“Shut up, Gassaway.”
“I’ve been watching you, Stevenson. You’re a big b.s. artist. First it’s computer crime, now it’s UFO hoaxes. You’ve got a sick sense of humour.”
I looked at Pat and rolled my eyes. “If I did, I’d think you were funnier than you are. Talk to you tomorrow, Gassaway, if the little green men don’t get you first.”
As we went upstairs, Pat asked. “What was all that about?”
“Bobby smells a rat. He’s really convinced I’m hoaxing the air force and his daddy.”
“So what?”
“It makes me nervous. I think about that jet coming up out of the clouds, and I get the shivers. Maybe they saw us. For all I know, they took photos of us.”
“What if they did? We weren’t doing anything wrong.”
I wasn’t in the mood for wisecracks. We went into my room and I slouched into my desk chair while Pat lifted herself smoothly into the old overstuffed armchair in the corner.
“I’m just starting to feel a little paranoid about all this, Pat. We aren’t exactly being discreet about lifting. We turn up on radar like the swallows coming back to Capistrano. I bashed into Al Suarez so hard I could’ve killed him. I nearly killed Jason and whatisface, and I felt some dents in his car that people might get really curious about.”
“Baloney. Occam’s razar. Even if Jason told whdreamtat happened, who’d believe him? They’d figure it was more likely that he was ripped out of his skull, cracked up the car, and then jumped up and down on the roof for a giggle.”
“Maybe so,” I agreed, “but the point remains that we’re fooling around with something really powerful, and it’s awfully easy to start abusing it. It’s kind of like having a pistol around the house - it can turn any little dispute into murder. I’ve got into a whole string of little fights with Jason, and each time I end up using the Effect in a more violent way.”
“He’s a slow learner.”
“Being an idiot isn’t a capital offence, and I’m not the Sate of California; I’ve got no right to kill people I don’t like.”
“You’re a slow learner, too. But you are learning, Rick. We both are. My gosh, we’re brand new at all this; we’re lucky we haven’t killed ourselves, let alone Jason. Do you think you’re really such a psycho case that you’ll end up murdering everybody who looks cross-eyed at you?”
“No, but other people sometimes really are psycho cases.”
“We’re back to that, huh?”
“I guess so. Well, imagine it was Jason who could lift. Suppose he decided to jump on Brunhilde’s roof; think he’d care if I drove us off a cliff? He’d laugh. And there’s a million Jasons out there. Think about the loonies who go up in office towers, or into hamburger joints, with a couple of rifles and a thousand rounds, and start killing everybody in sight. Imagine a guy like that, lifting down Market Street in San Francisco with an M-16.” I lifted my hands helplessly. “Pat, this is too much power for an ordinary jerk like me.”
“Or me?”
“Or you, or anybody. Look, you and I proved it’s easy to teach lifting, easier than catching a cold. If we go public with this, we have to start teaching other people, and they teach other people. It spreads geometrically, and eventually some people learn it who are going to go crazy with it. If we go to the government and say, here’s a secret, we still have to teach people and the same thing finally happens. My gosh, I’ll bet you wouldn’t even have to be taught by a lifter - if you know how it’s done the first time, you can do it by yourself. Like building an atomic bomb.”
Pat sat quietly in the armchair, her hands folded in her lap. I belatedly noticed that she was wearing black pants and a dark blue sweater, and I was suddenly willing to bet that her backpack held goggles and a balaclava as well as her school books. She was all ready to go lifting tonight.
“You think about the crazies,” she said at last. “I think about the people like me. Rick, I’m sixteen years old, and I never took a step without help until you taught me how to lift. All my life I’ve been a prisoner of a stupid hip. Sometimes at night I used to lie in bed and try to jump out of my own body - just leave it behind, so I could be free, so I wouldn’t have to limp and I wouldn’t have to hurt all the time. And now I am free. At least some of the time, I’m as free as a bird. I think you want me to be back in my cage, and wear this damn thing” - she slapped her brace - “the rest of my life. And you want everybody like me to stay in their cages, too. Do you know how many people can’t walk at all? Amputees, people with strokes, paraplegics and quadriplegics and people with cerebral palsy and old ladies with brittle bones who fall down and break their hips. Teach them how to lift, and they can do anything. They can live the way they’re supposed to live. It’d be the greatest miracle cure in history. Even if I knew some nut was going to shoot me after I’d been lifting for just a day, a day of freedom would be better than a lifetime in a cage, or a brace, or a wheelchair. An hour of freedom.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that, so I just shook my head slowly to gain time.
“It’s not that simple, Pat. Heck, you don’t even know if some of the people you mentioned could lift anyway. Suppose if you got a stroke or palsy or something like that, you can’t lift; how would you feel when you saw other people lifting out of wheelchairs?”
“I’d feel terrible. But at least there wouldn’t be so many people like me. The misery level would drop a lot.”
“Maybe on the personal side it would. On the social side it would start going up pretty soon after.” She started to speak, but I went on: “Pat - I think I understand, I really think I do. But you’ve got to understand how I feel, too. Which is scared.” I could hardly speak the last word. I was shivering, and noticed - as if from a distance - that my palms were pressed together between my knees. “I’ve got to work this all out somehow, so I know I’m doing the right thing, so I don’t spend the rest of my life regretting all this ever happened.”
“So what do you want to do?” Pat’s voice was calm.
“I’m going to give up lifting for a while.”
“Completely?”
“Completely.”
“For how long?”
“For however long it takes me to figure things out. If I go on lifting, it’d be like smoking while I tried to decide if I should quit.”
She laughed, briefly. “Boy, Gibbs would skin you alive if you tried that kind of argument by analogy with him.”
“Maybe. But it really is like a drug.”
“Sure, like oxygen or food. Really addictive. And what am I supposed to do while you’re working this out?”
“I can’t tell you what to do. But one reason I’m going to quit is so I don’t get caught and have to reveal everything. I just hope you don’t attract more attention from the air force or whoever.”
She looked out the window at the willow tree’s branches brushing against the glass. “I think I can do that much.”
“Okay. Good. “Now how about some homework?”
“Fair enough.”
We got into it, and I felt a little better. But even with Pat sitting right next to me, I had a funny feeling that she was a long, long way away.
Chapter 12
THE AFTERNOON AND evening passed quietly, with homework and preparing dinner and eating it and going out to rent a movie and coming back and watching it and finally taking Pat home. She kissed me goodnight in the car.
“See you tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Great.”
“I love you, you know.”
I think she must’ve known I wasn’t saying it just to be lovey-dovey, but to make her do things my way. I’d already decided that all was fair in love, war, and levitation. But she didn’t bite my head off or anything; she just kissed me again and went inside.
I drove home and sat in my room reading science fiction until one in the morning, bored out of my skull. All that empty sky up there, and me not in it, and Pat probably out soloing…
Bu
t the air force was quiet. Maybe she’d decided it was smarter not to taunt them so soon after they’d nearly caught us. I fell asleep and dreamt about lifting.
Monday morning was cold, with sunshine burning through a high overcast. Between the shattered windshield and Brunhilde’s feeble defroster, I could hardly see where I was going. Pat limped out from the house and got in.
“HI again,” she chirped.
“Grr. I hate driving.”
“I don’t blame you. When are you getting the windows fixed?”
“I’ll drop it off at the shop after work. Boy, it’ll be a relief to go to Willy’s instead of practising.”
And that was the way the conversation went, all the way to school and up to the lab. Cheerful, animated, superficial. She didn’t want to bring up her differences any more than I did, and I didn’t think I could survive another split with her. While we nattered away about calculus and Willy Preuzer, I was wondering if this was what being in love was all about: needing somebody so much you were ready to throw away everything else you cared about. Remember that line about “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more”? It’s bull. If Pat had said: “Hey, Rick, let’s go on TV tonight and show the country how to lift,” I would’ve headed straight downtown to KST-TV and asked for an audition. But she didn’t, and I was glad.
Gibbs stumped in as usual, and went through his usual ritual of reading his mail and dropping it in the wastebasket before starting class. This morning, though, he looked at me instead of launching into his lecture.
“Stevenson, can you hang around for a minute after class?”
“Yes, sir.”
I might’ve wondered what was up, but we got into some really interesting math that everybody else was allowed to handle on the computers. I was eighty-sixed, of course, but I had fun composing a program to handle the problems Gibbs gave us, and then let Pat run it on the Apple she was using. The program didn’t work, but it failed in entertaining ways; it wasn’t until class was over that I remembered Gibbs’s request.
“How you feeling today?” he asked, once the rest of the Awkward Squad had drifted off.
“Okay, sir.”
“You seemed kind of upset just after the game.”
“Well, I sure didn’t mean to put anyone in the hospital.”
“Suarez told me he was really glad you came to see him.”
I goggled at him. It had never occurred to me that Gibbs might be worried about Al Suarez, too. I’d just figured Gibbs was too tough to care about some jerk on the other team.
“His nurse told me he’s getting better in a hurry. They checked him out of the hospital this morning.”
“Oh, great.” Something started to relax inside me, something I hadn’t even realised was all knotted up. “Boy, I’m glad to hear that.”
“So was I. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you free to come to dinner Wednesday?”
“At your place, Mr Gibbs?”
“Yeah, but you’re in luck; I’m not doing the cooking.”
“Well, gee - I’d like to, very much. Thank you.”
“Good. You can come over with me after Wednesday afternoon practice. Now you better get going or you’ll be late for your next class.”
The rest of the morning went along pretty much as always, except that in the halls everybody said hello to me and guys punched me in the biceps and said “Way to go!” At lunch, Pat and I went down to the cafeteria and sat with the jocks and kidded each other a lot. Across the room I saw Jason and the Tricycle Rats, including Brad Whatisface with a big rectangle of gauze taped to his scalp. They didn’t pay any attention to us; I was just as glad.
Just as we were finishing, Bobby Gassaway came by. He hadn’t been in lab that morning, and I asked him why.
“Putting the finishing touches on my report for tomorrow.”
“About time. You still think I’m a little green man from Mars?”
“No. But my dad tells me they chased a couple of UFOs on Saturday.”
“A couple of them now. Talk about a waste of taxpayers money. Gassaway, don’t you ever read The Sceptical Inquirer?” That’s a little magazine that debunks paranormal junk like ESP and UFOs and astral travelling. Gibbs had a lot of copies lying around the lab.
“Sure I read it. They’re really biased, though, at least about UFOs. Maybe I’ll send them my report after Gibbs gets it.”
“Why would they need confetti?” I asked.
“Stevenson, your arse is so smart it almost makes up for the rest of you being so dumb. You’ll learn.” And he took off after giving me a funny look - almost a smirk. It made me a little uncomfortable, on a day when everybody else had stroked my ego until it developed static cling.
After school I gave Pat and Angela a ride to Angela’s place.
“I can’t pick you up tomorrow morning,” I said. “Brunhilde’s going in the shop tonight.”
“That’s okay. See you at school. The walk’ll be good exercise.” And she winked at me. What was that supposed to mean?
Willy was all smiles when I walked in. Before I could do a thing, he sat me down in his office and gave me a cup of coffee and sailed into a long, detailed analysis of the game. He’d certainly understood more about it than I did.
“Best game I ever saw Terry High play,” he concluded, “and that’s saying something. You were fantastic. Listen, you ever think of maybe playing some ball in college, and then turn pro?”
“Pro football. Gee, Willy, I don’t think so.”
“Aw, come on - think about it at least. You got real talent for the game, Rick. Talent. I tell you one thing, this Friday they’re going to have a lot of scouts watching you in the stands. Berkely, UCLA, Stanford, maybe even U of W.”
“Who?”
“University of Washington. You know, up in Seattle?”
“Oh, sure. Well, let’s get to work, Willy. I’m costing you money just sitting here.”
“Listen, it’s a pleasure. I don’t get to talk about football very often. Boy, that was some game. I get a real bang out of it, you know, see a couple of good teams go to work on each other like that. Everybody evenly matched, none of that big-league pressure for a million bucks a year, just kids playing good ball for the fun of it.”
I felt a twitch of guilt and stood up, grabbing a handful of order forms. “Be back with this stuff right away, Willy.”
I was glad to be back in the quiet warehouse, doing a familiar job again. Even the tedious parts, like pushing the ladder up and down the aisles when a quick lift would’ve saved time, were enjoyable. I could almost pretend that the last few weeks hadn’t happened, that I was just an ordinary schmo with no problems.
Not lifting turned out to be a good idea, because Willy got bored and came out to keep me company. We talked about the game some more, and business, and what would happen in the next game.
“You better be on your toes,” he warned. “Those guys are going to go after you. They’re going to figure you’re trouble until they got you on the ground and out of the game.”
“Well, I’ll try to be careful.”
I was already dreading Friday.
After work, I dropped Brunhilde off at the auto body shop and then walked home in the dark. It was over a mile, and I was almost the only pedestrian. Cars whizzed by, and the occasional motorcycle, but no one was walking anywhere. In California, nobody ever does.
Las Estacas Street was just as empty of pedestrians as the rest of town, but at least there weren’t many cars. As I reached home I noticed a sedan of some kind. American, parked out in front where Brunhilde usually sat. I glimpsed a couple of people inside, then went on up the footpath and let myself in.
“Actually had to walk home, huh?” Melinda said as I collapsed dramatically into a chair at the kitchen table. “Poor baby.”
“It was your basic Third World experience,” I wheezed. “You could at least sympathise.”
“Hey, I thought you were into hiking.”
<
br /> “That’s for the hills, where it’s pretty. In town, you go for a walk and you start getting subversive ideas about dynamiting petrol stations.”
Marcus had been sitting at the entrance to the kitchen, which was as far as he was allowed in until washing up. Suddenly he spun around and took off for the front door, barking in a hysterical baritone. I heaved myself upright and went to see what was up - most likely it was Girl Scouts selling cookies or proselytisers for some religious group asking if we wanted front-row tickets for Armageddon.
Wrong. Holding onto Marcus’s collar, I opened the door on two men. One was shortish, stocky, and sandy-haired; the other was tall, rawboned, and dark. Both were wearing cheap slacks and corduory sport jackets. They were somewhere around thirty, but they looked very solemn.
“Good evening,” said the sandy-haired guy. “Are you Richard Stevenson?”
“Yes.”
He pulled a little plastic ID card out of the inside pocket of his sport coat, and held it up under the porch light so I could see the little photo of him, in uniform.
“We’re from Hotchkiss Air Force Base. Intelligence. Mind if we come in and talk to you for a minute?”
Wow. I’d heard this whole routine before, from the cops who came to nail me for my computer crimes.
“Come on in,” I said, yanking Marcus out of the way. “We’re just getting dinner ready.” Marcus predictably shoved his big beezer into their crotches, and for once I didn’t chew him out about it. We all paraded into the kitchen; Melinda looked surprised for a moment, and then her face smoothed out as she, too, remembered the cops.
Sandy-hair identified himself as Mr Randall; the dark-haired guy was Mr Borowitz. Despite their reluctance to say much about themselves, they were obviously officers. Melinda invited them to sit down for a bite to eat, which they politely declined.
“We’ll only take up a few minutes of your time,” Mr Randall said. “Basically, it boils down to this. Our air traffic controllers have been picking up some, uh, unusual images on radar, usually over Santa Teresa but sometimes up in the hills to the east. They look like some kind of small aircraft, or maybe balloons. They could be a hazard to our aircraft, and we’re trying to determine their nature and their origins.”
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