A little later, I was suited up in a proper blue-and-gold football uniform, completed with pads and helmet, and standing around with the varsity team.
The mood wasn’t entirely chummy. I knew most of these guys, and they were nice enough; the trouble was, they knew me. Jerry Ames, our quarterback had spent the last few years avoiding being on terms with me, and now he kept staring incredulously.
“C’mon,” I overheard somebody say, “Gibbs isn’t serious. This is like, to cheer us up, give us a smile, you know?”
That ticked me off. Here I’d just turned Jason Murphy into a hundred and fifty pounds of compost, and these bovines were patronising me. I stood off to one side a bit, squinting a lot and trying to look cool.
“Hey, Rick?”
I turned and saw Wes Powell hopping across the grass on crutches, with his jeans split to the knee to make room for his cast.
“Just want to wish you a lot of luck,” he said, and shook my hand.
“I’ll need it,” I muttered, more grateful than I cared to admit for his public support.
Once we got into practice, I was a target again - this time, of guys who could run like mad and who outweighed me by thirty or forty pounds. You might think that Sean Quackenbush is a funny name, but when its owner is bearing down on you, you stopped grinning because Sean is 6’4”, about 220 pounds, and still growing.
We did some running plays first, and I managed to escape being killed by Sean and others. Gibbs was pleased; I could tell by the carnivorous smile on his face when his best tackles couldn’t nail me. Then he got bored with watching me run around the ends, and switched us to plays where I had to go through the line.
What a massacre. I’d get the ball and look for a hole in the chaotic whirl of bodies. Then a solid wall of defenders would rise up out of nowhere and pulverise me.
The fear of Sean Quackenbush was a real incentive to learning how to spot the holes. If I went through them with a little lift, I was able to get past the defenders most of the time; if I landed in front of somebody, a boost of lift threw me into the guy hard enough to get him out of the way.
After four or five of these plays, the whole team got kind of giddy. Guys on both sides were stopping and staring, even when Gibbs bellowed at them from the sidelines. He wasn’t alone there, either. A crowd was gathering, maybe a hundred students and some teachers. Mr Gordon, the principal, showed up. He was a nice enough guy, who put up with more guff from the Awkward Squad than he should have. He was even polite to Gassaway, who’d nearly electrocuted him last year. Now he stood beside Gibbs, a stocky guy with red hair and not much of it, looking like a middle-aged cherub chatting with the Prince of Darkness.
The practice went on. With Gibbs goading them on, the defenders went berserk trying to stop me, and a couple of times they succeed beyond my worst nightmares. If I went in through the line, they could still catch me in midair and pull me down before I had a chance to boost myself forward. Still, we weren’t doing badly, and by the end of the practice everyone was feeling fine. Gibbs gave us a pep talk that dwelt mostly on how we were luckier than we deserved to be to have a half-decent replacement for Wes, and that everybody was going to have to come up with 150 percent on Friday night or San Cristobal would take advantage of my inexperience and wipe us out. I expect his real purpose was to take some of the wind out of my bagpipes, and he succeeded.
Still, I went home feeling pretty pleased with myself, and parked myself in the kitchen to regale Melinda with a grunt-by-grunt account of my exploits while she fixed dinner. She listened in silence, attentive, amused, and a little bewildered.
“This sure isn’t like you,” she commented when I paused to draw breath. “Did Pat watch the practice?”
“No… she’s kind of sore at me.”
“Why?” She sounded really alarmed.
“If I knew that, maybe she wouldn’t be sore. She really overreacts sometimes.”
“Ah. Sure. What did you give her to overreacts to?”
“Nothing. I’m working on a little project and I said I couldn’t invite her over last night.”
“What project?”
“Oh, just something I’m fooling around with. Hard to describe without a lot of gibberish. If it works, I’ll show you. If it doesn’t, I’ll cannibalise the components.”
“Well, make an effort to patch things up, okay? I’d hate to see you two break up.”
“Break up? Who said anything about that?”
I got through dinner, cleaned up the kitchen, and headed upstairs. I ached a little bit from all the exercise and pounding, but the thought of getting out into the night sky made me fresh and impatient. It was one thing to use the Effect to increase my speed and agility on the ground; it was another to make it carry me up into the air, as high and as fast as I pleased.
The phone rang. It was Pat.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry I was such a crab. How was the practice?”
“Fine. I missed you.” Actually, I hadn’t even thought about her. “You should come and watch tomorrow. You going to the game?”
“Sure, I guess. What are you doing tonight?”
“Uh, working on my project some more. The experiment.”
“Oh. I thought we might study for the calculus quiz together.”
Oh boy. I’d forgotten all about it. And after flunking the last quiz, I was going to get serious flak from Gibbs regardless of my late-blooming athletic skills. “I wish I could, Pat, I really do. Listen, let me pick you up early tomorrow morning, and we’ll study before class.”
In the pause, I could hear Morty bleating: “Please turn the music down, girls!”
“Okay,” said Pat. “Pick me up about seven-thirty?”
“Will do. I’ll need all the help you can give me.”
I hung up, feeling a little guilty, and went to my room. There, I spent half an hour reviewing the calculus and then switched to science fiction. The evening dragged. I realised Pat and I could certainly have spent the evening studying together - but we would have taken too long, and I wouldn’t have gotten her home until eleven or later. I was waiting for Melinda to go to bed, which would be a lot sooner than eleven.
The evening dragged. Finally Melinda came upstairs from her study a little after ten, peeked in, and said good night.
“Good night,” I answered. “I’m sacking out pretty soon myself. Been a hard day.”
“Good thinking. My son the jock. I still can’t believe it.”
She went on down the hall to her room. I waited. Her toilet flushed. Fifteen minutes passed. I finished the sf novel and started another one. Half an hour. She’d be asleep by now; Melinda was a compulsive early-to-bed, early-to-rise type. I undressed quickly, pulled on my lifting clothes, and turned out my light. Two minutes later I was out and up, revelling in the roar of the wind in my ears and the rush of the Effect on my skin.
As before, I headed for the foothills. It was a cold night, but I didn’t mind. I goofed around a little, swinging from side to side, diving and rising. That wasn’t always fun. I still felt G forces, so when I dived, my stomach protested the sudden plunge and when I rose, it felt as if I weighted three hundred pounds.
At some point I saw a cloud drift by overhead, and decided to lift right up through it. The Effect shot me upward, fast; the earth dropped away below me. My ears popped, then plugged up again, muting the rush of wind around me. The cloud came toward me, surrounded me, and then was below my feet and dwindling. I laughed; my own voice was faint in my ears. Soon I started panting. The air must be getting thin, I thought vaguely, but it didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was climbing higher and faster, higher and faster.
Somewhere up there, I passed out.
I can’t really remember what it felt like. I have a confused memory of being really cold, and I think I dreamt. At some point I was awake again, awake enough to realise I was dropping like a stone - no, like a human being.
I was tumbling head over heels. My ears hurt violently, and
the wind slapped and shoved at me. How fast was I going - a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty? The world rolled up into my field of vision and sank down again. I seemed to hang in a roaring emptiness between the earth and the stars, and a long time passed. I called out, but my voice was lost in the wind. Soon I would strike the ground, and then I would die. It seemed logical, but not something I should worry about too much. It was more important to realise, as I now did, how big the world was, and how little I was.
Finally I was back in thick enough air to revive my oxygen-starved brain and make me realise what was going on. I turned on the Effect and felt weight return - a lot of weight. It occurred to me that I could apply the Effect so strongly that I’d break every bone in my body from the G force. Or I could apply it so weakly that I’d hit the ground hard enough to achieve the same result.
Down below was a hillside cut by a canyon, and oaks clustered darkly in the moonlight. The earth was coming up fast now, and I put on the brakes more firmly. Finally, after what seemed like a long, long time, I came to a stop only about a hundred feet above the canyon. The air was thick and sweet; I closed my eyes and panted the way Marcus lapped water. After a while I looked for the lights of Santa Teresa and headed for home almost on autopilot.
It wasn’t quit midnight when I slipped into my bedroom and quickly undressed. Carefully I put my lifting clothes away and slid into bed. Not until I was under the covers did the implications sink in: I had nearly killed myself. I had abused my powers and had stupidly risked death. If I had gone a little higher, or stayed unconscious a little longer, or panicked when I revived, I would now be a smear of exploded protoplasm on some dark hillside.
I was a long time falling asleep.
Chapter 8
AFTER A DAY like Tuesday, I needed a peaceful and relaxed Wednesday. Instead, I went to school and found Pat in the kind of mood that starts thermonuclear wars. I walked into the lab, sat down next to her and said hi.
“I’d like it if you’d sit somewhere else,” she said quietly.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t want you sitting next to me.”
“Can you at least give me a reason?”
“I don’t have to give you a damn thing. Now, you can get up and move or I can get up and move, but I was here first.”
“Pat, hey - would you please tell me what’s bugging you?”
She gathered her books and got up, moving across the room to share a table with Angela. They talked in undertones for a minute, with Angela nodding solemnly and glancing disapprovingly in my direction.
If I’d been rested and less wound up, I might’ve been cooler about it. Instead I slammed my notebooks open and concentrated on the calculus I should’ve studied all last night instead of gadding about in the lower troposphere. The hell with her. Here I was, levitating like a saint with afterburners, and an overnight sports hero as well, and she was in a snit over some imagined insult.
Gibbs limped in and took roll. He could see Pat and I weren’t sitting together, and my expression did everything except put the story into good English. His own face, however, showed nothing, and he swung into the first topic of the morning: progress reports on projects. His chief victim was Bobby Gassaway.
“Just gimmee a few more days, Mr Gibbs,” Bobby begged. “I’ve got to go back and talk to all my sources again. My dad says they’re picking up a whole rash of UFOs this week, and it’s just perfect for my report.”
“Is that right,” Gibbs droned.
“This is the real thing, Mr Gibbs. They turn up late in the evening, then they move all over the place and vanish. Last night my dad saw one shoot straight up to eighteen thousand feet and then come back down and disappear.”
“I assume this will be in your report, Gassaway.”
“Yes, sir, but I really need a few more days. I’m hoping to get a sighting, maybe even a photo, and my dad says he’ll try to get a photo of a UFO on radar.”
Gibbs sighed almost imperceptibly and nodded. “All right, Gassaway. One more week. Next Wednesday your report will be in, without fail.”
“Yes, sir.”
I sat back in my chair, shuddering. Eighteen thousand feet, in almost no time at all. No wonder I had passed out; I was lucky to not have been frostbitten as well. I must have been dropping at well over a hundred miles an hour, and a few more seconds’ unconsciousness would have left me just a mysterious red splatter on a hillside somewhere.
Irrationally, the thought made me even sorer at Pat. I would have been dead, and she would have nursed whatever her silly grudge was until it finally sank in on her that I was gone forever. Maybe they’d have found my body, or what was left of it, and she could have gone to my funeral. Then she could have spent the rest of her life regretting she’d been so crummy to me…
This was a pleasant enough fantasy, and I wallowed in self-pity for much of the morning. Then, when the calculus quiz came up, I suddenly remembered I’d promised to pick Pat up at seven-thirty to do some early studying. Instead, I’d slept until almost eight and rushed off to school alone. She’d had good reason to be sore at me.
Guilt and ignorance of the subject matter make a guaranteed prescription for failure on calculus quizzes, and I now had one more reason to feel sorry for myself. I began to wait impatiently for the afternoon and the chance to be a hero again.
At lunch Pat went off with Angela before I had a chance to apologise, so I gravitated to the corner of the cafeteria where the jocks hung out. They gave me a big hello, kidded me about the size of my lunch (Melinda was emptying the kitchen to feed me, on the premise that playing football burned a lot of calories), and generally made me feel welcome. I had a good time, and got some good advice about how the game should go on Friday. Exempted from extra practice, I spent the rest of the afternoon doing English lit and social studies while waiting for three o’clock.
It wasn’t exactly the same as the last couple of days. I trotted out in my pads and uniform (number 77) and saw the stands half-full of students and teachers and general passers-by. Gibbs and Mr Gordon was talking to a weedy young guy who was holding a microphone attached to a cassette recorder.
Wes hobbled out onto the field on his crutches and had a good time putting us through warm-up exercises. I did my jumping jacks and knee bends like everybody else, except that I puffed more and got tired sooner. I was used to all-day hikes, but not to sustained bursts of energy, and the other guys were in much better shape than I was. It made me realise that too much reliance on the Effect could lead to real health problems - quite apart from passing out and bumping into the planet at a high rate of speed.
Gibbs came out onto the field and we gathered around him.
“Gentlemen, as you can see, we have an audience of some size. Looks like the word has got around. A couple of the people on the stands are coaches from San Cristobal. We’re going to give them a show they’ll remember, so they go home and spread despair and depression all over their team.”
“Yessir!” we all bellowed.
“All right, let’s start with some passing plays.”
We did short passes and long passes, and then some really long passes. Jerry Ames and I started really clicking, each anticipating what the other was going to do. Gibbs screamed at the opposing squad to nail me, and they did their best to oblige him. In one play, Sean Quackenbush trailed me down the field and came down on me like divine wrath as I caught the ball. Rather than pivot and evade, I turned on the Effect and shoved myself right at him. The collision sounded like a couple of trucks meeting head-on, especially inside my helmet, and without my pads I’d’ve been pulped. But Sean bounced off, and I got my touchdown without any more trouble.
The crowd in the stands started cheering. Gibbs sat down on a bench, his bad leg straight out in front of him, and smiled with a flash of white teeth while Mr Gordon hopped up and down and waved his fists around in the air.
“Geez, Stevenson, how’d you do that?” Sean asked as he picked himself up and we h
eaded back up the field.
“Good timing, I guess.”
“Well, just remember I’m on your side, remember? Take it easy.”
“Sure, Sean. I’m sorry.”
We did some running plays after that, including some to make it clear our strategy didn’t depend entirely on me. Having a big audience made everybody show off a little: we were big on grunting and shouting and thrashing around a lot. The sun sank and the air cooled, but no one left.
Finally Gibbs called me off the field to rest, and I looked over the stands to see if Pat was there. She wasn’t.
After practice, I drove out toward the city airport and parked outside a small shop on Santa Barbara Boulevard. It was called The Junior Birdman, and it specialised in equipment for skydivers, sailplane pilots, and ultralights. A big tanned guy came out of the back room when the door jingled.
“Yeah, chief. What can I do for you?”
“I want to buy an altimeter and a windspeed gauge.”
“Getting into skydiving, huh?”
“Well, you know.”
He showed me quite a range of devices, most of them insanely expensive as far as I was concerned. Finally I settled for a bare-bones outfit that still came close to bankrupting me.
“Can I interest you in a good jumpsuit?” the tanned guy asked.
“Not just yet.”
“What kind of parachute you using? I’ve got some great ones, on sale.”
“Uh, I don’t have - I don’t need a parachute just now, thanks.”
“Okay, chief. Coming out to the meet at the airport next Saturday?”
“I don’t think I can make it.”
“Too bad. going to have some of the best people in California out there. Guys, you’d think they were really flying, y’know?”
“Uh-huh. Well, thanks.” I handed him a check that left about six dollars in my account, and scuttled out.
Dinner was quiet. Melinda had a new commissioin and was already in the high-intensity meditation state she always enters in the early phase of a new job. I ate my tamales and rice and thought about Pat’s knockout Italian food. Then, while Melinda immured herself in her study to commune with her IBM PC, I washed dishes and thought confused thoughts.
LIFTER Page 8
