The Spectral Stardrive

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Tilbey was the first guy I ever knew who could stare a firing rocket engine in the nozzle and survive to tell the tale. Of course he was dead at the time, so I don’t know if that counts, but it sure impressed me.

Not that he was such a macho guy or anything. Alive or otherwise, he was mostly just a klutz. That’s how he wound up dead in the first place. He’d been working on the main engine’s ignition system, but he hadn’t shut down the fuel feed first so he’d gone up in a puff of smoke the moment he switched on the injectors. There wasn’t a thing we could do for him after that, so the rest of the crew—Peter, Gwen, Captain Hoxworth, and myself—all mourned his loss and headed on to Mars without him.

That’s what we thought, anyway. But a few days later, his ghost came back to haunt us. Turned out he had a good reason: he’d forgotten to close the access hatch in the engine compartment, and the sensors that normally would have told us so had been damaged in the blast that killed him. If he hadn’t warned us about it we’d all have gone up in an even bigger puff of smoke when we lit the engine for our deceleration bum into orbit.

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