Piloting the Cherokee's stiff old suspension toward the north end of town -- where the visitor from space was rumored to be hidden -- Mark thought. If true, it's the worst-kept secret since the Vice Principal got a hairpiece.
He kept passing cars full of teens -- some from TNPHS and others from Mojave College. It felt more like Saturday than a school night.
Alex waved at some guys wearing helmets and pads, who zipped along on gleaming pairs of sneaker skates -- the latest fad -- slower than cars, but a lot more fun and great for shortcuts whenever traffic got dense.
"Hey froggi. Sup!" Alex shouted as one of them came swooping by to slap a friendly palm on the Jeep's hood.
"Hey girl," the wiry boy answered as he spun around once then gave her fist a friendly punch. "Seen it yet?"
"It?"
"You know... it! Some of us are high on the waiting list. We're all taking bets, whether it's real."
No way, man!" said another skater, barely missing a minivan that swerved into the left turn lane. Mark liked these guys, but they were crazier than kava chewers.
"I bet it's a rubber puppet," the second one sneered. "Like that robotic thing, last Halloween."
"Yeah? Well Benny got close last night and he says --"
"Benny's mind is torqued from too much gaming, man. Can't tell what's real anymore. Come on, what're the odds?"
"Yeah but what if? Sick! They're only letting a few visitors at a time and you gotta have cash. But I'll put in a good word for you, Alex. Maybe get your friends in --"
A warning bloop from a police car interrupted the skater, who shrugged with a blithe grin. Spinning 360, he vaulted the boulevard's center divider.
"Get us in where?" Alex shouted after him. But he was gone in a flash of turbo luminescent rims. Cops didn't even bother chasing the X-guys anymore. They could dart through an intersection and vanish like smoke.
Something's up, all right, Mark thought as he followed Barry's hushed directions, along one dismally similar suburban side street after another. The whole town feels it.
Or at least the part that was tuned into coolstuf -- the mesh of interests approved by those between fifteen and twenty. You didn't have to log into some avachat room to get a ruling on what's hot or not. It splattered like rain across bboard postings, a spray of half-sentence Instant Messages scrolling down specs and palm-pads. It murmered into earpieces and swarmed over the foldscreens or pullscreens of countless cellphones.
Pretty sharp, Mark admitted, grudgingly. Whatever it turned out to be -- probably a hoax -- somebody deserved credit for the town's best mob-ilization since he had arrived. Even better, the world of adults appeared clueless. So far, this whole thing seemed limited to the young.
I take that back, Mark thought suddenly, pulling the jeep over to one side. Just ahead, a police car had parked along the very block where Barry said the vice president of the Math Club lived. Two officers were just getting out, slamming doors.
With a hiss, the black-haired boy pointed.
"Look. There's two of those disguised Cirocco vans, just pulling up!"
"This is creepy," Alex said. A crowd was gathering, mostly teens, milling about and peering at the house in question.
"What do we do? Take a look? Someone outside may know --"
Someone rapped hard on the right-rear door. Barry yelped as pale face suddenly pressed against the glass, fogging it with hasty breath.
"Tang! Thank god it's you. Open up!"
"What in --" Mark didn't have time to object as Barry let in a figure, swaddled by a cowled windbreaker.
"Drive!" the boy croaked.
"But --"
"Get out of here! Then I'll explain."
Against his better judgement, Mark put the car in gear, turning carefully so as not to attract attention. His uninvited passenger sighed, quivering as he looked back at the commotion.
"Alex and Mark, this is Tom," said Barry. "Tom Spencer. That was his house with the police car in front."
Alex reached around, offering her hand to the nervous sophomore. "What's up? Want something to drink? We have Pepsi. Or a drumstick?"
Good move, Mark approved, offering a frightened person something as commonplace as food. Though he kept blinking rapidly, the Spencer kid seemed to calm a bit as he slurped a can of soda.
"They... came less than an hour ago. Just busted right in and took him!"
"Who came? The police? Didn't they just arrive?" Alex stayed scrupulously calm as the boy shook his head.
"Jocks! It was Larry Gornet and some of his football pals!" In the rear-view, Mark saw Tom take another long slurp, before resuming his rapid babble. "They came by for the first time last night, polite as could be. Paid me fifty dollars to let them in. Just wanted to have a look, they said. I should've listened to Dwight. He told me not to! But fifty will help buy that new hacking algorithm I wanted all year. So I let 'em in." He kicked the door next to him, reverberating the Jeep's rickety cab. "Idiot!"
"Chill, Tom. You say they paid you to let them look at something. What did they pay to see?"
But he was chattering now, telling it his own way.
"By this morning, it seemed like every kid in town knew! People kept sneaking up to my back door after school, offering more cash for a look at Xeno. It felt cool for a while, till Gornet and his bunch came back. They crashed right in and grabbed him!"
"Who did they grab?"
Tom Spencer shook his head.
"Then it got worse! My parents heard us yelling as Gornet left. They saw Gavin's black eye and found the mess downstairs... so they called the cops. I couldn't stop them!"
Mark shook his head. Clearly this dude had a hierarchy of fears. Invasion by thieving athletes was intolerable -- but not half as bad as alerting the world of adults.
"All right," Alex asked. "You're saying Gornet and his pals came barging in and grabbed someone. But who, Tom? Who did they take?"
Mark found himself fervently hoping that Tom would just shut up.
It's just a hoax that got out of hand, he hoped. It's got to be.
Tom swallowed hard before answering.
"They took our xenoanthropoid."
"Your --?"
Barry Tang translated. "It's Greek, meaning 'something like a manlike being from beyond.' Pretty awful Greek, actually. I guess they wanted something less clichéd than alien or extraterrestrial."
Tom sniffed.
"We spent days coming up with that! Anyway, it's a damn good thing we were the ones who found him. Well, Julie Mendel did, while she was performing one of her routine comet-searches. The IR scanner on her 22-inch wide-field telescope spotted something coming in fast."
"Nobody at the base saw it?"
"Her correlator noticed something all those Cirocco brainiacs missed!" Tom snorted, both proud and contemptuous. "I guess because it had all the color values of a falling meteorite. Anyway, a fresh carbonaceous chondrite is worth heaps, so Julie called me and Dwight and Gavin and Lauren to check the fall site, out in the southern drifts. Only when we got there, we found..." The boy's hands shook as he gestured, shaping something rounded, almost as if he could still see it, right in front of his face. "... we found a space capsule of some kind, half imbeded in one of the dunes!"
"No way!" Barry sighed, in a tone that was almost reverent and hushed. He prompted. "Then --"
"Then we found him... wandering around on the sands."
This is the end of the free sample chapters for Sky Horizon. To continue reading, purchase Sky Horizon (Colony High)
David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth, The Postman, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His nonfiction book -- The Transparent Society -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin's newest novel Kiln People explores a fictional near future when people use cheap copies of themselves to be in two places at once. The Life Eaters -- a graphic novel -- explores a chilling alternative outcome of World War II.
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