"Now? Well, yeah, sure. Excuse me. I'll undress into my suit," Mike told him.
And since everyone in the room knew he was Spirit Lad, he merely turned around to unzip his jeans and was out of them, his shirt and shoes, in seconds, his suit shining with the bright lights as it emerged from underneath the clothes.
"Well, I'm ready to go!" Mike announced. He unfastened his collar and flipped the protective covering over his head and face. He went to the shield and lifted it easily by the center handles.
"Take it easy, son!" Cooper told him.
"Please be careful, Mike!" Jeanie cautioned, and gave him a good luck kiss before he floated up and out of the opening in the dome, soaring casually passed the huge telescope.
Minutes later Mike was passing through the cloud covering again, holding the shield steady before him. As he reached the point where the sun had begun to bother him while testing the suit, he passed by it easily, feeling as strong as ever.
"Yahoo!" he yelled, and felt absolutely no discomforts while leaving the Earth's atmosphere. "It works! It works!" he cried out as he flew higher among the stars. It was a wonderful feeling, being easier to maneuver about. After staying for about five minutes in space, Mike couldn't wait to report his project a success. Descending was rapid, and playfully Mike stuck out his tongue at the sun as he passed it again on the way down.
"Ha, ha! I've found the secret! I've conquered you!" he shouted.
Just as Mike was beginning to enter the air space where he could be seen faintly from the ground, something zoomed passed him at a tremendous rate of speed.
"Huh?" he gasped, and paused in mid-air, but as he looked around to get a better view of the thing, it sped out of sight, soaring up into a cloud bank. "Oh, well, if it was anything important, I'm sure I'll see it again, sometime," Mike said, aloud, then headed for the observatory.
When he landed inside, his friends were hysterical with joy as he told them, "It worked! It worked! I went up quite high into space and hung around for awhile before I couldn't wait to tell you IT WORKED!"
Dr. Cooper was speechless, then he said, "Now comes the hard part of our attempted rescue of the world."
"What's that?" Mike asked.
"You will have to practice disarming the MLCs from down here on Earth. I've got the equipment handy to make a mock-up of a full sized MLC, and I'll patch it together in one of the lower level labs so you can learn the procedures with no one bothering you. And I'll start on that today. It won't take me long to complete. For now, why don't you take the rest of the day off to rest? We've got just a few odds and ends to catch up on, here. We'll need you tomorrow, though, son. How does that sound to you?"