“Well, drive carefully,” said Melinda. “I won’t wait up for you - I’m pooped.” She walked us to the door, chatting while I helped Pat on with her duffel coat. “It was fun, wasn’t it? I never thought I’d end up a football groupie. Where are you guys going hiking tomorrow?”
“San Miguel Creek, I guess,” I said.
“D’you mind if I keep Marcus? He’s supposed to go in for his shots, and I can take him up to Hillside Park after.”
“Okay,” I shrugged, delighted. For what we had planned tomorrow, Marcus would have had to be left in the car anyway.
“And let’s have Pat for supper when you guys get back.”
“Sure,” I agreed.
“Only if I can cook it,” Pat said.
“It’s a deal,” I said quickly. I’d seen Melinda’s eyes light up; give her a chance and she’d spend another hour working out a menu, discussing the pros and cons of homemade pasta, and reminiscing about Pat’s earlier culinary triumphs.
“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” Pat promised. “Thanks, Melinda.”
Five minutes later, we were up at Hillside Park, pulling on mittens and balaclavas.
“Those jeans going to be warm enough?” I worried.
“I put on tights underneath.” Pat giggled. “This is a riot.”
“What?”
“Sitting parked in a car with my boyfriend, and we’re both putting on more clothes.”
“You can go bare naked if you want to,” I said, “but the goose pimples will make a lot of air resistance.”
“I’ll show you one thing I’m not wearing.” She unstrapped her brace and heaved it into the back seat. Then she let herself out of the car, balancing a little unsurely with the help of the Effect. I got out and came around to her; she took my hand.
“All day I’ve been waiting for this,” Pat whispered.
“Me, too.” I was shivering a little, and not just from the chill in the air. I looked around. We were parked near the lookout where we’d first had lunch, weeks ago. No other cars were around, but we were close to street lights and the road.
“Come on,” I said. Holding hands, we walked into the darkness under a stand of aspens. Pat’s legs swung a little awkwardly, but she was walking, with no brace, no cane.
“Are we really going up there?”
“Don’t be scared. Just wait until you see the view.”
And up we went, still holding hands.
For the first hundred feet, Pat clung tightly to my hand. Then, as she gained confidence, her fingers loosened. Santa Teresa spread out below us, a glittering network of lights. I could see Las Estacas Street, and my own darkened house; a mile away was Pat’s place, all lit up. The hum of traffic was clear, and we could hear music playing somewhere close below.
We didn’t talk much, except to point things out to each other: a jogger shuffling through the pool of light around a street lamp, a police car speeding down a road with its red and blue lights flashing wildly. Slowly, steadily, we rose through ragged low clouds into a blue-grey world of moonlight and stars. The wind tugged at us and we went with it, matching its speed and direction so that we seemed to hang motionless. For a long time we let the wind carry us, while we watched clouds shift and change in the half-moon’s light. Far below, a light or two gleamed through breaks in the cloud.
Pat turned to me and put her arms around my neck. Her face was a pale oval, her eyes bright in the moonlight. We held each other close, each enjoying the other’s warmth.
“We’re free, Rick. We’re the only free people in the whole world.”
I hugged her and kissed her as we glided damply through a cloud, but I didn’t say anything. I was happier than I’d ever been in my life, but I felt somehow that it wasn’t going to last, that I was becoming less free all the time.
Chapter 10
I DIDN’T SLEEP well that night. The last twenty-four hours had been too eventful, and my mind kept racing from the fight with Jason to the collision with Al Suarez to the first glimpse of Pat lifting off the bed. Or maybe I was asleep after all, and just dreaming; at one point, I know, I did have a flying dream and woke to find myself solidly in bed. That was a relief. The Effect might need a theta state to get you started, but you couldn’t lift in your sleep.
The Saturday dawn was grey and drizzly. I was up even before Melinda, and made myself some oatmeal for breakfast. As usual I read the paper as I ate, but for once I started with the sports section. It was mostly about the game, and featured a big photo of me lifting over the San Cristobal tackler, with a caption that read something like: “Terry High back Rick Stevenson rockets over San Cristobal defender en route to 5 touchdowns. Terry High Saints look good for the Central Conference title if they can take San Carlos next week and beat Calaveras the week after.”
The story itself made me feel uncomfortable. I was used to reading about myself on electronic bulletin boards, where I generally appeared under the nom de guerre of Doctor Dork, but here was a story with my real name in it, and all kinds of corny writing about how fast I was and how San Cristobal looked as if they were standing still. Not on the field, they hadn’t! Apparently I’d also set a record for yards gained in a single game.
It even spent a paragraph on Al Suarez and the other guy, Scott Smith. Suarez was in Santa Teresa General with undetermined internal injuries, and Smith had torn cartilage in his right knee. The story didn’t spend a whole lot of sympathy on them.
After finishing the paper, I just sat there in the kitchen and looked at the rain oozing out of a dull sky. Eventually Melinda came downstairs and snatched the paper off the table. Before she’d finished reciting the purpler passages, the phone rang.
It wasn’t Pat; it was some guy I didn’t know, a Terry High alumnus (class of ‘54) who said he was really proud of me and keep up the great work. I thanked him and hung up, and the phone rang again. It was the manager of a sporting goods store downtown who said he just wanted to congratulate me on a fine job, and anytime I needed sporting goods he’d give me a fifteen percent discount. I thanked him, and hung up, and the phone rang again.
“H’lo?” I barked.
“Wow,” Pat said. “What’s the matter with you today?”
“Oh, hi. I’m sorry. I just got two calls back to back from people I never heard of, and it’s not even eight o’clock yet. How are you?”
“Ready to go if you are.”
“I’ll be over before you know it.”
“Goody.”
Leaving the phone off the hook, I started throwing stuff into my backpack: some gorp, some apples, a hunk of sausage and some rolls, stuff like that. Melinda was so deep in her print trance that she hardly noticed until I was ready to leave.
“You’re going hiking.”
“Is that an observation or a command?”
“Where to, may I ask, in case we have to send out the bloodhounds?”
“It’s no challenge for them if they know where I’ve gone so I’ll lie and say San Miguel Creek.”
“Okay. You’re sure Pat’s up to it, with this rain and all?”
“She did fine last time, and she’s in better shape this week. Especially after all that jumping around and screaming you two were doing last night.”
“After all that jumping around and screaming, I can hardly hold my head up this morning. You say we have to go through the whole thing again next week?”
“Next week I sit in the stands and you get to play.”
“Nobody loves a smart-arse football hero. Go get your girlfriend and get lost.”
I had hardly pulled away from the kerb in front of Pat’s house when she began undoing her brace.
“Oh, that feels good. I can’t wait to race you up the creek.”
It was hard to keep my eyes on the road, her face was so radiant and happy. Shifting was hard, too, since we kept holding hands. The drizzle kept up; Brunhilde’s windshield defogger sighed helplessly. We buzzed through empty, shiny streets, out past the city airport.
&n
bsp; “Look!” Pat exclaimed. “Parachutes.”
I braked and squinted through the misty windshield. A few hundred feet up, a light plane was droning past as it disgorged a string of skydivers. Each one dropped, a black speck, for long seconds before suddenly blooming into a flower, bright orange or striped red and white, vivid against the grey sky. They seemed to be aiming for a target zone beyond the main runway, where a few cars and trucks were surrounded by people in rain coats or jump suits.
“God, that must take real guts,” Pat said.
I started the car up again. “Never get me up in one of those things,” I agreed.
We drove on, listening to boring old Pachelbel’s canon on the tape deck and chatting about this and that. Before long we reached the car park on San Miguel Creek. It was deserted. The clouds were low enough to cut off the tops of the hills; a damp, chilly wind blew down the canyon in our faces. Bare aspens shivered against the clouds.
Pat couldn’t have cared less. After a quick look around, she took off up the trail in long, gliding strides. She was learning how to use the Effect to control the movement of her bad leg without interfering with her good one, and she moved gracefully. I followed her, and took a good half mile to catch up.
“Don’t overdo it,” I warned. “You could come around a curve in the trail and bump into somebody who isn’t ready for a girl who walks like Carl Lewis jumps.”
“Okay.”
So we drifted along, holding hands and enjoying the fine drizzle in our faces. The creek bellowed away below us, and before we knew it we’d reached the spot where Pat had slipped. She paused when we looked down the slope.
“Some day they’ll put up a historical plaque here,” she said, grinning, as she turned to me. “That seems so long ago, Rick, and it was just a week. It feels like it happened to somebody else.”
“It did,” I said, and kissed her.
We went on, up into the mist where the visibility was just a few feet. “Let’s see how high we can jump,” I suggested. “One, two - three!”
And up we went.
The ground vanished within seconds; we were climbing through a wet grey nothing, listening to the rush of the creek and the hum of the wind in the pines below us. My ears popped.
“How high are we?” Pat asked.
I checked the altimeter. “Four hundred feet above ground level. Four twenty-five. Four fifty.”
We were almost two thousand feet above ground level, and maybe five thousand above sea level, when we broke through the top of the cloud deck into dazzling sunshine. To the south and west and north, the white plain stretched to the horizon, marked only here and there by a tuft or wisp standing out against the perfect deep blue of the sky. To the east, the Sierra Nevada jutted up, many miles away, yet looking close enough to touch. Their peaks and ridges were blazingly white, almost too bright to look at.
Pat reached into her jacket and pulled out two pairs of ski goggles. “I thought it might be a little bright up here.”
“Boy, are you ever smart.” I pulled my goggles on gratefully; the albedo of the clouds and mountains was something fierce.
For a few minutes we just hung there, holding hands and looking at the slow movements of the clouds and listening to the silence.
It was quiet up there. Not dead quiet; we could still faintly hear the creek far below us, and a murmur of wind. But those soft sounds only made the stillness that much deeper.
“I could stay here forever,” Pat said. With nothing to echo from, her voice sounded small and flat.
“Forever isn’t long enough.” I put my arms around her and squeezed. “Let’s just drift for a while.”
So we let the wind carry us gently eastward, less than fifty feet above the cloud tops. We floated horizontally, on our sides, so we could see each other. We talked and laughed; when we got hungry, we floated on our backs and used our stomachs as tables for a picnic of apples and sausages sandwiches.
“This is fine,” said Pat. “Maybe we should keep it to ourselves.” She was nestled against me now, her head resting on my arm. The sun was warm on us, though the air was cold. “We’re the only two people in the world.”
“Not exactly. Look off to the west.” I pointed to the distant gleam of sunlight on a plane’s fuselage: probably a jetliner headed for Sacramento.
“That doesn’t count. But some day the sky will be full of people; and we’ll miss the good old days when we had it all.”
“You know,” I said, “maybe we should keep it to ourselves.”
“What for?”
“Oh… I think about what could happen when everybody can lift.”
“Like what?”
“Like muggers and rapists coming at you out of the sky, anywhere you happen to be. Armies invading other countries. Refugees going whatever they think they’ll be safe. Real chaos.”
“Anybody comes after me, I’ll slam him the way you slammed those guys in the game.”
“Yeah, and that’s something else. You can really hurt people with the Effect. I didn’t mean to hurt those guys, at least not the way I did. But somebody who knows karate, for instance - and also knows how to lift - boy, he could be dangerous. It’s a lot of power to give somebody.”
“Well, everybody else’ll have it, too. It’ll all even out.”
“Will it, Pat? We don’t know that. I’ve been thinking about other things, too. Like what happens to the economy when everybody can lift. Who’ll buy cars? Or ride on buses? If the auto industry goes under, what happens to everything else? Do the airlines survive? Do the highways start falling apart? What happens to the environment when millions of people start looking for their own little patch of wilderness and they turn it all into a garbage dump? Maybe you’re ready for a lifting rapist, but a grizzly bear ready for a lifting hunter?”
“I thought you were only scared about people on the ground with guns.”
“I am. When the nuts get airborne, I’ll be even more scared. This’ll be like giving a loaded gun to an idiot child.”
“That’s crap. Who says people are idiots?”
“Some are, Pat. Too many.”
“And you’re one of them. Let me tell you a story. This teenage cave man is sitting around banging flints together one day, just for laughs, and strikes a spark and the spark starts a fire. It’s warm, it’s bright, it’s a really nice fire. But the cave man sits there warming his hands and maybe cooking a nice lizard, and he thinks: In the wrong hands, like those Neanderthals in the next cave, fire would be a real pain. The Neanderthals will throw burning sticks on us good guys. And they’ll start forest fires. Maybe they’ll learn how to burn tobacco and give everybody lung cancer. So he pees on his fire, and it goes out.”
“That’s a pretty shaky argument,” I answered, because I didn’t think it was.
“The hell it is. You’ve stumbled on something as important as fire, or electromagnetism, and you’re just going to forget about it?”
“If it’s like fire or electromagnetism, somebody else will discover it soon enough. And then I won’t be responsible for the problems.”
Pat burst into that staccato laugh of hers. “You’ve two thousand feet up in the air, talking about the problems of lifting! Practice what you preach, you turkey.”
“Quiet.”
“Huh?”
“Sh.”
I’d heard something: a distant rumble, coming closer. Now we both heard it and looked around for its source.
A jet fighter suddenly shot out of the clouds just a couple of miles away. It was an F-14, sleek and powerful and unbelievably fast. I watch it the way a sparrow must watch a swooping hawk - unblinkingly, bewildered by the attacker’s might and unable to imagine all that energy devoted to catching something so much smaller and weaker. Watching a jet from the ground is watching a machine; watching it from the air is watching something alive.
“Drop!” I shouted, and turned off the Effect. The Effect around Pat vanished an instant later, and we began to fall. From the corner of
my eye I could see the jet circle toward us. Then we were plunging headfirst through the clouds, holding tight to each other. The jet crashed past overhead, so loud we yelled inaudibly in fright. I turned on the Effect again to drive us down faster than mere gravity could. Then we were below the clouds, diving toward forested hills.
“Get ready to slow,” I said. Pat nodded; as long as we held on to each other, if only one of us braked, the other would tear free and keep falling. “One; two; three.”
It was bumpy, but we got down to a reasonable speed. First the deceleration drove blood into our heads, nearly blacking us out; then, as we pivoted so we were falling feet first, the blood drained from our heads just the way it does when you’ve been squatting for a long time and you stand up suddenly. When I got over feeling dizzy, I looked around for landmarks and finally, off in the distance, saw what must be the highway. We’d come quite a few miles east of San Miguel Creek.
Now we soared back up through the rain into the overcast, heading west. Above us the jet’s engines faded like thunder and then grew loud again.
Pat and I were still holding each other tight, even though it slowed us down. “He’s hunting us,” I said into her ear.
She stared at me, her eyes barely visible through the ski goggles.
“The air force knows something’s going on out here. That’s what Gassaway’s been going on about. I got them to chase me when I buzzed the control tower. But I never thought they’d pick us up so far from the base, or send one of those damn huge things after us.”
Inside the strange, effervescent sheath of the Effect, I was shivering. We were vulnerable, fragile as butterflies; we could not only be caught and unmasked, we could be killed. They would have a great time wondering how two teenage misfits had gotten sucked into the slipstream of an F-14, a thousand feet or so above the earth, and torn to bits.
We began to rollercoast, dipping below the overcast and rising again, looking for San Miguel Creek without spending too much time being visible. Once we were back with Brunhilde, we’d be safe - just another ordinary couple coming home from an ordinary hike. But it felt like a long time before we finally found the creek. Brunhilde was alone in the car park, but we took no chances. The overcast was still low over the hills here, and we glided slowly through the mist until the slope rose up under our feet. We sank to earth on the trail and took off downhill.
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