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bodies. Marco stepped closer to one of the structures. The door was wooden, carved so elaborately with figures of people and animals that he couldn’t resist reaching out with his free hand to touch it. Why did the carvings seem familiar?
    â€œWait!” His eyes darted to his feet and he whipped around. “The tube! I lost it!”
    Leo said, “It’s back at the beach. It wouldn’t work here anyway.”
    Marco relaxed. Strange, but he didn’t feel frightened. For some reason, he felt himself trusting the boy from the stars.
    An old man with a gray beard walked up to Leo’s people and spoke to them. The man appeared to be kind, and seemed to welcome them, although Marco couldn’t understand his language.
    Sarah said, “They don’t seem afraid of you at all.”
    Leo shook his head. “No. My people were welcomed.”
    â€œHow did they know the language?” asked Marco.
    Leo nodded at his wrist, and a thin black bracelet Marco hadn’t noticed before. “One of our advancements. Almost like an implant that filters our language into anyone else’s. And the other way around.”
    â€œCool.” Marco stood with Sarah and Leo at the edge of the activity. They observed as the villagers brought some kind of porridge that Leo’s people quickly tucked into.
    The scene fuzzed up.
    With his free hand, Marco rubbed his eyes, but his vision didn’t clear. “What’s going on?”
    Leo said, “There’s more I have to show you before you see what happened next.”
    Sarah screeched.
    Marco found himself floating in black space, his limbs weightless and awkward. Chill air rushed around him loudly, stars dazzlingly bright in front of him. His heart pounded.
    Marco clutched Leo’s hand more tightly, not exactly sure what might happen if he let go. But he was certain that he didn’t want to find out.
    Leo must have sensed their fear, because he reassured them. “We’re fine! Look. That star is Sirius.”
    Marco gulped as they seemed to fly over and around the star. He flutter-kicked and made a lame attempt at half a forward crawl with his free arm, but nothing seemed to help him get control of his body. So he let himself drift, steered along by Leo.
    Nacho would have loved it.
    And then there was another star that orbited Sirius. Leo said, “This star is invisible from Earth, and its orbit around Sirius takes fifty years.”
    Suddenly, Saturn streamed past in front of them, resplendent rings so blinding that Marco shielded his eyes with his free arm as he swallowed a scream.
    Leo said, “My people told the tribe about Sirius and the star. And about the four moons of Jupiter—”
    â€œ Don’t take us to Jupiter!” shouted Sarah.
    Marco was relieved, because he was thinking the same thing. His stomach did flips, and he was afraid he was going to hurl. For the first time, he felt a little empathy for Sarah and her bout of motion sickness on the Moonflight .
    â€œThese were all things your Earth people hadn’t even discovered yet.” Leo dropped their hands.
    They were back on the beach.
    Marco took a deep breath. The white tube was still in his hand, which was now trembling. “This sounds familiar. Nacho made me watch this show with him once.”
    â€œI wouldn’t think Nacho could ever make you do anything,” said Sarah.
    Marco shrugged. “He was sick. I felt bad for him.”
    Sarah raised her eyebrows. “That was nice.”
    Marco ignored her mild surprise and continued. “This tribe in Africa never had contact with anyone until some anthropologists showed up in the 1930s. And the tribe had these wild myths, how they’d been visited by beings from an advanced culture.”
    Sarah asked, “Did they believe them?”
    Marco shook his head. “Not at first. But they knew about the four moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.” He shivered