Up and Down (14 page)

I pulled out my iPad from my bag, called up
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
, and read Mom “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

Amanda and I sat in the painfully white lobby of Borden-Bennett’s head office on the forty-seventh floor of First Canadian Place. Amanda looked good in a different variation of black on black that I didn’t think I’d seen before. We were both feeling buoyant about making it through the contest alive and escaping the noose of the postal strike.

A young man in a black suit approached.

“Hello, I’m Grayson, Emily’s assistant. Follow me, if you will.”

We walked down an open staircase to the forty-sixth floor and along a corridor to two frosted glass doors. The small flat screen display mounted next to the doors said “Turner King Contest Administration.” Grayson swiped his security card and pushed open the doors. It looked like a repurposed boardroom, probably because it was. Two computers sat on a long table along with four cardboard banker’s boxes. Emily Hatch stood when we entered. Grayson closed the door behind him when he departed, his crucial mission accomplished.

“Good morning, Emily,” I said, extending my hand. “You remember Amanda Burke.”

“Hello, David, Amanda.”

“So this is where the magic happens, eh?” I asked, surveying the room.

“Well, if you mean, is this where we store all the online and mail entries and make the draw, then yes, this is where the magic happens,” Emily replied.

“So when does the magic actually start?” prodded Amanda, who was all business.

“It can start right now.”

With that, Emily sat down in front of the first computer and keyed in a few log-in strokes.

Grayson suddenly materialized next to us. I hadn’t seen him slip back into the room and was startled. Emily noticed.

“Grayson is here because there must be more than one Borden-Bennett employee in the room when we draw a winning number. It’s just a security protocol,” Emily explained.

Grayson smiled, so I smiled back.

“Are we all ready?” Emily asked.

“Well, I’d kind of like to savour the moment a little longer and reflect on how far we’ve come since we started this little …”

Amanda cut me off.

“We’re ready! Let’s do it!”

“Of course.”

We crowded around Emily as she opened the random number generator program and typed in the lower and upper bound numbers, 1 and 1,723,590. She then clicked a button on the screen
helpfully labelled “generate random number,” while my two index fingers offered an arrhythmic drum roll on the edge of the table. We waited only an instant before 541,349 appeared.

“And we have a winner,” I declared.

“Almost. All we really have now is a winning number,” Emily explained. “Stand by for the winner.”

With that, she moved to the second computer and keyed in 541,349. A data base contact card appeared immediately on the screen with the name of the 541,349th person to submit an entry. This was our lucky winner.

“L. Percival, 21 years old, Cigar Lake, British Columbia, V0C 1R0” was all it said in red on the screen.

“That’s all we’ve got on the winner? No phone number or address?” Amanda asked.

“Yes, I’m afraid this is all we have,” Emily confirmed. “It’s in red, so we know it was a mail entry. Let me pull the hard copy to ensure we’ve accurately captured all the information provided, though I’m certain we have.”

She opened the second banker’s box and plunged her fingers into the neatly filed mass of paper and cardstock dividers. It took her a moment to find the one she was seeking but eventually pulled out the 541,349th sheet on which was mounted a small square of paper. There, in handwriting that was just a barely legible blue ink scrawl, was what looked to me like “L. Percival, 21 years old, Cigar Lake, British Columbia, V0C 1R0.”

“But the entry asked for their email, mailing address, and
phone number,” Amanda said. “Shouldn’t we consider this an incomplete entry and draw another?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Emily replied in her accountant and official raffle supervisor voice. “Unless we officially designated certain fields on the entry form as ‘required information,’ you are under the obligation to find this person, based on what we know. We can only draw a second name after we have exhausted what we call ‘best efforts’ to identify and contact L. Percival of Cigar Lake, B.C.”

I spent the afternoon with my old friend Google in search of the elusive L. Percival. There were lots of L. Percivals to be found on the Internet, including a Canadian sports pioneer, Lloyd Percival. But he had died in 1974, having lived his entire life in Ontario. There was a Liza “the lovely” Percival who was a very much alive pole dancer of some repute from Drummondville, Quebec. No, I don’t think so. I found a Leon Percival doing time in the Kingston Penitentiary for settling an argument by dumping 150 gallons of hot tar through the passenger window of his father’s 1977 Plymouth Duster, in Port Perry, Ontario. Nope. Finally, I tracked down a Lorne Percival who had up until 2009 been known as Lori Percival. But even after sex reassignment surgery, Lorne still lived in Montreal, where he had always resided.

Directory assistance was no help either. There was no record of an L. Percival with a phone anywhere in B.C. Great. In the
end, I ran down more than twenty-seven L. Percivals across Canada and hit dead ends with each.

I switched tracks and learned what I could about Cigar Lake, B.C. I found it on a map. It was a smallish, yes, cigar-shaped lake in northern B.C. not too far from Fort Nelson. On the ten-point remoteness scale, it registered a twelve. I wasn’t able to find much on the web about the community, so I made a few calls to towns that seemed to be located near Cigar Lake. You’d be surprised how unhelpful people can be when you call them up out of the blue and ask if they know anyone named L. Percival. It wasn’t a fun afternoon.

“Why don’t we just write to the winner? We have an address of sorts and a postal code,” Amanda proposed.

“Yes, that would work were it not for the trifling matter of a national postal strike,” I replied.

“Shit,” was all she said.

After conferring with Crawford Blake and Diane Martineau, and arguing with the stickler queen herself, Emily Hatch, it was decided that the only way to honour our “best efforts” legal obligations in the matter was to send yours truly out to Cigar Lake to track down the elusive L. Percival, whoever he – or she – was. I’d have to vet the winner anyway to make sure we had a viable choice to put forward to
NASA
, but I was optimistic. Given our tight timelines, I was really hoping to avoid having to spin the drum again, draw a second name, and go through the vetting procedure again. So the plan was for me to inform L. Percival
personally of his – or her – win and at the same time qualify him – or her – as our official Canadian citizen astronaut. We wouldn’t be announcing and introducing the winner until later on anyway. Mindful of Crawford’s rather pointed directive to find the right candidate, I was hopeful I’d be meeting a strong, chiselled, classic lumberjack type, with all of his hair and teeth, and no police record or weird hobbies. A long shot perhaps, but it was possible. I was headed for logging country, after all.

I was a confirmed big city boy being sent on an important mission to the wilds of B.C. It left me a tad uneasy. Amanda Burke’s last words to me before I headed out were “Go west, young man – and bring back the great Canadian astronaut.”

The world headquarters of Wilderness Charters was not much more than a Quonset hut perched up on the hill overlooking Williston Lake. I arrived fifteen minutes before I was scheduled to take off in the float plane I’d chartered for the final leg of my journey to Cigar Lake. It was only 5:00 in the afternoon but I was already wiped. My packed morning Air Canada flight to Calgary had been uneventful, if you didn’t count the flight attendants dumping a glass of orange juice on my chest. As well, my so-called personal video screen nestled in the back of the headrest of the seat in front of me yielded a stunning crystal-clear picture. Unfortunately, the audio jack in my armrest was broken and could not be fixed by any of the five crew members who tried in turn, one by one. I’d already ordered up a movie so I just sat there and watched it as a modern-day silent movie. Halfway into the film I decided, based on the video, that not having the audio may well have been a blessing.

In Calgary, I hopped aboard a Rocky Mountain Airways connecting flight bound for Prince George in northern British Columbia. I’m not even sure what kind of plane it was, but I had thought that open cockpits and canvas-covered wings were long-gone relics from the early days of aviation. Apparently not. Okay, I exaggerate, but not much. In the twenty-first century, one does not expect to look around the interior of a commercial aircraft and see wood. Nine of us braved the flight to Prince George. I sat very still the entire time with my fingers in my ears, wishing I could turn back the clock to earlier in the day when my principal in-flight concern had been the malfunctioning entertainment system. Of course on Rocky Mountain Airways there was no in-flight entertainment, no in-flight magazines, no in-flight snacks, no in-flight beverages. As far as I was concerned, it was a miracle we were in-flight at all. We landed safely in Prince George. When the plane finally came to a stop and the ear-splitting engine died away, I was as relieved as Charles Lindbergh must have been upon touchdown in Paris. But Prince George was not my final destination.

My rental car was smaller than any automobile ought to be. I was trying to save
NASA
some money by opting for the subcompact. I won’t be doing that again. I had to use a bungee-cord to secure the hatchback because my rather small suitcase just wouldn’t fit in the back. What kind of car can’t accommodate
a single small suitcase? As for the driving, well, my rental wasn’t exactly a speed merchant. As I headed up the Alaska Highway, the engine sounded like a sewing machine but lacked the power. The speed limit was ninety kilometres an hour but I could really only get it going up to about eighty kilometres an hour before the vibrations threatened to rearrange my internal organs. It took me nearly three hours to drive the 185 kilometres to Mackenzie.

Named for the famous explorer Alexander Mackenzie, the town was a lumber and logging centre built on the shores of Williston Lake. In fact, the world’s largest tree crusher (and no, I really don’t know what that is) sat on display at the entrance to the town as a symbol of Mackenzie’s roots in logging. Seeing it didn’t really help me understand its precise purpose. I parked in front of Wilderness Charters and headed inside.

“You have got to be David Stewart,” exclaimed the man sitting at a cluttered desk behind the counter. “Welcome to northern B.C. I’m Chatter Haney.”

“Um, yes. You’re right, I am David Stewart. Hello.”

“Well, Mr. Stewart, I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “The bad news is we blew an oil pump on our Cessna the day before yesterday and it won’t be fixed until next week.”

“Hmmm, the oil pump sounds like it plays an important role in the safe operation of the plane,” I said.