The Spectral Stardrive
by Jerry Oltion
Illustration by Alan M. Clark
Tilbey was the first guy I ever knew who could stare a firing rocket engine in the nozzle and survive to tell the tale. Of course he was dead at the time, so I don’t know if that counts, but it sure impressed me.
Not that he was such a macho guy or anything. Alive or otherwise, he was mostly just a klutz. That’s how he wound up dead in the first place. He’d been working on the main engine’s ignition system, but he hadn’t shut down the fuel feed first so he’d gone up in a puff of smoke the moment he switched on the injectors. There wasn’t a thing we could do for him after that, so the rest of the crew—Peter, Gwen, Captain Hoxworth, and myself—all mourned his loss and headed on to Mars without him.
That’s what we thought, anyway. But a few days later, his ghost came back to haunt us. Turned out he had a good reason: he’d forgotten to close the access hatch in the engine compartment, and the sensors that normally would have told us so had been damaged in the blast that killed him. If he hadn’t warned us about it we’d all have gone up in an even bigger puff of smoke when we lit the engine for our deceleration bum into orbit.
Of course the ignitor had been damaged as well, which meant he’d had to light the engine, too. By hand.
So in the end he’d saved our lives, and we’d all assumed he had gone on to klutzy engineer heaven while we landed on Mars; but in the days afterward I began to wonder if that was really the case. See, he’d still left one thing unfinished: the blinking, buzzing, and totally incomprehensible project that took up a third of his quarters.
He hadn’t been back, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, ghosts slip through walls. That means they can’t hang on under thrust. Tilbey had had a hell of a time just maneuvering around the ship when it was in free fall; he had to pull himself along like a swimmer through water, only in air and with him mostly insubstantial it was much less efficient. And when the ship was under thrust he’d dropped through the floor like it wasn’t even there.
What kept bugging me was this: if he didn’t pass on to his just reward after saving our lives, then when we decelerated to land on Mars he must have kept moving in a more or less straight line toward the asteroid belt. I didn’t know him that well, since I was a new hire on the ship when he died, and I wasn’t sure I quite believed all that had happened in the last few days anyway, but even so the idea made me shiver. To be adrift in space like that, without even the comfort of death to end your loneliness…
It would be hell. And little as I knew him, I did know that Tilbey didn’t deserve eternal damnation.
So on the day we were supposed to leave for Earth again, I found myself in the control cabin, explaining to Captain Hoxworth why we should take the long way home.
“It’ll only add a week to the trip,” I pointed out to him as I outlined the course and the fuel requirements on the navigation computer.
He floated just overhead so he could see my figures. “And it’ll shoot our profit for the entire trip,” he said. “Profit that already went into repairs on the main engine, which means we’d be dipping into the emergency funds.”
“Isn’t rescuing a crewmember an emergency?” I asked. He ran a hand through his silvery hair, leaving it no worse off than before. He always looked like he’d just taken off his pressure suit. “Tilbey’s already dead,” he said, but he said it without conviction. He’d seen the apparition, too.
Gwen had been logging in our cargo manifest; she looked up from the comp and said, “Danny’s right. We owe it to him to go look.”
“Look where?” the captain asked. “We don’t have any idea how strongly he interacts with matter, or if gravity will affect his trajectory. He’s had nearly a week to drift. He could be anywhere in a volume of space a billion kilometers on a side.”
I had already thought of that. “On the other hand,” I said, “he already caught up with us once. We know he has some control over his position in space. I figure if we just get close, he’ll be able to do the rest.”
“If he even knows we’re there,” grumbled the captain. “And what do we do if we catch him? We can’t take him anywhere. The moment we fire the engine he’ll fall right through the deck again.”
He had a good point, and I hadn’t figured out an answer to it, but I figured maybe Tilbey would have some ideas. He was the engineering genius, after all, and he’d had plenty of time to think it over.
Hoxworth took his time as well, trying to find a way to weasel out of the obligation without giving himself a guilty conscience, but in the end he couldn’t do it. He sighed heavily and said, “You win, Mr. Danbury. But if we go broke paying for this little junket, it’s coming out of your paycheck first.”
I laughed nervously, not knowing whether or not he really meant it. And by the time I realized he was serious, it didn’t matter, because I was dead, too.
It was a stupid accident. I was in Tilbey’s quarters, looking at his project for the fourth or fifth time since he’d died, wondering what it was and how I could safely shut it off. I’d found no obvious on/off switch, only a few unlabeled knobs, some pilot lights, (three of which blinked irregularly), and dozens of wires leading from them to a cluster of gray metal boxes that presumably held the bulk of the electronics. Wide black tape held the whole works together and secured it to the work table, which was in turn festooned with tools and test equipment Velcroed to every surface.
The rest of Tilbey’s quarters were no better; candy wrappers and empty drink bulbs nearly blocked the ventilator intake, and clothing had snagged against practically every projection. I was gingerly picking through it all, looking for clues, when I finally found a notepad under his bunk. I dusted off the screen and turned it on, and found it full of notes and equations describing “vector coupling constants,” “massless driver persistence ratios,” and similar terms. It took a few pages before I realized that Tilbey was describing some kind of interstellar spaceship drive. An engine that would somehow remove the mass from an object so it could be accelerated to the stars.
If that was what this blinking, humming monstrosity before me was, then we had more to think about than just a ghostly crewmember. I pushed myself up off the bunk, notepad in hand, planning to take it to Captain Hoxworth, when the navcom made a sudden course change, probably to avoid a piece of space junk, and I fell right into the project. I learned in a hurry that the bare wires along the top, at least, weren’t sate to touch. It felt like they were carrying at least a thousand volts, for that brief moment when they felt like anything.
Fortunately it happened after we d lifted off Mars and done our maneuvering into the volume of space I’d calculated Tilbey should be in, or I’d have been left behind. As it was I stayed with the ship, though I knew from Tilbey’s experience how precarious that was.
Panic, I discovered, is mostly hormonal. As I looked at myself drifting there beside Tilbey’s gadget, obviously dead, my hair still smoking from the current, my first thought was, “Oh, hell, not me too.” Close afterward I thought, “Captain Hoxworth isn’t going to like this.”
I wondered if maybe I could undo it, slide back into my body and jump-start my heart again, but when I reached out to touch myself my hand went right through. My new self was as insubstantial as fog, and about as well defined. I couldn’t even tell if I was clothed. I was just a white, vaguely human-shaped patch of mist. If I extended a single finger, I could see it as a separate digit, but otherwise my hand looked like a blurry mitten.
Using my blurry appendages, I flapped and swam the way I’d seen Tilbey do and I eventually began to move toward my body. I contorted myself around so I was in roughly the same orientation, but it did no more good than simply touching had. I just passed through and out the other side, and came to rest halfway into the wall beyond. The lights flickered as I apparently shorted out the wiring inside the wall, but I shoved and flapped myself free before anything blew. In the process I discovered that the wall provided better traction than simple air did, but even so, pushing off from it worked nothing like it had before I’d become a ghost.