It wasn’t much; a fully loaded cargo ship can’t do more than half a gravity or so, but it was enough to slam me to the floor and drop a half-full coffee bulb on my head. Tilbey dropped just as fast as the coffee and I did, but he didn’t stop. Wearing an expression of terrified surprise, he slid through the console and the floor beneath it as if it weren’t even there, and kept right on going.
The control panel tracked his path through the ship, short circuits triggering alarms in the crew’s quarters, the equipment bay directly beneath it, and the starboard maneuvering thruster quad below that. Tilbey’s ghost had apparently Men all the way through the ship and right out into space again.
I scrambled up and slapped the abort switch. The sudden loss of thrust sent me rebounding up to the ceiling, where I hit my head hard enough to raise a knot. A memento of the dear departed Tilbey, as it were.
“He must have left something undone,” Peter said when I finally convinced him and the rest of the crew what had happened. “That’s why ghosts appear—to finish something they left undone.”
“Tilbey?” Gwen asked incredulously. “He’d be spending all of eternity at it if he had to do that. ”
The captain rubbed his bushy eyebrows. “Hmm,” he said, as if having a ghost on board was just another in a long list of problems. “Much as I liked the poor bugger, I don’t think I’d take to having his ghost roaming the ship. I wonder if we can figure out what he’s up to and help him accomplish it. Then we can all rest in peace, eh?”
That was easier said than done. We didn’t see Tilbey again for nearly a week. I suppose it took him that long to catch up with us, though I can’t imagine what he used for propulsion. Magnetic attraction, perhaps. At any rate, we hadn’t found out what he’d left undone, either, because there were so many candidates to choose from. Without Tilbey’s admittedly clumsy hands holding it together, the ship was (ailing apart around us faster than we could keep up with it. The life support system had quit listening to its oxygen sensors, so it kept raising the partial pressure until we were breathing practically pure 02. Trouble was, at normal pressure that made practically every flammable item on board a potential bomb, as we learned when the coffee urn switched on one morning and rocked the entire galley with the explosion. We managed to contain the fire to the galley by donning p-suits and venting the entire ship to space, but the decompression played hell with the hygiene stations, and we were about out of suit air before we could get the lifesystem back on line again. By then the water tanks had boiled dry, so we were on emergency rations, and the navigation computer had overheated without its cooling air and was now convinced we were headed for Jupiter. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Mars was beginning to swell in the aft viewports. We knew we were supposed to start our deceleration bum to drop into orbit sometime within the next few hours, but without the navcom we didn’t know when. And a minute’s delay could mean the difference between a successful flight and a headlong crash.
So when Tilbey’s ghost floated through the control room wall again, I looked up from the diagnostic program I was running on the navcom and said, “All right! Grab a seat and have a go at this mother. ”
Of course he couldn’t grab anything. It was all he could do to bring himself to a stop before he drifted into the control panel again. He managed that by drifting through me instead, which felt like I’d been hit by lightning, but when I’d flinched clear of him he now floated stationary in the air before me.
He was trying to say something, but like before all he could make was a feint rustling sound. I tried to read his lips, but when I looked directly at him he was fainter than fog on a window. He tried pantomime, but I couldn’t guess what he was getting at. Maybe the ship was about to blow up or maybe he just wanted a doughnut; I couldn’t tell.
I called the others up to the control room and after they got over the shock of seeing Tilbey this way they all gave it a try, but we were no wiser until Tilbey, in mounting exasperation, started sticking his fingers through the navcom’s keyboard. Every time he did, the key he pressed shorted out, which is what keys on keyboards normally do when you press them, so within a minute or so the navcom was back on line again.
We all waited breathlessly for Tilbey to vanish now that he’d repaired it, but he stubbornly remained before us, his arms crossed over his chest.
“That wasn’t it, ” Peter said.
Tilbey waved at the keyboard again, then pantomimed speaking and words flying out of his mouth, and eventually I got it. “He can talk to us through the keyboard,” I said. Trouble was, none of the control instruments were set up for word processing. I solved that by getting out my portable notepad and unfolding that for him.
He pecked away at the keys for a moment, careful not to stick his fingers too far through and short out the main processor. When he finished he drifted back and we all leaned close to see what he’d typed.
mainn drives ignitter damagged. wont lite.
The captain frowned and turned to the control board. “The sensors show it’s fine,” he said. “Besides, it lit OK the… uh… the last time you were here.”
thats when it brroke. sensrs
bumd out tooo.
There was one easy way to check that. The captain tapped in a command for a half-second burn, just enough to check the system dynamically without changing our course much.
Nothing happened.
“Figures,” Gwen said. “So what do we do? We’ve only got—” she looked at the navcom’s screen, which was showing the correct figures now “—forty-five, minutes before our deceleration bum.”
“I guess we fix it,” the captain said. “What else?”
After Tilbey, I was the next-best-qualified drive engineer, so fifteen minutes later I found myself suited up and floating in the immense bellshaped combustion chamber, looking at the mangled remains of the engine’s ignition system. When the engine had fired with Tilbey inside, he had still been working on it, and the flameproof access hatch had been open, allowing the white-hot combustion gasses into the ignitor coils. The burst of flame that had killed Tilbey had no doubt caused some damage to them as well, but what had really done them in was the sustained bum when he had shorted out the controls a few days later. The coils were a melted mess, like we would be in a couple hours when we hit Mars’s atmosphere at interplanetary velocity, because there was no fixing the ignitor. The engine itself looked fine, but with no way to get it lit we were as good as dead.
Tilbey had swum his way back through the ship, careful to avoid any electronics this time. Being Tilbey, he had still blown out the main lighting circuit in the cargo hold, but that was minor compared to the trouble we faced. Now he floated beside me in the engine bell, shaking his spectral head at the mess he’d made of the ignitor.
“We’ll have to rig some kind of temporary system,” I said. “A one-shot spark generator on a timer or something.” It sounded easy enough, but I didn’t know if it would be possible to do in the short time we had remaining to us. Tilbey could probably do it, but even with him coaching me I wasn’t sure if I could.
Tilbey gestured impatiently for my notepad.
can’t hear you, he typed when I unfolded the keyboard and held it out for him.
We were in vacuum, so I supposed that made sense, but since he apparently didn’t need to breathe anymore I hadn’t been sure about air for hearing. I wasn’t sure about much where Tilbey was concerned. There were so many things I wanted to ask him, including the Big Question, but if we couldn’t come up with some way to light the engine I’d know the answer to that first hand in about twenty minutes. So I typed, We needd to majke a spark generattor on a timer. In my p-suit, I was as bad a typist as Tilbey.