Apparently so did the UN cops. We were escorted to the judge’s chambers within an hour, where we learned the situation. It turned out Liam’s nephew had caught wind of Liam’s plans to join our crew, and he’d suddenly had a change of heart. He didn’t want dear old uncle to leave him all alone, even if he did get Liam’s zero-g condo, so he’d filed papers to prohibit euthanasia and had filed charges against us for exerting undue influence over an invalid.
Nothing makes a guy want to do something more than being told he can’t do it. When we had left him three days ago, Liam had been waffling worse than a newly elected president, but now he was all hot to jump out an airlock in his skivvies—provided Tilbey’s mass eliminator was ready to catch him when he did it.
And therein lay the problem. Despite the UN grant that had let us build the starship and despite Tilbey’s and my persistence for nearly a year as “artificially augmented post-vivo standing waves,” our procedure was still experimental as hell and UNMed wouldn’t OK it for Liam. Nor was he sick enough to qualify for the Kevorkian assisted suicide exemption, so he couldn’t use that route, either. And if he intentionally impaired his own health so he could qualify, we would be liable for undue influence over the elderly.
Never mind that Liam was still perfectly capable of deciding his own fate, or that his nephew was the one forcing his hand. The law had been set up to protect people’s lives, not help end them, and that’s what it was going to do in this case as well.
After the charges were read we had a chance to talk with Liam in one of the private meeting rooms off to the side of the courtroom. His lawyer had to be present, of course, and so did our court-appointed council, but that didn’t slow him down any. As soon as we sat down—Tilbey and I somewhat delicately in our wispy state—Liam woke us right up with an astute observation.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of convenient timing that this all happened right after you proved the technology works?” he asked us. He looked over at his lawyer, an East Indian woman named Indira who seemed kind of uncomfortable being in the same room with two ghosts, and said, “Find out who got to my nephew. That greedy bastard has been waiting for me to kick off for twenty years; I guarantee you he doesn’t give a damn about me now. He wants a piece of a bigger pie.”
“Oh, that much is obvious,” Indira said. “There are at least five different factions, starting with the UN peacekeeping force, who would love to get their hands on this technology. Since the UN are the ones who actually took possession after your nephew’s legal action, I’d suspect them first.”
“So how do we fight them?” I asked.
Our lawyer, a young kid fresh out of college by the looks of him, regarded me skeptically. “They’re the UN,” he said. “They do have to obey the laws, but unfortunately very little law applies to you, since you’re legally dead.”
Liam laughed. “Well, they can’t desecrate your grave, then. Can we call the Spook your tomb or something and at least keep them out of there until we get my nephew off my back?”
“It’s worth a try,” our lawyer admitted.
“What else can we do?” I asked. I didn’t like the idea of relying on legal maneuvering to get us out of this fix.
Neither did Liam. “How about if I challenge someone to a duel and lose?” he asked.
Indira laughed. “You wouldn’t even have to lose. Dueling is a capital crime, so the court would be compelled to execute you if you won. Of course the automatic appeals process would take at least five years to work through before they actually carried out the sentence, so you’d be better served to let your opponent win.”
“Fine. So who wants to fight a duel?” Liam asked.
Nobody spoke up.
“Chickens,” he said.
I shrugged. “I’d volunteer, but I’m already being held for conspiracy.”
“Maybe you could choke on a chicken bone,” Tilbey suggested.
Indira said, “The way I understand it, Liam has to be in close proximity to the, um, ghost generating device when he dies, or it may not lock onto his, um, his essential pattern of existence, isn’t that correct?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Tilbey said. “We’ve been parking the Spook two miles from Freeport so it won’t capture anyone who dies here, and it seems to have worked so far. On the other hand, I was nearly fifty feet away from the prototype when I was killed and it still picked me up, so you probably don’t have to be right on top of it the way Danbury was.”
“But what you’re saying is you really don’t know the range of this device of yours,” our lawyer said.
“Not really,” Tilbey said. “We know it can keep us stable for thousands of miles once we’ve been captured, but we haven’t exactly had a lot of opportunity to test the acquisition phase.”
Indira nodded. “So to be safe, my client would have to choke on his chicken bone in close proximity to your ship. I think we would have a hard time convincing anyone that it was an accident.”
Tilbey said, “How about if we crashed the ship into the station while he’s having lunch? The surprise scares him into swallowing wrong, and—”
“Stop,” our lawyer said. “I know you’re just being facetious, but these statements could be used against you to prove your intent to conspire against Liam’s life.”
“Well damn it, we’ve got to—” Tilbey began, but he stopped when our bodies suddenly grew more distinct.
“Somebody’s tinkering with the ship,” I said. I stood up and backed away from my chair so I wouldn’t be inside it if they turned the coupling constant all the way up. I’d accidentally materialized inside one of the engine parts once, and it had been painful as hell.
Or they could turn it the other way. I shivered at the thought. “We’ve got to get them out of there before they shut us off,” I said, heading for the door.
“Where are you going?” our court-appointed lawyer asked. “You can’t return to your ship until the injunction is lifted.”
“If I don’t get back there pretty soon,” I told him, “whoever’s fooling with the mass eliminator could flip the wrong switch and—”
“I give up,” Liam suddenly said. “My nephew wins. I won’t kill myself.”
“Huh?” I asked.
Liam nodded to the lawyers. “I say so in front of witnesses, and I’ll do it again in front of the judge if necessary. I won’t kill myself. My mind is made up, so there was no undue influence on Tilbey’s or Danbury’s part, which means there’s no case against them, which means no one but them has any right to be aboard the Spook. So call the judge in here and let’s get this cleared up once and for all.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “Don’t you want to go to Alpha Centauri with us?”
He nodded his head. “Of course I do. But if I’ve learned one thing in ninety years, it’s how to be patient. So I’ll just stay here and keep my idiot nephew from living in my condo for another twenty years, and I’ll go with you on your next trip.”
It wasn’t that simple, of course. Convincing the judge to drop the charges against us took most of the afternoon, and only when I “accidentally” slipped through his records computer and blamed the resulting explosion on the people tinkering with our interface did he finally expedite the paperwork and order the UN investigative team off our ship.
Liam met us in the airlock on our way out. We had to go out the normal door since the investigators had left our coupling constant turned way up and we couldn’t slide through walls anymore.