“You mean this is all a side-effect?” asked Peter. Tilbey gave a ghostly shrug, then typed, Well, yeah. It’s still experimental, after all. He cocked his head a moment, thinking, then typed, Could someone adjust the coupling constant a bit higher? That might help us interface better.
Captain Hoxworth looked at the rat’s nest of wires and lights. “Coupling constant?” he asked.
Tilbey pointed at an unlabeled knob and pantomimed twisting it clockwise. Hoxworth gingerly gave it an eighth turn or so, and I immediately noticed a difference. The sound level grew louder, for one. I reached out to the wall and gave it a soft push, and though my hand still went through it, I felt a lot more resistance than before. I floated across the room toward the other wall, and actually stopped when my feet reached it.
“Yeah, that works,” I said. “Crank it up some more.” Captain Hoxworth obligingly turned up the constant another eighth-turn, and I realized that he’d heard me speak.
I noticed Gwen blushing, and I realized that Tilbey and I had taken on much more well-defined form now, too. And no, clothing apparently didn’t persist after death.
But Tilbey took my mind off modesty when he said, “Be careful. It takes a lot more power the higher you go.”
“Wonderful,” Hoxworth said. “We’re already over budget.” I shivered at the thought that economic considerations might force him to turn me down again. Or that a circuit failure might wipe me out completely. “We can’t go on like this indefinitely,” I said. “There’s got to be a way to give us some kind of permanent form.”
Tilbey shrugged. “Permanent is no problem. We’re essentially a set of standing waves. Very stable as long as the power holds out. I designed all this for an interstellar voyage, after all.”
Peter snorted. “On what ship? Nobody’s built anything that’ll cross interstellar space in less than a century. Even the one-way probes take forever.”
Tilbey shook his snowy white head. “No, no, that’s what this is supposed to replace. The only actual mass we need to send is the generator, and once we miniaturize the electronics we can probably get it down to less than a kilogram. That much we can boost up close to light-speed, so it would only take a few years for the trip. Less, subjectively, since we’d have relativity working for us. And once we get where we’re going we can zoom around all through the planetary system without using any reaction mass at all.”
I remembered how I’d enjoyed drifting in space, the stars hard points of light all around me. Once we adjusted our interface so we could get around a little easier, we probably could swim from planet to planet, and move around on the surface with relative ease as well, exploring every nook and cranny without fear of danger. There wouldn’t be much that could hurt us, because we would already be dead.
I don’t think I’d have gone for it if fate hadn’t already forced my hand, but considering my alternatives, it actually sounded pretty good.
“So let’s get busy and do it,” I said. “Where do we start?”
Tilbey leaned over the device. “Well, I guess we need to calibrate the intensity settings, and find out what our distance limits are, and—yow!” He had reached in to adjust another knob, but of course he’d shorted it out instead. Sparks flew, and I felt myself grow massive as an asteroid for just a second before Tilbey jerked free and things settled down again. Some of the debris in the room had begun to drift toward us, but the effect was too short-lived for any of it to pick up any real speed. So I plucked an empty coffee bulb out of the air and helped it along toward Tilbey’s head.
“Hey,” he said, batting it aside. “You don’t have to get mad. It was an accident.”
Yeah, right. A Tilbey accident. The thought of working with him for months to come, and exploring with him for years afterward, momentarily made me shudder. But I forced myself to be calm, and even managed a reasonably sincere laugh. It was either that or murder him on the spot, but considering what had happened the last time he had died, I figured I had best leave well enough alone.
Editor’s Note: this story is a sequel to “Unfinished Business,” in our October 1996 issue.