Holiday Spirits

Illustration by John Stevens

It must have been just after Thanksgiving when I died. I hadn’t paid much attention to the date at the time, being preoccupied with more primal concerns, but when Tilbey, my partner in our wraith-like afterlife, asked me what I wanted Santa to bring me for Christmas I suddenly remembered the season.

“A body,” I answered immediately.

Tilbey laughed. His voice sounded thin and distant, like a ghost’s voice should. That wasn’t on purpose; it was a side-effect of the mass cancellation process. The stronger we wanted our interface with normal matter to be, the more energy it took, so we had adjusted the coupling constant as low as we could go and still manipulate our tools—which in free-fall was pretty low. That meant the energy-equivalent of our vocal chords didn’t push very much air, so we couldn’t make much sound when we talked. But it was enough to get the message across.

“A body?” Tilbey asked as he plugged a fiber-optic data line into the control computer we were installing onto the stardrive. The jury-rigged monstrosity (the stardrive, not the computer) took up nearly half of Tilbey’s quarters, and most of it was electrical rather than optic, so we had wires and converters and light pipe running every which way. “What do you want a body for? It’d just cost you tons of fuel to move it around. And then you’d have to watch out all the time that you didn’t damage it.”

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “I might get killed, and then where would I be?”

Tilbey hung his head. If he’d been capable of it he probably would have blushed, as well he might, considering it was his gadget that had killed me in the first place.

Well, OK, I fell into it when the ship made a course change, but he shouldn’t have left it running.

Of course that same prototype stardrive was responsible for my persistence as a ghost after it electrocuted me, so I suppose I owed him one for that. I’d had a glimpse of the absolute blank emptiness that awaits spirits who aren’t preserved as standing waves, and I knew I was far more fortunate than most fatal accident victims. But I still missed my body. I missed the simple things that came with it.

“I’d like to drink something again,” I said.

Tilbey looked at me over the tangle of wires and blinking lights. “You probably could if we cranked it up far enough.”

“Hoxworth would throw a fit,” I said. The captain of the Intrepid, the Earth-Mars shuttle on which Tilbey and I were still nominally crew members, was still trying to make a profit on this run and he begrudged us every extra kilowatt we used.

“He probably would,” Tilbey agreed. “But it would be a legitimate test. We could find out if our sense of taste still works, and if the matter we ingest would be assimilated into a new body. And what happens when we turn the power down again afterward.” He sighed. “That’s what I want for Christmas. Enough research money to figure out all the ramifications of this.”

I had no objection to that. There were so many things we didn’t know about the stardrive. Tilbey had designed it to remove the mass—and thus the inertia—from an object so it could be accelerated to lightspeed without requiring enormous amounts of energy, but we had been caught up in its influence long before he had intended to try it on a person.

That was why we were installing the control computer. Now that we had become inadvertent test subjects, it could at least monitor what happened to us and help us diagnose any unexpected side effects. And hopefully reproduce them. If we were going to sell the notion of interstellar exploration by ghost to the taxpaying public, we needed a reliable piece of hardware to demonstrate. And we needed it soon. The Intrepid was making its final approach to Earth, and while Captain Hoxworth would probably let us stay on board while the crew unloaded our cargo and took on more for another Mars run, he had made it clear that he didn’t want to carry us along for another round trip.

“Let’s wait until we get our UN grant,” I said. While I trusted Tilbey’s engineering genius, he was still a klutz. I didn’t want him fooling any more than necessary with the machine that kept me alive, at least not until we had a backup.

“Oh come on, where’s your sense of—” he started to ask, but the intercom interrupted him.

“Hoxworth to Tilbey,” the captain said.

“Here.”

“Our deceleration burn into Earth orbit is coming up. How soon can you be ready for thrust?”

“Any time,” Tilbey replied. “Want us to turn up the power now?” He winked at me and mouthed, Go ahead. Get yourself something to drink.

“No, we’ve still got ten minutes. Wait for my mark,” Hoxworth said, predictably.

Even so, I went ahead and got a squeeze bulb of coffee from Tilbey’s private stock. As long as we were going to crank up the interface anyway, I might as well try it. As it was I could just barely pick up the bulb and burst the heater pack inside it, and tearing open the nipple was beyond my present capability, but I took some encouragement from the sensation of heat that slowly spread through my hands. If I could feel it, maybe I could taste it, too.

I never got the chance to find out. When Captain Hoxworth called with the sixty second warning, Tilbey reached for the coupling constant knob to turn it up—but in his usual Tilbey fashion he bumped it with his thumb before he could get a good grip on it and nudged it the other way. The coffee bulb slipped through my fingers—literally—and floated toward the ventilator intake.

Tilbey tried to turn the knob the other way, but now his hands were just as insubstantial as mine.

“Wait!” I shouted toward the intercom, or tried to, but my attenuated vocal chords moved no air, either.

Tilbey looked at me with panic in his eyes. I could read his lips as he asked, “What can we do?”

We had maybe thirty seconds to come up with something. If we couldn’t interact with matter well enough to push against the deck when it pushed against us, then the Intrepid would leave us behind when Hoxworth fired the engines. It had happened to Tilbey before, and we’d had a hell of a time finding him again, even in open space. Now, deep in Earth’s gravity well and in the midst of restricted orbits and approach vectors, it could become nearly impossible.

When the coupling constant was this low, we had only one trick: we could short out electrical circuits. So I did the only thing I could do. I reached for the control knob, reached into it, right down to the potentiometer at the base of the shaft, and stuck my finger through the wires down inside.

There are two ways to wire a simple control circuit. The direct way, where more electricity means more of whatever you’re controlling, or the indirect way, which in this case would mean that a short circuit would switch us off completely. Tilbey had always seemed to be a direct sort of guy, so I prayed that his wiring habits reflected his character—

—And in the next instant I screeched in pain as the control knob and my forefinger became one. For an instant I was as solid as a live person again, but the last joint of my finger had achieved that state inside the potentiometer.

Then the sudden surge tripped the circuit breaker, and I went where dreams go when you wake up.

I realize that Tilbey’s stardrive has also answered a completely different conundrum that has interested humanity for millennia: namely, is there really some part of a person that continues on after death? The answer is obviously yes, or else there wouldn’t be anything for the stardrive to stabilize, but I’m afraid theologians will still have plenty to debate after the Tilbey process becomes commonplace, for my own experience as a disembodied soul in the natural state shed absolutely no light on the condition. No tunnel of light, no enlightenment—no anything at all.

Not even time passed. I felt myself go away, and then I felt myself come back, but there must have been at least a couple minutes in between because when I returned to consciousness Captain Hoxworth was there beside me. He had evidently heard me scream, or noticed the power surge before the circuit breaker kicked out, and had come down to Tilbey’s quarters to see what was wrong.

My finger was no longer inside the machine. My flinch had apparently moved me just enough, or my unenhanced self had moved while I was unconscious, but in either case I was free of pain again. I was also nearly insubstantial again.

So was Tilbey. He pantomimed turning up the coupling constant knob, and Captain Hoxworth finally obliged him. The short had evidendy damaged it; we flickered in and out while he turned the knob, but we eventually settled down to a solid enough state to permit speech.

Hoxworth didn’t mess around— not with a deceleration bum window rapidly closing on him. “Let’s fix your little problem, gentlemen,” he said, “and put this ship in orbit.”

“We’re ready now,” Tilbey said sheepishly. “I think.”

“You think.”

“Well, just to be safe…” Tilbey reached for the control knob, but I batted his hand aside and adjusted it upward myself. I held myself in place by a wall grip while I stamped on the deck with my feet. They didn’t go through.

“Looks OK,” I said to Hoxworth.

“Good. Now kindly don’t do anything else until we can get you and this damned contraption off my ship.” He kicked off through the doorway and disappeared up the central access shaft.

“Jeez,” Tilbey said petulantly, “you’d think he’d be a little more excited about having humanity’s first stardrive on board his ship.”

I pulled myself down to Tilbey’s bunk in preparation for boost. “Maybe if it worked better he would be,” I said.

“For crying out loud, it’s a prototype!” said Tilbey as he pulled himself down beside me. It was a one-man bunk, and I wasn’t too thrilled to be sharing it with Tilbey, but you get used to close proximity on a spaceship. Besides, it would only be for a few minutes. As he wiggled in between me and the wall, Tilbey said, “There’s all sorts of bugs to work out, but once we get some funding we’ll fix’em in no time.”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Having to commit suicide to use it is a pretty big bug.”

He snorted. “To you, maybe. There are millions of would-be astronauts who would kill for the chance to explore another star system.”

“Yeah, but would they kill themselves?”

He was still trying to think of a reply when the thrust hit. The bunk slapped up against us, and we sank down into it, but we did it the way people normally do. It was a long burn, but when it was over we were in Earth orbit. Back to the cradle of humanity, who would, we hoped, help us work out the bugs in Tilbey’s invention.

We should have known better. Ghosts don’t exist. Science is done in universities or multinational corporations. And advances in space flight technology happen at UNASA, the United Nation’s umbrella organization for off-Earth matters. It took the appropriations committee less than five minutes of debate to dismiss our request for funding on the grounds that our project showed “little chance of success or of having significant practical applications in the unlikely event of success.”

We got the word the day before Christmas. We were still on the Intrepid, holding down the fort while the captain and the rest of the crew went home for the holiday. We were nearly insubstantial again to conserve power, especially now that the ship was docked to the UN Orbital Freeport and Hoxworth had to pay extra for utilities. Besides, we had already done practically all the modifications we could afford to do to the engine. Those modifications included a holographic control panel that we could manipulate even in our most tenuous state, but we needed far more improvements than that if we were ever going to use it for its intended purpose.

“Hah, Merry Christmas,” Tilbey said disgustedly when he finished reading UNASA’s rejection letter. “Cheap bastards.” He squinted at the signature at the bottom of the screen. “F. Davis Rigby III,” he read aloud. “Committee Chairman.”

The letter was dated just a few hours ago, and sent from the UN council offices right there on the station. I said, “I’m surprised they’re working on Christmas Eve.”

“Hah,” Tilbey snorted. “They probably get a real charge out of dropping coal into as many stockings as they can today. Keep the rabble in their place, spread a little bah humbug.” He stuck his finger through the holographic control to switch off the screen. “They didn’t even ask for a demonstration.”

He pushed himself away from the reader—a process more akin to swimming than to the usual free fall tap-and-bounce—-and headed toward the wall that separated his quarters from the entertainment commons, but I stopped him before he could push on through.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “So what if they didn’t ask? Why don’t we give them a demonstration anyway?”

“What for?” he asked.

“For spite, if nothing else,” I said. “But maybe we can prove to them that we have something real here.” I swished my hand through the wall just above the light switch, and the power flickered momentarily as I shorted out the wiring.

“We’ll have to do better than that,” Tilbey said, but I could already see wheels turning as he thought it over. “Hah!” he said at last. “The ghost of spaceflight future! Sure, let’s blow their tiny little minds.”

We set the coupling constant at mid-range, figuring that would give us enough substance to manipulate objects if they weren’t too massive, but we could still push through walls if we got a run at them. I left the control computer hooked to our e-mail line just in case we needed to change the settings, but I didn’t want to count on that working. First we would have to find a computer wherever we were, and then we would have to type in our instructions without shorting it out.

We found the council chamber easy enough—it was listed on the station map—but by the time we got there nobody but a janitor was left. He was an older guy, white-haired and thin as a stick, and on Earth he would probably have been too weak to even stand, but here in zero-g he was still able to hold down a job. So Tilbey’s invention was impractical, was it? I thought. So was the space station when it was first proposed, but here was one old duffer who no doubt felt different now.

The meeting room had a great view: a whole wall of Plexiglas that looked straight out into space. The nightside of Earth filled about half the view, cities sparkling bright as stars.

Tilbey paid it no attention. “Come on,” he said to me when he saw that the UN appropriations committee was gone, “we’ve got to find this Rigby guy.” And he pushed past me into the council chamber, shouting, “Hey buddy!”

“No, wait!” I said, but it was too late. The janitor heard Tilbey’s thin, reedy voice, turned his head, and his eyes nearly bugged out of his head when he saw two smoky apparitions drifting toward him. At least we’d had the good sense to come in through the open door.

It didn’t matter. The janitor gasped for breath, then turned nearly as pale as we were. He looked down toward his chest, frowned, clutched at his breastbone as if he was trying to tear it loose, then he looked back at us with an expression of total bewilderment, said, “Uh oh,” and went limp.

“Heart attack!” I shouted. “Damn it, Tilbey, you’ve scared him to death!” I rushed toward the janitor, who, attached to the floor by his Velcro shoes, swayed gently like a piece of seaweed in the ocean. I grabbed him by his shoulders and began CPR, using my knees to compress his chest the way they train you to do in free-fall, but it was like trying to compress a cloud. My knees just sank in, and my hands slipped through his shoulders.

“Help me!” I yelled at Tilbey, and he went around to the other side and tried to help compress the guy ’s chest from behind, but it didn’t work any better with two of us than with one.

“The coupling constant,” I told him. “Find a computer and dial up our control panel, and give me a solid body.”

He moved toward the conference table in the middle of the room, where glassy rectangles set in its wooden surface had to be monitors, but a moment later he said, “No good. They’re password protected.”

“Then call a medical team! This guy needs help.”

But UN officials evidently carried their own phones, because there weren’t any in the room, nor in the corridor outside. There was an unmarked intercom to somewhere— probably a page call—but nobody answered when Tilbey stuck his finger through the button and screamed, “Help!”

That left just the two of us and one dying janitor. And we had to do something quick, because his heart had been stopped for a couple of minutes now.

I had just one trick left. Gingerly, queasily, I reached inside his chest. I was substantial enough now to feel my way around, past the breastbone, through the ribs that stuck out to the side, over to the right of the lung, its air sacs like plastic packing bubbles— to the heart. It felt like a squishy potato with tubes sticking out the top. If I thought of it in those terms, I wouldn’t freak out. Just wrap my fingers around the potato and squeeze.

I went right through it, of course. But at our stardrive’s current power setting there was just enough resistance to move the heart muscle a little. And the heart works partly through electrical impulses, which I was shorting out like crazy the whole time my hand was inside it.

I felt it give a little squirm on its own, and I pulled away. Not too fast, or I could do more harm than good. I felt for a pulse in the janitor’s neck, but found none, so went back inside his chest for another squeeze. His heart kicked again, and this time I felt it beat a couple more times on its own before it quit. Once more, and this time it took off. The janitor shuddered like a ship with a bad thruster, then gasped in a breath.

A few more breaths and he opened his eyes. And of course there I was, floating right there in front of him like the grim reaper himself, come to harvest his immortal soul.

This time he got out the scream that had eluded him the first time.

“Good, good,” I told him. “Oxygenate that blood. Now take a deep breath and let it out again.”

“Huh?” he asked. Apparently that wasn’t what Death was supposed to say.

“You fainted,” I told him. “Come on, breathe deep now.”

“But… you—”

“It’s a long story. If you breathe for me, I’ll bring you up to speed.”

“Who—”

“Breathe.” I had no idea how long this guy ’s ticker would keep going after the workout I’d given it. I turned to Tilbey. “Get some medical help here. I don’t care how you do it, just get someone up here now.”

He thought about it for a moment, then went back over to the conference table and waved his hands through the computer terminals, one after another. Sparks flew, and smoke curled around the remains. Then for good measure Tilbey did the same for the intercom. “There,” he said. “That ought to bring someone on the run, and they can call a doctor.”

Sure enough, within thirty seconds two security guards burst into the room. They bounced to a stop when they saw us, but a man who’s had a heart attack elicits a near-universal response, even when he’s flanked by two ghosts. Maybe especially then. One of the guards used his wrist phone to call for a med-team while the other covered us with his laser.

“All right, you two,” he said to us, doing an admirable job of keeping the quaver out of his voice. “Start talking. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

I let the janitor go and pushed slowly away, stopping myself against a chair back. “We’re the Solar System’s first interstellar astronauts,” I told him. “And we’re here to show the UN appropriations committee what we can do. But we wound up saving this guy’s life instead.” I conveniently neglected to mention why that had become necessary. The story would no doubt become clear soon enough.

“You don’t look much like astronauts to me,” the guard said.

“Watch this,” Tilbey told him. He pushed off the wall toward the window, took a couple of swimming strokes to build up more velocity, and plowed right through the Plexiglas. He had to shove himself on through, but he remembered to keep a hand inside the glass so he wouldn’t drift away. From outside the space station, in hard vacuum now, he grinned and waved at the guard. Then he pulled himself back inside and said, “Astronauts. We’re going to Alpha Centauri if we can get the funding to miniaturize our stardrive. Wanna come along?”

The guard, it turned out, was more of a homebody. So was F. Davis Rigby III, we discovered when we finally got an audience with him. But the janitor—an ex-marine named Liam who’d flown sub-orbital fighters in the Australian war—was anything but. When he heard what had scared him nearly to death, and what had ultimately brought him back to life, he was all set to join our team and take off into the cosmos.

And Liam, it turned out, was an old war buddy of the appropriations committee chairman. If he wanted to throw himself behind this crazy project, then Rigby had no problem throwing a couple billion dollars of UN money into the pot to see that it worked out for him. That’s politics.

“You, uh, you do realize that there’s only one way we know of for sure to get to be like us?” I asked Liam.

He nodded. “So? I’m ninety years old. I hurt all over. If I don’t go this way, I’ll probably stroke out next week anyway. Or choke to death on a chicken bone in the cafeteria. What have I got to lose?”

When he put it that way, it was easy to see his point.

So Tilbey got his Christmas present. Within hours we were installed in our own lab right there on board the space station, with practically unlimited access to test equipment, state-of-the-art components to modify the stardrive with, and electricity to spare.

And I got my present, too. Now that we had the money to pay for the power, I spent the whole day with the coupling constant cranked all the way up. I’ve had at least a gallon of eggnog, every mug of it laced with a different brand of rum, to see what each one tastes like and what their effect might be on a ghost.

All in the interest of science, of course.

Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “Unfinished Business” (October 1996) and “The Spectral Stardrive” (November 1996).