hire us, right?

  “So we get enough money to go to specs. Only thing is, our venture capitalist wants a timeline of three years, not five—for the finished goods, not the specs. The specs take a year, three of us working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. I’ve never been so smart. I look back at that time and it’s like my mind was a hand. I could pick a concept up and turn it around, turn it upside down, inside out, rearrange it, make it simpler, better, more beautiful. And fast. Same for Frank and David. We develop the specs, we wow the money men, we get the green light to go to prototype.

  “Another year. You’d think three ambitious, egotistical guys would grow to hate each other, but it was quite the opposite. I’ve never been closer to anybody—except for my wife, but that’s different. Shared effort, grand enterprise, there’s nothing like it.

  “You know, in the movies you’d see lots of explosions at this point in the story, fires-in-the-lab kind of thing. We never had anything so dramatic. Just endless fizzles. Just developing independently motorized wheels involved major intellectual effort. And the power systems—how do you build a rechargeable battery that’ll last years, that’s still small enough? Do you have any idea where rechargeable batteries were at that time? And the whole thing’s gonna be computer controlled from down here on Earth? Where do you think wireless computing was back then? God, we were brilliant.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Cardinal said. “But you’d better tell me what went wrong.”

  Babstock reached for the whiskey and poured some into his glass. He took a sip and said, “LARS.”

  “The Arctic research station?”

  “It’s a Mars analogue site on Axel Heiberg. The ideal spot would have been the Haughton Crater station on Devon Island, but NASA had that all booked up for themselves.

  “Keith managed to book us a slot at LARS to test our prototype. To tell you the truth, none of us had any idea just how far north that place was. A lot of people don’t realize this country is as tall as it is wide. We’re talking twenty-five hundred miles. It’s not as glamorous as Haughton—it’s only a research and sleep hut and a couple of Parcoll tents and not much else—but we were excited as hell.

  “The day we arrived, another team was leaving. They’d been testing spacesuits, I think, so we had the place to ourselves. Let me tell you, the High Arctic is not for everyone. Some people, they get a taste of it, they’re totally addicted, they’re home. But most people are going to find it unsettling to say the least, and others have to be flown right out. Basically, all your moorings are gone.

  “We’d already had lots of test runs in Toronto, but in order to make an impact the rover had to work on hard terrain, cold terrain. This was it. There would be no more money, no going back to the drawing board. It was the proverbial throw of the dice—either we’d win, and win big, or we’d be four guys looking for work.

  “The plan was to test Rocky—the prototype was called Rocky—on the various types of terrain up there. Rock, snow, gravel, ice. The three most important features were the camera, manoeuvrability and response to command. Obviously, response to command is the most important, otherwise what you have is a paperweight.

  “We had set up a series of four tests, and I had put together a logging algorithm that would record what commands were input and where Rocky went as a result.”

  “How did you control it?” Cardinal asked. “A joystick?”

  “No, no, no. This is not a toy we’re talking about. Every move had to be done by keystroke. It’s the same now. So we take a deep breath and send Rocky off on Mission One. A simple go there, turn left, turn right, pan up, pan down, make a circle, come back. There was no manoeuvrable arm at that point.

  “Worked like a charm. This was pretty flat terrain, but it did involve several different surfaces. Let me tell you, there was much rejoicing at the camp that day. So far, so good. Next mission, we send it in a different direction. Pretty much the same sequence of commands, but the terrain was more challenging—a few hills involved—and we left it sitting out in the elements for twenty-four hours. You know what cold can do to batteries. I can tell you, David was sweating through that one.

  “Again, went off like clockwork. We were gods, John. Gods. Mission Three was the toughest yet. We knew this one was likely to fail. There was twenty-four-hour sunshine, of course, and aside from slush, which we did not want to mess with, there were areas where the permafrost had melted and the surface was mushy at best. Idea was to test the independent wheel motors and range of motion.

  “Well, it didn’t take long for Rocky to bog down. But he came out of it better than any of us expected. Keep in mind, we can’t see those wheels back at the shack—we can only see what Rocky sees, and the camera couldn’t pan down to that angle, not back then. But the rpm readouts told us which wheels were stuck, and I could turn them and try again.
It was mostly another triumph. We got him out of several jams and we knew we had a winner—even when we got him stuck in some foot-deep muck and had to go retrieve him. We were totally high by then.

  “Unfortunately, we still had Mission Four. We decided to make this one relatively easy. We sent Rocky off in a westerly direction. We wanted him to travel down this long, slow hill, stopping for a video survey every now and then. Then he was to shut down for three nights and we would leave him just sitting there and start him up on the fourth morning. We had plotted out a fairly easy route back to camp on the fourth day.

  “It wasn’t cold, really, by Arctic standards, maybe two degrees C. But needless to say, it was a pretty tense few days. Finally the time comes, I fire up the programme, and … nothing. We couldn’t raise him. There was a lot of solar activity that week, unbelievable. There was some storm activity off the western shore as well, but it wasn’t hitting us, and anyway, it’s not storms that screw up radio communications, it’s solar activity.

  “Rocky had a beacon on him and we couldn’t even pick up the signal from that, but of course we knew where he had shut down. So we pull on our gear and head out toward his last known address, a few kilometres west. We hike for an hour, get to the spot, Rocky’s not there. We have no clue where he is. The terrain is shale, no tracks. Very bad news.

  “It didn’t take long to narrow down the possibilities. Discounting human or animal interference, it was very unlikely and probably impossible that Rocky had gone in any direction other than due west. The question was, how far? How long? Depending on when he started up after we shut him down, he could theoretically be a hundred and fifty kilometres away.

  “But that wasn’t truly possible—Heiberg’s not that big. Anyway, he would run into trouble with the first rocky outcropping, the first hummock, anything resembling a pothole. But the four of us hopped on a couple of all-terrain vehicles and headed west. Couldn’t use snowmobiles because half the island was snow-free, depending whether you were windward or not.

  “Our biggest fear was maybe he’d driven himself right into open water. At the very least, we expected to find him face down in a gully.”

  “Surely it would crash into trees or something,” Cardinal said.

  “No trees, John. This is a thousand miles above the treeline—anything taller than six inches is an animal. And there aren’t too many of those either. Lack of trees worked in our favour, of course. It didn’t take too long to find Rocky, and it turned out we’d named him exactly right. He’d got himself into a rocky area and got his front left wheel caught and run his batteries down to nothing.

  “We were all relieved, but especially David and Frank, because electrical and mechanical had obviously performed fine. Clearly the issue was going to be software. Why did the little bastard not shut down? Why did he go rogue? In exactly two weeks we had to give our presentation and test data to NASA. There was no way they were going to be interested in a rover with a mind of its own. As we saw it, if this came out, it was a game-ender.”

  “I don’t understand,” Cardinal said. “It had performed so well up to that point, I would have thought you had a star on your hands.”

  “We were poised on the brink of massive success or massive failure—no middle ground. So by the time we found Rocky, we were in total panic mode. We couldn’t budge the rocks around him. So David and I go up to the top of this outcropping with some rope to get some loft into the configuration. We were up there, I don’t know, twenty minutes maybe, and I’m yelling things down to Keith and Frank, who are trying to rig the rope around Rocky so it doesn’t pull his arm or his head off.

  “Suddenly David says, ‘Look!’ I turn around and there’s a flare in the sky. It’s quite far off, four, maybe five kilometres. There’s no denying it. The thing is there, burning bright green, arcing down toward the north.

  “ ‘They can’t be signalling us, can they?’ David says.

  “ ‘It’s probably the sovereignty patrol running some kind of manoeuvre. Or it could be the RCMP practising rescue stuff,’ I said.

  “David had pulled out his binoculars and was staring out into this incredibly bleak landscape with them. ‘Really? That what you think it is? That’s your considered opinion?’ David talked like a cowboy even back then.

  “ ‘Well, who the hell else is it gonna be? There’s nothing else on this island.’ You have to understand, John, we hadn’t heard of Drift Station Arcosaur at that point. No one had.

  “ ‘Maybe it’s someone lost. Maybe some party’s trying to chase off a hungry ursine.’

  “Well, of course we both knew you wouldn’t fire a flare into the sky to scare a bear. The camp advisers had drilled us in all that stuff before we even set foot up there. You’d aim it at his feet or just over his head. I could hear in David’s voice that he wanted to believe we were not needed, that there was no one in distress. So I said again that it’s probably the sovereignty patrol and we’d better get Rocky back to camp or we were all of us staring into the face of complete failure.

  “Then David says he sees someone. A man. I ask what he’s doing, and he says it looks like he’s hiking, climbing the rocks. He hands me the binoculars and I take a look. I saw him, John.

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever told. Twenty years now, all four of us have kept it secret. When we got back to camp, we all swore we would never so much as mention it, not even to our wives. It poisoned our friendship. We had been working together for years, fresh out of school to the edge of success, but after we got back home and heard that people had actually died, that there were people in serious trouble, well, we couldn’t stand to look at each other, couldn’t stand to be with anyone who knew what we had done—or not done. We decided we were all free to exploit our separate patents and went our separate ways. I called David the other day when his wife was found, and that was the first time we’d spoken in more than twenty years.

  “I saw a man through those binoculars. He was hardly more than a blurry speck. Could have been part of the patrol, could have been anything. I saw him stumble, but he got up quickly and then he waved. Waved a cloth or something. That’s the thing I saw that I have not been able to unsee. Not for twenty years. He was signalling us, John. I’m filled with shame as I say it. He was signalling us.

  “Before I could say anything, David had called the other two to come up. The four of us had a powwow. David told them we’d seen a flare, we could see a man who seemed to be hiking, but we weren’t sure if it was someone who needed help or if it was nothing. We kept coming back to the sovereignty patrol. It had to be them.

  “The full responsibility, the blame, lies with me. I didn’t tell the others I’d seen the man waving at us. I don’t know to this day if David saw him do that. If he did, he kept it to himself. But the other two definitely didn’t. And we couldn’t find the man again in the binoculars.

  “None of us were seasoned adventurers, but we all knew you don’t turn your back on someone possibly in distress, not in those latitudes.

  “We weighed the options, and it came down to this: no one knew we had been there and it had to stay that way. It would have come out why, that we had a malfunctioning robot, and it would have doomed Rocky and his descendants to oblivion—and us as well. Our little day trip had to be excised from the record if we were to have any future at all.

  “It was just the patrol, we told ourselves. Just an exercise. Although I’m sure the others did the same as me later on, and looked up where the sovereignty patrol had been. It had passed Axel Heiberg a month earlier and by now had to be near the northern tip of Ellesmere.

  “We did the wrong thing, John. I did the wrong thing. We turned our backs on a man in distress, and now that man has come to balance the account. He has my daughter, John. He’s the one who has my daughter.”

  Cardinal reached into his pocket and pulled out his notebook and started flipping through it. “Which parallel did you say you were at?”

  “We were at seventy-nine degrees north.
Ninety north is the pole.”

  “Take a look at these.” Cardinal showed him the page with his various arrangements of the numbers found at the crime scenes. “What do they mean to you?”

  “None of these are right,” Babstock said. “Hand me your pen.” He took Cardinal’s pen in his manicured fingers and copied out the figures in a different order. Then he tapped the page with the tip of the pen and read them aloud. “79 degrees, 25 minutes north, 95 degrees west. Add a few minutes west and you have the coordinates of our location. That’s where we found Rocky, and where we saw that man.”

  21

  CARDINAL STARTED THE CAR, AND while waiting for it to warm up he checked his phone. North Slave Correctional had sent the information he had requested. He forwarded it to Chouinard and Drexler, then phoned them both.

  “And you think he’s headed up there?” Drexler said. “To the exact spot where it happened?”

  “Why else would he leave those numbers at the scene? He knows how to fly a plane, and I think he gave us the coordinates so we could attempt to mount a rescue—a rescue that would arrive too late.”

  “All right. I’ll call the Horsemen. They’ve got outposts way the hell up there. Somewhere.”

  “We need people watching private airfields—the smaller the better. He’s travelling with a person who’s unconscious. He’s going to avoid security as much as possible.”

  Cardinal drove over to Parliament Street and down to King, cursing streetcars the whole way. Then he had to fight a gauntlet of one-way streets, mostly grey with big-city snow, to find the address he was looking for. He parked on a filthy slag heap of old snow and walked up the front path of a red brick townhouse. In the front window, red curtains framed a grand piano.

  Alison Durie was slim and elegant and not happy to be visited by an out-of-town detective. She looked about fifty-five—but still with a bloom in her cheeks and something regal about the way she carried herself, an easy grace. There was no wedding ring.