Jerry Oltion - 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.