The Scalian Legacy

Chris was the first to arrive back at the campsite. When Kenny and Jack arrived, they saw Chris rummaging through Robbie’s bag.

“What are you doing?” Kenny said.

“Where’s the satellite phone?” Chris kept right on searching. “We need to get help!”

“It’s in Robbie’s pocket,” an exhausted Kenny replied. “You know, in that spaceship…or whatever it is.” He sat down on a log next to the fire ring and placed his head in his hands. While he had had conflict with his older brother for much of his life, he still loved him a great deal. It was surreal to think he might never see Robbie again.

Kenny lifted his head to see Jack standing next to him with a calm, solemn expression. Kenny felt overwhelmed. Not only could he not mourn his older brother and was fearful of whether he would get out of the current situation himself, but now he also had to worry about the fragile psyche of his younger brother.

“So, what are we going to do?” Jack asked with little emotion.

“Without the Sat phone,” Kenny said, “we need to take what supplies we can and try to get back to Macapá as fast as we can.”

“Makes sense,” Chris said.

“What?” Jack seemed confused. “You’re going to leave Robbie and Marcelo?” Jack asked this with an eerie calm. To Jack leaving Robbie and Marcelo to an unknown fate was not an option. He would rather die than leave his brother behind. However, he knew the others would take some convincing. He had to tread lightly in order to get Chris and Kenny to come around.

“No, we are going to leave them to get help.” Kenny tried to be firm again, but was nervous about his brother’s demeanor.

“I’m not going anywhere without Robbie and Marcelo.” Jack said this as a matter of fact, with almost no emotion.

Kenny and Chris looked at each and knew they had a problem. Kenny dropped his head back into his hands. He knew how stubborn his younger brother could be, and without Robbie in the picture to help, he had to think of another way to sway him. He couldn’t leave his brother here alone—and yet he also couldn’t let Jack kill himself in a vain attempt to save Robbie and Marcelo. Kenny’s feeling of being overwhelmed grew exponentially.

While Kenny silently lamented, Chris did not take Jack’s reaction quite as calmly. “Holy shit, Jack! What are you talking about? They are gone!”

“They are just about a hundred yards away. We need to get them out.” Jack remained calm.

Chris’s eyes opened wide and his jaw dropped. “Okay,” he said, “that’s it, you’ve finally lost it!” He looked at Kenny. “Tell him. Tell him he’s nuts.”

Kenny shook his head. He was thinking through possibilities. He could try to incapacitate Jack and force him back to Macapá, but he couldn’t see it ending well. Not only would Jack hate him forever, he was smart enough to act calm and then come back out here by himself to get himself killed. So, maybe it would be best to talk through it with him. There really wasn’t a way to save Robbie and Marcelo, so why not help Jack come to the same conclusion? So, he started: “Jack, how do you propose we go about doing this?”

This pretty much sent Chris over the edge. “What? You want to discuss a plan to do this?”

“Yes,” Kenny replied flatly.

“What the hell is wrong with you white people!” Chris was exasperated. “That thing disintegrated bullets, scorched the earth and, oh, yeah, shot lasers at us. How the hell are we supposed to save these guys?”

“That’s exactly what I want to discuss.” Kenny tried to be deliberate with his tone, to get his point across to Chris.

Confused, Chris looked at Kenny, and then he seemed to understand what Kenny was trying to do. “Oh…okay.” Chris calmed down, “Yeah, let’s think this through.”

“Sounds good,” Jack said as he sat. Kenny’s tack had not escaped him, but Jack needed their help to devise a plan, anyway. So, he said, “The first problem is getting past that force field.”

“Yeah,” Chris replied with condescending sarcasm. “I’d say that’s the first problem to tackle.…”

“So, what do we know about it?” Jack started. He went on to describe the spherical-shaped shield around the ship, the disintegration of the forest down to the surface and the disintegration of the bullets. Then, he added, “Don’t you see the inconsistency?”

“Inconsistency?” Kenny said while Chris couldn’t seem to get into this game.

“Yes,” Jack continued, “the field seems to be consistently oval. So, if that field disintegrates bullets and forestry, then why didn’t it continue to disintegrate the ground below?”

“Because it needed to land on a flat surface?” Kenny replied.

“Yes, and it means that it’s only active to the ground, not below it!”

“What are you saying?”

“We may be able to dig under it, like you dig under a fence.”

“Oh for goodness sake!” Chris finally jumped back in. “Advanced, probably alien tech is designed no better than an old-fashioned fence. Yeah, that makes sense!”

“Well, it’s a little deadlier than a regular fence, so we would need to dig pretty deep to make sure we don’t touch the thing. It’s not like it will be simple.”

“No, ‘simple’ wasn’t really a word I was going to assign to any task related to this insane exercise!” Chris decided there was no point in continuing to argue with Jack.

Jack persisted. “Well, we can easily test this out.”

Kenny tried a different approach. “Jack….We have to consider that they’re likely dead anyway.”

“Actually, I saw them breathing as they passed by me….” Chris stopped himself too late. He winced as he turned to see Kenny glaring at him.

“I knew it! So, let’s test out my theory.” Jack stood up and was ready to lead them to the vehicle.

“Wait…wait.” Kenny took a deep breath while still glaring at Chris. “Even if we dig ourselves under this force field thing, then what? The ship doesn’t exactly have an open door. There’s no way in.”

“Yes, there is,” Jack replied confidently. “The same way that probe went in and out. I noticed the door seems to stay open for a few seconds before and after.”

“Okay, but we have no idea when or if it will ever come back out.” Kenny was surprised at the resourcefulness of his brother’s delirium, but he stuck to his plan.

“The smaller floating object that took Robbie and Marcelo was likely distracted from whatever reason it had for coming out last time because of Chris’s picture-taking. So, it seems likely that it will come out again, and when it does, the opening seemed low enough for me to lift myself into it.”

“And then what?” Kenny had had enough. He had gotten Jack to start thinking logically. Now it was time to crush him and end this. “You really think they aren’t going to know that you’re there? You really think they aren’t going to shoot you the same way they shot Robbie and Marcelo? You really think they are going to have them somewhere that you can simply take them out? They obviously don’t want to talk to us. Their first reaction was to shoot.”

Instead of being at a loss for words, his brother’s rant seemed to trigger more thoughts and questions for Jack. “Why didn’t that thing shoot at us?”

“What?” Kenny had hoped it would end, but Jack was unexpectedly still into the exercise he had started. “I don’t know. We got lucky.”

“Against that? I don’t think so. It shot at Chris—or, more specifically, at the flash of his camera phone. Then, it shot at Robbie after he spoke out. And then it shot at Marcelo, because he had fired at it. Yet we were right there and it ignored us. It even passed right by Chris and ignored him. Why?”

“We didn’t do anything,” Chris replied automatically.

“Right,” Jack said. “They both did something that, well, that not just any animal in the forest could do. All of those actions could only be performed by someone with some higher form of intelligence.”

“So, then why didn’t it take me?” Chris asked solemnly. “I took the picture.”

“I could only guess that since we all scrambled after it shot your phone, it couldn’t tell which one of us did it, and Robbie was the first to speak.”

“So, I caused all of this and Robbie saved me?” Chris added slowly. Chris hadn’t thought it through quite in this way. Suddenly he felt a guilt that he didn’t expect or desire.

“That’s all fine and well,” Kenny said, “but back to the point: this has nothing to do with the fact that there’s nothing you can do even if, by some miracle, you manage to get in.”

“On the contrary,” Jack responded. “I can just act dumb. If they don’t see me as a threat, they may not react at all.”

“You’d still be an invader, dumb or not.” Kenny struggled to bring his little exercise to an end. “I’m sure that they don’t have a bunch of strange animals roaming around that ship just because they can’t speak.”

“I know, but it may buy me some time to….”

“Jack, that’s enough!” Kenny’s patience had expired. “We’re all getting out of here together. We’ll get help, and if Robbie and Marcelo are meant to be saved, they will be. Sacrificing ourselves on a crazy crusade doesn’t help anyone.”

Jack turned quiet but never stopped thinking of his next move. It seemed as though Kenny was no longer going to play along, and he didn’t figure he was going to get any further insights, anyway. It was time to charge ahead. “Kenny, I know this sounds crazy, and I’m not asking you and Chris to help, but I have to do this. I have nothing to lose anyway. If there’s even the smallest chance that I can save Robbie and Marcelo, I need to try. You know you can’t stop me.”

Kenny’s eyes expanded as he took a deep breath and shook his head. Before he could reply, Chris jumped in. “He’s going to do it no matter what we say.” Chris was throwing in the towel. “We might as well help him.”

Kenny dropped his head. His plan had backfired. Instead of convincing Jack to change his mind, his plan had instilled enough guilt in Chris to have him side with Jack. Kenny sensed he wasn’t going to move Jack on this, and he couldn’t leave his only remaining brother behind, either. All he could do now was hope Jack’s crazy supposition about the force field was incorrect. “Okay, how about this?” he said. “We start to dig under the force field, and if there’s no way to get through, then you head back with us to Macapá right away.”

“Deal.”

Jack took no time in beginning to search for the shovel.