LIFTER

by Crawford Kilian

“Where am I going to find that, sir?”

  “That’s your concern, Stevenson.”

  I figured I was getting off lightly, but I had to risk getting into trouble again. “Mr Gibbs, can I ask you a question about this gizmo?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’ve read that they can help you produce different kinds of brain waves, like alpha waves.”

  “If they’re set up properly, with electrodes on your scalp.”

  “I’m interested in that. Could I do my project on it?”

  He looked suspiciously at me. “You looking for a new thrill, Stevenson, inducing alpha waves?”

  “No, sir. I want to induce twilight sleep.”

  “What on earth for? You suffering from insomnia?”

  “No, no - I just thought it would be something interesting.”

  “Why twilight sleep?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just an interesting mental state. You know, being able to control your dreams, that kind of thing.”

  “Stevenson, I’ve got a bias. It’s taken a good two and a half billion years of evolution to produce conscious intelligence. Too many of the people who get it want to get back down among the oysters. Now you tell me you want to work at getting semiconscious. That doesn’t sound like you, Stevenson. You seem to like staying wide awake. So what’s your ulterior motive?”

  “None, sir!” I replied, lying like a rug. “But I’ve read somewhere that it’s fairly easy to induce twilight sleep, and I thought it would make a manageable project.”

  “I don’t buy it. You could build the device, but I don’t like the idea of you fooling around with your brain, any more than your liver. Find something else.”

  I nodded, ticked off because now I would have to do some other project as well as the biofeedback. At that point, Bobby Gassaway came over.

  “Hey, Mr Gibbs,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about my project.”

  “What is it, Gassaway?”

  “I’d like to do something on UFOs.”

  Poor Gibbs. He sighed and patted Gassaway’s flabby shoulder.

  “Give me a break, Gassaway. Last year it was dowsing and spoon bending.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I can do something really good on UFOs, Mr Gibbs.”

  “Gassaway, I don’t care what you wash it with, garbage is still garbage.”

  “Aw, that’s not the scientific attitude, Mr Gibbs. My dad’s an air traffic controller, for Pete’s sake, and he got an open mind on the subject.”

  “Open mind” on this subject meant “hole in the head” as far as Gibbs were concerned, but he was relatively tactful. “Gassaway, this project is supposed to be a little more than clipping stories out of the National Inquirer. This is an attempt at a serious scientific project, with reasonable goals and strict methodology. I’m not interested in UFOs because they have nothing to do with science.”

  “Well, just ‘cause something is paranormal doesn’t make it wrong, does it, sir?”

  “No, Gassaway. Being paranormal just means being safely outside the limits of scientific study.”

  I injected myself into the discussion. “What would you accept as evidence for something like UFOs, Mr Gibbs?”

  “Direct observation,” he answered instantly. “Repeated under controlled conditions, with no chance for cheating. And no ordinary explanation that fits the facts.”

  “So if I wanted to prove something like UFOsᚓ”

  “Not you, too, Stevenson!”

  “No, sir! I’m just asking.”

  “Give me photographs, preferably of little green men.”

  “Or telepathy?” I went on.

  “Tell me what I’m thinking, ten times out of ten. Then do it with a lot of other people.” He looked at us. “Now, what are you two going to do your projects on?”

  “Well,” I said. “I’d still like to do something on the biofeedback.”

  “Okay. Build a device, from scratch. Just for blood pressure, like these. But no fooling around with brain waves, understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gibbs turned to Gassaway. “If you’ve really got to do something on flying saucers, you can design a questionaire and survey all the traffic controllers out at the air base. Find out if they really think UFOs exist, and on what evidence.”

  “Aw, hey, Mr Gibbs, I’ve got all these booksᚓ”

  “Survey only, Gassaway. Garbage in, garbage out; remember?”

  It would serve Gassaway right, I reflected, to have to pester a lot of grown men who didn’t want to waste their time on some high-school kid’s science project. At least I could go home and get to work undisturbed.

  Pat Llewellyn came slowly back into the room. “Mr Gibbs,” she said, “could I speak to Stevenson by myself for a minute?”

  “Sure.” Gibbs moved off, with Gassaway tagging along. I looked at Pat, who stood leaning on her cane a couple of feet in front of me.

  “I don’t like being manipulated,” she said calmly. “Even for a good cause. Don’t ever do that to me again.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just tryingᚓ”

  “Don’t. Don’t try. Don’t be a nice guy or a pal or a jerk. You just get on with your life and let me get on with mine, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “And I really am sorry.”

  She settled in her chair, ignoring my apology. “Now it’s your turn, but first show me how to reset this gadget.”

  I was chauvinistically but pleasantly surprised to find that she understood a good deal about electronics. Once I’d told her what to look for, she readjusted the threshold herself with no fuss.

  “I built myself a stereo once,” she said. “That was in a foster home. The guy - the husband - knew a lot.”

  I studied the light bulb, which stayed off. “Gibbs told me to build one of these from scratch, as a semester project. Want to join me?”

  She nodded, but she didn’t seem ecstatic. “You’ll have to supply the worshop,” she said. “Where I’m living now, there’s no room. Besides, it’s a zoo. I wouldn’t leave anything lying around there; some of the kids are really destructive. How about your place?”

  “No problem,” I said.

  I couldn’t believe my luck.

  Chapter 3

  LATER THAT MORNING, the Awkward Squad split up and went to various other classes. I spent an hour ignoring English literature and thinking about the events of the day.

  I knew I had lifted myself, somehow, six feet above my bedroom floor. It had not been a dream or a hallucination; my knees and wrist still ached. My mental state, I speculated, might have had something to do with the lift. Certainly my waking up had ended the experience. Trying to repeat the lift while wide awake had failed thoroughly.

  So if I could do it again, I’d probably have to be in twilight sleep. That was a problem. How could I do something in my sleep that I couldn’t do wide awake?

  A thought occurred to me: suppose it happened again while I was sleeping on a camping trip in the mountains? I could wake up and drop fifty feet, or five hundred. Maybe I would have to tether myself to a rock, as if I were a balloon.

  But why would conscious thought interfere with whatever it was that enabled me to lift? Maybe it was the kind of skill that worked best when it was virtually automatic, like walking, or driving a car. If you think about what those skills require, you only confuse yourself, like a toddler or a learning driver.

  I had stayed up in the air for a second or so before realising what had happened. Only then had I fallen. Ergo, my amazement and panic - not my being conscious - had ended the lift. In a stupid sort of way, I had behaved like all those cartoon animals who chase each other off cliffs.

  If I could just get into twilight sleep, and then lift while knowing I was going to wake up, I might be able to sustain the lift while fully conscious and able to enjoy it.

  That would be a project I would love to spring on Gibbs. He could observe me to his heart’s content. He could photograph me, videotape me, bounce ra
dar off me. I’d call it the bootstrap effect. No - I’d call it the Stevenson Effect, with capitals.

  More problems. Supposing I could reproduce the Effect at will, and impress the pants off Gibbs and the Awkward Squad, what would happen next? I realised I’d read too many junk novels about people with wild talents: the army would appropriate me, bury me in some supersecret installation, and keep me there until the whole 82nd Airborne could dispense with parachutes. Or the CIA would just terminate me to keep the KGB from kidnapping me. Or would I become some weird celebrity, doing my thing on TV? Maybe I could do half-time routines at football games. Imagine rising above a crowd of thousands, everyone gazing up in amazement and awe, cameras clicking, flashbulbs going off… and some loony drawing a bead on me with a high-powered rifle.

  As soon as I thought about it, I knew it would happen. The country was crawling with psychopaths, sociopaths, religious maniacs, and trophy hunters, with the combined firepower of a medium-sized army. All the nuts who were planning on killing a cop, or the president, would instantly vote me Target of the Year. If the archangel Gabriel himself were to appear over the U.S.A. to sound the Last Trump, he’d be shot down before he could get through the first two notes.

  That thought cooled me off the whole idea for a while. Whatever the Effect was, it wasn’t worth dying young for. I was twitching with eagerness to find out more about it, but I could see that I was going to have to move really cautiously. For the time being I would have to operate in complete secrecy, but I would also have to document whatever I did - or Gibbs would give me the chewing-out of my life.

  By lunchtime I was a quivering mess of anxiety, frustration, and self-importance. As usual I headed back to the lab; the Awkward Squad had to share it with other students, but at lunch it was our property, a refuge from the Jason Murphys and all the other airheads. On my way, I met Pat in the hall.

  “Hi,” I said. “Come and have lunch in the lab. That’s where we all hang out.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to get outside. Being inside walls for too long makes me jumpy. In a manner of speaking,” she added dryly.

  “Want to go off campus? We could go up Hillside to the park. It’s got a nice view.”

  She gave me a cautious smile. “Sounds good.”

  We walked slowly out to the car park. Pat moved in an awkward, rolling limp; I had to gear down from my usual Ichabod Crane stride.

  “I sure felt like a jerk after I blew up at Gibbs,” she said.

  “He’ll get over it. Underneath that tough exterior is a gentle, caring, understanding sadist.”

  “I make myself mad when I pop off like that. I don’t have enough self-control.”

  “Have some of mine,” I offered. “I’m so repressed I bore myself to death.”

  Jason Murphy and the rest of the baboon troop were elsewhere, so we got through The Pit with little more than some giggles and some stares at Pat’s brace. She didn’t seem to notice; it wasn’t unusual for her to be the new girl with the weird leg.

  We got into Brunhilde, which Pat took completely for granted, and drove off campus. Pat ignored the endless dull condos and garden apartments, preferring to enjoy the Bach cassette I put on the tape deck. (I like Mozart better, but I was playing it safe; she was definitely not into rock, and would probably consider the nineteenth-century romantics a bunch of sentimental merchants.)

  When we got to the park, she cheered up. We walked from the car park across a broad green lawn between stands of aspen and pine, to a row of picnic tables at the top of a little cliff. From there we could look out across the town, past the air base, to the yellow foothills and the black-and-white peaks of the sierras.

  We sat at a table, sharing my lunch (Melinda usually packed enough for three starving longshoremen), enjoying the breeze and the sunshine. A jet taking off made a silver glint against the sky. My small talk evaporated; she didn’t seem to mind. After a while she said:

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess. What for?”

  “Bringing me up here. I don’t get out in the air very often. It’s just one damn box after another.”

  “I get cabin fever if I’m inside too long. So I go hiking almost every weekend - camp overnight if I’ve got the time.”

  “Where?”

  I pointed towards the foothills. “Out there.”

  “By yourself?”

  “That’s the whole idea.”

  “Boy, you’re lucky. D’you get scared?”

  “No, as long as you don’t step on a rattler, there’s not much that can hurt you.”

  “I’d be scared witless.”

  I looked at her. “How far can you walk on that brace before you poop out?”

  She looked back at me, surprised and almost ready to get sore again. “Farther than you might think.”

  “Okay. I’ll take you up San Miguel Creek some time.”

  “How far is that? To Hike, I mean.”

  “Hardly anything. Six, eight miles round trip from the road.”

  “You’re on.” But I could see from her face that she’d never walked that far.

  “Rick - tell me something.” Now she was using my first name; we were making real progress.

  “How come you’re being such a buddy? You just feel bad about fooling around with the biofeedback machine?”

  I almost laughed in her face. Suppressing the urge, I said, “Terry High is a very friendly school. We all like to make new people feel right at home.”

  “Oh, can it, would you? It’s just another lousy small-town high school with a million cliques and no style. I’ve been kicked out of better ones.”

  “Okay, I confess. You’re not as tough as you pretend. You’re a lot like Gibbs that way. I think he must’ve spotted you for a phony right away, which is why he didn’t kick you out on your ass this morning. You’re a nice person. I like you.”

  I know, I know - I was being savagely uncool, as only an amorous nerd can be. All I needed to complete my disgrace was to hand her a bouquet of wildflowers.

  But she wasn’t feeling so cool herself. I looked into those hazel eyes and I saw a girl who was tired of being alone, a girl who really needed to be liked. What was more, I did like her.

  For just a second, I saw her defences go up; she nearly got off some wisecrack. Then she must have decided the hell with it - a compliment, even from a juvenile delinquent nerd, was better than the proverbial poke in the eye.

  “I like you, too.”

  She reached across the table and put her hand on mine for just a second. Her fingers were long and slender and cool.

  Chapter 4

  IT WAS A BUSY AFTERNOON. In study hall I went to the library and found the Nuremburg Convention that Gibbs had ordered me to memorise. After a lot of searching through the microfiche catalogue. The Convention had been worked out after the World War II, when the Allies had learnt of the experiments on human beings in concentration camps. It was easy to see which of the ten principles Gibbs had in mind:

  The voluntary consent of the human subject is essential. The experiment should yield something for the good of society, something that can’t be obtained otherwise, and shouldn’t be random or casual. The experiment should be designed to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury. And the subject should be free to end the experiment at any time.

  Once I’d digest all this, I indulged myself in a little resentment of Gibbs. Did he think I was some kind of baby Nazi, running life-and-death experiments on Jewish prisoners? All I’d done was to tinker with a gadget to make it a little more sensitive. I was willing to confess to being a manipulative smart ass, but I wasn’t in the international-criminal class just yet.

  On reflection, I decided Gibbs was just using the incident to get me to think a little about the ethical questions involved in such experiments. Talk about manipulative!

  Next I went hunting for data on levitation. We had plenty; the shelves bulged with books about telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, dowsi
ng, and reincarnations. I could imagine what Gibbs must say in staff meetings about library spending.

  The stuff on levitation was pretty dumb: saints who were seen (usually by just one person) to rise off the ground while praying; swamis who suspended themselves horizontally with one hand lightly resting on the end of a staff, like a dirigible moored to a tower; spiritualist mediums who occasionally soured aloft during seances.

  I didn’t believe a word of it.

  Well, I could buy the idea of levitating in a trance; I’d done something like that. But it was always supposed to be a religious or mystical ecstasy that got people airborne. When Marcus had poked his nose in my face this morning, I’d been about as mystical as a box of cornflakes. The authors, in any case, were wildly ready to believe and transmit the dumbest stories, with virtually no evidence except the opinions of other authors.

  Maybe some of the stories had a basis in fact. If so, the original lifts have been buried in a mass of embroidery, exaggeration, and outright propaganda. That was a sobering thought. I didn’t want to end up shot, and I also didn’t want to end up as Saint Richard the Flying Hacker, or Guru Rickaswami, or the leader of some weird cult.

  The last class of the day was gym, where as usual I was picked last for somebody’s basketball team. Running up and down the court while my teammates ignored me. I at least got some exercise and a chance to compile a shopping list.

  After a quick shower I found Pat in the hall and offered her a ride home.

  “Thanks, but I’d rather walk. If you’re going to take me hiking, I’d better get in shape.”

  “Well, give me your phone number. I’ll call you tonight about the project, and we’ll work out a time when you can come over.”

  She hesitated. “Let me call you, after I’ve cleared it with Morty. He’s the house father.”

  “Fine,” I agreed. “I’ve got to get to my job now, but I’ll be home a little after six.”

  “Then I’ll call around seven-thirty or eight.” She gave me a cautious smile and walked away.

  Driving to work, I reflected on the fact that I was now just another jerk looking forward to a phone call - I, who normally made phone calls, and to some of the smarter computers in the country.