LIFTER

by Crawford Kilian

  I knew I was in the wrong with Pat, that I’d behaved like a jerk and hadn’t made much of an effort to straighten things out. But I still felt the time wasn’t right to reveal my secret, and the secret was more important than anything else right now.

  Finishing up the dishes, I went to the phone and called Pat. Morty, shouting over music that sounded like exploding garbage cans, said she was busy and couldn’t come to the phone. I asked if she’d call me back, and hung me up.

  She didn’t call back. In penance, I ground away on my calculus most of the evening, took Marcus for a long walk, and got back too late to phone her again. I would just have to see her in class tomorrow.

  For once, Melinda stayed up late, working on her new house. At last she went to bed. I rigged myself up with my new gadget strapped to my chest, and five minutes later I was soaring through a deck of low cloud into an emptiness glittering with stars. The dials on my gadget were illumined, so I could tell my windspeed and altitude at a glance.

  It was a strange feeling to be able to put numbers to what I was doing, to know I was five hundred feet above ground level and travelling eighty miles per hour. Eighty miles per hour, and I wasn’t even trying hard. After last night’s scare, though, I wasn’t eager to test my limits. For all I knew, I could break the sound barrier, or even hit escape velocity and go into orbit. Neither was a record I wanted to set.

  In any case, I had enough to amuse me. Once into the foothills, I cruised up and down canyons, just above the treetops, and balanced on cliffs before somersaulting hundreds of feet down and soaring back up again. The feeling was marvellous. I didn’t feel light as a feather, except when I shot up and let myself drop again. No, I just felt… powerful. Maybe surfers feel that way. I was getting a free ride from a source of infinite energy; while I could easily hurt myself, it would be my own fault if I did. That knowledge kept my eyes open and my mind alert.

  Everything poured in as I glided slowly over the dim foothills. The air smelled good. The wind rustled in the trees, and I could distinguished the noise of every leaf. In fact, my hearing seemed to be unnaturally sharp. An owl launched itself out of the blackness of an oak tree, saw me, and plunged into the shelter of another tree; I could hear the faintest whisper of its feathers. Something squeaked on the edge of a night meadow far below and I could have dropped to the exact spot.

  In some ways it was like swimming. I could hover and let the breeze push me gently, this way and that, as if I were inner-tubing down some lazy creek. Once or twice I drifted into a tree, or bumped my way slowly along a cliff face. When I tired of that, I lifted a thousand feet and looked out across the foothills to the distant lights of the cities of the valley. They glowed like distant galaxies, hanging as unsupported as I in the cold emptiness of night. I could rotate, and it seemed as if the whole dark world and a billion stars were turning around me. Here and there, at some unimaginable distance, a spark moved: a car on a highway, a plane.

  Too soon, it was past midnight. I was cold and tired; with my hands in my pockets, I headed for home.

  Just for a smile, I buzzed the air base control tower, coming down to within five hundred feet of it at a speed of over a hundred miles an hour. It made my eyes water like crazy, but it was fun. A few seconds later I slipped between the branches of the willow tree and into my room. A few seconds after that, a jet fighter boomed past overhead. I undressed, giggling quietly to myself in the darkness.

  The War To Stamp Out Amnesic Male Idiots was still raging the next morning. I intercepted Pat on her way to school, but she wouldn’t even talk to me, let alone get in the car. Finally I parked Brunhilde in somebody’s driveway, right across her path, and got out.

  “Look, this is crazy,” I said. “I’m really sorry I forgot to pick you up yesterday, okay? I’ve been feeling really stupid about itᚓ”

  “Good.” She gave me a magnum-force dirty look and limped across somebody’s flowerbed to get around me.

  I reached out to grab her hand. “Pat, pleaseᚓ”

  She swung her cane across my forearm like a cavalry sabre and I yelped, stumbling back against the car.

  “Stay clear of me. Just stay clear of me.”

  I stood there, watching her go on down the footpath, while I rubbed my arm. That was some whack she’d given me; I felt a belated twinge of sympathy for Jason Murphy’s shin.

  The garage door started rising at the end of somebody’s driveway, and somebody himself came rolling out in his red BMW. He saw me and Brunhilde blocking his driveway and stuck his head out the window.

  “Hey, you want to move it, buddy?”

  Always willing to oblige, I got in and backed out. Then I gunned the motor and took off. Old VWs are very poor for making dramatic exits in; they don’t leave rubber or roar a lot, they just wheeze louder. I passed Pat, who didn’t look at me. She didn’t seem so mad now, just unhappy. If I hadn’t been so sore at her, I’d have stopped and tried again. But I was sore, and my arm hurt, and I had that grainy-eyeball, half-zonked feeling of being without enough sleep, so I went on past.

  Bobby Gassaway was practically frothing in the lab. His dad had taken a couple of Polaroid snaps of last night’s UFO on the radar screen; they looked like nothing in particular, but Bobby seemed to think they were the honest evidence this side of an outright invasion from space.

  Gibbs was less impressed. “These are interesting, Gassaway,” he said, “but they certainly don’t prove anything except that an unknown aircraft was overhead last night.”

  “But, Mr Gibbs, my dad says it couldn’t have been an aircraft. The radar profile was all wrong. It hardly turned up at all, just like the last couple of times. Whatever it was, it was little and made out of something that hardly reflect radar at all, so right there we can forget about human technology. And it came right down toward the control tower just before it disappeared.”

  “Gassaway, you’re trying to have it both ways. Has anybody seen anything?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. At least not the controllers.”

  “So your only evidence is a blip on a screen, and not even a very strong blip. For all you know, it could be some prankster with a radio-controlled model airplane, or an owl.”

  “Sir.” Gassaway was all wounded dignity. “My dad knows what he sees on radar, and he says he’s never seen anything like this.”

  “And yet you started this project on the grounds that he sees UFOs all the time.”

  “Well, he does, Mr Gibbs. But this one just happens to be different. I’ll tell you this - they took it seriously enough to scramble a jet.”

  Gibbs regarded Gassaway dispassionately. “And did the jet pilot see anything?”

  “No, sir. It vanished again.”

  “What’s the principal of Occam’s razor, Gassaway?”

  “Well - that you should always choose the simplest explanation for these radar sightings?”

  “Good. What do you consider the simplest explanation for these radar sightings?”

  “I lean to some kind of small, unnamed craft from a mother ship, sir.”

  Gibbs kept his face immobile. “Why not a small, unnamed model airplane?”

  “Because one of the facts is that my father is a qualified air traffic controller and he eliminated that possibility, sir.”

  “You don’t think it could be the work of some prankster?”

  “Sir, now you better get out Occam’s razor. It’s hard to imagine how a prankster could handle something so small, but that can climb to eighteen thousand feet in next to no time, or travel just a couple of hundred feet at almost a hundred miles an hour.”

  “Gassaway, you’re making some dubious assumptions.”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “How do you know that whatever climbed to eighteen thousand feet the other night is the same thing your father saw on radar last night?”

  “Well, sir, it’s just been the last few days that he’s seen this kind of image.”

  “Gassaway, what does post hoc
ergo propter hoc means?”

  “It’s a fallacy, Mr Gibbs. It means, ‘after this, therefore because of this.’ And I see where you’re getting. Just because they’ve seen something funny a couple of nights running doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. But I could just as easily argue that just because you look like the teacher we saw yesterday doesn’t mean you are Mr Gibbs. You could be an impostor.”

  “What conclusions would follow from that hypothesis?” Gibbs asked, not at all put out.

  “Uh, well, that some kind of conspiracy was under way?”

  “What kind of conspiracy would require the replacement of a high-school science teacher?”

  “Maybe somebody doesn’t want the truth about UFOs to come out.”

  “Or maybe San Cristobal is getting serious about beating us tomorrow,” Gibbs answered with a smile. Most of us laughed.

  “Aw, come on, Mr Gibbs. Why would they do that?”

  “Give me some time and I can cook up any story you like. Gassaway, the point is this: a theory doesn’t just explain things. It disexplain things, too. If it asks us to throw away too much of what we think we already know, we’ve got a right to ask for iron-clad proof. That’s why Galileo and Darwin bothered people. Their theories threatened some very detailed and satisfactory bodies of knowledge. Now, maybe these UFOs of yours do exist. But if they do, their existence means some great big chunks of science are very wrong, and we’ll have to go back and do a whole lot of work from scratch. Nobody wants to do that until the evidence is incontrovertible - and until the new theory makes some predictions that can be tested.”

  “Well, sir, I think the evidence is incontrovertible that something is out there.”

  “Occam’s razor tells me it’s a hoaxer or a misinterpreted natural phenomenon, Gassaway.”

  I raised my hand. “Mr Gibbs, I think the evidence points to a hoaxer. Somebody who’s found a way to fool the air force radar. Bobby, when have these UFOs been turning up?”

  Gassaway turned a look of deadly suspicion on me. “Between about 11:00 P.M. and midnight, sometimes a little later. Why?”

  “Well, I’ll predict that another one turns up tonight around that time.”

  “Stevenson, are you pulling something on me?” Gassoway’s face was pale. “Because if you are, so help meᚓ”

  “Bobby, I’m telling you the absolute truth when I say I’m not a hoaxer. Okay? I wouldn’t know how to fool a radar beam if my life depended on it. But it seems logical that if somebody has figured out a way to do it, they’ll keep doing it - especially if now the air force is reacting by sending up jets. So I’ll predict that they’ll do it again tonight, probably about the same time.”

  “Your prediction doesn’t necessarily validate the hoaxer theory, “Stevenson,” said Gibbs. “Sunrise is another periodic phenomenon, but no one supposes that it’s due to a hoaxer.”

  “Maybe not, sir, but if Gassaway is really looking sharp tonight, and so is the air force, they might be able to spot this UFO and identify it once and for all.”

  Gibbs nodded absently. “Well, Gassaway can try to test your theory tonight.”

  All through this exchange I’d been glancing over at Pat, trying to see if she was paying any attention. She wasn’t.

  The rest of the day dragged along. After school, practice was almost like a regular game: the stands were jammed and people stood around the sidelines. Cheerleaders were doing their routines and getting a big reaction. The weedy young guy with the tape recorder were there again, along with a camera crew from the local TV station. Gibbs ignored it all and barked like an alpha-male baboon dealing with the dumbest young apes in his troop. We barked back and ran around trying to look fierce. I did my thing, mostly with running, and the crowd ate it up. At the end of practice the TV crew wanted to interview me, but Gibbs vetoed it. I showered and headed for home.

  I was bushed. I’d had maybe six hours’ sleep for two nights in a row; I’d run around trying to avoid being tackled by larger psychopaths, and hadn’t always succeeded; and I’d evidently broken up with the first girl I’d ever really cared about. When I thought about last weekend, up in the hills, I couldn’t believe it had been real.

  So I shuffled into the house and headed upstairs, hoping to grab a nap before dinner. Melinda called from the kitchen and I trudged back down.

  Some kind of casserole was cooking in the oven, and Melinda had made a big salad. She was sitting in the kitchen table with the newspaper and a glass of white wine.

  “Hi. Sit and have a Coke or something.”

  I had a tonic water.

  “There’s a story about you in the paper tonight.”

  “Yeah? I’m going to be on TV, too.”

  She smiled, but a little distantly. “Quite a change, isn’t it? Being a big jock?”

  “I guess. I don’t know why everyone makes such a fuss. It’s a lot like being involved in a mass mugging.”

  “And the prize for the most insincere display of modesty goes to - Rick Stevenson! Win it one more time and we’ll retire the cup.”

  “Aw, come on, Melinda. I hardly know what the heck I”m doing out there. Everybody else knows plays and strategy; they just tell me what to do and they give me the ball and I run.”

  “Baloney. You’re fantastic out there.”

  “You really believe what you read in the papers?”

  “The papers say you’re phenomenal, not fantastic. I’ve been to your practices the last two days.”

  “Huh? And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I just did. Don’t get sore, Rick. I just thought you didn’t need to get all self-conscious.”

  “Boy. Start playing football and everybody goes weird on you. Willy practically fires me. You sneak around to watch me. And Pat won’t even talk to me.”

  “Why not?”

  I yawned, shaking my head. “I don’t know. She got sore because I couldn’t see her on Monday night, and then one thing just led to another. I even overslept and forgot to pick her up, and apologising doesn’t do any good.”

  Melinda looked at me with those big intelligent blue eyes of hers. “What do you think about her, Rick?”

  “I think she’s a pain in the arse. I feel she’s the only girl I’ve ever met who’s worth caring about.”

  “I bet she feels just the same way about you. You’re a smart cookie, and you can be cute sometimes, but you’re a real ego-flexer and you’re not always so hot at handling other people’s feelings.”

  Usually I would roll my eyes and come up with a snappy retort when Melinda gave me this poor-repressed-macho-cripple routine. This time I was too tired and dull, so instead I said: “What have I been doing wrong?”

  “You’ve been closing yourself off, Rick. You started opening up a little after that damn computer got taken away, and you opened up to Pat. You made her start to think she could relax and trust you. Then you just - relapsed. Went off the air. All week long - hell, it’s been longer than that, really, but this week it’s been really bad. I don’t know why you’re doing it, but from out here it looks like you want to break up with Pat but you don’t have the guts to say so.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  She looked at me in a way I’d never seen before - as if she were looking at somebody else, somebody she didn’t like at all.

  “Beats the hell out of me, Rick. It just looks like you’ve got something else to interest you - or somebody else.” She poured herself another glass and I realised she’d been efficiently putting away most of the bottle while we talked. Very un-Melinda.

  “If you really want to know, you remind me a lot of your father just lately.”

  Do you ever get the funny feeling that the person you’re talking to is suddenly very far away, and then very close? That was the feeling I got then. Melinda’s face seemed to retreat and advance.

  “How so?” I asked, trying to sound casual. On the few occasions when I’d asked her about him before, she’d given me short, angry answers.

&nbs
p; “He was really, really good at all kinds of things. Especially at closing himself off in his own little world. It wasᚓ” She shook her head, and I saw tears gleam in her eyes. “He was such a bright, funny guy, but he couldn’t face responsibility. He couldn’t face being alone, either. So he’d try to reassure himself by attracting some girl, and then, as soon as she was hooked, he’d walk away. Just leave her there. ‘Babe, it’s not working out,’ he’d say in that deep voice of his. ‘I guess I’m not really your kind of guy. I’m just big trouble for you.’ And… off he’d go.”

  I felt paralysed. I wanted to tell Melinda that I wasn’t like that, that I had a real reason for behaving the way I was. But I didn’t want to argue with her because she might get off the subject of my father and it could be years before she felt like mentioning him again.

  “Is that what he did with you?”

  “Word for word. Oh, he said a lot more. But he managed to get it all said in about twenty minutes, and then he kissed me and walked out the door. I was almost three months pregnant.”

  “And he walked out on you anyway?”

  “He didn’t know, and I sure wasn’t going to tell him.”

  “But why not? My gosh, heᚓ”

  “If I couldn’t hold on to him by myself, I sure as hell wasn’t going to use you to do it. I didn’t want him living with me under duress, being the dutiful husband and father, and sneaking off to reassure himself with a string of new girlfriends.”

  “Did you ever hear from him again?”

  “I made sure I couldn’t. I moved out of town, quit school, came out to California and had you. Then I went back to school and - here we are.”

  “Where’d you been living?”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you when you’re eighteen or twenty-one or whatever age you have to be to be grown up these days.” She finished the bottle. “I know you’ve got a right to know who your father was and all that. I just don’t feel like seeing him again, and I’d probably have to if you got back in touch with him. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon not talk about him anymore.”