Cardinal looked around. The shelves were densely populated with dolls of varying size and physiognomy, teddy bears, action figures, board games, Bankers Boxes labelled Post Cards and Photographs. There were old toys, racks of DVDs and CDs, video games, and electronic gizmos that Cardinal could not have named.
“We’re eBay masters,” Jack explained. “We buy and sell pretty much anything that’s easy to ship and isn’t too breakable. No china, for example.”
“I don’t see any robots,” Cardinal said.
“Oh, lots of robots,” Jack said, his voice breaking like a thirteen-year-old’s. He led Cardinal to the end of one shelving unit and pointed from one item to another. “All in boxes. We must have twenty Robbies alone.”
“Twenty-three,” Wally said from his desk.
“Some even have the original packaging. We have Gort, Robosapiens, couple of Daleks, a whole family of Tekno Dinkies-even a vintage Sparky. We don’t even bother with Transformers anymore.”
“It’s not the toys I’m interested in.”
“No, you said. How’d you get on to us, anyway?”
“You’re the prime contributor to the Wikipedia article on Canadian robotics. I was expecting a professor or a grad student-”
“Not a web nerd-I get it. That’s okay. Robotics is a hobby of mine-I got into it through the toys and movies and it just grew into, I don’t know, a kind of useless expertise. I’m like a trainspotter, or one of those people who memorize bus schedules for cities they haven’t even been to. Alfred Hitchcock did that, believe it or not.”
“I had no idea.”
“It’s the kind of thing control freaks get off on,” Wally called from across the basement.
“Don’t mind my brother. It’s been hard for him, growing up in my shadow.”
“You had some material you were going to look up for me.”
“On David Flint and Frank Gauthier. Yeah, I did the Wiki articles on them too. I dug out some stuff over here you might find interesting. Patent applications dating from the early eighties. God, I’m such a nerd.”
“You are! ” Wally called out.
Cardinal looked at the applications. There were drawings and schematics for micro-movement systems and micro-power systems for “applications in remote-controlled vehicles.” Two of them had both Flint’s and Gauthier’s signatures. Several of them had a third signature.
Cardinal looked up. “They worked with Ron Babstock?”
“Cool, huh? Who knew? I dug up some stuff on LARS for you. I printed it out.”
“Who’s Lars?”
“L-A-R-S. Laval Arctic Research Station. They built it way the heck up on some tiny Arctic island. They test a lot of stuff for space exploration, to make sure it works in harsh conditions. Look at this.” He pulled a clear plastic folder off a shelf and handed it to Cardinal. “Dates from 1992 or so. Pristine condition. I could sell it for a decent price, but I’ll probably keep it.”
Inside the folder was a glossy brochure, only a few pages long, describing the research outpost. “A summer- only facility dedicated to the exploration of remote and extreme environments on Earth as analogues for human exploration of the moon and Mars. Development teams will find the environment ideal for testing equipment intended for outer-space applications.” Pictures showed a moon-like vista, smiling men in colourful parkas, arrays of electronic gear bristling with antennas.
“See there?” A bony finger, nail much chewed, pointed to a picture of four young men kneeling or standing beside a machine that looked like a mechanical praying mantis. “Brochure’s 1993, so the picture’s gotta be at least the year before. What you’re looking at is an early version of what eventually became the famous Marti.”
“Marvellous Marti!” Wally called across the room. “We love Marti!”
“We sell the models, when we can get hold of them.”
Cardinal read the caption aloud. “ ‘David Flint, Ron Babstock, Frank Gauthier and Keith Rettig with the prototype REV I exploratory vehicle.’ Ron Babstock worked with all three of these guys?”
“Cool, huh? Dude got NASA excited and the rest is history. Little bastard’s rolling across the Martian countryside as we speak.”
“You’d think there’d be all sorts of stuff on the Internet about those early days, but I couldn’t find it-not about these guys, anyway.”
“Sometimes the Internet can be a little unpredictable-sorta like a woman. That’s probably why we love it.”
“You’re darn tootin’!” Wally called out.
“He’s using the expression ironically,” Jack said. “At least I hope he is.”
Giles Blunt
Until the Night
From the Blue Notebook
I left Rebecca standing by the open water that separated us from Heiberg Island and headed back toward Dahlberg and Deville. The sky was fretted with high cirrus and the low-hanging sun bathed everything in red and gold. At any other time it would have been beautiful, but there was that growing smudge of darkness rolling toward us, and there was the scene before me.
It is commonplace these days for a man to be well versed in psychology. I am not such a person. At that time, that year, I had had little experience of outright madness. My earlier incarnation as a bush pilot had been stress-free in that department. In academia, in field research, I had encountered overwrought students, hysterical faculty members, countless florid eccentrics, but I had no experience of violent psychosis, if that’s what I was facing.
From half a kilometre off, I could see that Jens was down and Ray was standing over him. I won’t even attempt to convey my emotional state. I tried to empty my mind, to be readiness made flesh. The sun threw my shadow in a long dark tangent, as if it were being torn from me toward the magnetic pole.
Someone with training in psychological matters might have opinions about what would have been the proper way to handle the situation. The situation was there, I was who I was. I began talking to Ray as I approached-a hundred metres away, maybe a hundred and fifty-I knew he could hear me. But I chose to pretend I had not heard the shot, that I had not noticed Dahlberg lying motionless at his feet.
We must head that way, I told him, pointing. The current should take us to Meighen Island. They won’t send a plane for days. Ah, Jens-we’ll have to do something about that knee. Ray and I will put our heads together and come up with something.
As I talked on in this calm-in-the-face-of-disaster way, Ray did not so much as twitch. He stood, feet apart, arms a little away from his sides, head tilted downward. He looked like a man who had just shot a raccoon, or perhaps a cat by mistake.
I kept talking as I approached, one hand gripping the flare gun under my fleece. The flare gun is not a weapon. It is a plastic singleshot pistol not designed for accuracy. I needed to be close for it to be of any use at all. But I was not going to let Ray near Rebecca. I was not going to let him kill or injure me. I was not going to let him live.
There may be a submarine, I said. We might have luck with the radio. Or the sovereignty expedition could come through.
This was a falsehood. The sovereignty expedition, made up of dogs and soldiers and Inuit reservists, had come up Nansen Sound and was by that time halfway across the top of Ellesmere.
If there’s any sign of them, I went on, Rebecca will send up a flare.
I was within thirty or forty metres, close enough to see the gun in his hand, when Ray finally moved. It was perhaps not a direct threat, perhaps nothing much at all. He didn’t raise the gun at me. He merely looked at me. There was something mechanical in the movement-perhaps the stillness in the rest of his body, or the way he lifted his chin and then turned his face toward me in two separate motions, as if responding to typed-in commands.
Another man, of a more heroic cast, might have waited until he aimed his weapon. Might have ordered him to drop the gun. Might have made a run at him. Still talking, I pulled the flare gun from my pocket and fired.
The flare made a tremendous hiss as it corkscrewed toward him. I feared it would miss him entirely, but it didn’t. It caught in his down jacket and the phosphorus burned as white and brilliant as a comet. His coat was on fire and he turned this way and that, flapping his arms. I saw the gun fall and ran for it.
Ray managed to shake the flare from his jacket. The phosphorus hissed and burned in the slush, sending up
