The Spectral Stardrive

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.

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.

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.

“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.