part 6:
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
by Matthew Atanian and
William Thomas Hughes
©2014 by Matthew Atanian and William Thomas Hughes
Boy Scouts ½ created by Matthew Atanian
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
by Matthew Atanian and
William Thomas Hughes
©2014 by Matthew Atanian and William Thomas Hughes
Boy Scouts ½ created by Matthew Atanian
Wednesday. Scout night.
It was quiet. Perhaps too quiet. Perhaps Luke should have known it would be this quiet; after all, most of the Garden Snake Patrol was away, half of the other kids had other plans for the season and wouldn't be back for a few weeks at least, and even most of the adult leaders had left for a period of time.
But still, he was at least mildly shocked that there were only nine scouts there. He was there, of course, as was his younger brother Ben. The rest of his patrol seemed conspicuously absent, alas, and he knew that at least a few of them had moved onto other interests over the summer and were likely not coming back. (Luke didn’t think he’d miss Homer or Slim too much.) Justy was there, but this was not a surprise as he would never pass up a chance to lord over others, and Proctor, as usual was standing just behind and to one side of him. There was Jon Becker, Will Shmuler, and Matt Swett, looking a little lost as they stood in the spot usually filled with Garden Snakes. Luke was a little surprised to see Kenny in line with the other Garden Snakes; for whatever reason, he had thought that Kenny was going to be with the others who’d left for Sri Lanka, or wherever it was that they’d gone.
The final kid was someone he didn't recognize. A new scout, he thought, although it's not really 'new scout season'. He supposed there was no particular reason to think that there would even be a new scout season, but that idea was firmly stuck in his head, and this, then, was clearly a breach of his entirely arbitrary belief.
Oh, well, he thought, standing in the spot reserved for his patrol. It was sparse with just himself and his brother standing there, but it was better to stand in line than listen to Justy whine and rant about a breakdown in order and anarchy and dissention in the ranks and such things.
Justy stepped up to the podium and began his maniacal, wheezing laugh. It was how he started most of his speeches.
Luke sighed.
Luke checked his watch. It was a new watch, a nice one. It had a great timer function that Luke was currently playing with. Justy had laughed for two minutes, seventeen seconds. Luke was pretty sure that was on the short side. Justy had then proceeded to claim dominion over all of the world's people, yea unto the least of the creatures that crawl upon the land. That had taken nine minutes, twenty-two seconds. Then Luke got bored and decided to measure his heart rate. He was pretty sure than 53 beats per minute was low, and he started wondering if it was possible for a ranting megalomaniac to literally bore someone until their heart stopped.
Then everyone was shuffling around. Luke started, blinking and looking around. Everyone was standing in the Garden Snake line, and now they were all staring at him. Strangely, even Ben was standing over with the others.
"Uh. What did I miss?" he asked, looking around.
"I knew it!" Justy yelled, starting to turn red. "Anarchy! Dissention in the ranks! If only this were a proper military dictatorship! I should have you court martialed, then..."
Luke sighed and hit the start button on his watch.
Eleven minutes, thirty eight seconds later, the patrols were reorganized. There was just one patrol now, which Justy, in a fit of pique over Luke's insubordination, had renamed the “Disgusting Flatworms or Possibly Fluke Worms Whatever Is More Gross That Crawl Before the Might of Their Dread Master Justy” patrol. Luke wasn’t sure what he thought of the name. Hopefully they could come up with a better one.
"So," Luke said, looking at his patrol mates. "Who's in charge?"
It took three attempts to properly elect a patrol leader. The first two times, somehow Justy wound up as leader. The third time, they refused to let Justy count the ballots. To his own surprise, Luke won. He’d expected to lose to Matt Swett, since this new patrol was mostly made from former Garden Snakes. However, Swett had declined to run, saying he preferred to keep his Assistant Patrol Leader position. Both boys were pleased; they didn’t have to change the position patches sewn onto their uniforms.
They would all have to change their patrol medallions, however. After some deliberation, and in a fit of whimsy, they had decided maybe to keep the suggested name… but in a heavily condensed form. They were now the Fluke Patrol.
“Where the heck’re we gonna to get patches for that?” Swett asked.
The new kid… what was his name again? Hugh? He cleared his throat. “I may be able to provide,” he said in a flat voice.
"Right," Kenny said. He turned to Luke. "Now what, sir?"
Luke considered, then glanced at his watch. Only ten minutes left in the meeting. He looked up towards the front of the hall.
Justy was standing by the podium, directing Proctor to start hanging fourteen foot tall portraits of himself along the hall. "Ah, good, my minions can help!" he declared, pointing at Luke. "You! Minions! Start hanging my glorious likeness!"
“That a good idea, Justy?” Swett asked. “They do kind of also use this hall for other things… like a church, and stuff.”
Justy blinked, lacking comprehension. “Indeed. And I am their Lord God Yung.”
"Is it just me," Ben muttered, "Or has he gotten more crazy recently?"
“WHAT?” Becker replied.
"Why don't we just call it an early meeting?" Swett suggested, looking towards the door.
"Sounds good to me," Luke said. "Okay, Fluke Patrol, dismissed! Meeting adjourned! Whatever it is I need to say to get us out of here." They all rose from the table they were seated at and raced for the door, half of them bumping into the other half in the process.
"Anarchy!" Justy screeched as the Flukes filed out. Alas, this drew the attention of Will Shmuler, who stopped, turned, bolted back to where Justy and Procter were, and started running in circles around them while doing jumping jacks and giving off a high pitched yell each time his hands clapped above his head.
Justy screamed.
"Hey, Kenny, I thought you were going with the other AWOL Snakes?" Luke asked as they gathered around the old playground at the back of the church, waiting for their rides.
"Oh, no, I'm staying here. More or less."
"More or less?" Ben asked. "How can you more or less be staying somewhere? Isn't it sort of, you know, binary? Either you go or you stay?"
“You’d be surprised,” Becker cryptically muttered. He was temporarily in the land of the aurally aware as he was in the middle of changing the disc in his portable CD player.
Luke turned to Becker to inquire after his comment, but it was too late as he had already slipped his headphones back on. So Luke’s gaze returned to Kenny who, he noticed, had a kind of mischievous expression on his face. A sort of furtive half smile that he was trying to hide.
There had long been rumors amongst the non-Garden Snake members of the troop that there was more to this kid then it seemed. Luke had always brushed it off, but the evidence he’d always dismissed came flooding into his mind. The Klondike Derby. The sets for that play that time. That catapult thingy at the Spring Camporee. That camping trip when they’d been making spaghetti and meatballs and… Luke shuddered as he remembered what had happened with the pasta.
Luke’s mind returned to the present. "What did you do?" he asked Kenny.
Kenny seemed reluctant to speak at first but, as he thought about it, he had observed Luke in the past to be a responsible person. Besides, he was their Patrol Leader now, so it would be difficult to conduct any experiments that required the Patrol's involvement without his consent. “Alright, but you have to promise not to tell anyone, okay, Mr. Walker? I would prefer this kept as confidential as possible.”
Luke nodded. Kenny reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like small, folded square of sheet aluminum. As Kenny unfolded it, Luke was astonished that no creases were left behind. Finally, it was fully extended to the size of a document sized envelope. Kenny opened the envelope and carefully reached inside. When his hand came out again, he was holding…
Nothing.
“Is it something invisible?” Luke asked.
“No,” Kenny said, perturbed. “It is something missing.”
Everyone turned, startled, as the rear door of the church flew open. It was just Will Shmuler finally coming out, still doing jumping jacks and now wearing a portrait around his neck, his head through a hole in the canvas where previously Justy’s visage had been.
Everyone turned, startled, as suddenly there was the sound of someone clearing their throat. “Is this what you seek?” a flat voice asked. Hugh stood there, holding something in his hand. It was black, but Luke could not quite make out its shape.
Kenny looked pale. He remembered Hugh bumping into him on the way to the door, but still, the object had been in his pocket in a folded envelope… extracting it and returning the envelope unnoticed was quite a feat. How had he…? That wasn’t really the most important thing at the moment. “I should think,” he said, “you might wish to be careful with that.”
Even Becker was startled enough to remove his headphones. “Kenny, is that the PBH?”
“What’s a PBH?” Ben asked.
Hugh was holding the object up more, and Luke could see that it was circular and flat, but he still had trouble looking directly at it.
“A portable black hole,” Kenny said. "Not in the literal astronomical sense," he clarified, "but as in the object from popular animated programs."
“What, from like in Looney Tunes?” Swett asked.
“What is a ‘looney tune’?” Hugh asked.
“That’s me!” Shmuler replied excitedly.
Kenny ignored him, keeping his attention focused on Hugh. “You need to be very careful with that,” Kenny said. “It is calibrated for use with this end attached to a specific wall within my laboratory. With it in a different spatial location, it can be quite dangerous. There is no knowing where the terminus is located.”
“I know,” Hugh replied.
Kenny was unsure how to take that response. Did he mean he knew it was dangerous, or that he knew where the terminus was? Or both? Before he could ask for elaboration, however, Becker spoke.
“You should just give that back to us, okay, Hugh?”
“Okay,” Hugh replied.
“No!” Kenny yelled. Hugh flung the PBH Frisbee-like towards them. It expanded in diameter mid-air until it was more than wide enough to envelope the entire group of them. There was a sudden VWORP noise, and then the universe turned inside-out. Everything smelled purple.
Luke woke up on a beach. It was actually quite placid and warm, even with the sun low in the sky. The crashing waves made a lovely sort of lullaby and, for a moment, Luke thought about laying back down and taking a nap.
"Mr. Walker!" someone cried. Luke groaned and sat up, looking around. Kenny was standing at the top of a sand dune, waving his arms wildly. Luke sighed and stood, using a metal pole that had been lying on the ground beside him to brace himself as he rose. He suddenly realized what the pole was: it was most of one leg from the church’s swing set. He dropped it back to the ground.
"What's up?" he called out to Kenny, waving his arms to signal that he had heard. He started to trudge up the dune, brushing sand off of his uniform and moving slowly and carefully to be sure of his footing.
He paused at the top, looking out over a massive expanse of desert in one direction, a calm ocean to the other. "Where are we?" he asked.
"Kenny says it's Egypt," Becker said, climbing over the dune to sit down, staring out over the sea. "That's the Mediterranean, I guess." He removed the disc from his player, blew on the lens, and replaced the disc.
"Red Sea," Swett popped up. As far as Luke could tell, the rest of the patrol was laying on the shady side of the sand dune, out of sight until he reached the top. "That's east, right?" He pulled out a compass, peering at it. "Mediterranean would be north, so we're on the coast of the Red Sea."
"Alright, back up." Luke flopped down at the top of the sand dune. It was nice, if a bit warm. "Why are we in Egypt?"
"The portable black hole was calibrated to attach to one specific point, but that calibration was dependent on knowing where both ends were located. With our end in the wrong location, the exit could have been anywhere," Kenny said. “At the very least, given the PBH’s limited range, it was likely we’d remain on Earth, but as it is we are most fortunate we didn’t end up in the ocean, or a high altitude with no ground beneath us.”
"Alright, alright," Luke said, reasonably. "Can we just go back through?”
“Yes, theoretically.”
“What do you mean, ‘theoretically’?” Ben inquired.
“The hole on this end is gone,” Kenny replied. “There appear to be footsteps,” he pointed, “going off in that direction.”
“Ah,” Luke said. He really needed to assess the situation. He thought of the metal pole. “Is everyone okay?” he asked. “All intact? No missing limbs?”
Everyone muttered affirmative replied.
“And all present and accounted for?” Luke asked. “Flukes, sound off."
"WHAT?" Becker said.
"Yo," Swett added.
“Yup,” Ben said.
"Present,” Kenny replied.
“My hovercraft is full of eels!” Shmuler shouted. (Before disappearing, Mike had given him some Monty Python video tapes, in the hopes of channeling his strangeness in a more positive direction.)
"I'm here, too," Luke said. “That everyone.” He paused. “Well, almost everyone.”
They all turned to look in the direction that the footprints led. They disappeared off into the horizon.
Hugh.
“How far do you reckon he could have gotten?”
“I’m not sure how long we were all unconscious, although given the time difference and the fact that the sun seems to be on the rise, I should guess three to four hours,” Kenny mentioned. “The unconsciousness was an unusual side effect, probably because the PBH was not calibrated correctly. Obviously, Hugh recovered first, but there’s no way to know how much of a lead he has on us.”
"Well, we can't just stay here, forever speculating," Luke said. It was starting to get hotter and they were all sweating. The fact that they didn’t exactly have any supplies such as food and water was certainly worrisome, too. He pointed off in the direction the footprints lead. "I don’t suppose anyone has any idea if there are any towns in that direction, and how far they might be?"
Ben was already pulling a map out of his backpack. “Matt, can I borrow your compass?”
“Sure thing.” He tossed it to Ben.
Ben spread the map out on the dune, worked with the compass a bit while consulting it, all while frowning.
"Why do you have a map of Egypt in your backpack?"
"I’m working on the Archaeology merit badge, remember?" Ben replied. "I have, like, three dozen maps in there. Okay, I think we're here, which means that the nearest town is... either Aswan, if we head west into the desert, or Qusir, if we head along the coast. Either way... uh... Guys, it's a couple days walk to either."
“And the footprints,” Kenny observed, “head in the direction of the desert.”
"This is a problem," Swett said.
"I don't suppose any of you speak Arabic, by any chance?" Luke asked.
Shmuler, Ben, and Kenny shook their heads in unison. Becker was in his own headphone-induced world. Swett shrugged and said, “أستطيع”
Everyone stopped and stared at him.
"What? I can't want to learn a new language?" Swett asked. "I wanted to expand my horizons." He just hoped no one asked him to say anything more, so he wouldn’t have to admit that that was as far as he’d managed to get on the day he’d decided to learn Arabic before he got bored, gave up, and went outside to play some street hockey.
Luke shrugged his shoulders. “Well, let’s get going, everyone. Looks like we’ve got quite a walk in front of us.”
An hour later, Becker’s batteries died. “Aw, shucks,” he said, pulling his headphones off from his ears and hanging them over his neck.
About forty-five minutes after that still, there was a problem. “Gotta pee… gotta pee…” Shmuler was saying as he hopped around madly.
“So do it,” Luke suggested.
“Where?” Shmuler pleaded.
“Anywhere,” Luke suggested.
Will Shmuler looked around. All around them was flat, sand colored nothingness.
“But there isn’t anywhere!” Shmuler complained. “At least, not anywhere private…”
“Well,” Luke said, “just walk ten or twenty feet back the way we came, turn your back to us, we’ll turn our backs to you…”
“No!” Shmuler insisted. His face suddenly scrunched up into a strange contorted grimace as he doubled over and clenched his legs together.
“What’re you doing?” Luke demanded.
Shmuler’s face relaxed and he stood. “Gonna hold it,” he insisted. “Should be fine now. Less talk. More walk.”
Luke shrugged.
They continued on their way, Shmuler the quietest the others had ever observed him.
The sun was high in the sky as the heat beat down upon them. It was definitely late morning, local time. None of them were looking forward to being out in the afternoon. They had to find shelter.
Swett shielded his eyes with his hand and gazed off into the distance. “What is that?” he asked.
“What’s what?” Luke replied.
Swett pointed.
Luke gazed. Off in the distance, he saw… “I dunno, but there’s something there. Come on, let’s continue.”
They kept watching, and the fuzzy blur on the horizon gradually came into focus.
"Oh, come on,” Swett said. “That’s almost cliché.”
“And you have a problem with that, why?” Becker asked him.
It was a few palm trees. And, of course, where there were trees…
“That’s a good point. Come on!” He made as if to run, but before he could do so a hand gripped his upper arm.
“I wouldn’t,” Luke said.
“Indeed,” Kenny concurred. “That is likely still a good two or three miles away.”
“Maybe,” Swett pondered, “I’ll walk.”
As they got closer, what they saw astounded them. A small grouping of palm trees stood there, on the shore of a still, clear pool of water.
“Oh my God, yes!” Swett exclaimed, as he decided that they had reached a distance where running was a possibility. He tore across the sand full tilt, reached the shore, stopped dead with a loud, resounding clang, and fell backwards into the sand.
“Ow!” Well, he was still alive. That was good. His palm flew to the red spot forming on his forehead. “Son of a… Ow!”
The others came closer now, and carefully reached out with their hands. There was something there, hard, cold, and frictionless to the touch.
“Fascinating,” Kenny said.
“Aw, man,” Ben said. “It’s like that episode when they got rid of Wesley.”
“Not quite,” Kenny explained, running his hand over the invisible thing before them. “This isn’t a force field blocking the way to the water. There is no water.”
Swett was quite annoyed. “Son of a…”
"It would appear that there is something cloaked here,” Kenny continued. “The cloak is creating the illusion of an oasis.”
“Well that’s dumb. Why hide something with something else that would draw attention?” Becker wondered.
“We need to figure this out,” Luke said. “Is this thing an object we can go around, or is it a wall blocking our path? Maybe it’s Hugh trying to stop us following him?”
“Leave it to me!” Shmuler shouted. “I know what to do!” He placed one arm against the surface of whatever it was and started running off, skipping as he did so. Sure enough, after a few minutes he seemed to disappear around an invisible curved surface.
“Shmuler?” Luke called out.
“Wait there!” Shmuler replied. “Can you see me?”
“No,” Luke replied. “What do you see?”
“Wait there!”
“Is something wrong?” Luke asked.
There was no response. Luke listened carefully. He heard something. A zipper?
He was distracted by that thought when suddenly the ground started rumbling and the space before them shimmered. The oasis – water and palm trees – disappeared, replaced by… something.
It looked like a giant cylinder, perfectly smooth, as wide as the oasis had been, perhaps as tall as a three story building, and, for some reason, pink.
“Noooooo!” Shmuler screamed.
Luke took off in the direction Shmuler had gone, followed quickly by the rest of the Flukes.
They found Shmuler on all fours, apparently unharmed but with an extremely dejected look on his face. “It ain’t fair,” he moaned. “I just need a minute’s privacy…”
Then Luke noticed an opening on the side of the ship. It was dark within the opening, and within it stood a shadowed figure.
“I had hoped you would come,” the figure said. It retreated inward, saying, “Follow.”
It was Hugh.
There was some brief deliberation on whether or not they should do as… instructed? Asked? Hopefully the latter. In the end, it came down to two basic possibilities: Hugh meant them harm, or Hugh didn’t mean them harm. If he meant them harm, he could have done something while they were still unconscious on the beach. Besides, not following into whatever the structure was meant, what? Trekking days through a dessert with no water?
So they followed.
Inside was a dark and featureless corridor. It led them to a room that looked like some sort of control room out of a low budget BBC science fiction serial. There was a large screen on one wall, and facing it were two control panels. At one of them stood Hugh, still wearing a Boy Scout uniform.
“Hugh,” Luke said. “What is this all about?”
“I will answer your question,” Hugh said. “But first, please allow me to refresh you.” He walked over to a device on one wall, pressed a few buttons on it, and opened up a compartment. From it, he withdrew a trey upon which sat some glasses and a large, sweating pitcher containing a clear liquid. “You must be in need of some hydration. Please accept this dihydrogen monoxide.”
Kenny walked forward and gladly took a glass. He noticed he was the only one who did so, so he turned back to the others. “Water,” he translated.
Now four other thirsty people eagerly rushed forward to get some.
Kenny turned back to Hugh. “Who are you?” Kenny asked. “Where do you come from?”
“My name,” Hugh began, his voice still strangely toneless, “is difficult for your phonetics. On this world, for convenience I have chosen the name Hugh as an inconspicuous designation. It will suffice.”
“If you share a last name with the director of Heat, I am flippin’ out!” Swett exclaimed.
The others ignored Swett.
Hugh continued. “Forty-seven years ago, my partner and I were conducting a reconnaissance flight of your planet to determine if you had yet reached societal level worthy of initiating contact. However, we suffered technical difficulties and were forced to make a crash landing. My partner was terminated by the crash and the ship was severely damaged.”
“Half a century, and no one else came looking for you?” Becker asked. “No search parties?”
“It is always possible that a planet we are studying may show hostility towards us. It is our way, to help limit contact with such cultures, that our reconnaissance parties are always small… and expendable. If a mission is lost, the planet to which it was sent is marked unsuitable for further contact and no further missions are sent.”
“Harsh.”
“Necessary. However, while alone, I still lived. It took my first decade here, but repairs were completed. The ship is functional once more. Alas, this presented another problem.”
“And this is where he tells us his ship is fueled on human flesh,” Swett said. The others shot him a dirty look, and he decided it would be best to sit out the rest of this conversation.
There was a sound, like liquid swiftly being emptied through plumbing. Everyone turned and noticed an additional door on the same wall as the exit to the corridor they had come in through. The door opened and Shmuler stepped out, drying his hands with a disposable towel. “I miss anything?”
“Nothing you’d find that exciting,” Ben informed him. “We’re just in the middle of an exposition dump.”
“Ooh!” Shmuler then said, his eyes falling on the pitcher of water. “Dihydrogen monoxide! My favorite!” He helped himself to a glass, gargling before he swallowed.
“Please,” Kenny said, doing his best to ignore Shmuler, “continue. You said there was a problem?”
“Yes. Our technology requires two operators to activate.”
“Why?” Becker asked.
“It just is,” Hugh replied. “It is the way of our culture.”
“There’s no way around it?” Becker persisted. “I mean, come on. Your situation is a perfect example of why that's stupid.”
“It is difficult to explain the reasoning in a short span of time when we lack a common frame of reference,” Hugh replied.
“But it doesn’t make sense!”
“In my time on your planet, I have observed many things that, even after almost five decades, make little sense to me. Why do you still fight over a fuel source that is finite and pollutes your planet, when you have reached a sufficient technological level to produce cleaner alternative sources? Why do you sell cylindrical meat products in packages of ten, and the breaded exterior coverings for them in packages of eight? Why would you listen to auditory entertainments at decibel levels guaranteed to cause cochlear damage? These are things I do not understand. If you can explain them to me, I will try to explain our ways to you.”
Becker opened his mouth as if to reply, thought better of it, and closed his mouth again.
“As to the technological problem I needed to overcome, although I feared it may be futile, I hoped that if I traveled your planet I may eventually come across an individual to whom I might turn for assistance. I searched for many, many years. Indeed, I was beginning to lose hope. But then I found the one I sought. And so, facilitated by the fact that I resembled a male juvenile human, I joined your youth organization to get closer to the one I needed.
“I was trying to figure out how to bring you here to my ship, when my scanning device also detected much to my surprise that one of you was possessing of a stable, portable, trans-dimensional conduit. It was a simple matter to recalibrate it to terminate at least the general vicinity of my craft, and then leave a trail for you to follow to me.”
Kenny arched an eyebrow. A simple matter, was it? Anyway, “Why didn’t you just ask for our help?”
“It is difficult for me to tell with you humans how you will respond to such things. I could not risk that you would supply a negative response.”
Kenny shrugged. “I cannot argue that in some cases you would be right to be extremely cautious with humans. But I should like to think that you would have found a more positive response with us. In any case, we are here now. What can I do to help you?”
“You are not the one whose help I require,” Hugh replied.
Kenny blinked. “What.”
It is someone else I seek.
“But…” Kenny was confused. This was sciencey stuff! This was his area! “But…”
“The one whose help I require,” Hugh said, turning to Luke, “is you.”
It was Luke’s turn. “What.”
“Perhaps I should explain more,” Hugh said. “Our technology requires the living genetic imprint of two registered operators in order to be activated. As my partner had ceased living, this became an impossibility. However, our two planets have a very similar bio-chemical makeup. And our two species seem to have had very similar evolutionary patterns. The chance, while extremely small, was higher than zero percent that I might be able to find a human with a similar enough genetic code to my former partner as to be able to use that person as a specimen to trick the system into activating. Although human DNA is somewhat simplistic in comparison to ours, having roughly half the standard number of chromosome pairs the activation computer should look for, I believe I have been able to produce a program to compensate for the differences.”
“Um… Specimen?” Luke swallowed. “You don’t… you don’t, like, need to harvest parts from my body, or liquefy me, or anything like that, do you?”
“No,” Hugh replied. “You need but to place the palm of your hand on the right side control panel, within the activation box, as I do the same on the left side control panel. The ship will scan our genetic codes and, if a match is confirmed, it should activate. Please, you are the best hope I have had.”
“But what about… well… I don’t wanna go to another planet!” Luke insisted. “Not right now, at least.”
“This is also unnecessary,” Hugh replied. “Your genetic code will only be required to activate the ship’s systems. Once that is done, and as long as I am not foolish enough to deactivate any of them before returning home, I should be able to pilot the ship by myself.”
“Oh,” Luke said, brightening up a bit, “okay.” He walked over to the right control panel. “This box here?” he asked, pointing to a smooth screen on the surface of the panel.
Hugh nodded affirmatively.
Luke moved his hand towards the panel, pausing just before he made contact. “This won’t… this won’t, like, hurt or nothing, will it?”
“The process should be completely painless.” Hugh moved to do the same on the left control panel.
“Well, here goes nothing.” Luke made contact.
Nothing happened.
He raised his palm and lowered it again. Still nothing. Again. Nothing again.
“Oh, come on!” Luke said to whatever fates cared to listen. “When I said, ‘here goes nothing,’ it was not a literal request!”
“We have failed,” Hugh said. “My search, it shall never end.” He sighed. "I shall never see home again."
“Maybe,” Kenny said, “it is time for you to try a different path. I have… I have facilities. We could work together there. We could accomplish such greatness. And maybe, in time, we could even find another solution for your problem.”
Hugh, his hand still uselessly on the control panel, turned his head to face Kenny. “You would extend such an offer to me?” His voice had the faintest sign of intonation to it, sounding vaguely hopeful.
Kenny smiled. “It would be my honor.”
“Hold on,” Ben said, walking over to Luke’s side. “What if we do this?” He placed his hand over his brother’s.
The effect was immediate as the ship came alive around them.
“What did you do?” Kenny asked, dumbfounded.
“Well,” Ben replied, “Hugh said that humans have only half the chromy-whazzits that his people do. And I figure I must have similar DNA to my brother, what with us being brothers and all. So if Luke was compatible, maybe I was too! And if he is half, and I’m half, together we should be one big whole!”
“But…” Kenny sputtered. “But genetics doesn’t work that way! Of course as brothers you have similar genetic structures, statistically you should share approximately 50% of your chromosomes! However, the shared portion would not be cumulative in the scan! It should have only been counted once! So if Luke’s 23 pairs, or 46 chromosomes total, were only half of the required number, and the half duplicated between you two contributed nothing new, you could at most only add approximately 23 more chromosomes, meaning we’d still be about 25% short of what would be needed for a match to activate the ship!”
Ben shrugged. “Don’t knock it, it worked.”
“But…” Kenny still couldn’t wrap his head around everything. “But…”
“Hey, don’t stress too much about it,” Becker told him. “Hugh said he had a program to compensate for the difference, maybe it did work but just not as well as he hoped, and Ben just gave it the extra jump start it needed.”
“But…”
“And don’t worry,” he said, able to read Kenny. “You’ve still got me as a lab partner!”
Kenny sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose I do.” He turned to Hugh. “So, is your ship functional?”
“Sufficiently, yes,” Hugh said. “Thank you, Luke and Ben Walker,” he then said. “You have saved me.”
“Think nothing of it,” Luke replied modestly.
“Would you like to be brought home?” Hugh asked. “It is quite a small detour for me, now that my ship is functional once more.”
“Oh please, yes,” Luke said. “Although I look forward to explaining to my parents where we’ve all been for the better part of a day.”
“That will not be a problem,” Hugh assured him. “The relativistic properties of the ship’s drive allow for some reverse time passage. It is very limited, but should be sufficient so that you will not have been missed.”
“Oh, okay,” Luke replied.
“Convenient,” Kenny huffed.
A very short time later, they were being dropped off behind the church. The ship landed in the field behind the rear parking lot, cloaked once more to blend perfectly in, and everyone disembarked.
“I believe this is yours,” Hugh said, holding out a black object for Kenny to take.
“Yes, it is,” Kenny replied, replacing it in its container. “Going to be a pain to recalibrate,” he muttered as he walked off to examine the damage to the swing set. “I’ll be up all evening when I get home, and that won’t be until after I fix things here…”
Becker followed Kenny to see if he could help, or at least to offer moral support.
Hugh turned to Luke now. “Once again, I offer my gratitude. Would you allow me to present you all with a token?”
Luke nodded anxiously, wondering what strange and mystical gift they might be about to receive.
Hugh extended an open hand, palm up. In the hand were a number of objects that looked like small, circular pieces of cloth with designs embroidered upon them. “I synthesized the pattern using an amalgamation of your mental images after the finalized name had been decided upon,” Hugh explained.
Luke picked one up and examined the image upon it. It appeared to be a large worm, anthropomorphized in such a way that it had arms, and holding those arms in a pose that strongly suggested an indifferent shrug.
There appeared to be sufficient patches for them each to have one, so Luke took them all to hand out later. “Thank you, Hugh.”
“Thank you, Luke Walker. And you, Ben Walker. In fact, thank you to all of you.”
“Will we ever see you again?”
“The future is not determined, and all things are possible. For this moment, I can now go home and am eager to do so. But past that, who knows?”
“Anyway, Hugh,” Luke said, holding up one of the patrol medallions once more, “make sure you synthesize an extra one of these for yourself." He grinned warmly at Hugh. "We’ll always consider you a Fluke.”
For the first time, Hugh’s face seemed to hold something close to an emotive expression. If there were any cultural similarities between his species and humans, then Luke would take what he saw as a slight smile. Hugh then bowed his head, turned, and disappeared into his ship.
There was a low rumbling, and those still standing near the ship took that as their cue to back away. Once the ship was about a hundred or so feet into the air, it became visible again. They had just enough time to get a quick good look at it before it moved swiftly, vanishing into the heavens.
“Well,” Luke said, “that’s that.”
Just on time to miss anything that would demand explanation, a few cars pulled into the parking lot, parents beginning to arrive to pick them up.
“Man, a shame that Mike’s gone,” Swett said.
“Why is that?” Luke asked.
“Well, this whole thing, it was like something out of that show he loves, wasn’t it?”
A brief chuckle escaped from Luke. “We must never tell him,” he decreed. “It would kill him to have missed it.”
It was quiet. Perhaps too quiet. Perhaps Luke should have known it would be this quiet; after all, most of the Garden Snake Patrol was away, half of the other kids had other plans for the season and wouldn't be back for a few weeks at least, and even most of the adult leaders had left for a period of time.
But still, he was at least mildly shocked that there were only nine scouts there. He was there, of course, as was his younger brother Ben. The rest of his patrol seemed conspicuously absent, alas, and he knew that at least a few of them had moved onto other interests over the summer and were likely not coming back. (Luke didn’t think he’d miss Homer or Slim too much.) Justy was there, but this was not a surprise as he would never pass up a chance to lord over others, and Proctor, as usual was standing just behind and to one side of him. There was Jon Becker, Will Shmuler, and Matt Swett, looking a little lost as they stood in the spot usually filled with Garden Snakes. Luke was a little surprised to see Kenny in line with the other Garden Snakes; for whatever reason, he had thought that Kenny was going to be with the others who’d left for Sri Lanka, or wherever it was that they’d gone.
The final kid was someone he didn't recognize. A new scout, he thought, although it's not really 'new scout season'. He supposed there was no particular reason to think that there would even be a new scout season, but that idea was firmly stuck in his head, and this, then, was clearly a breach of his entirely arbitrary belief.
Oh, well, he thought, standing in the spot reserved for his patrol. It was sparse with just himself and his brother standing there, but it was better to stand in line than listen to Justy whine and rant about a breakdown in order and anarchy and dissention in the ranks and such things.
Justy stepped up to the podium and began his maniacal, wheezing laugh. It was how he started most of his speeches.
Luke sighed.
Luke checked his watch. It was a new watch, a nice one. It had a great timer function that Luke was currently playing with. Justy had laughed for two minutes, seventeen seconds. Luke was pretty sure that was on the short side. Justy had then proceeded to claim dominion over all of the world's people, yea unto the least of the creatures that crawl upon the land. That had taken nine minutes, twenty-two seconds. Then Luke got bored and decided to measure his heart rate. He was pretty sure than 53 beats per minute was low, and he started wondering if it was possible for a ranting megalomaniac to literally bore someone until their heart stopped.
Then everyone was shuffling around. Luke started, blinking and looking around. Everyone was standing in the Garden Snake line, and now they were all staring at him. Strangely, even Ben was standing over with the others.
"Uh. What did I miss?" he asked, looking around.
"I knew it!" Justy yelled, starting to turn red. "Anarchy! Dissention in the ranks! If only this were a proper military dictatorship! I should have you court martialed, then..."
Luke sighed and hit the start button on his watch.
Eleven minutes, thirty eight seconds later, the patrols were reorganized. There was just one patrol now, which Justy, in a fit of pique over Luke's insubordination, had renamed the “Disgusting Flatworms or Possibly Fluke Worms Whatever Is More Gross That Crawl Before the Might of Their Dread Master Justy” patrol. Luke wasn’t sure what he thought of the name. Hopefully they could come up with a better one.
"So," Luke said, looking at his patrol mates. "Who's in charge?"
It took three attempts to properly elect a patrol leader. The first two times, somehow Justy wound up as leader. The third time, they refused to let Justy count the ballots. To his own surprise, Luke won. He’d expected to lose to Matt Swett, since this new patrol was mostly made from former Garden Snakes. However, Swett had declined to run, saying he preferred to keep his Assistant Patrol Leader position. Both boys were pleased; they didn’t have to change the position patches sewn onto their uniforms.
They would all have to change their patrol medallions, however. After some deliberation, and in a fit of whimsy, they had decided maybe to keep the suggested name… but in a heavily condensed form. They were now the Fluke Patrol.
“Where the heck’re we gonna to get patches for that?” Swett asked.
The new kid… what was his name again? Hugh? He cleared his throat. “I may be able to provide,” he said in a flat voice.
"Right," Kenny said. He turned to Luke. "Now what, sir?"
Luke considered, then glanced at his watch. Only ten minutes left in the meeting. He looked up towards the front of the hall.
Justy was standing by the podium, directing Proctor to start hanging fourteen foot tall portraits of himself along the hall. "Ah, good, my minions can help!" he declared, pointing at Luke. "You! Minions! Start hanging my glorious likeness!"
“That a good idea, Justy?” Swett asked. “They do kind of also use this hall for other things… like a church, and stuff.”
Justy blinked, lacking comprehension. “Indeed. And I am their Lord God Yung.”
"Is it just me," Ben muttered, "Or has he gotten more crazy recently?"
“WHAT?” Becker replied.
"Why don't we just call it an early meeting?" Swett suggested, looking towards the door.
"Sounds good to me," Luke said. "Okay, Fluke Patrol, dismissed! Meeting adjourned! Whatever it is I need to say to get us out of here." They all rose from the table they were seated at and raced for the door, half of them bumping into the other half in the process.
"Anarchy!" Justy screeched as the Flukes filed out. Alas, this drew the attention of Will Shmuler, who stopped, turned, bolted back to where Justy and Procter were, and started running in circles around them while doing jumping jacks and giving off a high pitched yell each time his hands clapped above his head.
Justy screamed.
"Hey, Kenny, I thought you were going with the other AWOL Snakes?" Luke asked as they gathered around the old playground at the back of the church, waiting for their rides.
"Oh, no, I'm staying here. More or less."
"More or less?" Ben asked. "How can you more or less be staying somewhere? Isn't it sort of, you know, binary? Either you go or you stay?"
“You’d be surprised,” Becker cryptically muttered. He was temporarily in the land of the aurally aware as he was in the middle of changing the disc in his portable CD player.
Luke turned to Becker to inquire after his comment, but it was too late as he had already slipped his headphones back on. So Luke’s gaze returned to Kenny who, he noticed, had a kind of mischievous expression on his face. A sort of furtive half smile that he was trying to hide.
There had long been rumors amongst the non-Garden Snake members of the troop that there was more to this kid then it seemed. Luke had always brushed it off, but the evidence he’d always dismissed came flooding into his mind. The Klondike Derby. The sets for that play that time. That catapult thingy at the Spring Camporee. That camping trip when they’d been making spaghetti and meatballs and… Luke shuddered as he remembered what had happened with the pasta.
Luke’s mind returned to the present. "What did you do?" he asked Kenny.
Kenny seemed reluctant to speak at first but, as he thought about it, he had observed Luke in the past to be a responsible person. Besides, he was their Patrol Leader now, so it would be difficult to conduct any experiments that required the Patrol's involvement without his consent. “Alright, but you have to promise not to tell anyone, okay, Mr. Walker? I would prefer this kept as confidential as possible.”
Luke nodded. Kenny reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like small, folded square of sheet aluminum. As Kenny unfolded it, Luke was astonished that no creases were left behind. Finally, it was fully extended to the size of a document sized envelope. Kenny opened the envelope and carefully reached inside. When his hand came out again, he was holding…
Nothing.
“Is it something invisible?” Luke asked.
“No,” Kenny said, perturbed. “It is something missing.”
Everyone turned, startled, as the rear door of the church flew open. It was just Will Shmuler finally coming out, still doing jumping jacks and now wearing a portrait around his neck, his head through a hole in the canvas where previously Justy’s visage had been.
Everyone turned, startled, as suddenly there was the sound of someone clearing their throat. “Is this what you seek?” a flat voice asked. Hugh stood there, holding something in his hand. It was black, but Luke could not quite make out its shape.
Kenny looked pale. He remembered Hugh bumping into him on the way to the door, but still, the object had been in his pocket in a folded envelope… extracting it and returning the envelope unnoticed was quite a feat. How had he…? That wasn’t really the most important thing at the moment. “I should think,” he said, “you might wish to be careful with that.”
Even Becker was startled enough to remove his headphones. “Kenny, is that the PBH?”
“What’s a PBH?” Ben asked.
Hugh was holding the object up more, and Luke could see that it was circular and flat, but he still had trouble looking directly at it.
“A portable black hole,” Kenny said. "Not in the literal astronomical sense," he clarified, "but as in the object from popular animated programs."
“What, from like in Looney Tunes?” Swett asked.
“What is a ‘looney tune’?” Hugh asked.
“That’s me!” Shmuler replied excitedly.
Kenny ignored him, keeping his attention focused on Hugh. “You need to be very careful with that,” Kenny said. “It is calibrated for use with this end attached to a specific wall within my laboratory. With it in a different spatial location, it can be quite dangerous. There is no knowing where the terminus is located.”
“I know,” Hugh replied.
Kenny was unsure how to take that response. Did he mean he knew it was dangerous, or that he knew where the terminus was? Or both? Before he could ask for elaboration, however, Becker spoke.
“You should just give that back to us, okay, Hugh?”
“Okay,” Hugh replied.
“No!” Kenny yelled. Hugh flung the PBH Frisbee-like towards them. It expanded in diameter mid-air until it was more than wide enough to envelope the entire group of them. There was a sudden VWORP noise, and then the universe turned inside-out. Everything smelled purple.
Luke woke up on a beach. It was actually quite placid and warm, even with the sun low in the sky. The crashing waves made a lovely sort of lullaby and, for a moment, Luke thought about laying back down and taking a nap.
"Mr. Walker!" someone cried. Luke groaned and sat up, looking around. Kenny was standing at the top of a sand dune, waving his arms wildly. Luke sighed and stood, using a metal pole that had been lying on the ground beside him to brace himself as he rose. He suddenly realized what the pole was: it was most of one leg from the church’s swing set. He dropped it back to the ground.
"What's up?" he called out to Kenny, waving his arms to signal that he had heard. He started to trudge up the dune, brushing sand off of his uniform and moving slowly and carefully to be sure of his footing.
He paused at the top, looking out over a massive expanse of desert in one direction, a calm ocean to the other. "Where are we?" he asked.
"Kenny says it's Egypt," Becker said, climbing over the dune to sit down, staring out over the sea. "That's the Mediterranean, I guess." He removed the disc from his player, blew on the lens, and replaced the disc.
"Red Sea," Swett popped up. As far as Luke could tell, the rest of the patrol was laying on the shady side of the sand dune, out of sight until he reached the top. "That's east, right?" He pulled out a compass, peering at it. "Mediterranean would be north, so we're on the coast of the Red Sea."
"Alright, back up." Luke flopped down at the top of the sand dune. It was nice, if a bit warm. "Why are we in Egypt?"
"The portable black hole was calibrated to attach to one specific point, but that calibration was dependent on knowing where both ends were located. With our end in the wrong location, the exit could have been anywhere," Kenny said. “At the very least, given the PBH’s limited range, it was likely we’d remain on Earth, but as it is we are most fortunate we didn’t end up in the ocean, or a high altitude with no ground beneath us.”
"Alright, alright," Luke said, reasonably. "Can we just go back through?”
“Yes, theoretically.”
“What do you mean, ‘theoretically’?” Ben inquired.
“The hole on this end is gone,” Kenny replied. “There appear to be footsteps,” he pointed, “going off in that direction.”
“Ah,” Luke said. He really needed to assess the situation. He thought of the metal pole. “Is everyone okay?” he asked. “All intact? No missing limbs?”
Everyone muttered affirmative replied.
“And all present and accounted for?” Luke asked. “Flukes, sound off."
"WHAT?" Becker said.
"Yo," Swett added.
“Yup,” Ben said.
"Present,” Kenny replied.
“My hovercraft is full of eels!” Shmuler shouted. (Before disappearing, Mike had given him some Monty Python video tapes, in the hopes of channeling his strangeness in a more positive direction.)
"I'm here, too," Luke said. “That everyone.” He paused. “Well, almost everyone.”
They all turned to look in the direction that the footprints led. They disappeared off into the horizon.
Hugh.
“How far do you reckon he could have gotten?”
“I’m not sure how long we were all unconscious, although given the time difference and the fact that the sun seems to be on the rise, I should guess three to four hours,” Kenny mentioned. “The unconsciousness was an unusual side effect, probably because the PBH was not calibrated correctly. Obviously, Hugh recovered first, but there’s no way to know how much of a lead he has on us.”
"Well, we can't just stay here, forever speculating," Luke said. It was starting to get hotter and they were all sweating. The fact that they didn’t exactly have any supplies such as food and water was certainly worrisome, too. He pointed off in the direction the footprints lead. "I don’t suppose anyone has any idea if there are any towns in that direction, and how far they might be?"
Ben was already pulling a map out of his backpack. “Matt, can I borrow your compass?”
“Sure thing.” He tossed it to Ben.
Ben spread the map out on the dune, worked with the compass a bit while consulting it, all while frowning.
"Why do you have a map of Egypt in your backpack?"
"I’m working on the Archaeology merit badge, remember?" Ben replied. "I have, like, three dozen maps in there. Okay, I think we're here, which means that the nearest town is... either Aswan, if we head west into the desert, or Qusir, if we head along the coast. Either way... uh... Guys, it's a couple days walk to either."
“And the footprints,” Kenny observed, “head in the direction of the desert.”
"This is a problem," Swett said.
"I don't suppose any of you speak Arabic, by any chance?" Luke asked.
Shmuler, Ben, and Kenny shook their heads in unison. Becker was in his own headphone-induced world. Swett shrugged and said, “أستطيع”
Everyone stopped and stared at him.
"What? I can't want to learn a new language?" Swett asked. "I wanted to expand my horizons." He just hoped no one asked him to say anything more, so he wouldn’t have to admit that that was as far as he’d managed to get on the day he’d decided to learn Arabic before he got bored, gave up, and went outside to play some street hockey.
Luke shrugged his shoulders. “Well, let’s get going, everyone. Looks like we’ve got quite a walk in front of us.”
An hour later, Becker’s batteries died. “Aw, shucks,” he said, pulling his headphones off from his ears and hanging them over his neck.
About forty-five minutes after that still, there was a problem. “Gotta pee… gotta pee…” Shmuler was saying as he hopped around madly.
“So do it,” Luke suggested.
“Where?” Shmuler pleaded.
“Anywhere,” Luke suggested.
Will Shmuler looked around. All around them was flat, sand colored nothingness.
“But there isn’t anywhere!” Shmuler complained. “At least, not anywhere private…”
“Well,” Luke said, “just walk ten or twenty feet back the way we came, turn your back to us, we’ll turn our backs to you…”
“No!” Shmuler insisted. His face suddenly scrunched up into a strange contorted grimace as he doubled over and clenched his legs together.
“What’re you doing?” Luke demanded.
Shmuler’s face relaxed and he stood. “Gonna hold it,” he insisted. “Should be fine now. Less talk. More walk.”
Luke shrugged.
They continued on their way, Shmuler the quietest the others had ever observed him.
The sun was high in the sky as the heat beat down upon them. It was definitely late morning, local time. None of them were looking forward to being out in the afternoon. They had to find shelter.
Swett shielded his eyes with his hand and gazed off into the distance. “What is that?” he asked.
“What’s what?” Luke replied.
Swett pointed.
Luke gazed. Off in the distance, he saw… “I dunno, but there’s something there. Come on, let’s continue.”
They kept watching, and the fuzzy blur on the horizon gradually came into focus.
"Oh, come on,” Swett said. “That’s almost cliché.”
“And you have a problem with that, why?” Becker asked him.
It was a few palm trees. And, of course, where there were trees…
“That’s a good point. Come on!” He made as if to run, but before he could do so a hand gripped his upper arm.
“I wouldn’t,” Luke said.
“Indeed,” Kenny concurred. “That is likely still a good two or three miles away.”
“Maybe,” Swett pondered, “I’ll walk.”
As they got closer, what they saw astounded them. A small grouping of palm trees stood there, on the shore of a still, clear pool of water.
“Oh my God, yes!” Swett exclaimed, as he decided that they had reached a distance where running was a possibility. He tore across the sand full tilt, reached the shore, stopped dead with a loud, resounding clang, and fell backwards into the sand.
“Ow!” Well, he was still alive. That was good. His palm flew to the red spot forming on his forehead. “Son of a… Ow!”
The others came closer now, and carefully reached out with their hands. There was something there, hard, cold, and frictionless to the touch.
“Fascinating,” Kenny said.
“Aw, man,” Ben said. “It’s like that episode when they got rid of Wesley.”
“Not quite,” Kenny explained, running his hand over the invisible thing before them. “This isn’t a force field blocking the way to the water. There is no water.”
Swett was quite annoyed. “Son of a…”
"It would appear that there is something cloaked here,” Kenny continued. “The cloak is creating the illusion of an oasis.”
“Well that’s dumb. Why hide something with something else that would draw attention?” Becker wondered.
“We need to figure this out,” Luke said. “Is this thing an object we can go around, or is it a wall blocking our path? Maybe it’s Hugh trying to stop us following him?”
“Leave it to me!” Shmuler shouted. “I know what to do!” He placed one arm against the surface of whatever it was and started running off, skipping as he did so. Sure enough, after a few minutes he seemed to disappear around an invisible curved surface.
“Shmuler?” Luke called out.
“Wait there!” Shmuler replied. “Can you see me?”
“No,” Luke replied. “What do you see?”
“Wait there!”
“Is something wrong?” Luke asked.
There was no response. Luke listened carefully. He heard something. A zipper?
He was distracted by that thought when suddenly the ground started rumbling and the space before them shimmered. The oasis – water and palm trees – disappeared, replaced by… something.
It looked like a giant cylinder, perfectly smooth, as wide as the oasis had been, perhaps as tall as a three story building, and, for some reason, pink.
“Noooooo!” Shmuler screamed.
Luke took off in the direction Shmuler had gone, followed quickly by the rest of the Flukes.
They found Shmuler on all fours, apparently unharmed but with an extremely dejected look on his face. “It ain’t fair,” he moaned. “I just need a minute’s privacy…”
Then Luke noticed an opening on the side of the ship. It was dark within the opening, and within it stood a shadowed figure.
“I had hoped you would come,” the figure said. It retreated inward, saying, “Follow.”
It was Hugh.
There was some brief deliberation on whether or not they should do as… instructed? Asked? Hopefully the latter. In the end, it came down to two basic possibilities: Hugh meant them harm, or Hugh didn’t mean them harm. If he meant them harm, he could have done something while they were still unconscious on the beach. Besides, not following into whatever the structure was meant, what? Trekking days through a dessert with no water?
So they followed.
Inside was a dark and featureless corridor. It led them to a room that looked like some sort of control room out of a low budget BBC science fiction serial. There was a large screen on one wall, and facing it were two control panels. At one of them stood Hugh, still wearing a Boy Scout uniform.
“Hugh,” Luke said. “What is this all about?”
“I will answer your question,” Hugh said. “But first, please allow me to refresh you.” He walked over to a device on one wall, pressed a few buttons on it, and opened up a compartment. From it, he withdrew a trey upon which sat some glasses and a large, sweating pitcher containing a clear liquid. “You must be in need of some hydration. Please accept this dihydrogen monoxide.”
Kenny walked forward and gladly took a glass. He noticed he was the only one who did so, so he turned back to the others. “Water,” he translated.
Now four other thirsty people eagerly rushed forward to get some.
Kenny turned back to Hugh. “Who are you?” Kenny asked. “Where do you come from?”
“My name,” Hugh began, his voice still strangely toneless, “is difficult for your phonetics. On this world, for convenience I have chosen the name Hugh as an inconspicuous designation. It will suffice.”
“If you share a last name with the director of Heat, I am flippin’ out!” Swett exclaimed.
The others ignored Swett.
Hugh continued. “Forty-seven years ago, my partner and I were conducting a reconnaissance flight of your planet to determine if you had yet reached societal level worthy of initiating contact. However, we suffered technical difficulties and were forced to make a crash landing. My partner was terminated by the crash and the ship was severely damaged.”
“Half a century, and no one else came looking for you?” Becker asked. “No search parties?”
“It is always possible that a planet we are studying may show hostility towards us. It is our way, to help limit contact with such cultures, that our reconnaissance parties are always small… and expendable. If a mission is lost, the planet to which it was sent is marked unsuitable for further contact and no further missions are sent.”
“Harsh.”
“Necessary. However, while alone, I still lived. It took my first decade here, but repairs were completed. The ship is functional once more. Alas, this presented another problem.”
“And this is where he tells us his ship is fueled on human flesh,” Swett said. The others shot him a dirty look, and he decided it would be best to sit out the rest of this conversation.
There was a sound, like liquid swiftly being emptied through plumbing. Everyone turned and noticed an additional door on the same wall as the exit to the corridor they had come in through. The door opened and Shmuler stepped out, drying his hands with a disposable towel. “I miss anything?”
“Nothing you’d find that exciting,” Ben informed him. “We’re just in the middle of an exposition dump.”
“Ooh!” Shmuler then said, his eyes falling on the pitcher of water. “Dihydrogen monoxide! My favorite!” He helped himself to a glass, gargling before he swallowed.
“Please,” Kenny said, doing his best to ignore Shmuler, “continue. You said there was a problem?”
“Yes. Our technology requires two operators to activate.”
“Why?” Becker asked.
“It just is,” Hugh replied. “It is the way of our culture.”
“There’s no way around it?” Becker persisted. “I mean, come on. Your situation is a perfect example of why that's stupid.”
“It is difficult to explain the reasoning in a short span of time when we lack a common frame of reference,” Hugh replied.
“But it doesn’t make sense!”
“In my time on your planet, I have observed many things that, even after almost five decades, make little sense to me. Why do you still fight over a fuel source that is finite and pollutes your planet, when you have reached a sufficient technological level to produce cleaner alternative sources? Why do you sell cylindrical meat products in packages of ten, and the breaded exterior coverings for them in packages of eight? Why would you listen to auditory entertainments at decibel levels guaranteed to cause cochlear damage? These are things I do not understand. If you can explain them to me, I will try to explain our ways to you.”
Becker opened his mouth as if to reply, thought better of it, and closed his mouth again.
“As to the technological problem I needed to overcome, although I feared it may be futile, I hoped that if I traveled your planet I may eventually come across an individual to whom I might turn for assistance. I searched for many, many years. Indeed, I was beginning to lose hope. But then I found the one I sought. And so, facilitated by the fact that I resembled a male juvenile human, I joined your youth organization to get closer to the one I needed.
“I was trying to figure out how to bring you here to my ship, when my scanning device also detected much to my surprise that one of you was possessing of a stable, portable, trans-dimensional conduit. It was a simple matter to recalibrate it to terminate at least the general vicinity of my craft, and then leave a trail for you to follow to me.”
Kenny arched an eyebrow. A simple matter, was it? Anyway, “Why didn’t you just ask for our help?”
“It is difficult for me to tell with you humans how you will respond to such things. I could not risk that you would supply a negative response.”
Kenny shrugged. “I cannot argue that in some cases you would be right to be extremely cautious with humans. But I should like to think that you would have found a more positive response with us. In any case, we are here now. What can I do to help you?”
“You are not the one whose help I require,” Hugh replied.
Kenny blinked. “What.”
It is someone else I seek.
“But…” Kenny was confused. This was sciencey stuff! This was his area! “But…”
“The one whose help I require,” Hugh said, turning to Luke, “is you.”
It was Luke’s turn. “What.”
“Perhaps I should explain more,” Hugh said. “Our technology requires the living genetic imprint of two registered operators in order to be activated. As my partner had ceased living, this became an impossibility. However, our two planets have a very similar bio-chemical makeup. And our two species seem to have had very similar evolutionary patterns. The chance, while extremely small, was higher than zero percent that I might be able to find a human with a similar enough genetic code to my former partner as to be able to use that person as a specimen to trick the system into activating. Although human DNA is somewhat simplistic in comparison to ours, having roughly half the standard number of chromosome pairs the activation computer should look for, I believe I have been able to produce a program to compensate for the differences.”
“Um… Specimen?” Luke swallowed. “You don’t… you don’t, like, need to harvest parts from my body, or liquefy me, or anything like that, do you?”
“No,” Hugh replied. “You need but to place the palm of your hand on the right side control panel, within the activation box, as I do the same on the left side control panel. The ship will scan our genetic codes and, if a match is confirmed, it should activate. Please, you are the best hope I have had.”
“But what about… well… I don’t wanna go to another planet!” Luke insisted. “Not right now, at least.”
“This is also unnecessary,” Hugh replied. “Your genetic code will only be required to activate the ship’s systems. Once that is done, and as long as I am not foolish enough to deactivate any of them before returning home, I should be able to pilot the ship by myself.”
“Oh,” Luke said, brightening up a bit, “okay.” He walked over to the right control panel. “This box here?” he asked, pointing to a smooth screen on the surface of the panel.
Hugh nodded affirmatively.
Luke moved his hand towards the panel, pausing just before he made contact. “This won’t… this won’t, like, hurt or nothing, will it?”
“The process should be completely painless.” Hugh moved to do the same on the left control panel.
“Well, here goes nothing.” Luke made contact.
Nothing happened.
He raised his palm and lowered it again. Still nothing. Again. Nothing again.
“Oh, come on!” Luke said to whatever fates cared to listen. “When I said, ‘here goes nothing,’ it was not a literal request!”
“We have failed,” Hugh said. “My search, it shall never end.” He sighed. "I shall never see home again."
“Maybe,” Kenny said, “it is time for you to try a different path. I have… I have facilities. We could work together there. We could accomplish such greatness. And maybe, in time, we could even find another solution for your problem.”
Hugh, his hand still uselessly on the control panel, turned his head to face Kenny. “You would extend such an offer to me?” His voice had the faintest sign of intonation to it, sounding vaguely hopeful.
Kenny smiled. “It would be my honor.”
“Hold on,” Ben said, walking over to Luke’s side. “What if we do this?” He placed his hand over his brother’s.
The effect was immediate as the ship came alive around them.
“What did you do?” Kenny asked, dumbfounded.
“Well,” Ben replied, “Hugh said that humans have only half the chromy-whazzits that his people do. And I figure I must have similar DNA to my brother, what with us being brothers and all. So if Luke was compatible, maybe I was too! And if he is half, and I’m half, together we should be one big whole!”
“But…” Kenny sputtered. “But genetics doesn’t work that way! Of course as brothers you have similar genetic structures, statistically you should share approximately 50% of your chromosomes! However, the shared portion would not be cumulative in the scan! It should have only been counted once! So if Luke’s 23 pairs, or 46 chromosomes total, were only half of the required number, and the half duplicated between you two contributed nothing new, you could at most only add approximately 23 more chromosomes, meaning we’d still be about 25% short of what would be needed for a match to activate the ship!”
Ben shrugged. “Don’t knock it, it worked.”
“But…” Kenny still couldn’t wrap his head around everything. “But…”
“Hey, don’t stress too much about it,” Becker told him. “Hugh said he had a program to compensate for the difference, maybe it did work but just not as well as he hoped, and Ben just gave it the extra jump start it needed.”
“But…”
“And don’t worry,” he said, able to read Kenny. “You’ve still got me as a lab partner!”
Kenny sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose I do.” He turned to Hugh. “So, is your ship functional?”
“Sufficiently, yes,” Hugh said. “Thank you, Luke and Ben Walker,” he then said. “You have saved me.”
“Think nothing of it,” Luke replied modestly.
“Would you like to be brought home?” Hugh asked. “It is quite a small detour for me, now that my ship is functional once more.”
“Oh please, yes,” Luke said. “Although I look forward to explaining to my parents where we’ve all been for the better part of a day.”
“That will not be a problem,” Hugh assured him. “The relativistic properties of the ship’s drive allow for some reverse time passage. It is very limited, but should be sufficient so that you will not have been missed.”
“Oh, okay,” Luke replied.
“Convenient,” Kenny huffed.
A very short time later, they were being dropped off behind the church. The ship landed in the field behind the rear parking lot, cloaked once more to blend perfectly in, and everyone disembarked.
“I believe this is yours,” Hugh said, holding out a black object for Kenny to take.
“Yes, it is,” Kenny replied, replacing it in its container. “Going to be a pain to recalibrate,” he muttered as he walked off to examine the damage to the swing set. “I’ll be up all evening when I get home, and that won’t be until after I fix things here…”
Becker followed Kenny to see if he could help, or at least to offer moral support.
Hugh turned to Luke now. “Once again, I offer my gratitude. Would you allow me to present you all with a token?”
Luke nodded anxiously, wondering what strange and mystical gift they might be about to receive.
Hugh extended an open hand, palm up. In the hand were a number of objects that looked like small, circular pieces of cloth with designs embroidered upon them. “I synthesized the pattern using an amalgamation of your mental images after the finalized name had been decided upon,” Hugh explained.
Luke picked one up and examined the image upon it. It appeared to be a large worm, anthropomorphized in such a way that it had arms, and holding those arms in a pose that strongly suggested an indifferent shrug.
There appeared to be sufficient patches for them each to have one, so Luke took them all to hand out later. “Thank you, Hugh.”
“Thank you, Luke Walker. And you, Ben Walker. In fact, thank you to all of you.”
“Will we ever see you again?”
“The future is not determined, and all things are possible. For this moment, I can now go home and am eager to do so. But past that, who knows?”
“Anyway, Hugh,” Luke said, holding up one of the patrol medallions once more, “make sure you synthesize an extra one of these for yourself." He grinned warmly at Hugh. "We’ll always consider you a Fluke.”
For the first time, Hugh’s face seemed to hold something close to an emotive expression. If there were any cultural similarities between his species and humans, then Luke would take what he saw as a slight smile. Hugh then bowed his head, turned, and disappeared into his ship.
There was a low rumbling, and those still standing near the ship took that as their cue to back away. Once the ship was about a hundred or so feet into the air, it became visible again. They had just enough time to get a quick good look at it before it moved swiftly, vanishing into the heavens.
“Well,” Luke said, “that’s that.”
Just on time to miss anything that would demand explanation, a few cars pulled into the parking lot, parents beginning to arrive to pick them up.
“Man, a shame that Mike’s gone,” Swett said.
“Why is that?” Luke asked.
“Well, this whole thing, it was like something out of that show he loves, wasn’t it?”
A brief chuckle escaped from Luke. “We must never tell him,” he decreed. “It would kill him to have missed it.”
Matt's Notes & Disclaimers
Well, this story has
been a while in coming, hasn’t it? Nothing new for Boy Scouts ½, I suppose I must admit. For once, though, I get to
blame someone other than myself!
Blame is perhaps a strong word to use, however. I don’t wish to imply any ill feelings towards Hughes in this regard.
To sum up for the readers: months ago, I asked him if he might be interested in writing Boy Scouts ½, part 6. I explained the extremely basic premise that I would like, on average once every main storyline, to then have a story that cuts back to the mystical land of Massachusetts to see what is going on back there. He agreed, and so then it was time to wait for the magical results!
At one point, after a bit of time passed, I asked for an update and Hughes shared what he had thus far. A bit strange, I thought. I certainly didn’t expect them all to suddenly end up in Egypt, and (since, presumably, it would defeat the purpose of “back at home” stories for them to not be back at home) I looked forward to seeing how the heck they would get out of that before the end of a single story!
More time passed. And more time. I began to get worried. More time passed. I finally contacted Hughes again. He seemed mortified, and explained the things that had cropped up in his life that had prevented him from finishing the story, and in fact caused it to for a time completely slip his mind. I shan’t go into great detail here, but while disappointing to me personally, his reasons were understandable and I do not hold a grudge against him. (I may even ask him in the future if he is interested in writing again, but this time I will also ask him to make sure up front that he can dedicate the time for it before he says yes!)
Anyway, while he said he still wished he could complete the story himself, he also said he knew he would not have time to do so for months still, and gave me leave to take over for him. And so I did. And thus, I took what he had so far, which hadn’t changed from when he had previously shared his progress with me.
I had quite a task. First, what he had so far needed some revision. Hughes had forgotten a few characters (such as Shmuler!), some of the character voices seemed a bit off (such as Kenny seeming all too eager to show things off to anyone) and the technology involved with Kenny’s transportation device was all wrong (being some sort of remote control that produced a Sliders-like wormhole rather than a portable black hole out of Looney Tunes, made possible after Kenny had studied the effects of mallet-space in Japan.) These were all things that I would have worked with Hughes to fix after he delivered a completed draft, but now I ended up having to just make the alterations myself. (And, of course, I also made some further amendments as I wrote the rest of the story, to help set things up properly and keep it all flowing as one work.) Hopefully, though, Hughes will still recognize the essence of what he wrote within the first half of this story.
As for the second half... Well, the partial draft from Hughes ended just after Swett reviled he spoke Arabic. (Although, not wishing to have to research more Arabic myself, I quickly amended it to be that he really only knew the one bit... which, if you are curious, Google tells me translates as, “I can.”) So basically, all I had was the setting up of characters and the base situation: Here’s who we have, and they suddenly find themselves in Egypt! And there is a mysterious new member of the patrol! Hughes didn’t even offer a name for the new kid, so once you all figure out who the director of Heat was, you can thank me for the awful and cliché pun. The only note I received for whatever Hughes might have planned for the second half was, “The new kid was going to be an alien. Sort of. Kind of thing. You know.”
No clues to his motivation. (And in the draft from Hughes, he wasn’t even necessarily responsible for them being in Egypt. Rather, that was more a matter of Kenny irresponsibly playing with the aforementioned Sliders-esque remote control.) Was he good? Was he evil? How would everyone get home from Egypt? No bloody clue!
Well, it was up to me to come up with something!
And so I did. Thanks to Jason Bertovich for offering some notes on my revised version of the first half, as well as being a receptacle for my brainstorming on the second half.
And, of course, thanks to Hughes for his work on the original draft of the first half! I do hope that there may be an opportunity in the future where you may have more time available during a period that would coincide with another opening in the Boy Scouts ½ writing schedule. (Or, of course, you don’t even need to wait for an opening if you have an idea for a side story!)
Well, onto the more dry matters: disclaimers and such! Not as much, really, this time. The usual stuff about this story not being endorsed by or meant to reflect the values of the Boy Scouts of America! (Although, if you guys don’t mind me indulging on a side note, values-wise I am pleased that the BSA has relaxed somewhat on an area where I would have found myself in disagreement with them concerning membership policies... Now if only they would relax that policy as far as adults go as well as youth! But I digress... They made a huge step in the right direction, so good for them!)
I suppose I don’t need to disclaim anything concerning Ranma ½ this time... Probably for the first time in a Boy Scouts ½ mainline story! But I should think that this is the first such story to not include any of the characters who are Jusenkyo cursed, as this story is set in Massachusetts, and they’re all in Tokyo busy racking up more things to disclaim. So I suppose that’s it for disclaiming! Still, even if a disclaimer is unnecessary, I’d at least like to acknowledge that Boy Scouts ½ would not be here without the prior existence of the works of Takahashi-sensei.
Well, see you next time as we return to Japan!
– Matthew Atanian, 18 January 2014
Blame is perhaps a strong word to use, however. I don’t wish to imply any ill feelings towards Hughes in this regard.
To sum up for the readers: months ago, I asked him if he might be interested in writing Boy Scouts ½, part 6. I explained the extremely basic premise that I would like, on average once every main storyline, to then have a story that cuts back to the mystical land of Massachusetts to see what is going on back there. He agreed, and so then it was time to wait for the magical results!
At one point, after a bit of time passed, I asked for an update and Hughes shared what he had thus far. A bit strange, I thought. I certainly didn’t expect them all to suddenly end up in Egypt, and (since, presumably, it would defeat the purpose of “back at home” stories for them to not be back at home) I looked forward to seeing how the heck they would get out of that before the end of a single story!
More time passed. And more time. I began to get worried. More time passed. I finally contacted Hughes again. He seemed mortified, and explained the things that had cropped up in his life that had prevented him from finishing the story, and in fact caused it to for a time completely slip his mind. I shan’t go into great detail here, but while disappointing to me personally, his reasons were understandable and I do not hold a grudge against him. (I may even ask him in the future if he is interested in writing again, but this time I will also ask him to make sure up front that he can dedicate the time for it before he says yes!)
Anyway, while he said he still wished he could complete the story himself, he also said he knew he would not have time to do so for months still, and gave me leave to take over for him. And so I did. And thus, I took what he had so far, which hadn’t changed from when he had previously shared his progress with me.
I had quite a task. First, what he had so far needed some revision. Hughes had forgotten a few characters (such as Shmuler!), some of the character voices seemed a bit off (such as Kenny seeming all too eager to show things off to anyone) and the technology involved with Kenny’s transportation device was all wrong (being some sort of remote control that produced a Sliders-like wormhole rather than a portable black hole out of Looney Tunes, made possible after Kenny had studied the effects of mallet-space in Japan.) These were all things that I would have worked with Hughes to fix after he delivered a completed draft, but now I ended up having to just make the alterations myself. (And, of course, I also made some further amendments as I wrote the rest of the story, to help set things up properly and keep it all flowing as one work.) Hopefully, though, Hughes will still recognize the essence of what he wrote within the first half of this story.
As for the second half... Well, the partial draft from Hughes ended just after Swett reviled he spoke Arabic. (Although, not wishing to have to research more Arabic myself, I quickly amended it to be that he really only knew the one bit... which, if you are curious, Google tells me translates as, “I can.”) So basically, all I had was the setting up of characters and the base situation: Here’s who we have, and they suddenly find themselves in Egypt! And there is a mysterious new member of the patrol! Hughes didn’t even offer a name for the new kid, so once you all figure out who the director of Heat was, you can thank me for the awful and cliché pun. The only note I received for whatever Hughes might have planned for the second half was, “The new kid was going to be an alien. Sort of. Kind of thing. You know.”
No clues to his motivation. (And in the draft from Hughes, he wasn’t even necessarily responsible for them being in Egypt. Rather, that was more a matter of Kenny irresponsibly playing with the aforementioned Sliders-esque remote control.) Was he good? Was he evil? How would everyone get home from Egypt? No bloody clue!
Well, it was up to me to come up with something!
And so I did. Thanks to Jason Bertovich for offering some notes on my revised version of the first half, as well as being a receptacle for my brainstorming on the second half.
And, of course, thanks to Hughes for his work on the original draft of the first half! I do hope that there may be an opportunity in the future where you may have more time available during a period that would coincide with another opening in the Boy Scouts ½ writing schedule. (Or, of course, you don’t even need to wait for an opening if you have an idea for a side story!)
Well, onto the more dry matters: disclaimers and such! Not as much, really, this time. The usual stuff about this story not being endorsed by or meant to reflect the values of the Boy Scouts of America! (Although, if you guys don’t mind me indulging on a side note, values-wise I am pleased that the BSA has relaxed somewhat on an area where I would have found myself in disagreement with them concerning membership policies... Now if only they would relax that policy as far as adults go as well as youth! But I digress... They made a huge step in the right direction, so good for them!)
I suppose I don’t need to disclaim anything concerning Ranma ½ this time... Probably for the first time in a Boy Scouts ½ mainline story! But I should think that this is the first such story to not include any of the characters who are Jusenkyo cursed, as this story is set in Massachusetts, and they’re all in Tokyo busy racking up more things to disclaim. So I suppose that’s it for disclaiming! Still, even if a disclaimer is unnecessary, I’d at least like to acknowledge that Boy Scouts ½ would not be here without the prior existence of the works of Takahashi-sensei.
Well, see you next time as we return to Japan!
– Matthew Atanian, 18 January 2014