Charon's Ark

SUMMARY: Teachers and students aboard a chartered 747 are kidnapped in midflight by an alien spaceship and taken to Charon, Pluto's moon A planeload of high-school students, their teacher, and the airliners crew are hijacked in midair by an alien spacecraft. The aliens take them to their crazily-malfunctioning starship Ark, which we know as the planet Pluto and its moon Charon. Sixty-five million years ago, the Ark came to Earth to collect plants and animals. It was ship-wrecked and stranded in our solar system. Now its alien crew intends to force the teenagers to learn to operate the Ark, so it can continue on its multi-billion year mission of sowing life among the stars. The humans are flabbergasted of course, but life-change is not unwelcome to two of them. One is copilot Froward, whose drinking, womanizing, and general fecklessness are about to cost him his career. The other is misfit student Charlie Freeman, a casualty on the battlefield of puberty. Hes with the group only by the whim of his teacher, Mrs. Robinelli. Aboard the plane are two other women who are about to be important in Frowards life: Gershner, the stewardess, who is Frowards lover, and sharp-thinking sixteen-year-old Chela Suarez. Charlie is intrigued and puzzled by the aliens ineptitude. He is contacted by a sinister new entity: the Proctor. The Proctor offers Charlie knowledge, power, and prom queen Eva Wilcox, in return for helping the aliens obtain the students cooperation. Charlie, intending to subvert everything and return to Earth a hero, grabs the opportunity. Can the hijacked students and adults overcome the dinosaur-infested wilderness of Charon, evade the murderous blundering aliens, and exploit the vast inexplicable Ark technology? Can they do it in time to save Earth from destruction by the monomaniacal Proctor? "For the teachers and students of Seattle's Garfield High School, the trip was just a public-relations lark, for helping a wealthy Pacific island open a science museum, they were to get a free trip around the world. It all seemed too esay. It was. As their chartered 747 crossed the Pacific, a huge spacecraft swooped down, cut off its wings, swallowed it up, and headed deep into outer space. Next stop: Charon, the moon of Pluto. Suddenly the flight crew, the students, and their teacher found themselves the unwilling guests of unseen and unreliable hosts whose life-support systems were breaking down. Even worse, the humans were caught in a deadly cross-fire between the rapidly failing aliens and a mad computer program that considered only itself indispensable, and whose intentions clearly were to destroy Earth ..."--Page 4 of cover