Defenders of Destiny, book one, the Discovery of Astrolaris

Joseph and Dad arrived at the pit before dawn the next morning. It looked like no one had visited the site. They began digging with the backhoe. Ever since Joseph could remember, he loved working with the backhoe with his dad and today was no exception – except that today he was more excited than ever. The four o’clock wakeup call that morning from his dad would normally have been unbearable, but today it was no problem.

  As they continued digging, they discovered that the sphere appeared to have a large tube extending from one end. They continued to dig.

  Suddenly, Joseph exclaimed with extreme excitement, “It’s a robot!”

  They had now uncovered what looked like the back of a giant metal head, neck and shoulders.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” reasoned Joseph’s dad, “it could be an ancient sculpture or monument.”

  “Yeah, right,” Joseph’s voice contained a hint of sarcasm. “It doesn’t look like copper, bronze, or even iron to me.” Joseph had been studying the stone, bronze, and iron ages in his world history class at school.

  “But how could it be a robot if it doesn’t have any seams or joints? How would it move?” queried Dad. “Look, here where the head meets the neck and where the neck meets the shoulders, it looks like one solid piece. Right? Who knows what kind of advanced metallurgies ancient people may have had and lost?”

  Joseph quickly responded. “I’ll bet they can’t make metal this hard, even today. There is still not a scratch on it, even after digging and scraping with the backhoe.”

  “Maybe it’s not ancient, maybe it’s modern,” Dad continued, without conviction but interested to see what other observations Joseph had made.

  “Then how do you explain the crater it’s lying in, and all those broken geodes? And why is it buried so deep? And why is there so much cactus and sagebrush growing over it? I’ll bet it’s been here for hundreds of years! Maybe thousands,” Joseph reasoned proudly.

  As the last word left Joseph’s lips, Dad realized the folly of his own argument. He knew what Joseph would say next.

  Simultaneously, Dad conceded thoughtfully, while Joseph announced victoriously with finality, “IT’S from SPACE!”

  Suddenly, Joseph remembered the pictograph on the rock above the pit.

  “Dad, this is in the rock art. Remember, it was flying through the sky, and lying in the ground.”

  “Someone must have seen it land!” exclaimed Dad with excitement, as he leaped from the backhoe and clambered up the hill to have another look at the pictograph.

  As they looked at the rock art, they realized that it was a series of pictures depicting the events of the crash landing of the robot. The second to the last one showed the robot lying under the ground.

  “What about this last one?” Joseph paused, “Something feels strange.”

  “Déjà vu,” whispered Dad, as he looked at the last pictograph of the robot lying in a hole with the primitive drawings of two men, one a little shorter than the other, holding spears and standing on top of the giant robot.

  “They must have defeated it with their spears,” speculated Dad.

  “Those aren’t spears—they’re shovels, whispered Joseph, “…it’s us.”

  Dad leaned a little closer to the rock, “They do look like shovels; I think you might be right…but how could that be?” he pondered soberly, almost to himself.

  Joseph answered the question, “It was probably drawn by an ancient medicine man, maybe he had a vision—don’t forget the déjà vu.”