“Help me!” I yelled at Tilbey, and he went around to the other side and tried to help compress the guy ’s chest from behind, but it didn’t work any better with two of us than with one.
“The coupling constant,” I told him. “Find a computer and dial up our control panel, and give me a solid body.”
He moved toward the conference table in the middle of the room, where glassy rectangles set in its wooden surface had to be monitors, but a moment later he said, “No good. They’re password protected.”
“Then call a medical team! This guy needs help.”
But UN officials evidently carried their own phones, because there weren’t any in the room, nor in the corridor outside. There was an unmarked intercom to somewhere— probably a page call—but nobody answered when Tilbey stuck his finger through the button and screamed, “Help!”
That left just the two of us and one dying janitor. And we had to do something quick, because his heart had been stopped for a couple of minutes now.
I had just one trick left. Gingerly, queasily, I reached inside his chest. I was substantial enough now to feel my way around, past the breastbone, through the ribs that stuck out to the side, over to the right of the lung, its air sacs like plastic packing bubbles— to the heart. It felt like a squishy potato with tubes sticking out the top. If I thought of it in those terms, I wouldn’t freak out. Just wrap my fingers around the potato and squeeze.
I went right through it, of course. But at our stardrive’s current power setting there was just enough resistance to move the heart muscle a little. And the heart works partly through electrical impulses, which I was shorting out like crazy the whole time my hand was inside it.
I felt it give a little squirm on its own, and I pulled away. Not too fast, or I could do more harm than good. I felt for a pulse in the janitor’s neck, but found none, so went back inside his chest for another squeeze. His heart kicked again, and this time I felt it beat a couple more times on its own before it quit. Once more, and this time it took off. The janitor shuddered like a ship with a bad thruster, then gasped in a breath.
A few more breaths and he opened his eyes. And of course there I was, floating right there in front of him like the grim reaper himself, come to harvest his immortal soul.
This time he got out the scream that had eluded him the first time.
“Good, good,” I told him. “Oxygenate that blood. Now take a deep breath and let it out again.”
“Huh?” he asked. Apparently that wasn’t what Death was supposed to say.
“You fainted,” I told him. “Come on, breathe deep now.”
“But… you—”
“It’s a long story. If you breathe for me, I’ll bring you up to speed.”
“Who—”
“Breathe.” I had no idea how long this guy ’s ticker would keep going after the workout I’d given it. I turned to Tilbey. “Get some medical help here. I don’t care how you do it, just get someone up here now.”
He thought about it for a moment, then went back over to the conference table and waved his hands through the computer terminals, one after another. Sparks flew, and smoke curled around the remains. Then for good measure Tilbey did the same for the intercom. “There,” he said. “That ought to bring someone on the run, and they can call a doctor.”
Sure enough, within thirty seconds two security guards burst into the room. They bounced to a stop when they saw us, but a man who’s had a heart attack elicits a near-universal response, even when he’s flanked by two ghosts. Maybe especially then. One of the guards used his wrist phone to call for a med-team while the other covered us with his laser.
“All right, you two,” he said to us, doing an admirable job of keeping the quaver out of his voice. “Start talking. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
I let the janitor go and pushed slowly away, stopping myself against a chair back. “We’re the Solar System’s first interstellar astronauts,” I told him. “And we’re here to show the UN appropriations committee what we can do. But we wound up saving this guy’s life instead.” I conveniently neglected to mention why that had become necessary. The story would no doubt become clear soon enough.
“You don’t look much like astronauts to me,” the guard said.
“Watch this,” Tilbey told him. He pushed off the wall toward the window, took a couple of swimming strokes to build up more velocity, and plowed right through the Plexiglas. He had to shove himself on through, but he remembered to keep a hand inside the glass so he wouldn’t drift away. From outside the space station, in hard vacuum now, he grinned and waved at the guard. Then he pulled himself back inside and said, “Astronauts. We’re going to Alpha Centauri if we can get the funding to miniaturize our stardrive. Wanna come along?”
The guard, it turned out, was more of a homebody. So was F. Davis Rigby III, we discovered when we finally got an audience with him. But the janitor—an ex-marine named Liam who’d flown sub-orbital fighters in the Australian war—was anything but. When he heard what had scared him nearly to death, and what had ultimately brought him back to life, he was all set to join our team and take off into the cosmos.
And Liam, it turned out, was an old war buddy of the appropriations committee chairman. If he wanted to throw himself behind this crazy project, then Rigby had no problem throwing a couple billion dollars of UN money into the pot to see that it worked out for him. That’s politics.
“You, uh, you do realize that there’s only one way we know of for sure to get to be like us?” I asked Liam.
He nodded. “So? I’m ninety years old. I hurt all over. If I don’t go this way, I’ll probably stroke out next week anyway. Or choke to death on a chicken bone in the cafeteria. What have I got to lose?”
When he put it that way, it was easy to see his point.
So Tilbey got his Christmas present. Within hours we were installed in our own lab right there on board the space station, with practically unlimited access to test equipment, state-of-the-art components to modify the stardrive with, and electricity to spare.
And I got my present, too. Now that we had the money to pay for the power, I spent the whole day with the coupling constant cranked all the way up. I’ve had at least a gallon of eggnog, every mug of it laced with a different brand of rum, to see what each one tastes like and what their effect might be on a ghost.
All in the interest of science, of course.
Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “Unfinished Business” (October 1996) and “The Spectral Stardrive” (November 1996).