Unfinished Business

Illustration by Alan M. Clark

The first time I met Tilbey, he made my blood boil. He apologized profusely while he dragged me back into the ship—he’d been working on the forward airlock and apparently got his wires crossed—but I hardly heard him. The roar of air whistling away through the open doors drowned him out.

I was a last-minute hire on the Earth-Mars cargo transport Intrepid, replacing a crewmember who had quit just before launch. I had considered myself lucky to get the job, at least until now. Now, with my vision going swirly and my skin tight as a balloon, I considered myself as good as dead. But Tilbey proved to be as resourceful as he was clumsy; he dumped me in one of the control room’s two acceleration couches (banging my head painfully against the armrest, but hey, what’s a minor injury when you’re dying?), then he jumped back into the airlock, shorted out a couple of wires dangling from the mid-lock control panel where he’d been working, and the outer door slammed shut—catching Tilbey’s tether rope in the jamb and pinning him in place.

The tether wouldn’t budge, so Tilbey unhooked it from his spacesuit’s belt to give himself more freedom, but that still didn’t solve our problem. The airlock couldn’t seal completely with the tether in the way. Though the pressure had gone back up, I could still hear the ominous hiss of breathing air venting into space. Tilbey eyed the situation for a moment, then closed the inner door. Through its tiny window I could see the outer door open again, and I caught a glimpse of an arm flailing as Tilbey tripped on something.

It seemed to be taking an awfully long time for him to coil up his tether and come back in. I waited a couple of minutes, gasping like a fish the whole time, but when he still hadn’t showed I pushed myself toward the door. The tiny control cabin was a blizzard of papers and coffee bulbs and all the other debris that had been blown free during the decompression, so I had to bat stuff aside to see through the window, but when I looked out I saw Tilbey’s tether drifting like a lazy snake, its head still attached to the D-ring beside the airlock. The other end attached to nothing. Tilbey had forgotten to reconnect it, and now he was nowhere to be seen.

We picked him up, of course. He hadn’t drifted far, and we had plenty of maneuvering fuel, so it was no big deal. It seemed the crew of the Intrepid—three others besides Tilbey and myself—were used to things like this. At dinner that night they laughed and told stories about the other silly things Tilbey had done, and they toasted me as an official, Tilbey-ized member of the crew. Even Captain Hoxworth, his unkempt gray hair and bushy eyebrows giving him what I thought of as a windswept, Ulysses sort of look, laughed and said, “Welcome aboard, Mister Danbury. I had hoped to preserve your innocence for a bit longer than your first watch, but now you know the truth: the Intrepid is a jinxed ship.”

Throughout it all, Tilbey’s round, cherubic face carried a pained expression, but at the captain’s pronouncement he screwed it into a true grimace and said, “Look, I said I was sorry.”

Everyone laughed, me included, even though my lungs still felt like they were pumping salsa fumes instead of air. Gwen slapped me on the back when I started coughing, and Peter passed me a bulb of vodka “to dull the pain.” He handed Tilbey one, too, and I accepted Tilbey’s apology and we toasted one another’s health. It seemed like the polite thing to do; after all, we would be stuck together on the ship for two months.

I wondered why the captain kept him on if he was such a klutz, but I slowly came to understand. The Intrepid was the worst collection of out-dated and mismatched parts to ever call itself a ship. The airlocks functioned perfectly compared to the rest of it. Hardly a day went by when some crucial subsystem didn’t break down, and despite his handicap—or perhaps because of it—Tilbey was a master at repairing things.

He caused nearly as many disasters as he averted, though. And he was a slob when it came to putting things away. Even his tools, which a good mechanic usually keeps lined up neatly in his belt, were scattered all over the ship, wherever he had last used them. I would find wrenches floating in the rec room, just waiting to bean the first person through the door, or test equipment wedged into an open power box, leads still connected. Once I found a laser welder bouncing gently around the personal hygiene station, just waiting for a stray water droplet to short it out and discharge its beam into the mirror.

And his quarters were even worse. He was working on some sort of hobby project in there, had been for a couple of years, Gwen told me when I asked, but he had refused to explain what it was. All any of us knew about it was what we could see: a rat’s nest of electrical components, servos, linkages, and blinking red lights.

I asked the captain if he was sure it was safe to let him build an unknown gadget, but he merely shrugged and said absently, “Tilbey knows what he’s doing. ” We were in the control room together, and he was looking at one of the diagnostic monitors, frowning at the readout that scrolled across the screen. “At least 1 hope he does,” he muttered. He flipped on the intercom. “Tilbey?”

“Yes?” came Tilbey’s voice. The indicator said he was in his quarters.

“Can you have a look at the main engine ignitor? I can’t get it to come on-line.”

“I’ll get right on it.” There came a clatter as Tilbey crashed into something, and I winced as I imagined his project blowing up and taking the whole ship with it, but nothing happened.

All the same, the next time I saw Tilbey, he was dead. He’d finally bumped the wrong thing at the wrong time—in this case the fuel injector assembly right after he’d repaired the ignitor, which he had of course left activated. He’d been working right inside the bell-shaped nozzle of the engine, and even though it had merely hiccoughed there still hadn’t been enough left of him to send home for a funeral. So the captain and Gwen and Peter and I had just held a short ceremony in the rec room, then spaced one of his rumpled coveralls as a symbolic gesture. Things were considerably more sedate—but also more relaxed—after that.

Until the evening when I was standing watch in the control room again and his ghost drifted in through the aft bulkhead.

I didn’t know what it was at first. I noticed the lights flicker, and the main power bus alarm buzzed for a second before it decided nothing was wrong after all and shut itself off again, but when I leaned back into the command chair I noticed a patch of white fog at the edge of my field of vision. When I turned to look directly at it it seemed to dim, the way a star in the night sky grows dimmer when you stare at it, so I looked a little to the side and saw that the apparition was shaped like Tilbey. His round cheeks and lips moved as he tried to speak, but no sound came out.

The control room suddenly felt about twenty degrees colder, and my spine felt colder still. “Tilbey?” I asked, my pounding heart making my voice quaver.

The ghost tried again to speak, but his vocal cords only made a whispery, rustling sound. He drifted closer to me, and I leaned back, and when he reached out for me I practically exploded out of the couch trying to get away.

He had evidently been reaching for support, because he made a lunge for the chair, but his hand passed right through it and he drifted into the control console. He went into it all the way up to his hips, like a swimmer walking into the water, before he came to a stop.

Warning lights wailed and alarms blinked from a dozen different circuits, but they were all short-lived. The bright flash of a short circuit lit up the control room, and suddenly we were under thrust.

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.

no time, he typed, would taake hours.

What, then? I asked.

let me do it. i can short thingss out—give mee a battery and a stopwatch and i’ll make plenty of sparrk for you.

I supposed he could at that. And one spark was all we needed; once the engine was lit, the reaction was self-sustaining. But could Tilbey face the same blast of flame that had already killed him once? It seemed more than anyone had a right to ask, even of a ghost.

You’ll be blown aaway from the shjip, probably forever, I typed.

He shrugged i’ll probly juzt disappear anywayy. besiddes, i alwayss wanted to go oout in a blasze of glory.

Well, you’ll certainly do that, I typed. You’re sure about this?

what otherr choice? i’ll fall freee if you gett the drive lit annyway.

That was true enough. So I left Tilbey with my notepad, which had its own stopwatch built in and plenty of battery power to make a great spark when he passed his hands all the way through it. I wanted to slap him on the back or shake his hand or something, but all I could do was type, Thanks, Tilbey, on the notepad before I turned to leave him in the engine.

He waved his hand in front of my face, then typed one final message: close the hatch.

Right. The ignitor coil access hatch. If I’d left that open, the drive flame would have burned through and destroyed the rest of the engine within the first few seconds of thrust. I looked at Tilbey, amazed that he’d remembered, and equally amazed that I’d forgotten. He shrugged. It happens, he seemed to be saying, though he didn’t bother to type it out.

I closed the hatch and left Tilbey there in the engine nozzle, climbed back inside the ship, and waited nervously for the deceleration bum. If it didn’t work….

But it did. Tilbey did his final job without a hitch, as far as we could tell.The drive lit right on time, and the Intrepid shuddered its way into Mars orbit on schedule, where Captain Hoxworth demanded a complete overhaul before he or anyone else in the crew would fly it again.

And that would have been that, except for one thing I found while I was going through Tilbey’s personal effects to send to his next of kin. It might take him a while to catch up with us, but I can’t shake the feeling that we haven’t seen the last of him. I hope we haven’t. After all, he left his mystery project running in his quarters, and try as I might, I can’t find a switch to shut it off.