Giles Blunt - Until the Night

“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.