Roswell Fanatics

It had seemed like things were finally under control to Ned Harris. They had finally gotten away from that accursed thunderstorm the idiot copilot had flown them in to - they were still getting a little minor bumping and shaking but the radar confirmed that the air ahead of them wasn't bad - at most a few light rain showers - and they were making good time south. The plane was on autopilot now and the GPS said that El Paso was only 115 nautical miles away - less than thirty minutes at their current speed. They could start to descend down to Flight Level 180 and maybe even shave a little off that time. With luck he could have Mr. Valencia back to El Paso about the time they would have been taking off from Roswell had they actually been able to land there - hopefully that - and explaining to the man about the incompetence of the new first officer - would enable him to get back in the man's good graces - assuming he had any.

Ned had looked to his right - at the young copilot - and cursed under his breath. The idiot could have easily killed them - they could have ended up smashed to bits - as no doubt had happened to that other aircraft. No, Ned was happy that he wouldn't be flying with that idiot again - although he was resigned to the fact that Joe Hendershott would continue to fly for Mesa Air. The kid's nodded approval of illegally flying in the clouds - while claiming to be in visual conditions - had sealed that. Ned would talk it over with Calderone and Valencia - make sure he still had that job with them, and then he'd walk away from Mesa Air. Joe Hendershott wouldn't be his problem anymore - if he killed anyone, it certainly wouldn't be Ned Harris.

Ned looked down at the GPS again - only 110 nautical miles to go.... that's when he heard the noise and felt the impact.

The cockpit instantly filled with fog and - as he started to reach for the controls - Ned knew only that they'd had an explosive decompression. At 16,000 feet the air pressure is half what it was at sea level. At 26,000 feet - where Mesa Flight 526 was - it was even less than that - barely more than five pounds per square inch compared to the normal pressure of almost fifteen. The interior of the airplane was kept pressurized by bleed air from the turboprops - compressed air stolen from the first stage compressorin the front part of the turboprop engine which both heated the cabin and pressurized it - allowing those within to breathe without supplemental oxygen. That was bad.

The time of useful consciousness at Flight Level 260 was short. In an unpressurized aircraft if you took your mask off you'd be unconscious in less than five minutes. But the rapid decompression had made it worse - the vacuum pulling the air out of their lungs but leaving behind their own carbon dioxide and water vapor. Ned knew that they had no more than three minutes of useful consciousness without getting their oxygen masks on but his first priority was to control the aircraft which had entered a steep climb. He needed to get this pig going back down, he thought to himself. The passenger oxygen masks would have deployed automatically - fallen from the overhead consoles - but they'd only be good for ten minutes or so. He needed to get down below 12,000 feet before then.

The procedure for this was straighforward. The pilot flew the aircraft while the first officer donned his quick-don mask then the copilot flew while the pilot donned his. As he grabbed the yoke he glanced sideways at Joe Hendershott. The man was frozen in immobility.

"Get your damned mask on," shouted Harris.

Joe Hendershott had never been ready for the job of first officer. He hadn't enough experience - had next to no high performance or high altitude experience - he had been 'behind the aircraft' as the aviation expression goes throughout the flight. The thunderstorm encounter had pushed him right up to his breaking point and the rapid decompression now pushed him past it. He froze - his eyes wide - panic in his face - and didn't move.....

"Get your damned mask on," shouted Harris.

Joe Hendershott had never been ready for the job of first officer. He hadn't enough experience - had next to no high performance or high altitude experience - he had been 'behind the aircraft' as the aviation expression goes throughout the flight. The thunderstorm encounter had pushed him right up to his breaking point and the rapid decompression now pushed him past it. He froze - his eyes wide - panic in his face - and didn't move.....

“Your mask – get it on!” Ned screamed again, but as his hands found the controls he realized he had an even more serious problem than a catatonic copilot. The autopilot was ALREADY moving the control yoke forward to try to arrest the climb – but it wasn't working. He pushed the yoke all the way forward but the aircraft continued its climb – in fact increased it. He had no control whatever in pitch – it was like the vertical stabilizer wasn't even there.

The Beechcraft 1900 was developed from the Beechcraft 90 Kingair by stretching the fuselage and moving the horizontal stabilizer from the sides of the vertical stabilizer to the top and adding winglets – small vertical stabilizers – to the tips of the wings. The t-tail configurations served two purposes; the first being to get the horizontal stabilizer out of the way of the turbulent airflow behind the wing and propellers and the second being to allow for a stronger vertical stabilizer to offset the more powerful engines.

The horizontal stabilizer normally doesn't create much lift – in fact creating lift with the horizontal stabilizer is not really even desirable since it increases drag. What it mostly does is control the aircraft in pitch – that is raise or lower the nose. Similarly the rudder on the horizontal stabilizer – the fin or tail surface – mostly controls the yaw of the aircraft – the tendency of the nose to move left or right. Turning is actually controlled by the ailerons out on either wing – a control surface sticking up on the wing on one side while the other stuck down – changing the effective cord of the wing to roll the aircraft in the direction of the desired turn while the rudder counteracted the adverse yaw that this caused. The problem for Ned was that pushing the yoke forward – which should have caused the horizontal stabilizer to lift the tail of the aircraft and lower the nose – wasn't working at all. The aircraft was actually climbing to an even higher altitude – while his petrified copilot had yet to even start to put on the oxygen mask.

“Put your mask on and then help me,” Ned screamed into the foggy and chilly air as he retarded the throttles to idle – a big mistake as it turned out. The nose of the aircraft fell precipitously and Ned instinctively pulled back on the throttle – to no avail.

The aircraft was losing altitude rapidly and normally with the speed building the nose would have started to come up – but not this time. Despite the rapidly building airspeed Ned rammed both throttles to their stops and – the wind screaming along the sides of the cockpit as the aircraft exceeded its redline speed – the aircraft leveled off only in passing as it again resumed its climb.

“Get the damn mask on!” Ned screamed again as he retarded the throttles about halfway. Ned looked over to Hendershott briefly as the nose of the aircraft came back down to level – the man seemed catatonic.

Ned still had no idea what had happened – an actual collision with another aircraft in he huge empty Tularosa so far down the list of possibilities he never really did consider it. He looked down at the annunciator panel of the Beech 1900 – tiny compared with the one on the F-117 and saw only three warning lights illuminated. One was the master caution light, one was the cabin low pressure light, and the other was the flight hydraulic pressure light. Could Calderone have put explosives of some kind in that suitcase and they somehow got triggered? It didn't really matter he decided as the nose of the aircraft continued the fall through the horizon and the aircraft started to once again pick up more speed toward the ground. Desperately he pushed the throttles back up and felt the aircraft leap forward and the nose again begin to rise...

“This is Mesa flight 526 – Mayday – Mayday – Mayday,” Ned yelled into the microphone on his headset. Almost instantly the call was answered.

“Mesa 526 – Cherokee control – what is the nature of your emergency?”

“There was an explosion and we have lost pitch control,” said Ned, relieved to see the nose start upward once again.

“Mesa 526 – my radar shows you 65 miles north of Holloman AFB and about 70 miles from Northrop Strip – do you need vectors to either field?”

As the nose of the aircraft climbed again above the horizon Ned tried to consider his options – but his mind wasn't all that clear. Holloman was closer and it had firetrucks and ambulances available – Northrop Strip was a little farther but the Northrop strip was an old dry lake bed and it was huge – five miles long by almost a half mile wide. They'd once landed a space shuttle there. The aircraft was almost uncontrollable – the Northrop Strip might be the better option.
Ned retarded the throttle by a third and watched the nose of the aircraft come down – catching it with full power just before it was level. He put the landing gear down - hoping that the drag would slow the aircraft and stabilize it but the nose dropped almost immediately and he raised the gear back up and pushed the throttles back up watching the nose slow its descent and gradually return to level flight.

“Mesa 526,” said Cherokee – do you need vectors?”

The nose came up again despite Ned pulling the throttles back to half just before he got back to level flight and he again pushed the throttles to full. Ned knew he was forgetting something but couldn't figure what it was. He turned to ask his copilot – what was his name? - and noticed he was slumped in his seat apparently asleep. As the nose continued to rise he knew he was forgetting it – he was certain of it – he just couldn't remember what 'it' was. He was tired – so tired – after nap maybe he could figure all of this out -figure what he had forgotten – what had gone wrong...

With the throttles at full the aircraft's nose rose to fifteen degrees above the horizon before it stalled – but the ailerons held its course to the south and after diving ten thousand feet in less than two minutes the engines – still at full power – brought the nose up and the aircraft climbed again. This repeated twice more before the aircraft entered a stall so deep that it rolled off on a wing. The autopilot tried to recover with the ailerons but the adverse yaw put the aircraft into a steep spiral. Almost fourteen minutes after the collision the Beechcraft 1900 impacted the ground in a steep dive twenty -seven miles north of Holloman. No emergency beacon was heard but the fireball was clearly visible from Alamogordo twenty miles away.

The wreckage of Air Mesa Flight 526 would eventually be collected by representatives of the NTSB with the assistance of the US Air Force. Tapes of the radar flight path of the Beechcraft from both the FAA and Cherokee range control were analyzed, as well as tapes of the F-117A's radar track prior to destruction of its transponder by the lightning bolt at Roswell. The damaged F-117A would be analyzed as well as what was left of the Beechcraft 1900. The bodies would be autopsied - to the extent their conditions permitted - and in both the NTSB investigation and a separate military aircraft mishap investigation a determination would be made of what happened at the time of impact.

Based on the testimony of the F-117A pilot, the recording of the few seconds that the Beechcraft occurred in the F-117A imaging infrared system immediately prior to impact, the cockpit voice recorder of the Beechcraft, and the expert opinions of several meteorologists it would appear that the flight crew of the Beechcraft had been lying when they had told the controller they were in visual conditions. That being the case - there was little the pilot of the lightning damaged F-117A could have done to detect the aircraft any earlier than he did - it was in fact rather amazing that he had detected them at all. Had he not done the 'slice' maneuver the loss of both aircraft would have been a certainty. That maneuver - a loaded roll at maximum available 'g' had ALMOST allowed the aircraft to miss one another. The F-117A had been nearly completely inverted when it had passed - belly to belly - under the Beechcraft. Nearly, unfortunately, had not been quite good enough. The left wing of the F-117A had intersected the belly of the mishap in a skiving fashion – tearing through the belly of the aliner starting about seven feet forward of the bulkhead between the cabin and the baggage compartment – a bulkhead that incidentally happened to be the main forward attachment point anchoring the T-tail to the fuselage

The Beechcraft 1900D had been designed to have more cabin head room than the King Air and as a consequence of this all control hydraulic lines to the t-tail ran from the cockpit under the floor through the bulkhead and then upward on the rear wall of the bulkhead into the t-tail where they activated the hydraulic cylinders to move the control surfaces of the tail. By slicing in to the belly of the Beechcraft in this area the F-117A wing ripped through these hydraulic lines and created a large hole in the floor of the fuselage– estimated from post-crash analysis to be nearly the entire width of the aircraft and six to seven foot in length destroying in the process the seats in the two aft rows as well as the lower portion of the baggage compartment bulkhead. This immediately destroyed continuity between the control yoke in the cockpit and the pitch and yaw functions of the t-tail. The large opening caused an immediate explosive decompression.

Unlike much of today's society, NTSB boards are not what you would call non-judgmental. They exist to assess CAUSATION of mishaps – not specifically to assign blame to individuals, but rather to insure the correction of defects in regulation, equipment, and procedures that either led directly or indirectly to the mishap or sustained a chain of events that allowed the mishap to occur. After six days a preliminary report focused on these areas of interest:

1.Qualification of aircrew.
2.Crew coordination/Crew Resource Management
3.Aircrew compliance with Part 141 of the Federal Air Regulations
4.Adequacy of the weather reporting service

Several additional items of concern where found as incidental items that were deemed not causative but of potential concern due to their potential to cause hazard to flying safety. These items were:
1.Presence of four (4) loaded handguns in the wreckage: Four loaded handguns were found in the wreckage of the Beechcraft 1900D. NTSB investigators studied how these may have been brought aboard the aircraft in complete violation of federal law. Based upon surveillance cameras in the Albuquerque airport it was determined that the Beechcraft Captain left the aircraft with his flightbag and met with several of the passengers outside of the security area at which time he was given a large suitcase. He then returned to the aircraft using his identification to bypass security. Investigation of the pilot's bank account showed that he had been receiving large quantities of money from the organization – allegedly a drug cartel – run by two of the deceased passengers and employing four more. It was theorized by investigators that the captain assisted the passengers in bringing the illegal weapons onto the aircraft and returned the weapons to them at that time. ACTION ITEM: TSA
2.Failure of two passenger seats (numbers 13 & 14): Several engineering members expressed concern that the two passenger seats immediately forward of the impact area had become dislodged and exited the aircraft through the hole in the floor at – or very near – the time of the explosive decompression. It was feared that the cambolts holding them may have been defective since – even in previous disastrous decompression incidents such as the Aloha Airlines Flight 243 mishap, seats were designed to remain rigidly attached to the seat rails - regardless of the severity of the adjacent structural damage. The engineers argued that while it was entirely understandable that unsecured items in the cabin – even poorly secured individuals – could be sucked out the defect in the cabin floor, neither of these two seats should have separated from the aircraft if the cambolts holding them had been properly fabricated and installed. This item of concern has now been dropped, however, after investigators interviewed Mr. John Phillips, an Albuquerque International Airport employee (baggage handler) who stated – between spitting out copious amounts of tobacco juice, that “...that damn copilot messed with six of them seats when he loaded all that damn baggage. There was just too damn much cube to fit it all in the baggage compartment. I really don't think that stupid sumbitch knew what the &%^* he was doing, though, he weren't none too bright.” After consideration, the previously concerned engineering personnel among the NTSB investigators indicated that they generally concurred with Mr. Phillips – albeit in somewhat less colloquial language. (ACTION ITEM: NONE, ITEM CLOSED)


Meanwhile, back aboard 526 just before the midair:
Subconscious minds can be devils. Oh, not real evil perhaps, but pushy and persistent and unrelenting in trying to force you to face those things you really don't want to face. Max's physical body was dog-tired perhaps, but his subconscious mind had him dreaming. It had started out as a dream anyway – when had it started to seem so much like a nightmare?

He'd dreamed he was at a wedding – everyone was happy – it was a beautiful spring day – destined to be a day of joy for some lucky couple. He was standing up near the altar in a tux – surrounded by four other guys – when the music started to play and the bride came marching down the aisle on the arm of her father. He recognized Jeff Parker almost immediately so he was hardly surprised when he saw Liz through the veil.

She looked …. incredibly beautiful. I mean Liz always looked pretty good – even when they were digging up dinosaur bones and she was dirty all over with skinned knees and elbows, but I mean she looked BEAUTIFUL. She was everything that all of those bride books say a bride should be and more. Even through the veil he could see her smile and it was clear – crystal clear – that this was going to be the happiest day of her life.

Max had felt good – happy for her. He wanted her to know all the joy that any bride could ever know and truly be happy ever after. Yes, he was happy for her. But somehow, when the minister said the words, “Do you, Kyle, take Elizabeth, to be your wedded wife, to love and keep her, in sickness and in health, until death do you part...,” somehow that sort of took the edge of his own happiness.

He wasn't sure why. I mean – that's what he wanted for her – why he took those pictures – why he had forced her away when she'd wanted to get closer. So she could have her special someone – so she could have her happy ever after with someone who was normal. True, when he'd told himself that he needed to give her up to find her special someone the idea had been -well, more abstract. Actually putting a face on that person …. It wasn't really that he had anything against Kyle Valenti – despite the fact that his father being a Deputy scared Izzy, Max had always sort of liked Kyle. It was just that....

Well, he'd promised he'd always be her friend but even he – socially challenged as he was – was pretty sure that Liz and Kyle Valenti would have little need of him cluttering up their lives. Oh, they'd be polite enough – but it would never, he realized, be the same between him and Liz. They'd never have what they once had – not that he'd have ever had even that much if she'd known his secret. But his life after Liz Parker – that was something that Max hadn't really considered.

Already he could sense what that would be like. Empty. Hollow. Like an essential part of him just wasn't there.

Subconscious minds do that to you. They take the thoughts that you are trying to avoid and shove them right to the forefront. They force you to look at unpleasant realities and realize just how unpleasant they are. They force you to acknowledge that there comes a time when your dreams must end and when reality will assert itself. Speaking of which.

The F-117 had 350 knots of closure when the wing struck the belly of the plane just behind Max's seat – six miles a minute – one mile every ten seconds – almost 600 feet per second. It carved through the floor of the six foot wide cabin - emptying it of the floor, four seats and the netted baggage in little more than one hundredth of a second. It was like the combination of an explosion with a freight train going by – less than two feet behind him. Loud doesn't begin to describe it – it was the sort of sound that could wake the dead – and certainly it awakened Max.

Max blinked once in disbelief as chaos reigned in the cabin in front of him – fog everywhere – every loose item flying toward him. He wondered in that fraction of a second it took for the wind -driven by the five pound per square inch overpressure in the cabin – to overcome the inertia of the seat he was sitting in - if there had been an explosion – and then the wind rushing from the forward cabin had yanked his seat camlock bolts that Joe Hendershott had forgotten to resecure out of the rails that Joe Hendershott had forgotten to resecure. It toppled backwards as it went through the hole in the floor and he had one last look at the lights of the ceiling as he went falling into the inky blackness below the aircraft.

The seat bucked and tumbled wildly as it hit the airstream his seatbelt yanking savagely at his abdomen with each gyration in the darkness. Finally he found the catch and opened it and he could feel it fall away beneath him in the darkness as he floated down. The aircraft had been at 26,000 feet and the ground below was about 5,000. It takes ten seconds to fall the first thousand and then you are at terminal velocity. It takes only five seconds for each thousand feet thereafter. It would take him almost two minutes to reach the ground below.

Samuel Johnson, an 18th century poet, moralist and author once said, “"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." It was sort of like that with Max.

Before Max had fallen thirty seconds – 5000 feet – he knew he was going to die and – strangely – he'd made his peace with it. He'd lived a lie all of his life – not even telling the people he loved. Maybe it was time for it to be over. Besides – he knew – perhaps he'd known all along, once Liz had found her special someone and moved on he really wouldn't have wanted to go on without her.

Max relaxed and fell through the cloud – feeling the wetness hit his face as he fell faster than the raindrops themselves. 'This won't be so bad,' he told himself, ...better than living my life without Liz anyway. He looked up into the darkness but he was still in the clouds and could see no trace of the aircraft in the inky darkness.. She'd been sitting right near the front when he'd last seen her and the damage to the aircraft hadn't looked all that bad. Hopefully she had an oxygen mask on right now and the pilot would safely land the aircraft. Max said a silent prayer for her safety and resigned himself to his fate.......

It had been a dreamless sleep – despite the trauma of the last 24 hours – despite the crude remarks of the passenger forward and eyes that had undressed her as she had walked past she'd had no problems falling asleep. Maybe it was only the fatigue – maybe it was that she felt so safe beside him – for whatever reason Liz had drifted off to a peaceful and restful sleep without dreams – and certainly without anything resembling a nightmare. Which was just as well, because she certainly woke up to one.

The wing of the jet cut through the floorplates only inches behind her seat – the shockwave of that impact transmitted to her body through the metal of the armrests even before the sound of the impact hit her ears. In the first one-hundredth of a second the seats behind her disappeared and the decompression was well underway even before the first of the baggage had been sucked into the hole in the floor behind her.

Liz's eyes came open to a scene of chaos as every loose object in the cabin seemed to hurl itself at her – but she needn't have worried about flying objects from the front of the cabin since the blast of air from the pressurized cabin had already started her seat toward the hole in the floor behind her. The seat rotated backwards as it fell through the lower fuselage of the crippled aircraft. She decelerated quickly as the fury of the initial windblast spent itself – which was just as well since she wasn't buckled in. She was – in fact – the only passenger on the aircraft who had actually read the small safety brochure – twice in fact, once on the trip Friday and again today on the off-chance that it might have changed in the ensuing forty-eight hours. The 'perfect' Miss Parker's reputation had been truly earned.

But the bruising on her abdomen from Jimmy Drevins fist had made the tight seatbelt uncomfortable and in that groggy halfway state between wakefulness and sleep she had somehow managed to unbuckle the seatbelt. It was therefor more good fortune than caution that allowed her to decelerate to near terminal velocity before the seat started its own tumbling and quickly separated from her. But as quickly as it happened it still left her with a vivid memory of plunging out the damaged floor into the darkness and as petrified as she was, some small part of her brain understood what had happened.

Somehow, she knew, there had been an explosion and she had been sucked out of the airplane by the decompression. Briefly terror overwhelmed her as she realized that she was certainly going to die.

They say that when you are finally about to die your entire life flashes through your mind in just a few seconds. When you are a young teenager, it's even quicker than that, because there isn't all that much there. But as those images flashed through her mind, she did think about them – exam each of them in those few seconds – and have time to notice that an awful lot of the happy ones were associated with working at the side of a young amber eyed boy – painting pictures on the walls of the Crashdown while sharing a rootbeer float – bicycling through the park in the Spring – brushing and scraping fossils from the earth together – partnering in science – all these memories and more went through her mind in just seconds – which was good because it left plenty of time for remorse – and there was certainly plenty of that once she had resigned herself to her fate.

Remorse about the people she would never see again – remorse about the things that she would never do – never go to high school and certainly never to Harvard – never be a bride – never be a lover - never be a mother – never grow old and see her grandchildren start their lives.... it seemed like in only seconds she could think of a thousand things that she would miss out on – and it was so unfair. Then she thought of Max.

Most of all she thought of Max. But when she thought of never seeing him again she had to admit that that at least would not be unfair. He had been her friend – as good a friend as anyone had ever had – and she'd hurt him. Hurt him by pushing him for a relationship he wasn't ready for – and maybe didn't want. She'd known more about his background than anyone – known more about his emotions than anyone – known how much that pendant had meant to him when she'd thrown it away. Even afterwards – crawling around on the floor of the quarry on her hands and knees in the dark to find it, she hadn't realized how much it meant to her. Why had she done something so cruel? Would she be cursed with carrying the memory of that act into the afterlife – if there was one?

Falling through the clouds her right hand found the top button on her blouse and opened it – groping briefly for the chain and then following it to the pendant. She drew strength from it – strength from all it had meant to her – all that Max had meant to her. She clutched it briefly - then tucked the pendant back in her blouse to lay against her heart.

Maybe in their next lives, she found herself hoping, they'd be together again. Maybe next time she wouldn't be so stupid – so hurtful. Maybe next time she'd spend as much time understanding him – finding out what caused him to be so fearful that day – as she'd spent on a stupid science fair project. Maybe, she thought, if Fate or God or – whoever was in charge of these things – were kind, she and Max might sometime be reunited. That, she decided, was the thought that she'd want to carry into eternity with her.

It took Liz 50 seconds to fall those first 9000 feet – fifty seconds that seemed like an eternity as all those thoughts rushed through her head. Except for the first few seconds when she'd been in the chair and actually ABOVE it, all of that falling was done at terminal velocity. For most people who have never experienced it – it isn't like you think.

You are falling – rushing toward the Earth at 200 feet a second – but you don't really have the feeling of falling the feeling of lightness – of having no weight, that you get when you jump from a diving platform or experience when above a trampoline or as the roller coaster tops out and heads down. That's because there is no acceleration. Your weight is pushing you down but your body is compressing the air underneath you because the inertia of the air won't let it get out of your way that fast. The wind roars by your ears and you feel the cold – but you are supported. You have no sensation of weightlessness, but it's more like being supported in a pile of feathers. Your weight is normal – you are totally supported by the compressed air beneath you –you can feel it - even though if you reach out it gives against you.

You quickly learn – falling at terminal velocity – that it's the surface area facing the wind that supports you. Surface area is mostly torso and legs – which sort of corresponds to where the most weight is on the body. You learn and learn quickly that small changes in body position can cause you to twist and turn, to somersault and spin – all of these somewhat disorienting and disconcerting. There are in fact basically two stable positions falling at terminal velocity – bent at the waist which puts you back down with limbs trailing behind you – or with your back in an arch – your arms behind you and your legs slightly split – which puts you face down where you can see the ground coming up at you. These too you learn quickly. As Liz approached 16,000 feet – still 11,000 feet above the floor of the Tularosa Basin – she was in that arch and facing her fears. It was just the kind of girl she was.

As she broke free of the bottom of the overcast Liz saw the full moon to the west, shining from over the Oscura range. It was beautiful she thought – the whole world was so beautiful. She burned the image of that beauty in her mind – and then lowered her head to face her fate. That's when she saw him.

He was maybe a hundred feet below her and perhaps fifty feet to the south of her floating face first toward the earth below – despite the dim light of the moon she'd know him anywhere. The realization was bittersweet – she had hoped that somehow he'd survived whatever had happened back in the plane but it was apparently not a good night to be a teenager flying on Mesa Air.

She wasn't sure he was even alive and she tried to call out to him but quickly found that a 120 mile per hour wind in your face really didn't let you shout too well even if a 120 mile an hour wind in his ears would have let him hear it. Then she saw his head look up to the west – probably looking at that beautiful moon just as she had. She nodded her head sadly – he was alive – no doubt going through his own last thoughts – knowing what would be coming all too soon. At that point Liz resigned herself to her fate.

It'll be alright,' she told herself, '...whatever happens, at least we'll face it together..'

Liz used the air flowing over her hands to turn herself to face him – then brought her arms back toward her hips. Her body went into a gentle glide forward losing altitude relative to him as she closed until she had slid several feet above him – then losing lift in the pocket of disturbed air directly above him she pretty much fell the two feet onto his back.


Max had been resigned to his fate falling through the cloud – it was going to be alright. As he fell out the bottom of the overcast – he looked to the west to see the moon – it was awesome in its beauty – he had to give it that. He wondered if there would be anything lthat beautiful where he was going afterwards – if there was an afterwards.

He looked down – so far below – but he could already see a dark splotch of ground below him separating itself from the flat desert. He could see the splotch grow as he fell toward it - it looked like he would land right in the middle of it. Minds are funny things – even though it wasn't going to matter in another minute, he still was curious as to what kind of ground it was – whether anyone would even find his body there. But he didn't really have much time to mull those questions over – something hit him in the back.

No – SOMEONE – he thought as he felt the body against his - felt the right arm encircle his waist and felt the left hand grip his shoulder.

“Max, I'm so sorry this happened to you...” someone said with Liz Parker's voice inches from his ear, “... but at least we are together.”

For Max, the nightmare had just started in earnest.

According to experts on grieving and coping mechanisms the human being - when confronted with imminent tragedy - goes through five stages. These are:
Denial - You tell yourself that it isn't happening.
Anger - You become angry at fate, at God, at the doctors, at yourself for not doing enough.
Bargaining - With death, the bargaining comes before the death. You promise anything if God will just let them live.
Depression - It comes during the anger stage, and the bargaining stage, and in the letting go stage. It can come at any stage, actually. It is characterized by many of the symptoms of grief. Depression is normal. It may last longer in some people than in others.
and finally,
Acceptance - When you have worked through all of the other stages, you will come to acceptance. You accept that everything happens for a reason. You may not see why yet, but you accept that it happened.

Of course, when you only have about fifty seconds to live yourself, you really have to rush that process and in truth Max never really did get through it before He smacked in to the ground, but he certainly tried.

'She can't be here - she was in the front of the plane,' he told himself. Except of course, the weight of her body laying on his back and her hips along his buttocks - even her legs against the back of his - was as undeniable as the warmth of her breath as she exhaled against his neck. Besides, he'd heard her voice. No, that stage only took about about three seconds. Exactly HOW Liz had gotten there was in question, but the FACT that Liz had somehow joined him in this trip to the great beyond was undeniable.

'How could someone so perfect - so kind and caring and wonderful - keep getting herself in these terrible messes?,' he asked himself. A fair enough question, but pretty deep philosophically - certainly nothing he could answer in the next forty-seven seconds, which was really all the time Max figured he had left. He chose to treat the question like one of those real hard questions on a long exam - he'd try to answer the easy ones first and just skip this one and move on. That got him to bargaining.

'Why couldn't it have been just me?' he asked himself. 'It wouldn't have really mattered had it been just me. Hell, I almost died that day when Liz was kidnapped - I almost killed myself that day at the quarry...'It wouldn't matter if it was only me dying....

And that's where the whole grieving process started to go off the rails - because it got him thinking about that day at the day at the Quarry when Deputy Valenti had interrupted him. He'd been leaning out over the cliff there supported by the wind from the torus he'd made. He had - he recalled - been leaning out at 30 degrees. By vector algebra leaning out suspended at 30 degrees meant that the wind from the torus he'd created had been holding up half his weight - about fifty-five pounds. Liz and him together weighed about 200 pounds - and the wind in his face had increased slightly when her weight had settled on to his back. If he could use his power to slow Liz down - maybe the landing would be survivable for Liz. It didn't have to be all the way - he'd be underneath her - but he had to slow her down enough that the fall wouldn't be any greater than the fall I took with that kidnapper because he really didn't care if HE lived or died - he offered up to any God or Fate that was listening - the last we will hear of the bargaining stage - if only Liz would survive.

Truthfully, he had no idea if he could do it but he had a little time - oh, probably about thirty-seven seconds now - to think about it. He considered it like a story problem - he was good at those - better even than Liz.

Liz was the biology ace - she'd once told him that the largest organ in the human body was actually the skin because it covered the entire surface of the body. The average surface area of an adult was 1.5 meters squared. Max's body surface area was probably a little less than that - call it 1.4 meters squared At 39.37 inches to the meter, a square meter was about 40 inches squared - call it 1600 square inches - giving him a total body surface area of about 2200 square inches. Of course, only half of those were on the bottom where the wind was hitting so that would have been 1100 square inches which right now were supporting about 200 pounds - that was less than two-tenths of a pound per square inch. It was theoretically possible. People did indoor skydiving in a vertical wind tunnel with a huge fan underneath pushing up that hard. Two tenths of a pound per square inch wasn't a lot of pressure - he'd reached more than that in his little wind tunnel.

When he'd done the work on the wind tunnel he'd placed the torus over the end and used his telekinesis to pump air into the tube and he'd achieved airspeed well above what was hitting him in the face right now - albeit over a much smaller cross section. The fact was, he wasn't sure if he could actually support ANY more than 50 pounds - and even if he had been then there was no assurance he could do it now - because he was still as physically and mentally exhausted as he had ever been in his life.

There were also two other problems he could see.

The first was that if he could really do this - generate a torus strong enough to bring 200 pounds to a stop - it would take him some time - at least five seconds - and during those five seconds he and Liz would be slowing down. Every mile per hour they actually DID slow down, there would be that much LESS support from the wind that was hitting them - meaning it would require MORE pressure from the torus. Max knew that given time he could probably figure that out, but having neither graphing calculator nor graph paper and straightedge currently, and being unwilling to trust doing differential calculus in his head right now, he figured he'd just give it everything he had. Timing would be critical though. Even if he was somehow able to bring the two of them to a dead stop by using his powers - say a hundred feet in the air or so before his powers gave out from exhaustion their situation might not be all that improved. He'd have to wait for the last seven or eight hundred feet - as nearly as he could judge with the moon-lit landscape - to even try to use his powers. That didn't leave much room for error.

The other problem was the ground itself. His telekinetic energy could make a torus of air, but as they approached the ground the torus would be pushed down to the dirt and rock below. Moving dirt and rock - weighing four or five pounds a quart would not work near as well as moving air that weighed a few tenths of an ounce a quart. That was good news in a way - he needn't worry about the torus stoning Liz to death - but it also meant the torus would be much less effective as it approached the ground because its energy would be taken up by the ground and not used to move air. Perhaps he could spread the torus out more widely - make it shallower but wider, but that would hurt him in a couple of ways. First it would take more energy from him - a LOT more energy, because something called the inverse square law made it much more difficult to do that. Secondly, with the diameter of the torus wider he'd have to pump in a lot more air - despite the torus now being almost blocked by the solid rock and dirt of the ground - to make as much pressure.

Max did a quick recheck of his calculations and they appeared to check out. Actually, he was pretty sure that even if he could make the torus work it would give out at about thirty feet when it got too close to the ground and he and Liz would fall from there, but that was alright - if she stayed on his back she might very well survive - just like he had when his fall had been broken by the kidnapper.

It wasn't much of a plan, perhaps, but it was the only one he had ... and he was running out of time. As they passed through 8,000 feet - only about 3,000 feet above the desert floor, a thought went through his mind - a scene from the movie 'Ghostbusters.'

Dr. Egon Spengler: I have a radical idea. The door swings both ways, we could reverse the particle flow through the gate.
Dr. Peter Venkman: How?
Dr. Egon Spengler: [hesitates] We'll cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: 'Scuse me Egon? You said crossing the streams was bad!
Dr Ray Stantz: Cross the streams...
Dr. Peter Venkman: You're gonna endanger us, you're gonna endanger our client - the nice lady, who paid us in advance, before she became a dog...
Dr. Egon Spengler: Not necessarily. There's definitely a *very slim* chance we'll survive.
[pause while they consider this]
Dr. Peter Venkman: [slaps Ray] I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! LET'S DO IT!

As he passed through a thousand feet above the desert floor below, Max smiled and shook his head.

I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! 'LET'S DO IT!' he said to himself, and he commanded the torus to form beneath them...

All Liz had wanted or expected was just to join him – to be together when the end came – to go together when they solved that final mystery – crossed over – stepped in to the light – you know, all those euphemisms for dying.

Liz had been raised to attend church but Miss Scientist had always been a little uncertain about the whole afterlife thing. It wasn't that she disbelieved, but the existence of an afterlife wasn't something that was really very amenable to scientific analysis. Of course on a two minute fall from the sky you can find a lot of religion. That's why she was praying.

What she found herself praying for wasn't her survival – that she was pretty sure wasn't going to happen. She was praying that it would be quick and that there would be something after – and that she and Max would be together. The last thirty-six hours hadn't been a whole lot of fun – so it seemed only fair she could ask for that much. Of course, her luck hadn't been real good lately either, so she had no real confidence that her prayers were going to be answered.

But at least she had the here and now – she thought as she pressed her cheek softly against Max's back just below his neck – at least for a few more seconds – and if in the end if they didn't go together to someplace else - well, at least they were leaving this world together.

As you get closer to the ground you can see more ground in your peripheral vision – even in the relatively dim moonlight - and that's what Liz was seeing as she got within a thousand feet of the ground. She knew the end was coming soon and she tightened her grip around his waist and buried her face against him. The first second she barely noticed the increased roar of the wind and her breasts flattening against his back as her weight pressed harder down on him. If anything, her cerebrums were agreeing with her midbrain – if she really HAD to die – dying with Max wasn't a bad way to go...



Max had a difficult time even starting the torus – he'd never been so fatigued – and as it came up to speed he was working his telekinetic ability harder than he'd ever worked it in his life. But between 800 feet above ground level where he finally got it started to 700 feet above ground level he'd slowed his velocity only from 200 feet per second to 185 and it wasn't looking good. A second later he was at 550 feet and still doing 160 feet per second.

Liz felt her body press more tightly against his – but thought it was only her arm pulling him more tightly against her as the end approached. Just why the wind seemed so loud in her ears she really didn't notice – even scientific curiosity has its limits.

A second later Max was passing 400 feet – still doing 140 feet per second and Max was fighting to remain conscious....

Perhaps if the wind hadn't been screaming more than ever before, Liz would have noticed the slowing of their fall – but Max was working the torus with all he had left – and the wind screamed by Max's shoulders and Liz just pushed her face into his back – smelling the smell of him – trying to form one last memory to last her for all eternity....

Passing 280 feet Max had their speed down to 100 feet per second – and he was fighting to remain conscious – he couldn't keep this up very long.

Liz felt the deceleration now – it didn't make a damn bit of sense – but somehow they were slowing down. They were still falling – but they were definitely slowing. Despite the roaring wind around them – or maybe because of it – they were slowing down. Of course they were still going fast enough to break their necks – it just made no sense whatsoever.

At 150 feet the velocity of the fall was down to 80 feet per second – Max shut his eyes and concentrated – oblivious to the fatigue – to the pain – to the fact that he'd used up nearly all the energy in his body. He was concentrating on getting ready for the torus to start to intersect the ground – already sure that would be far more than he could handle – but that didn't matter – if he could just slow down a little bit more – then Liz would survive -that was all he cared about.

The slowing was obvious – the force of the deceleration holding her tightly against Max. This was – unbelievable....

At a hundred feet the velocity was down to 60 feet per second – about thirty-five miles an hour – and Max was losing the fight to remain conscious. He held on for another second and was at sixty feet and the velocity was down to 40 feet per second when he felt the bottom of the torus start to push against the ground. He spead it out further – feeling it weaken as he did so. He wasn't going to make it but maybe Liz was. He gave a last push – everything he had – and lost consciousness.

Max in his hurry had miscalculated. While widening the torus weakened it, the proximity to the ground had actually helped him. Something called ground effect The proximity to the ground had caused the torus to push air in from the side and the desert floor trapped it increasing the deceleration force. Briefly Max – with Liz on his back - came to a complete stop four feet above a sandy area of soil. As he went unconscious he abruptly fell. Fortunately he wasn't injured. Unfortunately he landed on Liz's right arm.

Liz heard the crack and knew the arm was broken. It didn't hurt – not yet – but she knew it would. The arm was too cold now – cold from the fall through the sky with the rain and the cold air hitting it. The rest of her body had been protected by Max – Max who had – somehow – explained them both. Max who was barely breathing beside her. Max whose face was icy from the fall.

She had no idea how he had done it – she only knew that he HAD somehow done it – and that it had nearly killed him to do it. It made no sense and she couldn't begin to figure it out– but that wasn't the priority. Max was soaked and getting more hypothermic by the second – so was she. She looked around – it was the roughest area she'd ever seen in her life. It was lava. She saw a nearby opening – what looked like a collapsed lava tube from what she could tell in the moonlight. She dragged Max slowly – painfully – across the sand and seuffed him in – then crawled back over him to block the entrance and try to keep the small crevice warm. The narrow area wasn't big enough for the two of them - more like one and a half - but at least it would keep Max dry and the interior of the tube still held some of the heat from the day. She pushed her body against his – trying to warm him – while blocking the cold air from outside with her own body, although most of her back was still exposed to the fine mist drizzling down.

“Don't you dare die on me, Maxwell Evans,” she said as she cradled her broken arm and looked at him. She kissed his cheek – it was icy – and snuggled as close as she could to him – shared body heat was important she told herself. The truth was, she was now more at risk for hypothermia than he was, but that didn't matter to her right now. She would watch him intensely for three hours not really relaxing until he seemed to be breathing better. The clouds would clear and the air would cool even further and she would gradually lapse in to hypothermia - but she never even considered leaving him to find her own shelter. She was too worried about him.

Back in Roswell the phone at the Air Mesa desk was finally ringing and the ticket agent picked it up. It was from the home office in Phoenix. The clerk listened briefly - he had gotten a ten minute lecture on this in his training for the job - but hadn't honestly thought he'd ever have to put that training to use.

Jeff Parker had looked up as soon as the telephone rang, and the other three parents eyes quickly followed his as the ticket agent walked toward them.

"Mr. and Mrs. Parker - Mr. and Mrs Evans - I'm afraid I have some bad news...."

The town of Carrizozo New Mexico is not a very big town – even by New Mexico standards – only a thousand people. It sits over 5200 feet above sea level nestled against the foothills of the Sacramento mountains that form the eastern border of the Tularosa Basin. Ten miles north-northwest of Carrizoza is a not terribly big mountain – especially by New Mexico standards – the ninety foot high Little Black Peak. About 1400 years ago Little Black Peak was the vent for a crack that went deep into the earth – and for a period of twenty to thirty years molten magma regularly flowed from Little Black Peak – an awful lot of lava by anyone's standards – estimated to be 4.3 cubic kilometers. The flow naturally went downhill – eventually traveling 47 miles and reaching five miles in width. It is the youngest large volcanic field in the continental United States.

The Carrizozo Malpais – Spanish for badlands – is a vast field of basaltic lava almost 250 square miles – of some of the toughest country on Earth. Fourteen hundred years – in geological terms – is a blink of an eye. No significant weathering has occurred on the lava in that time. Sandstorms have brought in enough dust and sand for shallow pockets of earth that support some plant life but the principal feature is unrelenting lava. The lava occurs in ropey flows, in upthrust ridges, in [/url=http://skywalker.cochise.edu/wellerr/st ... age012.jpg] broken crevasses[/url], and endless fields of just flat unbroken lava. Vegetation is sparse – mostly yuccas and scrub brush. There are many species of animals in the malpais – their coloring evolving over the generations to match the constant black background of the basalt. They shared one other charachteristic as well. None of them were particularly big – that was due to something called the square-cube law, a bit of engineering esoterica that can be explained like this:
If you triple the size of an animal, you generally increase its mass by a factor of twenty-seven. That's simply because weight is proportional to volume which is a cubic function. Where this comes into play is in the feet. When you triple the size of a foot, you increase the contact area with the ground – in this case with some very sharp lava – by nine. For every increase in mass, proportionately more weight must be absorbed by those feet and flesh and bone could only bear so much. Even hooved animals didn't tolerate the malpais. There were birds aplenty, small rodents, abundant snakes whose large 'footprint' relative to their mass spread their mass out much less forcefully, although even they seemed to prefer the few sandy areas. Big animals just didn't do well in the park.

With the exceptions of one road – highway 380 – splitting the malpais and the single park of 530 acres, - the Valley of Fires Recreation Area - the malpais is as desolate as it was at the time of the Spanish. People hike in the park – on limited paths partially cut out from the lava fields by bulldozers and filled with gravel – and even in that limited area you will likely destroy a good pair of hiking boots in less than a day. The real malpais – the other 249 plus square miles is seldom trod by human feet at all. Those few who have – usually professional researchers – have not been kind in their description of the experience. One such individual claimed that he found no flora or fauna that didn't 'sting, bite, or impale you,' and described even touching the lava as 'almost certain to produce a cut or abrasion.' Whereas on normal ground people tend to hike at a rate that is as much as two or three miles an hour, two or three miles a day was a lot in the tough terrain of the malpais – and that only if you were well equipped.

Few people ever actually travel in the malpais. It eats up four-wheel drive vehicles as readily as shoe leather. Nor does there appear to be a 'good season' to hike it. In the summer time the sun bakes the black basalt lava – temperatures as high as 130 being recorded commonly on the surface and not much cooler in the air above. But in winter the high desert can also be cold with nightly lows going below freezing five months of the year. Perhaps there are more inhospitable places on the Earth – but they would be few.

As morning breaks in the center of the malpais there are in fact only four people in that 250 square miles. Two of them are a seventy year old couple who – along with their two chihuahuas and their RV - took shelter at the RV parking area in the Valley of Fires last night after fighting the thunderstorm last evening on the way back to Albuquerque from a three day trip to the Lincoln National Forest. In a couple of hours they will make breakfast and leave what both will acknowledge to be one of the most God forsaken places they have ever parked their RV. The other two are 15 miles south of them – in a lava field. One of those two is in serious danger of dying.


Liz wasn't shivering any more – that was bad. Her body had been shivering almost convulsively for most of the night. That was in fact the good news. That meant that she was only in stage II of hypothermia. It was hardly surprising. Although she hadn't been exposed to the cold wind and rain during the fall to the extent that Max had, she'd been nonetheless soaked.

It had taken her almost five hours from the time she had placed Max under the cover of the lava tube for her to start to get her clothes dry – and then the rain had come again. The good news was that it was relatively warm – the remains of the warm air mass that had caused the thunderstorm that had pretty much devastated Lincoln County. The bad news was that she had again been drenched – still half sticking out of the lava tube herself - and the squall had brought winds that had chilled her back and legs throughout the night.

Hours ago she had passed the first stage – her exposed skin numb and her body shivering moderately – and by 4AM was well into stage II. Her shivering had become violent as her body fought to burn enough calories – create enough heat – to keep her core temperature up. She had been slowly losing that battle for the last three hours. Her lips and fingernails were blue – her muscles wracked with spasms – in fact the muscle spasms had been severe enough to displace the fractures in the bones of her right forearm – it was taking on a decided dogleg appearance.

But that was then and this was now. The shivering had stopped, and she was in stage III.

Her core temperature was down to 92 degrees Fahrenheit – call it 33 degrees Celsius – and now thah her body could no longer shiver to keep her warm, she would be passing the magic number – 32 degrees Fahrenheit where the muscles would give up their fight and cease shivering – plunging her temperature down even more where ventricular fibrillation and death would inevitably occur.

What Liz needed was sunshine to heat her and the black lave basalt. Even in winter the rays of the noontime sun could get the lava up to seventy five degrees – the air temperature over sixty. But that wasn't going to happen any time soon. Although the morning sun was already lighting up the eastern slopes of the Oscura range on the other side of the basin, where she was the shadow of the Sacramento range still blocked the sun and would for another hour.

She'd known the risk she was taking – using her body to keep the wind and weather away from his. Perhaps some hours ago she even knew she was losing that battle – it hadn't changed her mind though. She could have changed places with him – that she hadn't even considered. She could have left him to find herself better shelter – but that would have exposed Max to greater risk. Perhaps she had thought that neither of them would make it anyway – and had just wanted to be close to him when they both died. For whatever reason, she'd chosen to stay. She'd lain there next to him – wondering how the hell he'd done what he'd done – as she got gradually colder and colder and her shivering had come and now had gone – and finally she had passed out altogether.



Max had never been more tired in his life. He too was cold, but the tube had been dry at least and – baked by the previous day's sun – it had never gotten below 50 degrees. Eventually his clothes had dried and – shielded from the second rain by Liz's body – even managed to stay that way. But as the light from the distant mountain tops to the east filtered in to where he was, he gradually awoke.

Max opened his eyes and found himself staring into the face of Elizabeth Parker. She looked – well dreadful really. His hand reached out to touch her and she was icy. Her white short sleeved blouse had been soaked and under other circumstances he might have found viewing that pleasurable as it had nearly turned transparent and her sports bra provided only a modest opacity to what was underneath – but not this morning. Even through the blouse her skin was pale and waxy and he had to look for long seconds to convince himself she was breathing at all. Her lips were so blue they almost seemed purple.

Max rolled Liz onto her back and slid from the tube. He looked around quickly in the gathering light and he was intuitively sure what had happened. He was wrong of course – male intuition is like that - but that didn't mean he wasn't sure.

Somehow he had managed, he quickly decided, to almost stop their fall – both had hit the ground and been rendered unconscious – Liz breaking her arm in the process – before both had rolled toward the shelter. He'd wound up under the overhang and Liz hadn't.

Max knew about hypothermia – most kids raised on the windy plains of eastern New Mexico did – and he knew he had to act and act fast. Problem one was the hypothermia which – if he didn't do something would quickly kill her. Problem two is any additional injuries she had from the fall – the arm was apparent – it had never bent that way before – but Liz might have internal injuries as well. The problem was he couldn't even connect with her to assess her for those until he got her warmed up.

Right now her brain was so cold it wasn't working – that was both good and bad. It let her survive – even though she was barely breathing – because the cold slowed her metabolism almost to the point of death. But that meant that right now at least – there was no way for him to connect with her to assess or heal her other injuries because right now – no one was home.


But Max didn't hesitate – not even to think – he could still treat her hyperthermia. Even if he couldn't connect with her – still he could manipulate molecules – and that included the molecules of Liz Parker. No, he couldn't actually patch things up without connecting to her – without stealing the information from her body on just what to put back together with what – but he could certainly make the molecules move. All heat was was molecules in motion, and he could certainly use his powers to get her molecules moving.

Max knew enough not to heat her extremities first – the extremities are the first things to be automatically shut off from blood flow as body core temperatures drop – they become icy and if they are the first thing that is warmed the initial blood flow returning is so cold that you actually drop the temperature of the blood reaching the heart – often with fatal consequences. But with molecular manipulation he could warm her centrally even if he couldn't yet connect with her. Max straddled Liz's legs and pulled her arms down to her sides – wincing as he moved her broken right arm, and pulled her blouse out of her waist. The bulk of the heat energy produced by a body at rest came from the liver – if he could heat that up, she would again start making her own body heat as well. It was as good a place as any to start. Max stuck his hand up under the blouse stopping at the liver – just above the lower edge o=f the rib cage on the right and let his energy flow through to warm the tissue below. He couldn't do it too quickly – he didn't want to burn the tissue – but he was pretty sure this would work fast. It didn't.

There is an old aphorism, ' a watched pot never boils,' and while not actually true – eventually a watched pot will boil if you put enough energy in it, it's an aphorism that SEEMS true. That's because of something called the specific heat of water. Put most simply, it requires a hell of a lot of energy to heat water. On a weight for weight basis, heating water one degree takes almost six times the energy of heating solid rock. It takes more energy than heating almost anything else.

Liz Parker wasn't what you would call a big girl. She only weighed about 40 kilograms – approximately eighty-eight pounds – even soaking wet, which coincidentally she happened to be – we may talk about heat of vaporization of water a little later – also a high energy requiring process. The biggest part of Liz or any human was water. What this meant that warming Liz was requiring scads of energy – not that Max was begrudging it – but it was energy that he really didn't have to spare.

By comparison, the total energy required – in theory - to decelerate two hundred pounds of Max and Liz from 120 miles per hour to zero was actually only about 40 kcal, that is 40 big Calories if you are talking food. Roughly half of a very small bag of French fries. The actual amount Max had used had been considerably more, of course. He'd had to generate a torus with an internal diameter of about two meters giving it a cross-sectional area of over three meters squared. His body had only blocked three-quarters of a meter squared of that, meaning that 75% of the energy he had used had been wasted. Put another way, in those seconds when he was stopping them the energy he had used was equal to avout 160 calories. The human (and alien human hybrid) body stores a lot more energy than that, but it's hard for it to mobilize it quickly. He had exhausted his reserves and spent most of the night on not real warm rock trying to build back those reserves and they still were far below normal.

The point is that warming Liz 4 degrees Celsius was going to take about a Calorie per Kilogram per Degree – about the same energy as he'd used stopping them from falling, and not over an awful lot more time. As he kept at it he was getting weaker and weaker without really knowing it. Ten minutes later he was fighting hard – both to remain conscious, and to get a connection through to Liz as soon as possible so he could fix her arm and anything else that needed fixing and break the connection before she had a chance to wake up and notice him. That's not exactly what went down.

Liz awoke to find herself on her back. Max – his eyes closed – was straddling her with one hand holding her broken right arm the other resting on her right ribcage almost touching her right breast where it was generating a rather amazing feeling of warmth. She was somewhat surprised by this.

In fact, her now defrosting cerebrum was not unalterably opposed to her and Max participating in a steamy teenage petting session – the truth being it had sort of included that in its long term plans ever since Friday night when Liz had walked out of the bathroom and caught Doug and Lexie going at it on the bed. The midbrain, needless to say, was ecstatic.

Nonetheless, this did seem a might on the pushy side to Liz's cerebrum – particularly since she had a broken arm and hadn't given any sort of consent – not that that would necessarily have been a huge problem perhaps, she thought while reveling in the unexpected and very welcome warmth – if only he'd asked. Unfortunately, that's when her right forearm started to glow.


Max had been concentrating so long on just making heat that the connection formed unexpectedly. By then he knew he had badly underestimated the energy this job would take. Fortunately there was nothing wrong but the broken arm – he straightened it quickly with telekinesis and then used Liz's body's DNA as a pattern for his healing …....

Liz watched as her forearm straightened itself and his hand continued to glow.
'What is going on?' she asked herself, not realizing that would send her mind traveling through the connection seeking the answer.

The flashes hit her quickly then – a podchamber with four pods – a six year-old size Max pulling himself from one of them covered with a clear jelly-like substance while an umbilical cord connected him back into it – a six year-old Isabel already laying naked and covered in clear goo on the floor beside him – Max and Isabel a day later walking naked along the desert road – being found by Diane and Philip Evans – Max on the edge of the quarry after their breakup – the torus holding him suspended over the edge of the cliff – Max working on his project – using the torus to replace the fan on his wind tunnel – Max using the torus to brake their fall – Max awakening to find her nearly dead of hyperthermia. But more even than what she saw in those flashes was what she felt. Max – straining – giving all he had to pour warmth in to her – depleting his own energy to the edge of unconsciousness – and beyond.



'Just a few seconds more....,' Max told himself, encouraging the osteoblasts to quickly cement the matrix of hydroxyapatite he formed between the two bone ends. 'There!,' he told himself as he broke the connection . He'd been concentrating pretty hard but he was pretty sure he'd gotten out before she'd even noticed. Now all he had to do was open his eyes and be here when she woke up. But it didn't work out quite that way. His energy depleted to almost where it had been the night before, he simply slumped into unconsciousness.


Liz caught him as he fell – surprised that her broken arm didn't hurt as she did so. She looked up to see his sleeping face – his body laying on top of her – not an altogether unpleasant experience her cerebrum agreed as her midbrain brought it up. He was nice and warm, too, she thought as she held him against her.

“This is so weird...” she said to no one in particular. She looked up at him – sleeping like a baby – and smiled. She rolled slightly to the side and he eased back onto the ground beside her - his hand dropping away from her chest. Liz was truly surprised how much she missed the feel of him pressing down against her. I mean - this went beyond weird - was Max even human? Somehow looking at him - remembering how she'd felt as she'd been falling - she certainly couldn't bring herself to fear him - and she couldn't deny that she wanted to be close to him.

Finally she gave up the effort to keep her distance and snuggled back against her sleeping friend.

“Go ahead and rest, Max,” she said as the shadows receded and the sun finally hit where they were and started to warm the lava beside them, “... but when you wake up, you got a lot of 'splaining to do...”

She wrapped her now working as good as new arm around him and within minutes was sleeping quietly beside him as the sun started to heat the malpais.

Hangar 23
Holloman Air Force Base, NM

The National Transportation Safety Board investigators were really just getting started, but the team captain had an extra job to do right now – a training job. Aircraft accidents were rare enough – fortunately – that there weren't a whole lot of people who really had the experience to do them. That was a good thing and all the primary team members had spent years building their experience. The bad thing was that accident investigators themselves were mortal – and even if they didn't die most would eventually retire. For that reason it was customary to bring at least one new guy along on each accident that did occur the idea being to get them experience as future primary team replacements. For some reason – lost in NTSB antiquity – this position was known as the makee-learnee guy. On this particular accident, the makee-learnee guy was Robert Hamilton. The team leaders job was to get him oriented. What he was about to do was one of the more unpleasant parts of that orientation.

“Bob,” said the team leader, “...come out back with me for a second.”

The refrigerated trailer had a small tent at its rear and a set of steps leading up to the door. The team leader stopped at the table and took a face mask from the box. Bob Hamilton copied the team leader and tied a m ask to his face as well.

“Let me show you a trick that's worth knowing, Bob,” said the team leader taking a small bottle from his pocket and rubbing it across his face mask – then reaching over to do the same to Bob's mask. A sharp citrus-like smell immediately became almost overwhelming.

Bob wrinkled his nose in surprise. “What is that?”

“Lemon oil.”

“It's a little strong, don't you think?”

“A lot better than the alternative,” replied the team chief. He strode up the steps and knocked on the door – it opened and a man in a white coat wearing a rubber apron motioned them inside.

It was cold on the inside and the smell was like singed hair – only a lot worse – even through the lemon oil soaked mask. Bob fought to keep from gagging as he looked at the long line of stainless steel tables and the charred contents on each.

“So what do you have so far, doc?”

“These two – by placement in the wreckage are likely the pilot and copilot. We have their dental records coming. These two – according to the x-rays of their pelvic structure – are most likely adult females.... the other six seem to be adult males -or rather what's left of them.”

“Only ten?”

“Oh, I've got two men going through the wreckage and they occasionally find a few more charred parts, but I doubt that there are any major parts still missing – so I guess I'd have to say, yes, at this point it only looks like we have ten.”

“Thanks, doc,” said the team leader. He nodded toward the door. Bob Hamilton, looking a little green around the gills – seemed more than happy to go.

When they were outside the tent, Hamilton took a couple of deep breaths and a more normal color returned to his face.

“In this case,” said the team chief, “... it appears that the aircraft was shallowing out of the dive – starting to bring its nose up in another of the roller-coaster sort of oscillations that you saw on the radar track. With a shallow crater, identifying the types of injuries to the bodies can give us some of our first information about the crash. In this case we turned up something even more interesting.”

“There were ten passengers on the manifest – plus a crew of two.”

“That's right, we have two bodies missing altogether.”

“How is that possible?”

“Actually, it's not that uncommon with a high altitude decompression due to loss of cabin integrity. Aloha Airlines flight 243 had one flight attendant ejected when their roof blew off. Once the cabin has a large breach, any loose items go right out that opening and that unfortunately includes people not strapped down.”

“So where do you think those bodies are?”

“Well, that's what we have to look at. We know when the first Mayday came out. We can check the time on that - calculate back on the F-117A FLIR record to the moment of impact – compare that to the radar record, and that can show us where the collision occurred. ”

“So that's where we'll find the bodies?”

“No, but it's where we'll find the debris from the crash, or at least it is close. Of course, the F-117A didn't show up at all on the radar and the transponder on the Beech left a mark so big that all of our numbers are going to be plus or minus five miles – especially when you consider there are often serious winds around a thunderstorm like that which could have blown debris for quite a distance. We ought to find the initial debris from the collision within a five mile radius of where the two aircraft hit. The bodies themselves....? Well, the engines keep trying to pressurize that cabin as long as they are at altitude – those two passengers could have been sucked out of that aircraft pretty much anywhere along that track – almost thirty miles. Add in the uncertainty in the radar track – that's almost 150 square miles where they could be”

“If what the doc is saying is right, that would probably be the two teenagers.”

“Yeah, damn shame too. We'll look of course, but no guarantee that they will ever be found. Aluminum debris just sits there. Bodies – even assuming we find them – well the carrion eaters get to them pretty quickly.”

“Do you ever get used to this?”

“It's a job that needs to be done, Bob. It's a job that saves lives. But no – I don't suppose any of us really get used to it.”



Carrizoza Malpais

It was 11:20 AM and the sun was beating down on the black lava – warming the surface to almost 70 degrees. Of course, to Liz it seemed a little warmer – snuggled against Max. It was cooler only a few feet above the surface of the lava – Liz knew that. An hour ago she had gotten up and wandered off looking for a place to pee. She'd only gone about twenty feet – just enough to be out of Max's sight should he awake. That had been more than ample – she'd never seen anyplace as God-forsaken as these badlands. A place to pee seemed to be all it was good for. She lived in a desert area near Roswell – but this.... She had a hunch that for most of the year even the moisture of someone peeing would have been desperately welcome. The thunderstorm had changed all that. There were in fact scattered puddles of standing water caught in the lava and in many places the lava had channeled the water into deeper pockets but most of the sandy areas were still damp. The plants – while relatively sparse – would be putting out blooms over the next few days. She'd seen it happen before in the desert.

She had come back to cuddle down beside him – not so much because it was warm there – although it was – but because she felt comfortable and secure next to him. She had closed her eyes and just cuddled up next to him content to let him sleep – he'd certainly earned a rest. But she hadn't fallen back to sleep herself. Too many things were going through her mind.


The problem wasn't just what she'd seen in those flashes – it was what she had felt. She'd felt the feeling that Max had felt during each of those flashes. Coming out of the pod had been bad enough. Maybe, Liz thought, it had been the same for her on the day she was born – the being thrown out in the cold – out of the warmth of the only life she'd ever known. If so she didn't remember it. Max did. Tossed out into the world with two others – neither any more equipped to survive than he was – she'd felt his fear – felt his pain. Even when his mother and father had found him naked walking along the road with Isabel – he had been almost as frightened of going with them as staying alone in the desert.

Liz knew that she had spent her existence before birth cuddled in her mothers womb – listening to her voice – to her heartbeat. Max hadn't had that. He'd been gestated by some cold impersonal machine. Maybe not cold in a thermal sense, but cold in an emotional sense. That he'd ever bonded with Diane and Philip Evans seemed amazing. He hadn't even known what they were. And then there were the lost years – six years of his life that he'd never get back – six years when Liz had been held – cuddled – told by her parents in every way she could that she was loved and wanted and ….. and one of them.

She'd heard Max's mom talking to hers once when they didn't know she was overhearing. They'd talked about some psychologist telling Max's mom that Max and his sister were like feral children – like they had been raised by animals almost. The flashes had told her that it was actually worse than that. If Max had been raised by wolves he would at least have had the love of a mother wolf – and a pack he felt part of. He didn't even have that.

The real thing that was bothering her though, was shame. Shame at how she had treated him.

She'd felt what he'd felt during that episode at the quarry. She had wanted to hurt him when she'd thrown that pendant away – but she had no idea how much it really had hurt him until that flash. He cared so much for her – and she had done that to him without a thought. Max cared for her – cared for her more than life itself. He'd certainly proven that often enough – but she had hurt him time and time again. She had almost lost him that day, she thought, perhaps not realizing herself just how possessive that sounded .

Sure, she had tried to help Max – certainly more than the other kids had. But how much of that was her trying to make him into what she wanted him to be? She'd never asked him what he wanted to be – or hell, even what he was.

Max had never been like that with her. From the very start – all he'd ever done was to care for her – protect her – be her friend. Max had never tried to make her into what he wanted her to be – to use her to fulfill his dreams – like she had done with him. He'd always given – never demanded – never asked her to be something that she wasn't comfortable being. No, whatever Max was and wherever he'd come from – well, he was a better human being than she was she figured – at least in the ways that really counted.

The second thing going through Liz's mind was – well , just what WAS Max? He certainly looked human enough – at least the parts of him she'd seen,. Even with his folks covering for him, he must have seen a doctor after he was found – a doctor who apparently thought he was human. Besides, he was a middle school student. Like her, he had to suit up for physical education and after class shower off in a shower room totally devoid of any semblance of privacy. If he wasn't – well totally human in appearance, somehow it would have gotten out. Of course, that didn't mean he was totally human inside.

Was that the reason he didn't appear to want to do boy-girl sort of stuff? Was he not human – or not all human at least? Did she have the wrong sort of pheromones to attract him? Were they even compatible – that way? Or was it all the weird way that he'd been born? Was it nature or nurture – or at least the absence of nurture – that kept him from being attracted to her?

For that matter, even if he was someday attracted to her that way – would they be biologically compatible? Could she make him happy and could he make her happy and – would her dream of being his wife and bearing his child even be possible?

She didn't have the answer to those questions – and didn't really know how to get them. Maybe Max knew but even if he did, it was hardly something she could ask him. She was more shy than that and he was far more shy than she was. Besides, she decided, it just didn't matter.

He was her friend – a friend who cared more about her than he cared about himself. For now that would be enough. She'd pushed him too much already about this and come too close to losing him. She wouldn't do that again. She'd concentrate only on being his friend – as good a friend to him as he'd always been to her. The other stuff would either work out or it wouldn't, but she'd always be his friend.

She seriously considered not upsetting him – not even telling him that she knew his secret – but would that really help Max? Max needed, she believed, to understand that she was his friend regardless of what he was or if he shared her dreams or not. Still, part of friendship was being able to be comfortable together. He needed to know he could be comfortable with her – that she could accept what he was – and that she could accept it if all they could be was friends.

Still, even friends could have fun with their friends sometimes. Her mouth took on a tiny evil smile as she wondered, 'How is he going to try to talk his way out of this?' she asked herself.

Max was lying there next to her. He'd been awake for over an hour. He had awakened when she had gotten up – wondering instantly just how much of what happened she had remembered. She hadn't seemed panicked when she'd woken up and she'd walked slowly off into the desert – not running in blind panic – so Max had logically concluded that she didn't know about him – male logic that, about as reliable in this case as male intuition.

Of course that left him with a problem – a huge one – how to explain what had happened. But this too he approached with logic – male logic naturally. Their was no social problem too big to be run away from. Since she obviously didn't know he had anything to do with their survival, it stood to reason that if he just acted ignorant as well, eventually she would come up with some sort of a theory – which, knowing Liz, she would - and, when she did, he could argue with her just enough to make it obvious he really had no idea – before agreeing with her theory – whatever that was. Anything Liz could dream up would have to be safer than the truth – that was for sure.

Actually it hadn't taken him the whole hour to come up with the – I'm abysmally ignorant of what happened – don't blame me – story. That was an old male standard when covering something up. He'd come up with that in about five minutes. The last fifty five minutes? Well, it was so nice and comfortable with her laying against him – feeling the warmth of her – the gentle movement of every inhalation and exhalation she made.... It wasn't like he wanted to rush this. Still, it was time they get this over with, he thought.

He rolled slightly away from her and – already surprised at how much he missed having her at his side – sat up and stretched. Looking at her there asleep was like looking at a sleeping angel. Still, he had to get this over.

She heard him move and was debating what to do next when she felt his hand gently pushing on her shoulder. “Liz! Liz! Are you alive? Omigawd, I can't believe it – somehow we both are still alive. The last thing I remember we were both falling from the airplane. How could we still be alive?"


She sat up and looked at him, fighting to keep a smile off her face. 'How on Earth has he managed to keep his secret this long/', she wondered. 'Max HAS to be the world's most inept liar... Of course, that in its own way was pretty endearing too.

“I don't know, Max. Obviously we didn't hit the ground too hard. I've heard of people getting lifted up and set down in tornadoes without being harmed. A lot of time thunderstorms spawn tornadoes, and it's pretty obvious there was a big thunderstorm here last night. Maybe a thunderstorm caught us in midair and somehow deposited us safely on the ground – no, that wouldn't work. Tornadoes are too vertical for that – it would have had to have been something like a horizontal thunderstorm – but even that would have just pushed us aside and let us fall. No, I guess it would have had to have been something like a tornado in the shape of a donut with the air coming up from right underneath – kind of a tornado bent into a torus...”

Max wasn't really able to talk. He just nodded agreement, his mouth somewhat agape. Damn,, he thought. 'Liz is REALLY good at this theoretical stuff...,'

“Of course,” she continued, “that really wouldn't fully explain it. All wet and with the weather that cold, laying out here we would have almost certainly gotten hypothermia.... but the ground is lava – maybe there is some geothermal source out here that kept us warm enough to not die of exposure,” continued Liz. A wide eyed Max nodded in agreement.

“Well,' said Liz, “...I guess that explains everything. I'm sort of hungry. Maybe we ought to look for something for breakfast.”

“Yes, I guess it does....,” said Max. He'd been scared to death where she'd been going when she said the word 'torus' and was happy just happy to get this little bit of drama behind them. “... let's see if there is anything edible around here.”

“Of course,” said Liz, softly taking his right hand and bringing it toward her – then with the other hand pulling up her blouse until it revealed the bottom of her bra and a silver iridescent handprint over her right lower chest and upper abdomen, “... it doesn't completely explain this....,” she said as she forced Max's right palm against her skin – exactly covering that silvery mark, “...does it,Max?”

It was exactly the same 'deer-in-the-headlights look he always had when he'd gotten in a social setting that was way over his head, and Liz had to work hard to resist her impulse to just cuddle him. Instead she just shook her head and feigned irritation.

“I cannot believe that after ALL the years that we have been friends you couldn't confide in me about something like this, Maxwell. I've like given you the BEST years of my life,” she said, something warming inside her as she acknowledged that her time with Max – at least when she wasn't pushing him to do something he couldn't bring himself to do - really had been the best time she could recall, “... and you have all these amazing talents and you don't so much as HINT to me you have them? Or that you actually were gestated by a machine? Do you even realize the biotechnology involved in that? How COULD you not trust me with this?”

Now sometime in the next ten or fifteen minutes Max would get it all back together – be capable of coherent thought. He wasn't there yet – wouldn't be for a time. The cerebrum was barely sputtering on about two cylinders right now – and it was normally a V-8. The midbrain was no doubt distracted by how close it was to getting to second base – it was pretty quiet right now. Nonetheless, Max did his best to make an excuse for not confiding in her. It wouldn't be good enough.

“Liz, I was afraid of how you'd react. I mean – look at the Crashdown – all those paintings in the party room about aliens – ugly scarey creatures – all teeth and tentacles...”

Liz's hands went to her hips – not easy to do sitting in the sand - “Max, you and I painted most of those ourselves. Mine are the ones that have the cute aliens with slightly oversize heads and almond eyes. YOU painted all those spooky ones....”

“Oh yeah,” said Max starting to remember clearly. Isabel had insisted he make them bizarre looking – so customers wouldn't think that aliens might look too much like humans. “So....you aren't scared?”

“Max, I'm not stupid,” she said, letting his hand slide from her skin – much to her own midbrain's dismay. “It's not like you haven't been my friend for five years – saved my life – well I've damned near forgotten just how many times. If you had some evil plot of some sort – well you could have done it long before now. Even last night – what you did when we were falling – if you'd saved only yourself it would have used only half the energy. You'd have been better off if you'd just let me die. I know how close it was for both of us to not make it at all... ”

It was hard to give up a lifetime of fears and beliefs – but Liz took his hand and looked into his eyes and – even without connecting to her he could see there was no fear there. It was true. Liz knew – well if not the whole truth, certainly enough to guess something real close to it – and she wasn't going screaming off into the desert in fear.

Of course Liz was special – logical – not everyone was like that. Still, in all his life he'd never believed that any human could really accept him if they knew his secret. Liz had. She truly was his friend -despite him being different - and that was more than he'd ever really believed to be possible. So Max looked into her eyes and said the words that all of his life he'd never believed he would say to anyone.

“OK, Liz …. I'll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Let's go find breakfast first Max, because you have a whole lot of 'splaining to do. You are going to need to keep your strength up.”

It was a strange feeling for someone who had spent his life hiding and living a lie. It was almost a surreal experience as he walked along beside her out on the lava field to forage for food.

“Well Liz, what DO you want to know?” he asked.

“Everything...”

“Well, that makes two of us. Unfortunately I don't know everything. All I can tell you is what I do know. Where do you want me to start?”

“I guess at the beginning.”

“The beginning is one of the things I don't know – but the beginning for me is when I found myself waking up halfway out of a pod with all this slimy goo on me.”

“That I saw....”

“You SAW it?”

“Well, when you were fixing my arm – and thawing me out.”

“You were awake then?”

She nodded her head.

“All at once I don't think it was an accident that I wound up under the only cover around and you wound up out in the cold. You pushed me under the cover, didn't you?”

“Maybe....”

“With an arm broken because I couldn't stop our fall in time...”

“No, with an arm broken because you stopped our fall about four feet in the air – then passed out from doing it. And because I was too surprised to get my arm out from under you when you fell. That's twice you did that, isn't it? The doctor said my other broken arm would continue to ache under my cast – but it stopped – about the time I had you write your name on it.”

Max shrugged his shoulders. “At least you didn't pick my brains that time.”

“Well, you hadn't given me anything to be curious about then. You gotta admit that stopping someone in mid-air when they fall out of an airplane does sort of make one suspicious that something unusual is going on...”

Max nodded, as if conceding the point.

“Well, starting at the beginning I awoke in that place – Isabel was there on the floor – probably got 'born' or whatever you want to call it about twenty minutes before I did – at least that's her guess. Michael came squirting out ten or fifteen minutes later.”

“Michael....Guerin?”

Max nodded. “Yeah – only he was even more scared than Izzy and I were. He saw mom and dad coming and he ran off and hid. I probably would have too, but Izzy was holding my hand. I think she was too terrified to move at first – I know I was. They picked us up and turned us over to Child Welfare but then mom came back the next day asking to foster us until an adoption could be approved. Michael – well Michael got found in the next county three days later and went to an orphanage – then got fostered out a number of times where he really didn't do that well. He didn't have our mom to teach him so it took him a lot longer even to speak and understand – I guess he's still kind of catching up.”

“I saw four pods...”

“So did we – Izzy said the one was already empty when she was born but no one was around – just the jelly-goo that served as amniotic fluid. The strange thing was – well, when we were borrn the door to the chamber was already open..”

“You think the other one just left?”

“It was more complicated than that. There are two areas on the stone – one inside and one outside the podchamber – where you can touch the stone and the door will open. It took us a couple years to find that out once we found the area where the podchamber is again after we were older. The thing is, the door only stays open about two hours – then it closes automatically. If the door hadn't been open when we were born we'd probably still be in there – dead. No way could we have reached that high on the wall when we were that small.”

“So you think – if the other person was that same size, that someone must have opened the door for them?”

“That's all we can figure. Somebody came – when one of us hatched they just took that one – then they walked off and left three of us, I guess not caring if we live or die.”

“You don't seriously think it was one of those 'shapeshifters' that Kyle's grandfather used to rant about, do you?”

“I don't know. All I know is that whoever opened the door didn't wait around for the three of us. He, she, or it, took whoever hatched first and left. There's no real evidence anyone has ever been back there except for Michael, Izzy, and me.”

“So what happened then?”

“Well, Izzy and I discovered that not only were we different in where we came from, we had powers other people didn't. Telekinesis – that's how I made the torus work – you saw how I healed your arm.”

“I guess I understand your parents reluctance to have people know about the two of you. You'd have had paparazzi around all the time, have no chance at any sort of normal life...,” She looked up to see the deer-in-the-headlights look again. “They do know, don't they Max?” she asked. The deer eyes only got wider. “Max, why didn't you tell your parents?”

“Well, by that time Izzy – well both of us really – we were really attached to them. We were afraid that what we were would scare them away. It was really Izzy's idea,” Max said defensively.

“Scare them away, Max? Because you could move stuff with your mind? Because you could heal people who were hurt? Why would that scare them? I mean it's not like you shoot death rays out of your hands or anything..” The deer-in- the headlights look was back in spades.... “You have GOT to be kidding me...”

“It's not really a death ray – Michael calls it a powerblast. If I wasn't still fatigued from everything that went on yesterday and this morning, I could show you.”

“Is there anything ELSE you haven't told me about what you can do?”

“Well, all of us can manipulate molecules, it's all sort of intuitive to us – that's why I was afraid you were going to blow yourself up with pressure and catalysts – I guess I wasn't bright enough to figure out about using enzymes until after you already were successful – sorry.”

“Yeah, well me too. I almost did blow myself up – I certainly made a mess of a pressure cooker. I should have listened to you. I'm sorry I didn't...”

“Uh, since I'm not without fault myself - for not trusting you like I should have - far be it from me to toss the first stone – or even telekinese it for that matter,”

Liz giggled.

“No,” said Max, “I really mean it. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I didn't think that you would be my friend if you knew the truth. In fact, I didn't think you'd do anything but run in fear. I should have known better. I should have trusted you.”

“Well, you find us breakfast and I'll call it even.”

“Your wish, mademoiselle, is my command. As a matter of fact I see it right over there. We will have Nopalitos Maxwell, with fruit for dessert.”
.

Fifteen minutes later they were sitting a few feet apart - facing each other.

There were small islands of sand and dust that centuries of sandstorms had brought in to the malpais. In these areas some plants had flourished - to the extent that any plants ever flourished in the Tularosa basin. Some were still moist where the rain from adjacent lava had drained in to them. Others - like this one - were better protected, and someone could sit on the sandy ground without getting wet.

Max had spotted the prickly pear cactus about fifteen feet away, and quickly gone to it. Nopalitos were a staple of cooking in parts of the Southwest - but Liz had never seen them harvested or prepared quite like this.

Max had run his hand over the cactus leaves and sort of singed off the needles while they were still on the plant - then busted off the leaves and placed them on the lava. He'd put his hand above them and it had heated them sort of like a convection oven, the lava under neath itself briefly glowing from the heat. He'd used one smaller cactus leaf like a spatula, flipping the others over after several minutes. Liz watched the whole process in fascination until he finally scooped up one of the leaves and dropped it in to her hands.

It was still pretty warm and she passed it from one hand to another for several seconds until it had cooled enough for her to take a bite. It tasted something like green beans – certainly no delicacy, but nonetheless appreciated by a stomach that hadn't had a really good meal in over forty-eight hours.

“Not bad, Max, not bad at all...”

His mouth flashed a quick smile. "If I had an onion and a jalapeno pepper – or even a little garlic or oregano – I could make you some reasonably superb nopalitos. Since we don't have that – well, these will just have to do for breakfast – or probably lunch by now.”

“Brunch,” agreed Liz, biting off another mouthful and chewing and swallowing. “You never told me you were a chef. Yet another secret ability that you've kept from me. Do Isabel and Michael do this too?”

Again the smile flashed briefly. “Anything but. Michael's idea of a seven course meal is a six-pack of Snapple and a cheese burger. Izzy – well, the reason I know how to do nopalitos is because of Izzy.”

“So she is a cook?”

“Definitely not. Don't get me wrong, I love the Ice Princess dearly – but she couldn't boil an egg.”

“She can't be that bad...”

“Yes she can. The girl can't boil water without scorching it. A couple of years ago mom decided it was time to teach Izzy how to cook. She had her cook every dinner for two weeks, and breakfast and lunch on the weekends. That's when I learned how to do nopalitos. I lived on them for the whole two weeks .”

“Max – I think you are fibbing....”

“Exaggerating maybe, but a lot closer to the truth than what you probably believe. Dad lost six pounds. I think he sneaked all the food off his plate and gave it to the neighbor's dog.”

“He did not...”

“He certainly did. I ought to know – I had to heal the dog twice myself.”

“Max – that's terrible.”

“I know it was – I'm pretty sure mom does too. She's never made the mistake of asking Izzy to cook again.”

“I mean it's terrible the way you talk about Isabel... I bet you ARE fibbing.”

The flash of his smile came again as he handed her another baked cactus leaf. “Well maybe a little bit - but I'll be interested in seeing what you have to say the first time you taste her cooking. She should have been adopted by the Borgia's rather than the Evanses. She'd have been a natural...”

“Maxwell Evans, you should be ashamed of yourself...,” said Liz.

Then she thought while she chewed. She had never seen Max like this. It seemed like for the first time since she'd known him he was truly at ease. 'It must have been terribly hard on him. He and Isabel and Michael were abandoned before they were even born – like some extra spare part someone didn't need. No wonder he had self-esteem sort of problems. Abandoned and different and uncertain.... and I wouldn't have done any better if that had happened to me – I'd have done worse.... But right now – maybe for the first time ever – I'm seeing a new Max. This Max isn't shy or socially inept – in fact he's …. charming.

“I wouldn't worry too much about Izzy, Liz. Trust me, she can hold her own. But now, the piece de resistance, Prickly Pear a la Maxwell.”

Liz was familiar with prickly pear fruit – most kids in the Southwest were. The flavor was great – the problem was they were like eating pomegranates only worse. Each one was filled with hundreds of little seeds and these were partly cellulose. Although the seeds themselves were edible, it was sort of like eating sand. That ended to discourage people from eating them, although straining the seeds out made an excellent jelly or jam..

“These look sort of like regular old prickly pears, Max. What makes them special?”

“Well, they first get subjected to a little molecular manipulation. The first is easy – I just interfere with the adhesion of the skins with the underlying fruit - that just makes it easier to peel them.”

Liz wathced as Max quickly peeled all of the purple fruit.

“The hard part is next – watch this...,” Max said as he passed his hand – and a golden glow – over the peeled fruit. “What that did was to convert the cellulose in the seeds into starch. Both cellulose and starch are made of sugars linked together – it's just that we can't digest the cellulose because we don't have the right enzymes..”

“Like termites,” Liz said nodding.

“That's right. But the difference between starch and cellulose is that the linkage of one is sort of the mirror image of the other. Because all I do is kind of flip that linkage it doesn't take much energy – but the cellulose granules become a sort of tapioca and instead of being gritty, it's almost like a prickly pear flavored bubble tea. Go ahead, Liz..... try one.”

Liz bit down and purple juice squirted into her mouth while some dribbled down her chin. It tasted wonderful. “This is great, Max.”

“It'd be a little better with tabasco,' said Max,”... but it's pretty good.”

“Tabasco? I think that's probably an acquired taste I haven't yet acquired, Max.”

“Well, once we get out of here and back home you'll have to give it a try.”

“What direction IS home, Max?”

Max turned to the sun and then turned ninety degrees to his left and pointed. “East...”

“Why East?”

“Because we don't have two mountain ranges on our side of the Sacramentos – this has to be the Tularosa basin and that means Roswell is to the East. If we go any other way we might hit one of the bombing ranges. I think if one of us stepped on a bomb, that might do damage that even I wouldn't be able to fix …. so my vote is East. At aminimum we'll get up into the Sacramentos. There are roads there that would lead us to civilization.”

“When we do get back home, any idea how we explain being alive to everyone?”

“Not yet, but I'm working on it. Any ideas you might have on the subject would be appreciated though...”

“This looks like awfully rough terrain to travel over...”

“I don't think it's going to be quick. We can start as soon as we are done eating.”

Liz nodded. She worried about her parents and what they were thinking but that couldn't be helped. First they had to tackle the desert before they could even phone them. The prickly pears really had been great … of course if the trip lasted a couple of days, she might get really tired of them.

Liz looked at Max. He seemed more comfortable right now – alone with her in the desert – than he'd ever seemed in all the time she knew him. She'd like to just give him a big hug – but she held back. First she was going to just be his friend – maybe once they got back home she could start to hint about more – but she was decided – she was never going to push him about boy-girl stuff again. She almost lost him by being impatient and it wasn't going to happen again.
'If all he wants is to just be friends,' she thought to herself,'...then we'll just be friends, and I'll still count myself lucky...'

Of course, her midbrain wasn't nearly as satisfied with that thought as her cerebrum was.