Not even time passed. I felt myself go away, and then I felt myself come back, but there must have been at least a couple minutes in between because when I returned to consciousness Captain Hoxworth was there beside me. He had evidently heard me scream, or noticed the power surge before the circuit breaker kicked out, and had come down to Tilbey’s quarters to see what was wrong.
My finger was no longer inside the machine. My flinch had apparently moved me just enough, or my unenhanced self had moved while I was unconscious, but in either case I was free of pain again. I was also nearly insubstantial again.
So was Tilbey. He pantomimed turning up the coupling constant knob, and Captain Hoxworth finally obliged him. The short had evidendy damaged it; we flickered in and out while he turned the knob, but we eventually settled down to a solid enough state to permit speech.
Hoxworth didn’t mess around— not with a deceleration bum window rapidly closing on him. “Let’s fix your little problem, gentlemen,” he said, “and put this ship in orbit.”
“We’re ready now,” Tilbey said sheepishly. “I think.”
“You think.”
“Well, just to be safe…” Tilbey reached for the control knob, but I batted his hand aside and adjusted it upward myself. I held myself in place by a wall grip while I stamped on the deck with my feet. They didn’t go through.
“Looks OK,” I said to Hoxworth.
“Good. Now kindly don’t do anything else until we can get you and this damned contraption off my ship.” He kicked off through the doorway and disappeared up the central access shaft.
“Jeez,” Tilbey said petulantly, “you’d think he’d be a little more excited about having humanity’s first stardrive on board his ship.”
I pulled myself down to Tilbey’s bunk in preparation for boost. “Maybe if it worked better he would be,” I said.
“For crying out loud, it’s a prototype!” said Tilbey as he pulled himself down beside me. It was a one-man bunk, and I wasn’t too thrilled to be sharing it with Tilbey, but you get used to close proximity on a spaceship. Besides, it would only be for a few minutes. As he wiggled in between me and the wall, Tilbey said, “There’s all sorts of bugs to work out, but once we get some funding we’ll fix’em in no time.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Having to commit suicide to use it is a pretty big bug.”
He snorted. “To you, maybe. There are millions of would-be astronauts who would kill for the chance to explore another star system.”
“Yeah, but would they kill themselves?”
He was still trying to think of a reply when the thrust hit. The bunk slapped up against us, and we sank down into it, but we did it the way people normally do. It was a long burn, but when it was over we were in Earth orbit. Back to the cradle of humanity, who would, we hoped, help us work out the bugs in Tilbey’s invention.
We should have known better. Ghosts don’t exist. Science is done in universities or multinational corporations. And advances in space flight technology happen at UNASA, the United Nation’s umbrella organization for off-Earth matters. It took the appropriations committee less than five minutes of debate to dismiss our request for funding on the grounds that our project showed “little chance of success or of having significant practical applications in the unlikely event of success.”
We got the word the day before Christmas. We were still on the Intrepid, holding down the fort while the captain and the rest of the crew went home for the holiday. We were nearly insubstantial again to conserve power, especially now that the ship was docked to the UN Orbital Freeport and Hoxworth had to pay extra for utilities. Besides, we had already done practically all the modifications we could afford to do to the engine. Those modifications included a holographic control panel that we could manipulate even in our most tenuous state, but we needed far more improvements than that if we were ever going to use it for its intended purpose.
“Hah, Merry Christmas,” Tilbey said disgustedly when he finished reading UNASA’s rejection letter. “Cheap bastards.” He squinted at the signature at the bottom of the screen. “F. Davis Rigby III,” he read aloud. “Committee Chairman.”
The letter was dated just a few hours ago, and sent from the UN council offices right there on the station. I said, “I’m surprised they’re working on Christmas Eve.”
“Hah,” Tilbey snorted. “They probably get a real charge out of dropping coal into as many stockings as they can today. Keep the rabble in their place, spread a little bah humbug.” He stuck his finger through the holographic control to switch off the screen. “They didn’t even ask for a demonstration.”
He pushed himself away from the reader—a process more akin to swimming than to the usual free fall tap-and-bounce—-and headed toward the wall that separated his quarters from the entertainment commons, but I stopped him before he could push on through.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “So what if they didn’t ask? Why don’t we give them a demonstration anyway?”
“What for?” he asked.
“For spite, if nothing else,” I said. “But maybe we can prove to them that we have something real here.” I swished my hand through the wall just above the light switch, and the power flickered momentarily as I shorted out the wiring.
“We’ll have to do better than that,” Tilbey said, but I could already see wheels turning as he thought it over. “Hah!” he said at last. “The ghost of spaceflight future! Sure, let’s blow their tiny little minds.”
We set the coupling constant at mid-range, figuring that would give us enough substance to manipulate objects if they weren’t too massive, but we could still push through walls if we got a run at them. I left the control computer hooked to our e-mail line just in case we needed to change the settings, but I didn’t want to count on that working. First we would have to find a computer wherever we were, and then we would have to type in our instructions without shorting it out.
We found the council chamber easy enough—it was listed on the station map—but by the time we got there nobody but a janitor was left. He was an older guy, white-haired and thin as a stick, and on Earth he would probably have been too weak to even stand, but here in zero-g he was still able to hold down a job. So Tilbey’s invention was impractical, was it? I thought. So was the space station when it was first proposed, but here was one old duffer who no doubt felt different now.
The meeting room had a great view: a whole wall of Plexiglas that looked straight out into space. The nightside of Earth filled about half the view, cities sparkling bright as stars.
Tilbey paid it no attention. “Come on,” he said to me when he saw that the UN appropriations committee was gone, “we’ve got to find this Rigby guy.” And he pushed past me into the council chamber, shouting, “Hey buddy!”
“No, wait!” I said, but it was too late. The janitor heard Tilbey’s thin, reedy voice, turned his head, and his eyes nearly bugged out of his head when he saw two smoky apparitions drifting toward him. At least we’d had the good sense to come in through the open door.
It didn’t matter. The janitor gasped for breath, then turned nearly as pale as we were. He looked down toward his chest, frowned, clutched at his breastbone as if he was trying to tear it loose, then he looked back at us with an expression of total bewilderment, said, “Uh oh,” and went limp.
“Heart attack!” I shouted. “Damn it, Tilbey, you’ve scared him to death!” I rushed toward the janitor, who, attached to the floor by his Velcro shoes, swayed gently like a piece of seaweed in the ocean. I grabbed him by his shoulders and began CPR, using my knees to compress his chest the way they train you to do in free-fall, but it was like trying to compress a cloud. My knees just sank in, and my hands slipped through his shoulders.