And yet death did not come. Neither did total disintegration--if a
distinction can be drawn. The _Fly by Night_ went right on being
translucent, and so did Nathaniel Drake.
He took a tentative step. He took another. The deck supported him, even
though he could look down through it and through the decks beneath it
and through the hull and dimly see the stars--yes, and in the nearer
distance, the green globe of Iago Iago. He raised his hand, and found
that he could see through his flesh too. He got a mirror and hung
it on the wall and stared into his translucent face. He could see
right through his reflected eyes to the reflected wall behind him. He
could see right through his reflected cheeks and chin. Looking down
at himself, he found that he could see through his body. Through his
clothes. The translucence was such that the combination of clothes
and flesh cancelled out nakedness; nevertheless, his spaceshoes and
his spaceslacks and his thigh-length spacecoat were as unquestionably
spectral as he was.
And yet he felt whole. His body had solidity. He lived and breathed.
His ghostly ship still sped on its way to the distant shores of Dior.
Maybe he was dead, but he did not feel dead. I think, therefore I
am....
He got out the log and set down the co-ordinates of the field. Abruptly
he remembered his passenger, and ran down the companionway to the
starboard storeroom. However, he did not throw open the lock. If he had
he really would have been dead. Beyond the translucent bulkhead lay the
utter airlessness of space. The storeroom was gone. So were all the
other starboard compartments. So was the starboard hull.
So was Saint Annabelle Leigh.
* * * * *
Nathaniel Drake sought out Madame Gin, only to find that she too
was a ghost of her former self. Nevertheless, she had not lost
her sixty-proof personality, and he consulted her at considerable
length--throughout the rest of the voyage, in fact--beseeching her to
close up the rather raw wound that had appeared in the side of his
hitherto impregnable conscience. This, Madame Gin obstinately refused
to do.
Between consultation he put his mind to work on a pair of pressing
problems. The first problem had to do with his cargo. It had come
through, every yard of it, but it had come through the way the ship
itself had come through--with the exception, of course, of the
starboard side, which had apparently passed through the center of the
field and been disintegrated altogether. It was ironic that a vessel so
effective when it came to nullifying thermo-nuclear devices could be so
utterly helpless against Lambda-Xi bombardment. Translucent to begin
with, the pastelsilk was now virtually transparent and undoubtedly
would be rejected by _Dernier Cri_ Garments, the New Paris firm that
had ordered it. Worse, he was bonded for it, and if the bonding company
had to stand the entire loss, his ship would have to be forfeited, and
his career as an independent merchant spaceman would be over.
The second problem had to do with his ghosthood. He did not have to ask
himself how people would react to his appearance because he knew how he
himself reacted to it whenever he looked into the mirror. And it was no
good arguing that the mirror was a ghost of its former self too. He had
merely to glance down at his hands to prove that the degree of emphasis
was negligible.
Invariably his thoughts reverted to the wound in his conscience,
whereupon he would rejoin Madame Gin at the chart table. Oh, he had a
hundred arguments in his favor. He had not asked Saint Annabelle Leigh
to stow away on his ship, had he? He had not known that the ship was
going to undergo Lambda-Xi bombardment, had he? He had not known that
the starboard section was doomed, had he? But, while each question
could be answered with a resounding "no", the cold cruel truth marched
inexorably on: If he had acceded to Annabelle Leigh's request and put
in for Iago Iago, she would still be alive, and by not acceding to her
request and by locking her in the starboard storeroom, he had afforded
Fate a very large assist.
"I wash my hands of it," he told Madame Gin. "I'm no more to blame for
her death than Pilate was to blame for the death of Christ the First."
Madame Gin was silent.
"It's not my fault she was a saint," he said. "That's what makes it
seem worse than it really is--her being a saint, I mean."
Madame Gin said nothing.
"If she hadn't been a saint, it wouldn't be half so bad," Drake went
on. "If she'd been some bum peddling her posterior, it probably
wouldn't bother me at all. Why the hell should I care just because
she was a saint? It's crazy, I tell you. Hell, she wasn't even a good
saint. Good saints don't go around making the kind of proposition she
made me, no matter what the cause. Saint Annabelle Leigh isn't quite as
noble as you might think."
"Wasn't," said Madame Gin.
"All right then, I killed her. I'll even admit it. All I'm trying to
say is that her being a saint makes it worse."
"Murderer," said Madame Gin.
Nathaniel Drake seized her around the neck, whereupon she turned into
an empty bottle. He smashed the bottle on the edge of the table, and
spectral splinters flew in all directions. "I'm not a murderer!" he
screamed. "I'm not, I'm not, I'm not."
* * * * *
The first person to set eyes on "The Jet-propelled Dutchman" was the
pilot of the New Paris sewage barge. He saw the ghost ship rather
than its ghostly occupant, but this is of small consequence in view
of the fact that the same looseness of terminology that marks the
original legend also marks the second. He took one long look, then
dumped his cargo into orbit post-haste and put back into port. The
word spread rapidly, and when Nathaniel Drake put down some fifteen
minutes later the New Paris streets and rooftops were jammed with jaded
curiosity-seekers hopefully waiting to be scared out of their wits.
They were not disappointed.
It is one thing to scare people who have no chestnuts in the fire that
frightens them; it is quite another to scare people who have. The
_Fly by Night_ had barely settled itself on its anti-grav jacks when a
ground car came skimming across the spacestrip and drew up before the
cargo dock. Out of the car stepped Thaddeus P. Terringer, president of
_Dernier Cri_ Garments, Dorrel Numan, vice president of _Dernier Cri_
Garments, and the mayor of New Paris, who had his finger in the pie à
la mode somewhere but exactly where not even the IRS troopers had been
able to find out. Nathaniel Drake did not keep his visitors waiting,
but donned his anti-grav belt, opened the ventral lock, and came
drifting down to the dock. He had not shaved in two weeks, his unkempt
hair hung over his forehead, and he was as translucent as tissue paper.
They gaped.
The dock, rising as it did some five feet above the spacestrip,
gave him an eminence of sorts, and the eminence, in turn, gave him
confidence. "First time I ever rated a welcoming party," he said.
"Where's the red carpet?"
Thaddeus P. Terringer was the first of the tongue-tied trio to recover
his voice. He was a tall portly man, and he was attired as were his
companions in the latest of _Dernier Cri_ Garments' creations for the
modern male: a pink tophat, a green, form-fitting suit of hand-twilled
_thrip_ fuzz, and high-heeled plastigator shoes. "Drake," he said,
"you're drunk."
"No I'm not--I'm disintegrated."
Terringer took a backward step. So did Dorrel Numan and the mayor. "You
went through a Lambda-Xi field!" Numan exclaimed.
"That's about the size of it."
"Nonsense," Terringer said. "No one could survive Lambda-Xi
bombardment."
"You call this survival?" Drake asked.
"The cargo," groaned the mayor. "What about the cargo?"
Drake answered him. "With a little luck, it might make good wrapping
material for invisible bread. Put on your belt and go up and take a
look."
By this time, the port master had arrived upon the scene. "I don't want
anyone to board that ship till I've run a radiation check on it," he
said. "Meanwhile Drake, take it up and park it on the five-hundred foot
level. I don't know what happened to it and I don't know what happened
to you, but I'm not taking any chances."
"Bring back a sample bolt," Terringer said. "We won't be contaminated
if we look at it from a distance."
* * * * *
Drake nodded, adjusted his belt and guided himself up through the
ventral lock. He extended the anti-grav jacks to five hundred feet,
then, after getting a bolt of pastelsilk out of the hold, he drifted
down to the dock again. He unrolled the bolt a little ways and held it
up so that Terringer, Numan and the mayor, all of whom had retreated
to a safer distance, could get a good look at it. It was as tenuous
as mist, and owed what little visibility it still possessed to the
exquisite blueness which the worms of Forget Me Not had imparted to it.
Terringer groaned. So did Numan. So did the mayor.
"And it's all like that?" Terringer asked.