The Refugees(35)
“How did you sleep, Mr. Carver?”
“Not so well.” Carver was pleased someone cared enough to inquire. “I kept waking up.”
“Bad dreams?”
Carver hesitated. “Just restless. Confusing.”
No one asked him what he had dreamed, so he said no more. They reached the demining site ten minutes later, half a kilometer off the main blacktopped road, down an earthen track to a small house and a trio of shacks on the edge of a barren acre fenced with barbed wire. As the Land Cruiser pulled up, two teenage boys leaped from hammocks strung between two jackfruit trees. Carver immediately forgot their names after the introductions. They wore oversize shorts and anomalous T-shirts, one emblazoned with the Edmonton Oilers logo, the other commemorating a 1987 Bryan Adams concert tour. The taller one’s prosthetic arm was joined with the human part at the elbow, while the other’s prosthetic leg extended to mid-thigh. Carver nicknamed the tall one Tom and the shorter one Jerry, the same names he and his U-Tapao roommate, a Swede from Minnesota, had bestowed on their houseboys.
“They lost them playing with cluster bomblets when they were kids,” Legaspi explained. Tom and Jerry smiled shyly, their prostheses appearing to be borrowed from mannequins, the café au lait color of the plastic not an exact match for their milk chocolate skin. What spooked Carver about the detachable limbs was not just their mismatched color, but their hairlessness. “They guard the site and look after the mongooses.”
“Not mongeese?” Michiko said.
“Definitely mongooses, Mrs. Carver.”
The mongoose Tom fetched from one of the shacks was named Ricky, feline in size but with a more luxuriant coat of fur and the angular, wedge-shaped head of a mouse. “We use a mongoose because it is too light to trip a mine,” Legaspi said. “Meanwhile, its sense of smell is acute enough to detect explosives.”
Jerry carried out a pair of robots from another shack. Instead of being the sleek, stainless steel machines Carver expected, the robots were cobbled together from what looked like two tin milk shakes, joined mouth-to-mouth, each milk shake sporting a pair of legs made from rubber hose. Like a draft of horses, the two robots were harnessed side-by-side, braced front and back by iron rods. The forward rod was attached to a round blue disc the size of a Frisbee, with Ricky yoked to the blue disc via a rubber vest, the entire robot-and-mongoose affair no more than a meter long and half that in width.
“I steer the robots with this remote control.” Legaspi held up a palm-sized black box of the type William had used to fly his model planes. “Ricky sniffs for the mines. The blue disc is the impediment sensor, and when it tells the robots something is blocking the way, the robots steer Ricky away from the obstacle. And when Ricky smells a mine, which he can do from three meters, he sits up.”
“That’s ingenious,” Michiko exclaimed.
“My adviser developed it to demine in Sri Lanka. But we’re experimenting with the robot and mongoose here, too.”
“So what are you still testing?” said Carver.
“The legs. It’s very difficult to mimic the locomotion of human or animal legs, especially over rough terrain. Having a robot vacuum your living room floor or climb some steps is completely different from having it deal with sand, or grass, or rocks, or any unexpected thing even a five-year-old knows how to get around.”
The field was planted with defused landmines. At the perimeter of the field Legaspi piloted the robot and mongoose team from under a tent, under which Claire, Michiko, and Carver also stood. Tom and Jerry followed the mongoose as it scuttled over the terrain, Tom with a metal detector strapped to his back, Jerry with a quiver full of red flags. Whenever Ricky stopped and stood up on his hind legs, Tom stepped in with the metal detector to confirm the landmine’s existence, and Jerry marked it with a red flag.
“A human team would take months to clear out this area,” said Legaspi. The back of his linen shirt was stained with sweat, the air humid even though the sky was gray and overcast. “You could bulldoze, but that tears up the topsoil and ruins it for farming. We can clear this in a couple of weeks for a small fraction of the cost.”
Carver watched Legaspi and Claire as the humanitarian jargon of cost efficiency, improvement of the land, moral obligation, employment of local technicians, and so on spooled forth. The light and focus in Claire’s eyes as she watched Legaspi were the same in Michiko’s when Carver told her on their first date about driving from State College to New York City to catch Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot Café on St. Mark’s Place, where he stood close enough to see the yellow half-moons of Monk’s cuticles against white ivory. The great man’s genius had rubbed off on him enough to shine and catch hold of Michiko’s gaze. It was the same with Legaspi, borrowing someone else’s ideas, and this was enough for Claire.
“Do you even know who you’re dealing with? You ever thought about what the DOD could do with these robots?” Carver said. The look in Legaspi’s eyes was hesitant, afraid, weak, that of someone not ready to face bare-knuckled reality, the clenched iron fist of power. Legaspi’s na?veté annoyed Carver profoundly. “Some brilliant guy at a university working on a defense contract will figure out a way to put a landmine on this robot. Then the Pentagon will send it into a tunnel where a terrorist is hiding.”
“That’s the kind of work you would do, Dad. Don’t think everyone’s like you.”