A ghost. There was no avoiding the truth. Nor could I ignore the obvious: both Tilbey and I had died suddenly on board the ship and come back to haunt it. Since I had heard of maybe a dozen ghosts in my whole life, and never seen any good evidence for any of them until Tilbey, it stood to reason that something on board this ship—almost certainly his project—was responsible. It might have been a prototype stardrive, but by the looks of things it made a pretty good ghost generator as well.
Like it or not, Captain Hoxworth needed to know about this. It took me twenty minutes of swimming to pull myself forward to the control room. Half that was spent getting up some speed, and the other half slowing down. I hung close to the walls for traction, but that had its dangers; I kept shorting out the wiring, and in one alarming moment I misjudged my direction and slipped right out through the hull. I felt genuine panic then, but after a few minutes of frantic flapping I learned that I could push against space almost as well as I could against air. Maybe it was magnetic fields I was reacting with, I didn’t know, but whatever it was that provided me with traction I was glad to have it.
It was also encouraging on another front: It meant Tilbey probably wasn’t as helpless out there as I’d feared. Then I did the math to figure out how much swimming it would take to change his velocity by even a thousand kilometers per hour—which is hardly anything to an interplanetary spaceship—and I nearly gave up. Because if I had miscalculated even a little bit on Tilbey’s trajectory, then one of us had a lot of swimming to do to catch up with the other.
Captain Hoxworth wasn’t in the control room when I finally drifted through the last bulkhead and frantically flapped my way to a halt. Peter was, but he was asleep. The book he’d been reading floated free, tumbling slowly end over end just a few inches from his nose, its backlit screen giving his skin an eerie blue tint. I resisted the urge to nudge it back toward him; I didn’t want to ruin it. So instead, I just tapped him on the shoulder.
My hand went right through him, of course, with hardly any more resistance than you’d feel pushing through a spider web, but the effect was evidently more pronounced on his side. He shot up in his chair and would have pitched right on into the control console had his harness not stopped him. He looked right at me—right through me, I could tell by the way his eyes tracked—then he flinched again when he realized what the foggy patch in front of him was.
Tilbey?” he asked. His voice sounded tinny and distant. Air didn’t vibrate my eardrums any better than it pushed against my hands.
“No, it’s me, Danbury,” I said, though I knew it was pointless. Tilbey had tried to talk to us, too, and he hadn’t been able to make enough sound to be heard. So I just shook my head and waved my arms back and forth and pointed downship toward Tilbey’s quarters, where my body still lay beside his mystery machine. Then I flapped my way over to the data-comp and stuck my finger into the keyboard, trying to access the e-mail menu so I could type a message. One thing I could do was short things out, which meant I could use a keyboard if I was careful not to stick my finger through into the processor.
Peter saw what I was trying to do and brought up the mailer for me. When I got a clear screen, I one-finger typed as carefully as I could, I’m Danbury. Elctrcutd in Tilbeys quartrs.
“Ah, hell,” said Peter.
Call captn, I typed, but he was already doing it. Hoxworth and Gwen showed up together.
Hoxworth took one look at me and at what I’d typed, then burst into a fit of cursing, which he ended with, “Gwen, kill the power to Tilbey’s quarters. We should have done that days ago.”
“No!” I shouted, but Gwen was already moving toward the environmental control panel. I waved my arms and tried to catch her, but it was no contest. She reached the panel, punched up the ship’s power schematic, and killed the circuit before I could even begin to move.
“What’s he so excited about?” Hoxworth asked, but if anybody answered him I never heard it, because just then the Universe went where candle flames go when you snuff them out.
I came back to consciousness an instant later. It must have been a bit longer for them, because Gwen and Hoxworth and Peter were all looking around the control room as if they were trying to locate a mosquito, and Hoxworth was saying, “Damn it, I said I was sorry. I had no idea it would do that.”
“Well you’ve got to think of that sort of thing before you—” Peter said, but Gwen suddenly pointed toward me and said, “There he is!”
Hoxworth and Peter spun around, and Peter asked, “Are you all right?” Gwen laughed. “Aside from being dead, of course.” That seemed a bit tacky to mention just now, but I decided she was just trying to handle the idea that another of her crewmates was now a ghost.
“I’m fine,” I told them, and I typed it into the comp for them to read.
Peter and Captain Hoxworth settled down a bit as well when they read my reassurance. After a moment, Hoxworth brightened a little and said, “Hmm, I wonder if Tilbey blinked out just then, too.”
“Probably,” Gwen said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“What?”
“If we can make him blink on and off like a light, the wide-field debris scanner might pick him up. It mostly relies on radar echoes, but it does have optical sensors as well.”
“Oh no you don’t!” I shouted, typing furiously. My message looked like ooohno yoou dont dontt do thatt!, but they got the idea.
“Why, did it hurt?” Hoxworth asked.
No, I reluctantly, typed. But—
“But what? We’ll blink you once more and scan for Tilbey at the same time. What’s the big deal?”
Eternity, I typed. Oblivion. The bigg sleep. I was nowhere when you did that.
“But you came right back,” Hoxworth argued.
You want to try itt? I typed. That slowed him down, but only for a second.
“Look, you were the one who wanted to find Tilbey,” he said. “We’re out here in the middle of nowhere because of you, and he hasn’t showed up on his own, so it looks to me like we’re going to have to track him down. If you’ve got a better idea, I’m open to suggestion.”
I tried to think of something else we could do, but unfortunately Hoxworth was right. The wide-field optical cameras were perfect for finding faint, blinking objects. That’s what they were designed for, after all; to spot tumbling space junk before it plowed into the ship at interplanetary speeds.
I did have one thought. Would Tilbey be as bright as me, out there in space? I could still see a fuzzy outline of my former arms and legs, and I remembered Tilbey glowing a soft white, about as bright as a single Christmas tree bulb, but we’d never checked to see if that was an intrinsic light or a reflection. I leaned over the keyboard and typed, Do I glow under my own lightt?
“That’s easy enough to check,” Gwen said, and she switched out the cabin lights.
I went out as well. For a moment I felt like a disembodied viewpoint adrift in space, and then I realized that was pretty close to what I actually was, but hard on the heels of that thought came the realization that I would have pretty much the same sensation if I were still alive, too. We were all in free fall in a dark room.