LIFTER Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Previous Works

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Support the Author

  ONE SMALL STEP

  FOR MANKIND…

  I was maybe two or three inches off the bed, still in a sitting position with my hands reaching out as if to hold my balance. But I wasn’t teetering or wobbly; I was absolutely steady. Reaching down, I swept one hand under my backside and confirmed that I was indeed detached from the bed. Realising what a momentous event this was, I reached for my cassette recorder and drifted across the room toward the workbench where it lay. Punching the Record button, I uttered these historic words:

  “Uh, I’m up.”

  Ace Science Fiction books by Crawford Kilian

  BROTHER JONATHAN

  LIFTER

  LIFTER

  CRAWFORD KILIAN

  ACE SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  This book is an Ace Science Fiction

  original edition, and has never

  been previously published.

  LIFTER

  An ace Science Fiction Book/published by arrangement with the author.

  PRINTED HISTORY

  Ace Science Fiction edition / July 1986

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1986 by Crawford Kilian.

  Cover art by James Warhola.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

  by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkely Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York,. New York 10016

  ISBN: 0-441-48304-6

  Ace Science Fiction Books are published by

  The Berkely Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Once more,

  for Anne and Maggie

  Chapter 1

  THE FIRST TIME I ever lifted, I was half-asleep and I nearly broke my neck.

  It happened one morning in October. I was asleep until the first jet of the day boomed past over the house. We were about a mile from the end of the main runway at good old Hotchkiss Air Force Base, and the noise was pretty bad.

  This time, though, it didn’t quite wake me up. I heard it; I recognised it as a T-33 trainer; and I dozed off again. That was when Marcus stuck his big, black, wet nose in my ear.

  Marcus is a black Labrador who hates to see anyone in bed when he’s already up and thinking about breakfast. As an alarm clock, he’s sloppy but effective.

  Between the T-33 and the dog, I was pretty nearly awake. But not quite. I was in a middle state, what they call twilight sleep, and I started dreaming about the jet whose rumble was just starting to fade. I imagined myself going to the window, pushing off the sill, and shooting up into the sky in pursuit. I was going fast, and the ground was far below me; I could see the whole town of Santa Teresa spread out below me, and off toward the Sierras was the silver gleam of the jet. I couldn’t feel the wind, but I could feel something - something odd but comfortable. It was a kind of tension, a pressure that enclosed me like the swirling water in a Jacuzzi; it held me up and pushed me at the same time. I wasn’t afraid of falling, but one side of me was cold. I shivered and turned, and then I was cold all over.

  I woke up enough to realise my blankets had slipped off. Marcus was scuffling around. I opened my eyes and saw him backing out from under the blankets, which were on the middle of the floor. The floor was six feet below me.

  I was floating horizontally, six feet above the floor and wearing nothing but my jockey shorts and a horrified expression.

  Marcus got clear and looked up at me. Before he even had time to bark his disapproval, I said something clever like “Oh!” as I dropped straight down.

  It amounted to a bellyflop onto a hardwood floor, cushioned only by a couple of blankets; Marcus’s good reflexes had gotten him away from ground zero just in time.

  I lay there for a few seconds, did a cautious push-up, and got to my feet. Marcus sat down at a safe distance and waited to see if I was going to do anything else. All I did was sit down on the edge of the bed.

  The one thing I absolutely knew was this: I had been wide awake for at least two seconds before I fell. Whatever had happened to me hadn’t been a dream; it had probably inspired the dream. My knees and ribs hurt, and one wrist ached.

  “Rick?” It was my mother, Melinda, out in the hall. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. I fell out of bed.”

  “My God, it sounded like a bomb. It’s after seven.” I heard her slippers slapping down the hall toward the stairs.

  Rubbing my sore knees, I looked around the room. As usual, it looked like a bombed-out electronics shop. Opposite the bed was my workbench, running the whole width of the room. It still looked funny with the computer missing. The bookshelves were jammed: manuals, magazines, paperback novels. Where the bookshelves didn’t cover the walls, I’d put up planet posters: Jupiter, Io, Saturn. When I pulled the blankets back onto the bed, the floor was littered only with the usual debris - boots, runners, camping gear I’d been meaning to put away since August, the frame of a TV set I’d started building after they took my computer.

  Nothing different. No pulleys in the ceiling, no trampoline where the bed should be.

  I got up and did an involuntary Groucho Marx glide across the room, my knees hurting. From the filing cabinet where I kept my clothes, I dug out a pair of jeans and a blue-and-red striped Rugby shirt. Tucking them under my arm, I went out and down the hall to the bathroom.

  After a quick shower and shave, I dressed and tried to lift again. Nothing. Just a tall sixteen-year-old with wet brown hair, standing in the middle of a bathroom trying to float up into the air, like everybody else does when they’re ready to face the day.

  On my way downstairs to breakfast I tried to think what Gibbs would say. He’d probably get out Occam’s razor: whatever happens, explain it with the simplest theory that fits all the facts.

  The simplest theory was that I had had a world-class hallucination. Any other theory would involve junking some comforting basic natural laws, like gravity, and Gibbs wouldn’t rush to do anything like that.

  Never having had a hallucination before, I had no idea what it was supposed to feel like. Somehow it didn’t seem right that a mental misfire could wreck your knees and sprain your wrist.

  No: it had happened, for reasons that escaped me completely. Very likely I would never know what they were, any more than a bee understand why it can’t fly through a glass window. But it was pretty interesting.

  The kitchen was empty. In the adjoining study, where Melinda had her office, she was already at work. I looked enviously at her computer, a beefed-up IBM PC I was legally forbidden to go near.

  “You sure you’re okay?” she called. I put bread in the toaster and got out the eggs.

  “I gave myself a hell of a thump, but I think I’ll live.” While the eggs fried, I gave Marcus a dog biscuit and let him out into the backyard.

  “I think it was because I had a flying dream just before I woke up.”

  “Uh-huh. They’re fun,” she said a little absent-mindedly. Her face had a greenish cast from the video monitor. “Done al
l your homework?”

  “Every last little bit. I didn’t even use my calculator to do the math.”

  “Are you bragging, or feeling sorry for yourself?”

  “Both.”

  “Tough bananas.”

  “Hey, if I can’t get a little sympathy from my own mother, I’ll run away from home.”

  “Promises, promises. Let me know when you’re going so I can rent out your room.”

  “Who’d want to live in that dump?”

  Normally I’d have gone along with her mood; we razz each other a lot, and sometimes it’s even funny. But my wrist hurt and I was afraid my brain had been sprained even worse. So I just growled and finished eating my eggs. Melinda went on working, building a new house on her video screen.

  “Hey, Rick?”

  “Uh.”

  “How you getting along in school these days?”

  “Fine.”

  “I mean with the other kids.”

  “Fine.”

  “Bring some of your friends around one of these days. For dinner or whatever. This place gets lonely with just you and me, and you always fooling around in your room.”

  “Sure.”

  “Any girls you’re interested in these days?”

  Aha. If I hadn’t been so distracted I’d have seen it coming. I got up and started on the dishes. That was the price I paid for being able to keep my own room the way I wanted it. “Melinda,” I said, “am I a male chauvinist pig?”

  “Not as bad as some I’ve known.”

  “Well, okay, remember that I’ve been raised by a no-crap feminist, right? So when I tell you that the girls of Santa Teresa are world-historic airheads, you won’t say I’m just a male jerk.”

  “Not out loud I won’t.”

  I popped the dishes into the drainer. “The guys aren’t much better.”

  “I’m not asking you to turn gay. But now it sounds like you’re not a male chauvinist, you’re an IQ chauvinist. An intellectual snob.”

  “I know enough about IQ testing to know that the people who design them are as dumb as the people who believe in them. Uh, let’s change the terms of this discussion, okay?”

  “Sure,” she agreed innocently.

  I dried my hands on a dishtowel and leaned in the study doorway. “Let’s say I’ve got a really high entertainment threshold, and most of these people bore me blind.”

  “You think some of those little sex bombs are boring?”

  I struck like a pit viper. “Now who’s being sexist and chauvinist?”

  “Touché and shut up.” She pushed herself away from the computer and leaned back in her chair. Melinda is a good-looking woman: tall, thick blond hair, blue eyes like lasers. Even in a housecoat, she looked pretty stylish.

  “But I worry about you, Rick. I sort of had higher hopes for you than just becoming a computer nerd. You should get to know some girls, find out what makes them tick. You’re going to end up a lopsided genius. And one of these days, you’re going to get a rush of hormones to that big brain of yours. Then you’ll probably fall for some real airhead because you won’t know any better.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Suppose I find a girl with a big handsome, divorced father. Thirty-eight, forty, big muscles, plenty of money, sense of humour, nonsmoker. Can I bring him home, too?”

  She laughed, but those laser eyes cooled perceptibly. “God, yes! Better yet, just send him over by himself, and you and the girl can get lost.”

  That was really a joke. Melinda sometimes had one of her partners over for dinner, or a client, but she had never had a romantic attachment. It wasn’t because she was all knotted up about her darling only son, either. She’d always given me plenty of breathing space, and made sure I didn’t turn into a mama’s boy. No, she just lived a celibate life and seemed comfortable in it. Not happy. Comfortable.

  And that worried me. I figured I was having enough trouble coping with adolescence without complicating everything with girls. But Melinda was thirty-five and lived like a nun. It didn’t seem quite natural to me, and I thought that for her own good she should have a man around at least part of the time. I wasn’t hoping for a father figure, either; I had that in Gibbs. But Melinda was my mother, and I loved her, and I thought she deserved to be happier than she was.

  Still, even in the happiest single-parent households, you learn to avoid pushing too hard on some subjects. This was one of them, and when Melinda pulled herself back up to the computer I knew I’d been dismissed.

  “Your lunch is on the sideboard,” she said. “See you after school.”

  “Right.”

  As I left the kitchen, I paused for a moment and tried to lift. Nothing.

  “Rick?”

  I turned; Melinda was looking across the kitchen at me, perplexed.

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “You looked all clenched up there, as if you were hurting.”

  “I was doing isometrics.”

  Her look changed to standard, exasperated mom. “You know, you’re so weird I almost dread to see what kind of girl you’ll finally drag home. Go on, get out of here before I call a cop.”

  I got my school gear together, threw it into a scuzzy old knapsack, and toted the knapsack over one shoulder out to the street where Brunhild waited.

  Brunhilde was my pride and joy: a ‘69 Volkswagon Beetle, red and dented, which Melinda had bought for my sixteenth birthday. It was a lot like Oscar the Grouch’s garbage can only with wheels, but I loved it. It got me around the urban wasteland of Santa Teresa and up into the hills where I went hiking most weekends. I suspected Melinda had bought it to make up for the lost computer; whatever her reasons, I was grateful.

  While Brunhilde warmed up, I looked out the windshield at the willows lining Las Estacas Street, and wondered if I’d really had a hallucination after all. The street looked exactly as always, right down to the carved sign on our front lawn: Melinda Stevenson, Custom Home Architecture. It was another typically gorgeous California day, with the early morning sun sending bright shafts through the trees and onto the lawns. This was a neighbourhood of remodelled older houses; Melinda had gussied up a lot of them, including our own. It looked so damn natural. Could I really sit in this rackety bug, on this ordinary street, and honestly believe that I’d defied the law of gravity in my sleep?

  The answer was yes.

  Chapter 2

  ONCE I saw a reprint of a British cartoon from the mid-nineteenth century. A young vicar, a kind of junior priest, is having breakfast with his bishop’s family. The bishop says: “I’m afraid you have a bad egg, Vicar.”

  “Oh no, Your Grace,” says the Vicar. “I assure you, parts of it are quite good.”

  That was how I felt about school.

  Santa Teresa High - Terry High to its inmates - was south of downtown, a sprawl of buildings done in what Melinda calls Eisenhower Modern. It was built to hold the first Baby Boomers; the Boomers’ babies were still pretty young, so at the moment, the school was underpopulated. In some towns, that might’ve meant cutting back on the school budget, maybe even shutting the whole school down so some other one could be efficiently overcrowded. But Santa Teresa had a lot of high-tech industries, plus some engineering types out at the air force base; they expected the best for their kids, and they voted.

  So what? So we had some programs that would’ve been blown away as frills in most California towns. That was what kept me from going totally bananas, because one of those programs was the Awkward Squad.

  The Awkward Squad was a collection of weird and wonderful adolescents who were practising to be Nobel Prize winners or turnips, or both. We had Pablo Sanchez and Ronnie Feinstein, who played almost nonstop chess with each other - without bothering to use a board and pieces. We had Mason Reeves, who played classical violin, jazz saxophone, and professional blackjack - when he wasn’t zonked out on dope. We had Eustis Bowson, who rigged up his own LSD lab in ninth grade. We had Angela Bat
tenbury, who was six-feet tall and did calculus in her head. And we had Bobby Gassaway, who ground his own lenses for telescopes and then used the ‘scopes to spot flying saucers. Then we had a few others who drifted through on their way to Juvenile Hall or back again, and we had me. I was new in the Awkward Squad, just since September, and in some ways I was relieved to be there. Last year I’d been just your average computer nerd; now I was in the big leagues, nerdwise, even if the computer was gone.

  In the Awkward Squad you still had to take some regular courses - Modern life Skills, English, that kind of stuff - but most of your day was spent in John Gibb’s science lab.

  John Gibbs. He scared almost everybody in Terry High, including the principle. He even scared the Awkward Squad most of the time. He was thirty-eight years old, and almost that many feet tall. He was the kind of black guy who tromps through the nightmares of KKKers: big, strong, intelligent, and with the world’s lowest crap threshold. When he came into a room, the effect was like nightfall coming behind a thunderhead. Other teachers were into first names and relating to their students. Gibbs called you by your last name, and you called him “Mister” and “Sir” without his ever making a point about it because if you were in his class you weren’t totally, suicidally stupid.

  As an All-American defensive end at UCLA, Gibbs used to scare quarterbacks, too - right up until the Rose Bowl game in his senior year, when he wrecked his left knee beyond repair. He finished the year, went on to graduate school, and took a master’s in psychology to go with his B.Sc. in physics. Then he took a year’s teacher training and went to work teaching high-school science, with a little coaching on the side. In the last ten years, Terry High’s football team had beaten the daylights out of every other team in central California. Gibbs was married to the former Letitia Scot; they had two little girls, Flora, 12, and Diane, 10. He owned a three-bedroom house a couple blocks from school, and was paying off a $75,000 mortgage. He had Visa and American Express cards, and paid his bills like clockwork.