LIFTER

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LIFTER Page 6

by Crawford Kilian


  The country here was mostly rolling hills, mostly covered in long yellow grass, with clumps of oak trees here and there. We had the road to ourselves; it climbed into steeper country where pines replaced the oaks. Mist hung in ragged streamers over the ridges.

  I turned off on the gravel road that led to San Miguel Creek. Halfway up to the parking area, we saw three deer - two does and a yearling - slip off the road and into the trees. Pat squealed.

  “I’ve never seen them, not wild like that. Isn’t that awful? God, they’re beautiful!”

  Looking at her, I thought she was beautiful, too, but I wasn’t about to say so. Her face was pretty, all right, but always tight, guarded; now her guard was down, and she was so beautiful she made me dizzy. I wonder, now, what I looked like just then, deep in a spasm of self-congratulation over my insane good luck.

  The parking area was at the end of the road at a small, public campsite. The creek ran down out of a canyon, almost inaudible under the rush of wind in the trees. Pat pulled her rucksack straps over her shoulders; I took my own backpack, far larger and heavier. The trail wound along the steep north side of the canyon, not climbing much yet. The chilly air smelled good. I found myself enjoying the slow pace that Pat kept me to, instead of my usual quick striding. We talked, noticed mushrooms and mosses and flowers, and held hands. Far below us, the creek tumbled whitely over rocks. Marcus raced up and down the trail, occasionally checking up to make sure we hadn’t gotten ourselves lost.

  After a mile or so, I called a halt; the trail would start to climb soon, and I wanted her to rest awhile. We munched on gorp (good old raisins and peanuts), listening to the white noise of moving water and wind.

  “That’s what it feels like,” I blurted.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. The wind just reminded me of something.” What it reminded me of was the feeling of the energy flow, the Effect. I started babbling about hikes I’d been on, just to change the subject. Boy, that had been close. Sitting there, lulled by the noise, I’d nearly gone into theta. The thought of having an unreliable brain was not a pleasant one. Remember, I told myself: she’s living in one reality and you’re in another.

  We carried on, up a gentle grade and over a couple of plank bridges across minor streams. The mist was all around us now, blotting out all but the nearest trees.

  “How’s your hip?”

  “Fine. How’s yours?”

  But I could see she was tired and hurting, so I called another halt. We perched on a long-dead log, warming ourselves with hot chocolate from my Thermos.

  “What does it look like to you?” I asked.

  “Different. Indifferent. It must’ve looked like this a thousand years ago. Ten thousand. It’ll look the same when we’re gone.”

  “That’s partly why I like it out here. Indifferent - that’s a good way to put it. Places like this don’t care if you’re smart or dumb, good or bad. They don’t tell you the rules, but they’ll give you a chance to figure them out. If you don’t learn fast enough, you get hurt.”

  “Just like life,” Pat said with a smile. She heaved herself up onto her feat. “I’ve got to go pee. Don’t look.”

  “I won’t.”

  She moved across the trail to a clump of trees that perched on the edge of the slope, blocking the view of the creek. I sat and looked at the ground between my boots for a while, thinking. She took a long time. Then I heard rocks rolling and clattering, and Pat, scared, calling my name.

  Jumping up, I ran across the trail and into the trees. The slope within the grove was shallow at first, but steepened sharply and dropped away into something like a scree slope of loose rock and gravel just about at the angle of repose. Maybe a hundred feet down the slope, Pat lay on her back in a cloud of dust. The trail of disturbed rock and dirt was dark brown against the beige of the slope. Right at my feet was Pat’s cane.

  “Are you okay?” I shouted.

  “I think so,” she called in a shaky voice. Her feet where pointing downslope. “But I can’t move. When I try, I just slide further down.”

  Another sixty or seventy feet beyond her, the slope turned into a near-vertical cliff; I couldn’t tell how far the drop to the creek was, but it was farther than I wanted to see her fall.

  “Don’t move.” Great advice. I stood on the edge of the cliff and bit my lip. No rope, with us or in the car. Someone might turned up in the car park or the campsite with a rope, but I didn’t think a run back down the trail was worth the gamble.

  “I’m coming down after you.”

  “Don’t. You’ll get stuck, too. Just go get help, Rick. Please.”

  I reached for the feeling of the Effect, and there it was.

  Marcus sat there with a worried look on his face, and I worried that he might follow me.

  “Stay,” I ordered.

  I didn’t turn up the power; instead, I drifted down the slope, the soles of my boots just tapping the rocks. Pat tried to twist her head around to see me, but couldn’t. A good thing, too. I must have looked like Oberon the King of the Fairies, tiptoeing down the hillside. When I reached her, I stopped just behind her.

  “Hi.”

  “My god - how’d you do that? Now we’re both stuck, you jerk.”

  “Nope. I’m going to pull you back up, but I can’t move you around, okay? I’m going to grab you under your arms and you’d better not be ticklish. Then I’m going to pull you up, all right? Just let me take your weight. I’ll know where to put my feet.”

  “I think you’re insane.”

  “Just relax.”

  So help me, I looked around to make sure no one was watching. Not that anyone up on the trail could have seen anything odd, since we were screened by the grove of pines. Squatting down, I slid my hands under Pat’s arms; my feet were just barely touching the rock, resting instead on the Effect. I lifted myself up and back a little bit, dragging Pat with me. She tried to help by shoving her heels into the rocks, but they gave away and she slid back, almost unbalancing me.”

  “Oops! Easy, easy.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just relax.” I lifted again, and again. The scrape of rock and gravel under Pat’s body helped to conceal the fact that I was making no noise at all. A long tongue of mist drifted down the canyon, wrapping us in chilly fog. I found myself observing the Effect under new conditions: it took a lot more effort to lift while carrying extra weight. If I’d had to carry Pat’s entire weight, I might not have been able to get off the ground at all.

  In just a couple of minutes we were back in the grove. Marcus looked relieved and gave us congratulatory thump of his tail. I got Pat’s backside onto firm ground and stood up, letting the Effect fade away. Then I helped her to her feet and got her cane.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  “I came down here to do my business, and when I was finished I got up and lost my balance. “ She gave me a dirty, make-something-of-it look.

  “Boy, you sure scared me. How are you? Did you get hurt?”

  “I don’t think so. I might have some bruises, but that’s all. It was almost funny, you know? Sliding downhill like that.” She looked at me more gently. “You must be some mountain climber, to get both of us out of there.”

  “No, dope. I just watch where I put my feet.”

  “What a sarcastic rat you are.” But her heart wasn’t in it. With one hand gripping my arm and the other on her cane, she began to walk back to the trail.

  “Hurt?”

  “Yeah, a little. I’ll get over it.”

  She did, too. We went down the trail for a couple of miles, moving at the same slow pace, before we stopped again. On the last stage of the hike, where the trail climbed through a series of switchbacks up the side of the canyon, Pat had a little trouble climbing over the steep, crude steps, but she insisted on doing it herself.

  The trail ended in a meadow, not quite high or cold enough to be alpine, but a pleasant enough place that looked d
own into the next canyon and out toward the west. The overcast had burnt off by now, and the late-autumn sun was warm on our faces. We climbed up through dead grass to a rocky shelf, and basked there like a couple of lizards.

  “I’m starving,” said Pat.

  So I dredged out lunch: pastrami on rye with hot mustard, pickles, olives, some of Melinda’s industrial-strength potato salad, more hot chocolate, and some of my own trail cookies - a sort of mix of gorp and granola. We finished up with hard green Granny Smith apples that cracked like gunshot every time we took a bite. Marcus contentedly crunched on a giant dog biscuit.

  Groaning comfortably as my blood sugar shot up, I tucked the backpack under my head and stretched out on the rock to soak up the sunshine, with a paperback sf novel to keep the sun out of my eyes. Pat put her head on my stomach, got out her own book (a biography of Nikola Tesla, patron saint of the severely gifted - Gibbs had turned her on to him), and settled down with a sigh.

  That was in the middle of a couple of the happiest hours in my life. I didn’t worry about anything - not the Effect, not what to say or do about the girl on my stomach, nothing. The sun was hot on my face, and the air was cold. But I knew, once I put the book down and dozed with the sunlight on orange glow through my closed eyelids, that this was the end of my ordinary life. Somehow I just couldn’t stir up the energy to be scared or depressed or even serious about it.

  “Hey, Rick?”

  “Mrf.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What for?”

  “Bringing me up here.”

  “Save your thanks until I got you back down in one piece.”

  She bounced her head, hard, on my stomach, rolled onto her side, and started tickling me.

  Chapter 7

  THE NEXT DAY my life began to get bizarre. I know, I know - it was already about as ordinary as life with the Kent family in Smallville, but now it got really strange.

  First, Gibbs was grimmer and more preoccupied than usual on Monday morning. Then he got on my case about the biofeedback device, which he knew shouldn’t have taken this long to put together. I said we’d been running tests on it (and we had) and would bring it the next day.

  “Let’s run some more checks on it,” Pat suggested near the end of the class. “It’s kind of fun.”

  “I can’t, not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got something else I have to do tonight. Another experiment.”

  “Oh?” She was surprised and interested. “Tell me about it.”

  “I can’t. That is, I want to try a couple of things out before I show anybody.”

  “Aw, come on. Now you’ve got me interested.”

  “Really, Pat, I can’t tell you.” I’d always considered myself a pretty fair amateur liar, but here I was, squirming and smirking and racking my brains to come up with something plausible.

  “Something with the EEG?” she asked quietly, so Gibbs wouldn’t hear.

  “Not exactly. Listen, it’s kind of a surprise, okay?”

  “Okay.” She shrugged, but I saw a kind of caution in her eyes that hadn’t been there for weeks. “So just bring in the device tomorrow morning and we’ll run it for the man.”

  About then, one of the typists from the main office came down to ask Gibbs to see the principal (the p.a. system in the lab was still sabotaged). He was gone some time, and came back looking powerfully unhappy. He practically kicked us out, and took off for the gym office.

  By lunchtime, the word had reached even the Awkward Squad: Wes Powell, our star offensive back, had gotten himself bunged up in last Friday’s game with Modesto. X-rays showed he had a broken ankle and would be out for the season.

  I thought it was too bad. Wes was a nice guy, and I envied him his fantastic speed and coordination. I didn’t have anything against football, as such; it just seemed to be a loud and uncomfortable way to waste your time when you could be breaking into Canadian banks instead. But I also knew I was hopeless at that kind of athleticism, and therefore a poor judge of the significance of Wes’s broken ankle.

  As I walked around the halls, though. I kept overhearing people who talked as if Wes had been shot by snipers. Some of the football groupies were actually sobbing in the cafeteria. I overheard a couple of tubby little tenth-grade guys lamenting.

  “Geez, how we going to beat San Cristobal without Wes?” said one.

  “We’re going to get killed,” the other moaned. “You know what? The last time Terry High lost to San Cristobal, I was in sixth grade. Now we’re going to get killed.”

  In English lit, Mr Pryce couldn’t keep his mind on Lord of the Flies (who can’t), and kept trying to cheer everyone up by pointing out that it’s unhealthy to put too much stock in winning all the time. The idea is to play as well as you can with the ability you have, he said. The idea didn’t go over well.

  At lunch, Pat and I sat in the lab with Angela and Bobby Gassaway, listening to him go on and on about his UFO project.

  “My dad says they get UFOs on the radar all the time,” he asserted proudly. “I’ve interviewed him and three other controllers. They all agree.”

  “I’ll beg Gibbs will love your report to death,” I predicted. “All a UFO is, is a flying object that hasn’t been identified. So it’s an airplane or a glider or a balloon.”

  “Some of these bogeys don’t act like ordinary aircraft,” Gassaway insisted.

  “Shut up, Gassaway,” I riposted wittily.

  “Let him talk,” Pat said. I shrugged and rolled my eyes, as tolerant as the next guy if the next guy was in the Spanish Inquisition.

  Actually, I didn’t mind letting Gassaway carry on, but it was annoying to have Pat come to his defence. I was beginning to suspect she might be sore at me because I was doing something without her, and that in turn seemed like a pretty intolerant attitude on her part.

  After lunch I daydreamt through a couple of classes, planning my night’s activities, and ended up in gym. It was the usual semi-military grab-arse, with lots of calisthenics to warm up, and then some basketball on the outdoor courts.

  As usual I was chosen last, for a team playing another one led by Jason Murphy. I’ll say this for Jason: for an obnoxious twerp with a negative IQ, he played pretty good basketball. He and his guys waxed up to a high gloss in no time at all. Then, somewhere in the middle of the game, somebody tossed the ball to me and Jason fouled me.

  Actually, what he did was to slide one foot between mine and trip me so I fell forward. I hit the court with all the grace of a trunk full of crockery, and got up sore. Jason was down at the far end of the court, grinning and dribbling.

  Without bothering to say “Shazam!” I turned on a little lift and shot down the court after him; it was an eerie feeling, with my feet barely touching the ground - something like running downhill. Jason made a shot, missed, and went up for the rebound. I slammed into him on my way up, snatched the ball from his fingers, spun around in midair, and took off for the far end of the court.

  Now, I hadn’t gone all that high, but I still could’ve hooked my shin on the rim of the basket. Jason may have been surprised; I know I was. In no time at all I was back under our basket, jumping, and doing a pretty fair slam dunk. Coming down was rough; I turned off the Effect once I’d launched myself, and nearly stumbled when I hit the asphalt.

  “Way to go, Stevenson!” one of my teammates said. That was about the highest praise I’d ever received for an athletic feat, so I shot out and stole the ball from Jason again. The ball nearly got away from me a couple of times as I dribbled back - I was still an uncoordinated klutz - but the end was the same.

  Inside five minutes, we’d turned the game around. In the adjoining court they’d stopped playing to watch. Every time I went in for a layup and then lifted, the guys on my team started yelling.

  By the time the game ended, we were too far ahead to count. Jason tried to foul me a couple of times, but I was too fast for him. As we left the court, headed indoors for the showers,
I saw Gibbs standing on the track nearby, beckoning to me.

  “You were looking good, Stevenson.”

  “Thanks, Mr Gibbs.”

  “How long you been jumping like that?”

  “Oh, gee - I dunno.”

  “You look like you’ve been practising a lot. How come you haven’t gone out for anything this fall?”

  “I’m not really into sports, Mr Gibbs. You know that.”

  “Do you know how fast you were running?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Take a lap.”

  “Aw, hey, Mr Gibbs, I’ve been running my tail offᚓ”

  “You aren’t even breathing hard. Take a nap around the track, and make it a fast one.”

  So I did, giving myself just a little forward push and a little lift. As I went around the far curve I had to fight against the temptation to let go and shoot around the track, or soar into the air. Lifting wasn’t scary now; it was fun, and the desire to let it rip was strong. Idiot that I was, I should have realised that Gibbs hadn’t just felt like giving me a chance to show off.

  So I went pretty fast, sailed past Gibbs, stopped, and trotted back. I was breathing hard down. Gibbs looked at his little digital stopwatch. Surprising him was like surprising an anvil: hard to do, and hard to tell when you’ve done it. But when he looked up at me, he was indeed surprised.

  “Stevenson, come here.”

  He showed me the stopwatch. “You just ran the quarter mile in 52.5 seconds. That’s pretty good.”

  “Yeah, wellᚓ”

  “Look at me, Stevenson, and tell me something. I want an honest answer from you.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Are you on any form of drug? Any form?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I believe you. Now, how long have you been running like this?”

  We had attracted a small crowd of jocks and coaches. Some had seen me run, and were telling the others.

  “Uh, gee, sir, I’ve always been kind of fast. I guess I’m just getting it together.”

 

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