Flightsuit (23 page)

He snapped awake.  He'd dreamed that he'd fallen asleep
by the river.  In the dream he'd been shaken awake by the young cop.  The cop was friendly and was just lightly shaking him by the shoulders, "Hey Leo wake up buddy.  What are you doing asleep out here?"

"
I was just tired," he replied.  "I'm not in trouble am I?" 

"
No of course not," the officer smiled back shaking his head a little to show Leo what a funny idea it was that he'd be in trouble for falling asleep outside.  He brushed aside hair from Leo's eyes.  "Let's get you home buddy," he said.  He put his arm across Leo's shoulder and turned him to walk toward home.  Leo noticed the older cop sleeping on the sand a few steps from where he'd slept with his back to them.  As Leo and the young cop walked around him, Leo saw blood on the sand in front of him.  The older cop's hands were gone.  He seemed to be sleeping peacefully as if there were nothing wrong, but Leo felt the dream grow suddenly cold and wrong.  He watched the older cop as they walked past, trying to step quietly so he wouldn't wake him.  He didn't want the cop to wake up.

The younger cop said,
"Hey! Steve!  Wake up man.  We've got to get Leo home."  Leo was terrified.  The older cop's eyes snapped open, staring directly at him.  The older cop started to sit up in the bloody sand, his eyes locked on Leo's, fixing him in place.  He wasn't able to move, couldn't run away, what is happening?  He needed to run away.  He looked at the younger cop for help.  The young cop was staring at him now too as if he'd just realized Leo was something awful.  Leo saw the arm the cop had around his shoulder had no hand.  Bloody pieces of white bone protruded from torn tendon with a flap of skin hanging down.  The young cop patted Leo's shoulder with the bloody stump.  "It's ok buddy.  We'll put you someplace where you won't hurt anyone again.  That's the best thing.  Steve and I will take care of you."

Leo looked into each corner of the room's rough rock walls to assure himself that the mangled cops weren't hiding in the dark.  Ethan still slept peacefully, seemingly in the same position he'd been in last night. 
Or day
, Leo thought. 
It might be daytime now
.  There was no way to tell in the mine.  He got quietly up from the bed, not as concerned about waking Ethan having seen how stubbornly the man slept. 

The suit was warm.  Leo sat down on the box and waited for Ethan to wake up.  After a few minutes, he grew bored and decided he would put the helmet on and learn more about the suit.  He held it overhead and felt the suit take hold of it with whatever force it used to maneuver itself.  He tentatively turned the helmet loose.  It floated in the air for a second then gradually lowered into place, clicking shut.  For a moment there was no sound at all, then the suit began transmitting sounds from the room
, and he heard tiny sounds below the range of his own unaided ears.  He heard the drip of water falling into the rusted sink, and with the helmet's light amplification, he saw the next drop gathering from the cabinet above it. 

He wondered,
how much can it understand?  Can it read my mind?  It can tell when I want to sneak around.  The suit disabled the camouflage effect when he left the back room.  Are you there?  Can you hear me?
  Nothing happened. 
Guess not.  It must decide what I want to do by my movements, like when it makes a punch super-fast and lets me pick up a can without snatching and crushing it.  Wonder if it can hear me?

He turned away from Ethan in case the suit amplified his voice and said "Can you hear me?"

A soft tone came from the helmet near his ear.  Leo jumped up surprised and unnerved by the response.  A blue squiggle of light projected inside the helmet.  As Leo looked at it, it morphed into other shapes, flashing rapidly from one to the next.  Just as he recognized the shape as letters from other languages, the letters faded out and the word "YES" appeared.

Leo's skin felt cold within the suit.

He spent the next hour sitting on the box, facing the dark corner and talking in a whispered voice.  Words flashed across the helmet, along with images, maps and checklists. 

The suit's logic was a pinnacle achievement of an explorer society, thousands of years more advanced than humans
were thousands of years ago.  It communicated with humanity's own ultimate achievement, the mind of a fourteen year old, with an equal and otherwise unparalleled hunger for exploration. 

They made plans.

Leo stood beside Ethan as he slept.  He'd asked the suit in a whisper if Ethan was alive.  There was no way Leo could tell by just looking at him.  If he
was
breathing, the breath was so shallow or slow that he couldn't see Ethan's chest move.  The suit assured him that Ethan was alive.  He asked the suit how long Ethan had been asleep.  14 hours.  Leo wondered,
how long is he going to sleep?
  He'd spent the last several hours experimenting with the suit, tossing and catching things, trying to move quietly, playing with the stealth settings, listening to Ethan's slow breathing from the other room.  He was ready for something else now and growing bored. 

He reached out to shake Ethan's shoulder, deactivating the stealth mode as he did.  A few shakes were required before Ethan's eyes opened. 
His dream must have been a lot better than mine
, Leo thought. 
He wakes up like it's a sunny Saturday morning down here in the mines
.  Leo smiled at the thought.  Ethan smiled back at him, sitting up stiffly. 

"Good morning," he said, "I guess morning anyway.  Any idea how long I was asleep?"

"Good afternoon actually," Leo replied, grinning.  "The suit says you've been asleep for 14 hours.  Is that normal?"

Ethan's smile didn't totally leave, but he became more serious.  "No.  It isn't.  Usually, there's no one to wake me up, so I sleep longer."  He watched Leo's eyes for a reaction.

"Longer than 14 hours?" 

"Yes.  It's related to my condition.  I call it an "entropy field".  That's as good a name as any.  It doesn't really matter what I call it, I've never met or heard of anyone else that has it
, other than kids like Ray who have it without any ability to control it."

He looked at Leo gauging whether he should tell the boy more. 
Amazingly resilient kid.  I guess they all are probably
.  He felt Ray snicker and smiled.

"That's why I keep Oscar.  He'll eventually lick me awake or tug on my shirt when he gets hungry.  I put his food in a weekly feeder before I go to sleep so he'll have food in case he can't wake me up right away."

Leo asked, "How long do you sleep if he doesn't wake you?"

"Weeks, Leo.  I might sleep for weeks at a time.  Whatever it is, my subconscious has control of it.  When I sleep, it pulls the reins in tight
, and the field only affects me.  Slows me down in time.  I wake up weeks later and it feels like a normal night has passed.  For my body, at least, that's all that it has experienced.  I'm as hungry as you are in the morning, but that's all.  Everything just slows down when I sleep, like a bear hibernating, except the bear is passing normally through time asleep, and I'm out of phase with the world when I do."

"What's the longest you've ever slept?"

"I slept for 65 days once and almost as long several times.  When you are out for that long, it takes most of the morning to catch up on the news.  It makes a lot of problems.  I had to get into town for more food and supplies."

"
I'm glad you woke me up.  Please wake me when you get up from here on out, ok?"

"Yeah, I definitely will."

"It's ok, it's not dangerous to you," Ethan reassured him.  Leo hadn't really considered that there could be any danger until Ethan said that.  Ethan was watching him and saw the concern creep in.  "I wasn't able to control it, but now I can.  It's been like an annoying puzzle my whole life, like when you have a tooth that's loose and you just keep wiggling at it with your tongue.  Even when I was doing other things, somewhere in the back of my mind, it was trying different things, different feelings, different thoughts, movements of my arms or face, anything to find the control that my subconscious mind already knew, but couldn't share."

Ethan stopped and smiled.  "Then yesterday, when the soldiers or agents, whatever they were…"

"Agents," Leo said.

"Ok, agents then," Ethan agreed.

"When the agents shot at me, I guess somewhere in my stubborn subconscious, it decided to let go, and it was right there where I could see it.  See it in my mind, I mean.  Just a little thought pattern, like a rhyme or song that you can repeat in your mind without saying it out loud.  I just thought about it in that different way and the field shot out and aged the bullets instantly into dust."

"And the tree," Leo offered.

"Yes, the tree, because I wanted to make sure, after all those years of looking for the secret that I had it firmly in my grasp now.  I was afraid I'd lose it again."

"But you didn't?"

"No.  I have it now.  I can control it at will, although obviously when I'm asleep, nothing's really changed.  I can live with that though.  I've learned to.  It's not like anyone else's life, but I've adapted to it."

"If I'm here to wake you though…" Leo trailed off letting it become a question.

"Right.  If you're here to wake me, I'll be like everyone else."

"We might not be exactly like everyone else after this," Leo suggested.

"Right, of course."  Ethan paused, "So I guess we'd better work out a plan.  We can't stay down here forever."  Ethan was concerned that Leo hadn't mentioned going home. 
Wouldn't most kids be eager to get home?  Did that thing mess with his mind somehow?

Leo was grinning.  Ethan looked askance and raised an eyebrow.

"What?  What's funny?"

"Not funny," Leo replied.  "It's exciting, not funny."

Ethan waited, but Leo was enjoying the buildup.  Presently, he said, "Taylor said this is a flightsuit."  Leo waited for Ethan.  "A flightsuit."

"Ok, I get it," Ethan said.  "I
t might fly, that's pretty exciting, sure."

"It can do more than fly Ethan.  It can fly very, very fast.  It can fly very fast in space, between planets."

"You want to fly in space?"

"Uh, yeah, of course, who wouldn't want to?  Who wouldn't want to go through space and see things that no one else has ever seen?"

"I guess so, but if it can fly, why didn't it fly when we fell off the cliff?  I got the sense that it was working pretty hard to keep us from splattering into piles."

"The flight pack is missing," Leo replied.  "The whole suit blew apart when he entered the atmosphere."

"He?"

"The alien, when the alien came to earth he did something wrong
, and his body burned up.  It wasn't the suit that failed.  He messed up.  His mind sprang out looking for a container.  The alien's minds and thoughts are connected to other intelligent consciousness across distances, so they're able to hold themselves together even without a body.  He reached out and found Taylor, flying miles below in a plane.  Picked him out of all the other passengers and huddled himself in Taylor's mind, trying to fit himself into it.  For years, the alien just hid, showing himself only through Taylor's timesharing.  The timesharing gave the alien more room and a few hours to stretch beyond Taylor's cramped head, so he encouraged Taylor to timeshare by letting him share in the fun and helping Taylor get money and women."  Leo smiled.

"You got this from Taylor when he was trying to move the alien over into your mind?"

"Yeah, most of it and some from the suit."  Leo explained how he'd learned to communicate with the suit.

"Ok, so it's a flightsuit, but the flight pack is missing."

"Yep, here's where it fits."  Leo whispered to the suit.  Ethan could see his lips moving very slightly, but the helmet blocked sound it interpreted as piloting commands.  A blue outline projected on the helmet where Ethan could see.  The outline showed a front and side view of the suit with a flattened egg-shaped device on the back.  As he watched, the image animated and three small wing vanes extended.  They looked to be a few inches long. 

"Not very big wings, are they?"

"It says those are just there to give it projection surfaces for stabilizing fields, whatever that actually means.  It doesn't really matter.  I'm sure it'll make the controls easy for me to manage, like it does the jumps and stuff."

Ethan shook his head, smiling. 
I'd forgotten how infectious their excitement and wonder at the world was
.  "I assume the suit has told you where this flight pack is?"

"Yes. It's out west," Leo enjoyed making Ethan tease out the secret.

"Out west, ok, where exactly out west should we look?"

"We don't have to look.  The suit detected it from here
, and anyway it's exactly where you'd think it would be."

Ethan thought but came up with no idea.  "I don't understand, Leo.  Where is it?"

"It's in Nevada.  At Area 51, with all the other stuff."

Oh, right, exactly where you'd think.
  "What other stuff?  What else is out there?"

"The other alien ship that he was tracking here, the one that crashed in Roswell.  The one with the other aliens, the grey ones."

Ethan decided it was best that he sit down.

After a few seconds
, he was ready, "So you want to break into Area 51 and get the flight pack?  You want to get into the throat of what's obviously the government's biggest secret?"

"Yes.  The suit is very powerful, Ethan.  We've only seen it do a few things.  It can do a lot more than that.  A lot more."

Ethan's mind churned, desperately trying to keep up with too much new information. 

"So, you already have a plan for how you can do this?"

"We have money Ethan", he motioned to the stacks piled on the table's edge.  "We also have the ideas Taylor had to make more money, if we need it, in his journal.  We can make our way there, staying hidden from them.  They're expecting us to come, but it won't matter.  They can't imagine what the suit can actually do."

Ethan looked at the boy.
The government will be waiting for him to come home anyway.  He can't get near there without them catching us.  Probably can't even safely call his mother without them closing in on us in minutes.  We've got to be the biggest thing on their radar. 

What else is there?

What else is there for me?  There is no one.  I've spent my whole life, since Ray, alone, slow driftwood, getting further from land every day.  I can't relate to the world anymore.  There's nothing I can contribute, no job that a mind from the fifties can do in this world.  No job I can do.  Except fatherhood.  I can do that. 

I was a good father once
, he thought, tears pooling quickly into his eyes. 
I loved it and it was taken away.  How long, God?  This long?  Is this how long it takes for a prayer to be answered? 

A thought came to Ethan that didn't feel like his
. 
It takes as long as it takes
.

I guess it does.  I accept, I humbly and gratefully accept your second chance.

Leo asked, "Are you alright?"

Ethan wiped his eyes and nodde
d.  He waited a moment to speak.  "So you have a plan I guess?"

Leo's smile flashed, "Yes.  We have a plan.  Let me tell you about it."