Giles Blunt - Until the Night

“Not really. By the time she finished university-”

“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.