Gwen shined a flashlight around the cabin, and when the beam swept across me I lit up bright as day. “Great!” she said. “All we have to do is trigger the emergency beacon at the same moment we kill the power to Tilbey’s gadget, and we’ve got us a ghost detector.”
Her logic seemed a bit off to me, but it took me a moment to pin down why. I waited for her to turn on the lights again so I could see to type, then I wrote, If you switch him off whenn you flash the lights, there won’tt be anything there to detecct. fust flash the liggts and leave us be.
“Oh,” she said. “Right. Sorry.”
Sorry, I thought. We’re talking oblivion here, and she says sorry. But I didn’t type anything.
So Gwen switched on the beacon and let it blink for a few seconds. It’s bright enough to call attention to itself over a million kilometers away; it didn’t take long for the debris scanner to start finding reflections. Most of them were genuine space junk, all on widely different trajectories, but one reflection was moving along our own path just thirty thousand kilometers behind us and closing at a few hundred kilometers per hour. It would take days to catch up at that speed, but it was hard to believe that something could be following us by sheer coincidence.
Why don’t you ggo see if ifs him? I typed.
“What about you?” Hoxworth asked. “You’ll fall out of the ship if we use the engine.”
You can come back for me, cann’t you? I typed. In the meantime, I’ll try to match Tikby’s velocity.
“How?” he asked, clearly skeptical.
Swim, I typed.
I pushed myself out of the ship first, so I wouldn’t fall screaming through it when they lit the drive. I didn’t like the idea of watching the decks rush toward me, nor did I want to short anything else out on the way through, and I didn’t want the flame blasting through me as I fell out the bottom, either. Tilbey might have stared it down without fear, but I take a more cautious approach to things. I didn’t know what was sustaining my consciousness beyond death, but I didn’t want to test the limits of its endurance.
As I watched the ship dwindle in the distance, I started swimming the way we’d originally been headed. That was away from Tilbey, but it was the same direction he was moving and he was going faster than me, so that was the way I needed to go if I wanted to rendezvous with him. I tried to calculate my velocity change while I pushed myself along against the ether, or the magnetic fields of the Solar System, or whatever it was I was interacting with. At a ballpark estimate of a centimeter per second acceleration for every stroke, call it one stroke per second, that gave me a meter per second of velocity change every minute and a half. Some stardrive, I thought. What were we supposed to do, swim all the way to Alpha Centauri? Tilbey obviously needed to refine his invention a bit before he applied for a patent.
All the same, a centimeter per second squared does add up. If I could keep at it for just a couple of hours—and it seemed like I might be able to, since I didn’t feel tired yet—I could match velocity with Tilbey. Of course I’d still be about twenty-five thousand kilometers ahead of him, so I decided maybe I should slack off a bit and watch the stars for a while, let him catch up, and then match velocities.
It was pleasant drifting there in deep space, free of all the aches and pains and hormonal baggage that comes with bodies. Some part of me knew that I should be terrified, that I should be struggling frantically to resuscitate my body and shoehorn my center of awareness back into it, but I just couldn’t work up any urgency. Now that I’d survived it, death didn’t hold near the terror it had before. At least not the kind of death I’d experienced. I’d had a bad moment when Gwen had shut down Tilbey’s gadget and me with it, but apparently nonexistence was the big fear, not what form I existed in.
That led me to another comforting thought: for Tilby’s machine to work, there had to be something for it to act upon. Some part of me had survived after death, some natural part that the machine had enhanced to create a ghost. And it had survived a momentary power outage as well. I wasn’t religious, and my lack of any experience at all while in the unenhanced state made me disinclined to become religious now, but at the same time it was a comfort to know that some essential part of me persisted on its own.
The stars were bright hard points all around me. Without even a spacesuit visor between me and them, they felt almost close enough to touch. It came to me that Tilbey might not want to be rescued. This wasn’t the hell I’d imagined it to be. In fact, it was pretty close to the peak experience for someone who had always wanted to spend the rest of his life in space, which had been my ambition since the moment I realized it was possible. I didn’t know if Tilbey felt the same way as I did about it, but I wouldn’t have been terribly upset if the ship didn’t come back.
As long as they left the gadget running. And so long as they didn’t take it out of range, however far that might be. After all, I had no assurance that whatever natural part of me the stardrive acted upon would last forever without its help.
Suddenly I started getting nervous. Maybe that wasn’t Tilbey back there after all. Maybe he had faded out once and for all when we’d stopped on Mars and he’d looped on past at a couple thousand kilometers per hour. Maybe I was about to do the same.
I started flapping madly back the way I’d come. So of course I was doing a couple hundred klicks per hour toward the ship by the time they returned. They probably got some amusing pictures of me in the wide-field cameras when they fired the emergency strobes, pictures of me flailing madly at nothing at all, and for no reason. For of course the signal they’d gone to investigate had been Tilbey after all, and they’d come back to let me know they’d found him.
We had an amusing time matching velocities. Amusing to everybody but us, at least. Tilbey and I had to swim like crazy for hours before we came together, and even then we had a hell of a time with the final approach. Fortunately we didn’t grow tired, but just when it looked like we might both make it inside the ship at once Tilbey accidentally swept his arm through one of the attitude jets, which promptly fired and sent the ship into a spiral, tossing us both free like water drops off a wet dog’s back. When we tried it again he blew the main power grid to the starboard circuits, and we both blinked out for a moment until the breakers reset themselves. Whatever physical changes he had undergone, Tilbey hadn’t lost his klutziness.
We finally convened in his quarters. It was a good thing we were in free fall; the gadget and my corpse took most of the floorspace. Gwen and Peter and Captain Hoxworth eyed both with equal discomfort, and Gwen apologized for not thinking to put the body in the freezer, but I told her not to feel bad. It was my body, and I hadn’t thought of it either. We’d all been too busy to worry about that sort of thing. Now, however, it raised a good question for Tilbey.
So is there any way to put us back? I asked. We were using his notepad, whose holographic keypad responded better to our spectral touch. Maybe because it was no more substantial than we were.
I don’t think so, Tilbey typed. This wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place. The stardrive was only supposed to stabilize an object’s form independent of its mass, not separate us from our bodies. I don’t think it would have latched onto us at all if I hadn’t left it running with no target.