"_You_ invent an anti-gravitational shield? What are you going to use
for brains? Buttons? I've never known but one man in my life with the
genius to pull that miracle--and he's dead. Lanse Biggs. I hope that
wherever he is he can't hear you. He'll be rolling over in his grave
so fast they'll call him 'Revolving Biggs.' Either that, or he'll come
back and haunt you for daring to--"
And then it happened. Todd, who had been listening to me petulantly,
suddenly stiffened. His jaw dropped ... his eyes popped out like
marbles on stalks ... and his hair climbed two full, quivering inches
off his scalp.
"S-s-sparks!" he wailed. "D-d-don't say that! Behind you!"
Then he keeled over in a dead faint. I turned. My heart took a running
leap for my lips, and I think I screamed. Because I was staring at
a thin, wavering nebulosity--a form gray and ghastly--a transparent
simulacrum of--
_Lancelot Biggs!_
* * * * *
What happened next, I wouldn't rightly know. All I know is that for the
first time I realized how a deep-rooted tree must feel when a pup comes
sniffing at it with malice in his eyes. My brain said, "Get going,
babies! Double-quick!" But my pedal extremities were as nerveless as a
batch of yesterday's dough.
But there was nothing wrong with my senses. On the contrary: they
were as sharp as a creditor's letter. And for the first time in my
life I realized that the old stories you hear about ghosts are on
the up-and-up. For this shimmering wraith of Biggs carried along with
it all the visual, audible and olfactory accoutrements with which the
ghosts of lore are usually endowed.
My ears hummed with a high, thin singing; a sort of weird, unearthly
harmonic vibration. There was a biting odor in my nostrils, a scent so
subtle I could not tell whether it were charnelly repugnant or just
plain annoying. The phantom itself was gray, drab, colorless. Immobile.
Tense, strained of visage. For a moment its white lips seemed to move--
Then it was gone! As quickly as it had come it was gone, and the
paralysis left my limbs, and I was on my knees beside Todd, shaking him.
He came out of his blackout howling. "Did you see him, Sparks? It was
Biggs' ghost! Standing right there--"
"What the hell's going on in here?" interrupted the irate voice of Cap
Hanson. The door had burst open; he stood in the archway with Diane
a few feet behind him. "What's all this, Mister Todd? The two of you
groveling on the floor--drunk again, eh? Well, my two fine sirs--"
Todd pulled himself to his feet uncertainly. His voice was cracked,
incoherent.
"N-no, sir! S-something horrible. This ship is--is _haunted_, sir! I
saw--_Upph!_"
My elbow caught his bread-basket just in time. His next words
represented my own private opinion. But I didn't want Diane Hanson to
hear them. After all, it isn't soothing to a heartbroken gal to learn
that her lover has turned into a noisy, malodorous, spaceship spook.
"Haunted?" roared Hanson. "Are you mad, Lieutenant Todd? What do you
mean, haunted?"
I tried to catch the skipper's eye so I could give him the business to
lay off the quiz program for the time being. But my finger-flagging
came to naught. Diane shouldered past her father and into the room. Her
voice was intense, eager.
"Sparks," she said, "tell me! It was--_he_, wasn't it? Lancelot?"
Too late, Dick understood why I'd poke-checked him. He turned red and
began gobbling like a block-bound turkey.
"N-no, Miss Diane. N-nothing like that. Bert and I were just having a
little horseplay. We'd had a drink--"
"Don't lie to me, Dick! It _was_ Lancelot! It must have been. I--I saw
him myself!"
Well! That was one for the books. It was our turn to gape. Cap Hanson
stared from one to another of us wildly.
"What's this? You saw Lancelot, Diane? Where?"
"In my cabin. An hour or so ago. I was trying to take a little nap.
Something wakened me--I don't know what--and I saw him standing in the
middle of the room. He was so pale. So thin, and so sad. Oh, Daddy--"
* * * * *
She buried her face on his shoulder. Hanson said, "Now, there, honey!"
He looked like an accident hunting for some place to happen. He stared
at us dismally.
"Is that the truth, boys? Is that what you saw?"
We nodded. I said, "I'm not what you might call a superstitious guy,
Skipper, but I know what I see. It was his ghost, all right."
Todd wailed miserably, "And it was all my fault. I brought the haunt on
by bragging--"
"Nonsense!" snapped the Old Man. He wore a worried frown on his pan. He
released Diane, took a few swift paces across the room, spun, came back
to us. "Sheer nonsense!" he repeated angrily. "It isn't reasonable!"
I said, "Yeah, I know. That's what folks have been saying for
centuries, Skipper. That ghosts aren't reasonable. But the fact
remains, people _see_ them--"
"That's not what I mean. I don't give a hoot about the possibility or
impossibility of a ghostly afterworld, I'm just saying that it's not
reasonable we should see a ghost of _Biggs_! Lanse wasn't that kind of
boy. He wouldn't come back from the--from Beyond for no better purpose
than to frighten the living daylights out of his old friends and the
woman he loved. He was a logical man--
"Here's what I think! If you saw Biggs--"
"We did!"
"Very well! Then it wasn't his _ghost_ you saw! It was some sort of
projection of him. Don't ask me what kind, or how he did it, or where
he is. But I'll bet my last cent--Lancelot Biggs is not dead!"
The pronouncement galvanized Diane. Her eyes shone and she cried, "Oh,
Daddy--do you mean that?" Looking upon her joy, I groaned inwardly. It
was cruel of the Old Man to reawaken false hopes in her like that. As
I said before, I know what I see. And that vision of Biggs didn't look
like the projection of a living man's image. It wasn't flat. It was
transparent and tri-dimensional. And filmy--
I opened my mouth to protest. But I never got one chirp out of my
peeper. For at that moment the turret audio rasped to life, Chief
Garrity's grizzled face gleamed on the screen, and the C. E.'s Scottish
burr accosted us with accusing indignation.
"Captain Hanson, sirrr!"
"Yes, Chief?"
"Will ye be so kind as to accept my rrreseegnation, sirrr, _ee_-fective
_ee_-meejuttly! I willna ha' fairther dealin' wi' sooch scand'lous
nonsense as is now goin' on down here!"
Hanson snarled, "Resignation be damned, Chief! I've got troubles of my
own. Don't come bellyaching to me because you can't handle your own
men--"
"'Tisna _my_ men are ablatherin'!" declared the Chief in high dudgeon.
"'Tis one o' y'r ain men who by all rights should be dead an'
planted these past seven weeks! 'Tis the ghost o' the late Lootenant
Biggs--down here tryin' to gie my men orrrders f'r the _con_-struction
o' some fantastic machine!"
* * * * *
I think we all must have said something, but what I said I can't
remember. For I was conscious only of Hanson's exuberant roar. "See?
I told you so!" and of Diane's glad little cry, "Daddy! Let's go
down!"--then we were all high-balling it down the ramps toward the
engine-room.
What we found there was Bedlam. Bedlam in greasy overalls. The hypos,
hooked up the V-I unit, were perking along in their usual smooth
fashion. The rotor-pistons were chugging back and forth in their
channels with the calm precision of a five-year-old sucking a lollypop.
But in one corner of the room the members of Garrity's black gang were
huddled, wide-eyed, white-faced, closer than a duffer and his topped
drive; in another corner stood Chief Garrity, staring with speechless
wrath at a figure in the middle of the floor.
The figure was that which we had seen up topside. The wavering spectre
of Lancelot Biggs.
It's funny how the mind works. Even in that moment of stress I found
myself thinking that translation into the afterworld had not done
much to improve Biggs' handsomeness. He didn't look much like the
chubby cherubs or stalwart angels you see pictures of. He was the same
old Biggs I'd known and loved. Tall, gangling, lean to the point of
ridiculousness--dressed in space-blues rather the worse, I thought, for
wear--tousle-haired, grave-eyed, with that old familiar Adam's-apple
bobbing up and down in his scrawny throat like a half-swallowed orange.
There was one difference, though. He was not quiet, motionless, as he
had been when I had seen him in my turret. There was a look of fretful
anxiety in his eyes. He was gesturing impatiently to his awe-struck
watchers, motioning them to approach him. His lips were moving, but
no sound issued from them. There was in the air that same high, thin
whining I had noted before; that same sharp, rather ammoniac odor.
Then Diane cried, "Lanse! Oh, Lanse, darling--!" and rushed forward.
Straight toward, up to, into and _through_ the spectre of her lost
lover. And she stopped, dazed. Her arms waved wildly. "B-but he's gone!
He's not here? Where did he--"
I choked weakly, "D-don't look now, Diane, but you sort of--er--broke
him up. Little chunks of him are floating around you."
Which was the God's-honest truth, so help me! When she burst into that
phantom, it popped apart like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle.
Shattered into a thousand little shimmering, quivering bits, as an
image will shatter in a quiet pool when you chuck a rock into it. Diane
stepped back. The hunks of Biggs came drifting back together again. I
saw, now, that he wore a happy smile. His lips moved, and we read the
name he spoke. "_Diane!_"
Hanson whirled on the scowling Chief Engineer.
"How long has he been here, Chief? What's he want?"
Garrity's reply was as sultry as a Venusian sunset.
"And joost how, Captain Hanson, would I be capable of knowin' the
_de_-sires of a disembodied speerit? I'm a mon of broad expeerience,
sirrr, but I dinna pretend to comprehend _ee_-cleesiastical mysteries.
_Shoo!_" He waved his arms at the ghostly Biggs. "Go 'way, ye bodiless
demon! 'From ghoulies an' ghosties an' all sairts o' beasties an'
things thot go "Boomp!" in the nicht, O Laird, deliverrr us!'"
Hanson turned to me in desperation.
"He's trying to tell us something, Sparks. You and him was friends.
Can't you understand him?"
I was already pondering that problem. It was plain that Biggs' motions
were not purposeless, that he was trying to communicate some message.
I stepped forward, facing the wraith, formed short words clearly on my
lips.
"Lanse--can you hear me?"
He shook his head.
"But you can read writing?" I had some crazy idea of scribbling
messages to him for his perusal. Of course, it was a one-way ticket
to the Observation Ward if anybody ever found out I'd been holding a
chalk-talk confab with a ghost, but----
He didn't like that idea, either. He raised both arms. Then he
did a funny thing. He started waving his paws in the air. Left
paw--right--right again--left--left--
Todd groaned, and looked for a soft spot to faint on. "Not only a
spook," he wailed, "but a _dancing_ spook--"
"Shut up!" I yelled. "Cap, shove that alleged Mate through the airlock.
This ain't cuckoo--it's _code_! Go on, chum! I'm getting it!"
For:
"S ... p ... a ... r ... k ... s," Lancelot Biggs was left-righting to
me, "g ... o ... t t ... o b ... e b ... r ... i ... e ... f. Power
limited. Tell Chief line inner hull posi-charge steel lining, throw
nega-circuit through outer. Have Todd revise course to following
trajectory...."
I'll spare you the rest. It was all technical. So technical, in fact,
that I couldn't make head or tail of it. There wasn't a man aboard the
_Saturn_ who could. It was, furthermore, absolute proof that we were
dealing with no spook, but with L. Biggs himself. For this was typical
"Biggsian" mathematics.
And he was right in saying his time was short. He was beginning to
fade before he had completed the algebraic and mechanical formulæ he
wigwagged to me. Toward the end I had to strain my eyes to find out
which hand he was wiggling. But I caught the last waves.
"Follow instructions blindly," he signaled, "and we'll soon be together
again. Luck! My love ... Diane...."
Then he was gone.
* * * * *
Boy, now, I'll tell you the following hours were hectic. Our normal
complement is a twenty-men crew, of which only six men are engineers or
engine-room helpers. And the job Biggs had laid out for us was weighty
enough to stagger the resources of a Patrol repairship.
But Hanson turned on the heat, and when the Old Man shoots the juice,
things hop! We drafted everyone on board. Staff, crew, engine-room,
Ordinaries--even Slops and the mess boy burned blisters on the pinkies
performing the task Biggs had assigned us.
Most of us bent to our labors eagerly. Myself, for instance--I didn't
know what Biggs had in mind, or what the final result of our efforts
would be. But I knew damned well that Biggs never gave purposeless
orders. Some good would be the end of this fantastic webwork of plates,
wires and coils we were weaving through, in and about the _Saturn_.
Diane, despite the fact that her hands soon became raw and sore,
insisted on doing a share of the manual labor.
"I must, Sparks!" she declared. "I'd never respect myself again if I
didn't help in some small way. Because he promised this would bring us
together again. Where, I don't know--" She straightened, staring at me
speculatively. "I don't know!" she whispered. "Sparks--he never told
us where he is!"
"He didn't have time," I reassured her. "His power was limited, he
said. But everything's going to be O.Q."
But later, Dick Todd raised the same point, when I spoke to him in the
control-turret. He had been checking the course Biggs had designated.
Now, frowning, he laid his computations before me.
"You see what this means, Bert?"
"Yeah," I said, looking at the rumpled sheet. "It means you ought to
wash your hands more often. Well, what?"
"This course," said Todd nervously, "sets a direct trajectory
to--_Jupiter_!"