In the days that followed, Mark’s heart sank with every news report that mentioned his name. Reporters haunted the front lawn, shouting questions whenever he came outside. Every time the phone rang, he felt a tightness in his throat.
Fortunately, Dad handled most calls — the obscene or threatening ones, along with those who offered help.
“No, we don’t need police protection,” Mark heard him tell the County Sheriff at one point. “I’ve been given a desk job till this blows over — paperwork I can handle mostly from home. So just leave all the cranks and drive-bys to me. They’re mostly blowhards.”
Maybe. But some of the phone voices were pretty scary, whispering or shouting threats … or else making dumb fake-alien noises. Mark didn’t bother checking email or the sosh-sites anymore. His text-boxes, eposcenes and wallboards overflowed with messages from all over the world — some approving, but all too many of them anonymous denunciations, expressing ALL-CAPS fury over what he’d done. Meanwhile, Dad took care of the old-fashioned entreaties from the older generation.
“No, my son doesn’t need an agent … sure, I’ll keep your number. Goodbye.”
“No he’s not interested in doing a Reality TV show!”
“No sir, I don’t believe you’re calling from the Vatican.”
“Look, how do I know you’re really Bieber … prove it.”
“The governor? Is this really the governor? We’ve had a lot of crank calls … er, if you don’t mind, sir, how about doing an impression of your father. Say, ‘I’ll be back.’ Now do your great-uncle. Say ‘Ich bin ein Ber’ – hello? Hello?”
After that last one, Major Al Bamford had grinned sheepishly. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that was a fake call. If it’s not, I could be in trouble.” Clearly, Dad was both irritated by it all and trying to make the best of things.
“You don’t have to go on limited duty,” Mark told his father, who was already in uniform, despite the fact that he’d be working from home today. “Your unit has an important job, now more than ever. I can stay. Watch things here —”
“— and skip school? Not likely.” Major Bamford chuckled. “Look, son, I know some jerks may be rough on you today. But you’ve got to face them. What you did was smart and brave. You thought about humanity and your country, not just a circle of delusional teens. It was the right thing to do.”
The right thing?
Maybe. But also painful. At Mark’s age, there were few put-downs more devastating than to be called a ‘snitch’. Even among those who agreed with his decision, many thought that Mark did it out of self-interest — to grab headlines and become the center of attention. That opinion only grew each time his photo appeared in newzines or the web.
None of the stories got it right of course, or told how difficult the choice had been.
“Go on,” his father told him that morning, eighty hours after a fateful Thursday night. “Go to school. Try to have a normal day.”
Easier said than done. But Mark knew Dad meant well, and his approval mattered more than anyone’s. Especially since it might just be the two of us again, if I have to transfer schools. Or leave town.
That seemed increasingly likely, from the moment he swung his bike into the racks at TNPHS, feeling intense looks from everyone he passed. Conversations died whenever he drew near. A few kids smiled nervously. But a larger number scowled at the infamous traitor who had turned ‘their’ xeno over to the Feds.
No matter that most of the students only heard of it when the news broke on Friday. Not even the latest reports — about improvements in the star-visitor’s health and progress in crossing the language divide — seemed to make much difference in the mood on campus. The alien had become part of the greater world, and this place was again just another drab American high school.
It got worse indoors. Soon he couldn’t take more than a dozen paces without hearing someone horking in the back of their throat, as if preparing to spit. It became a theme song, following him around. When Mark reached his locker and spied a greasy brown fluid leaking out the bottom, he decided not to bother opening it, denying any satisfaction to those who were watching.
A crowd had gathered at the door to history class. Any hope of slipping inside and quietly taking his seat was dashed when yet another news crew emerged from the room, pushed by an affably insistent Mr. Castro, wearing his typical striped shirt and colorful tie. Hot camera lights made beads of sweat shimmer on his peaked, receding hairline.
“Enough please! We’re serious students and educators here. Save your questions for off-hours. Anyway, I was just a witness. The real heroes …”
Mark tried to melt into the crowd, but Mr. Castro spotted him first.
“Well, speak of the young man himself. Here’s Mark Bamford, the fellow who invited me to participate in last Thursday’s adventure.”
Mark winced when he saw the camera crew was from Channel Ten, one of the local stations that missed out on the ‘adventure’ when they refused his invitation, dismissing him as a crank. A costly mistake, and now they seemed eager to take revenge by painting Mark in the worst possible light, making up ridiculous motives.
That he hoped for a reward from the government.
That he was taking revenge for a romantic disappointment.
That he had religious objections to aliens.
That he was already talking to Hollywood agents (a few had left messages — Mark didn’t plan on answering) about doing his story as a mini-series.
None of the reporters told anything like the true story of those frantic hours that he and Alex spent — that nervous Thursday evening — setting things up just right. They had to act fast. Scott Tepper and Tom Spencer — leading their strange jock-nerd alliance — were already gathering a caravan of private vehicles, preparing to transport the xeno off to some hip refuge deep inside the L.A. sprawl, rationalizing to themselves that they were doing something heroic, defending a ‘guest’ from the vile-distrusted government.
Oh, it would have been easy enough just to foil their crazy plan. If that was all Mark and Alex wanted, they only had to phone up the Air Force. Or Cirocco labs.
But that option raised worries of its own. Did it make sense to transfer custody of the castaway from one group of secretive paranoids to another? Tom Spencer had a point. Some clique of bureaucratic poobahs would surely talk themselves into thinking just like Scott and Gornet! Foolishly trying to hide all evidence of an extraterrestrial encounter, keeping the news to an elite in-group, and coming up with elaborate reasons to justify it to themselves.
The world has plenty of bright fools in it, eager to act out movie clichés.
Oh, the secret probably wouldn’t hold for very long, for any group. Mark doubted that any cover story could last in today’s world. Take the crazy notion that three generations of top savants had been studying a spacecraft that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, ever since 1949.
Right. Hundreds of scientists and engineers, investigating fantastic alien technologies — with none of them blabbing in all that time? Not even when they retired? Nobody who actually knew a living, breathing scientist would believe such nonsense. The best minds are independent; the very trait that made them “best.” Even a military man like Dad would eventually get fed up with secrecy that stretched on and on, for no apparent reason. Especially if it appeared also to violate the law.
And nowadays, secrets can leak, ‘accidentally’, by as many paths as there are addresses on the internet.
Still, some group of adult Gornets might decide to try. In fact, given human nature, they probably would.
So, for two wild hours, Mark and Alex made calls and pounded on doors, collecting half a dozen reputable witnesses, then driving around — with several of them fuming impatiently — till the moment seemed right to dial up Cirocco.
As he elbowed his way into the classroom, ignoring Channel Ten’s shouted questions, Mark found himself almost wishing he never made that call — even though the plan worked better than he or Alex could have hoped.
* * *
It took Mr. Castro ten minutes to get rid of the TV people — maybe he wasn’t trying all that hard — and to settle class back to any semblance of a normal routine, taking roll and collecting the weekend’s essay assignment about the European Thirty Years War.
The teacher shook his head at the skimpy pile. Mark’s contribution amounted to just two pages, rehashed from a single Wikipedia article. In big type, with generous margins.
“Now people,” Mr. Castro said. “I know there have been some distractions lately, but that’s no excuse for slacking off. In fact, this startling news about First Contact ought to emphasize the need for focus. What event could possibly make clearer the importance of education for your future?”
A hand shot up from the forward right. Dave McCarty, wearing his usual black leather jacket, spoke without waiting to be called.
“Why?” he asked, pushing contemptuously at the textbook in front of him. “Everything we know is obsolete! All our technology, science, arts … every bit of it is passé. In a few years we’ll be using teleportation and warp drives, learning whatever we want from pills!”
That drew laughter. But some classmates also nodded.
“So,” Mr. Castro asked. “Should we dismiss our old-fashioned schools till then?”
“Sure! Why waste brain cells studying stuff we’ll never need?”
“Even the history of your species and civilization?”
“Especially history. It’s irrelevant. Everything up until now will be remembered as a time of primitives, like cavemen. B.C. … for Before Contact!” McCarty chortled, clearly believing he was on a roll.
“And do the rest of you feel the same way? Or the opposite?”
Silence. Mark, especially, didn’t want to attract any more attention. Anyway, he wasn’t sure he disagreed with Dave.
Mr. Castro walked around the desk and put his hand on an Earth globe that always stood there.
“I’ll grant you, it seems like a pretty small place in a big universe right now,” he mused. “Though our ancestors thought it was vast and filled with dark unknowns.” He set the globe spinning. “Take for example the period we’ve been studying, the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries —”
Students groaned. This teacher would use any excuse to swerve back on course.
“— a time of wrenching transition, perhaps even more shattering than the one we are about to enter.”
Froggi Hayashi snorted from a seat in back.
“How could anything compare with first contact? To meet powerful aliens with incredible technologies you don’t understand —”
“Exactly!” Mr. Castro grinned. And he waited. One of his famous pauses. Which usually meant that something — some connection — had been made. One that should be obvious to anyone who was paying attention.
Amid the ensuing hush, Mark felt a sudden wrench of understanding.
Oh, he thought.
Almost against his will, Mark’s hand started to raise … but another voice spoke up first.
“People in Africa … and Asia and the Americas … that was when they had to adapt to strange new things — to aliens and their technologies — when they faced European invaders.”
Mark turned around to see Helene Shockley, sitting to his left and two chairs back. As usual, she was simply overwhelming, with black hair falling in ringlets over dusky shoulders. To Mark’s surprise — especially after the events of Thursday night — she glanced his way with a fleeting smile that sent his heart lurching in his chest.
“Good point,” Mr. Castro answered with a nod. “And there’s no question that those Europeans were outright invaders in the Americas. There, the newcomers — or aliens, if you will — swarmed in without mercy, taking whatever they wanted, by force. They also brought waves of horrible disease that caught native peoples in the Western Hemisphere unprepared … something that I hope our leaders are bearing in mind right now.”
Several students blanched at the idea. Mark recalled how close he and his friends had been to the alien, breathing the same air! A plague from the stars. Now wouldn’t that just round out the whole month?
“Elsewhere, things were more complicated. Especially for the first couple of centuries after da Gama’s voyage, when Europeans came to Asia and Africa more as traders than conquerors, and where disease was much less of a factor. Even there, however, the arrival of a foreign culture and new technologies had profound effects, disrupting everything that had been static and assumed in local cultures. Even powerful nations that tried to control the effects of contact, like China and Japan, wound up destabilized, plunging into devastating internal strife.
“Still, none of those conflicts would match the bitter clash we’ve been studying for the last week, an awful conflagration that wracked Europe itself during the very same period.”
This time, the groan from Dave and some others held a tone of grudging admiration for the smooth way the teacher segued discussion back into the syllabus. Mr. Castro swiveled toward a map that hung from the south wall, covered with arrows showing the harsh, back-and-forth struggle called the Thirty Years War.
“Can anyone explain why this period was even more riotous inside Europe than in far-off lands that their ships were surprising and exploiting?”
Trembling a little, Arlene Hsu raised her hand.
“B-because of the … Protestant Reformation?”
Mr. Castro always took a gentler tone when answering Arlene. It obviously took courage for her to speak up. Freewheeling class discussions hadn’t been the style in school where she came from — a small town north of Guangdong.
“Yes, that was the reason given by kings and princes and city states for waging brutal war on their neighbors. A dispute over religious doctrine. But does that completely explain it? Anybody.”
Forgetting his vow to stay silent, Mark raised a hand.
“Weren’t they just as shook up by … by all this new contact with outsiders, as anybody else was?”
Mr. Castro smiled. Mark hoped it wasn’t too obvious that the teacher felt grateful for being chosen as one of the Thursday night witnesses. He had clearly enjoyed the chance to participate, helping to transfer the alien into professional hands while also preventing any government cover-up … and getting to watch history happen in real-time.
Fine, but Mark didn’t need ‘teacher’s pet’ added to the things murmured behind his back.
“You may be onto something, Mr. Bamford. Their world was changing. Can anybody suggest what could have shaken up Europe, at this time?”
Hands raised. One student after another started contributing to a growing list.
“New weapons. New war tactics.”
“All the gold and silver and stuff stolen from Mexico. That would’ve changed the economy.”
“There were new crops too … like corn? Potatoes and tobacco?”
“New ideas —”
“— spread by printing presses. Didn’t all this happen just a little after that German guy, Gutberg —”
“Gutenberg.”
“— yeah. Suddenly books and newspapers were cheap.”
“And new ideas don’t always bring folks together, do they? Sometimes they frighten people, or divide them. In the beginning, printing was more effective at spreading hate than encouraging tolerance. It took many generations to change that. Anything else?”
“How about dangerous ideas that came from those places the ships went?” Arlene asked, and Mr. Castro nodded.
“Interesting point, Miss Hsu! Did cultural colonization go both ways, affecting the invaders as much as the invaded? That’s not often talked about. Maybe you could do a paper.”
Again, groans. Before the bell, several more research topics were sure to be assigned.
“How about —” Mark heard Helene say behind him, her voice more hushed than usual. “How about the very fact that the world was bigger … a much bigger place, after Columbus? Maybe that changed view kind of drove them all a bit … crazy?”
There was silence for several heartbeats after that, as each student let the implication sink in. How her words applied today. Even Mr. Castro appeared subdued.
Anyway, the point was made. Even Dave McCarty clearly realized it. History still had a place in the post-Contact world.
“Excellent, Helene. That would also make a really interesting topic for a —”
Mr. Castro halted when the door creaked open. A student carrying a hall pass entered, handing the teacher a slip of paper. He read it with a pursed brow.
“Bamford,” he said at last, holding the slip out to Mark. “You’re wanted in the main office.”
Mark stood, lifting his backpack. He didn’t dare look around to see how others took this — yet another sign of special treatment. But at least now he might escape new assignments.
“Check my web site,” the teacher said as he departed, dashing even that silver lining. “Tonight’s homework will be a thirty minute e-debate, at the usual time. You can take first chair in the argument against contact, Mark. We’ll decide the exact topic while you’re away.”
Mark tried not to wince, especially with Helene watching. I guess it wouldn’t do for Castro to show gratitude, for my inviting him to help make history for a change, instead of just teaching it.
The halls felt eerily empty with all students in class. Along with his footsteps, faint echoes carried indoors from the athletic field, where coaches hollered at the lazy as they had for generations, probably going all the way back to Sparta. Mark shuffled along toward the administration suites, wondering now what?
It must be about Xeno.
Sure enough, when he entered the outer Administration Office Alex was already present. So was Barry Tang. They all shared a silent nod as the secretary ushered them through a final door into the sanctum of Principal Jeffers.
Jeffers cut an imposing figure. Almost two meters tall, he had actually trained for six weeks with the San Francisco Forty-Niners before failing to make the final roster. That was many years ago, but he still kept the jersey from his brief pro career in a glass case, next to photos from his time as a Peace Corps volunteer. The principal believed that everyone should have a broad range of interests.
“Here they are,” he said in a deep voice as the students came in. Two other adults turned at the same time, causing Mark to stumble briefly in surprise. One of them was a Marine Corps officer — his father!
The other, a pale-haired woman wearing a lab coat, smiled as Alexandra Behr blurted — “Mom! What are you doing here?”
Dad shared a silent look with Mark, saying wait and see.
“We’re still looking for Barry’s folks,” Principal Jeffers said. “I can’t let him go on a field trip without their permission. So if you’re really in a hurry…”
“We are, I’m afraid,” Major Bamford said. “We’ll just have to take Alex and Mark for now, and hope Barry can follow.”
Alex blinked.
“Field trip?”
Mark’s father drew a folded sheet of paper from his tunic pocket. It had official-looking seals and signatures — plus some odd-shaped blotchy symbols on the bottom.
“Not a normal one, by any means,” he said. “It seems you’ve been invited.”
“Invited?”
This time it was Mark’s turn to express puzzlement. So Major Bamford explained.
“For a reunion. With the visitor. We’re going to see your strange little man from the stars.”