'Why have you taken over the body of this man?' said Dirk.
'I need to have a voice with which to speak and a body with which to act. No harm will come to him, no harm -'
'Let me ask the question again. Why have you taken over the body of this man?' insisted Dirk.
The ghost made Michael's body shrug.
'He was willing. Both of these two gentlemen quite understandably resisted being… well, hypnotised - your analogy is fair. This one?
Well, I think his sense of self is at a low ebb, and he has acquiesced.
I am very grateful to him and will not do him any harm.'
'His sense of self,' repeated Dirk thoughtfully, 'is at a low ebb.'
'I suppose that is probably true,' said Richard quietly to Dirk. 'He seemed very depressed last night. The one thing that was important to him had been taken away because he, well, he wasn't really very good at it. Although he's proud I expect he was probably quite receptive to the idea of actually being wanted for something.'
'Hmmm,' said Dirk, and said it again. He said it a third time with feeling. Then he whirled round and barked at the figure on the stool.
'Michael Wenton-Weakes!'
Michael's head jolted back and he blinked.
'Yes?' he said, in his normal lugubrious voice. His eyes followed Dirk as he moved.
'You can hear me,' said Dirk, 'and you can answer for yourself?'
'Oh, yes,' said Michael, 'most certainly I can.'
'This… being, this spirit. You know he is in you? You accept his presence? You are a willing party to what he wishes to do?'
'That is correct. I was much moved by his account of himself, and am very willing to help him. In fact I think it is right for me to do so.'
'All right,' said Dirk with a snap of his fingers, 'you can go.'
Michael's head slumped forward suddenly, and then after a second or so it slowly rose again, as if being pumped up from inside like a tyre.
The ghost was back in possession.
Dirk took hold of a chair, spun it round and sat astride it facing the ghost in Michael, peering intently into its eyes.
'Again,' he said, 'tell me again. A quick snap account.'
Michael's body tensed slightly. It reached out to Dirk's arm.
'Don't - touch me!' snapped Dirk. 'Just tell me the facts. The first time you try and make me feel sorry for you I'll poke you in the eye. Or at least, the one you've borrowed. So leave out all the stuff that sounded like… er -'
'Coleridge,' said Richard suddenly, 'it sounded exactly like Coleridge. It was like 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Well bits of it were.'
Dirk frowned. 'Coleridge?' he said.
'I tried to tell him my story,' admitted the ghost, 'I -'
'Sorry,' said Dirk, 'you'll have to excuse me - I've never crossexamined a four-billion-year-old ghost before. Are we talking Samuel Taylor here? Are you saying you told your story to Samuel Taylor Coleridge?'
'I was able to enter his mind at… certain times. When he was in an impressionable state.'
'You mean when he was on laudanum?' said Richard.
'That is correct. He was more relaxed then.'
'I'll say,' snorted Reg, 'I sometimes encountered him when he was quite astoundingly relaxed. Look, I'll make some coffee.'
He disappeared into the kitchen, where he could be heard laughing to himself.
'It's another world,' muttered Richard to himself, sitting down and shaking his head.
'But unfortunately when he was fully in possession of himself I, so to speak, was not,' said the ghost, 'and so that failed. And what he wrote was very garbled.'
'Discuss,' said Richard, to himself, raising his eyebrows.
'Professor,' called out Dirk, 'this may sound absurd. Did -Coleridge ever try to… er… use your time machine? Feel free to discuss the question in any way which appeals to you.'
'Well, do you know,' said Reg, looking round the door, 'he did come in prying around on one occasion, but I think he was in a great deal too relaxed a state to do anything.'
'I see,' said Dirk. 'But why,' he added turning back to the strange figure of Michael slumped on its stool, 'why has it taken you so long to find someone?'
'For long, long periods I am very weak, almost totally non-existent, and unable to influence anything at all. And then, of course, before that time there was no time machine here, and… no hope for me at all -'
'Perhaps ghosts exist like wave patterns,' suggested Richard, 'like interference patterns between the actual with the possible. There would be irregular peaks and troughs, like in a musical waveform.'
The ghost snapped Michael's eyes around to Richard.
'You…' he said, 'you wrote that article…'
'Er, yes -'
'It moved me very greatly,' said the ghost, with a sudden remorseful longing in his voice which seemed to catch itself almost as much by surprise as it did its listeners.
'Oh. I see,' said Richard, 'Well, thank you. You didn't like it so much last time you mentioned it. Well, I know that wasn't you as such - -'
Richard sat back frowning to himself.
'So,' said Dirk, 'to return to the beginning -'
The ghost gathered Michael's breath for him and started again. 'We were on a ship -' it said.
'A spaceship.'
'Yes. Out from Salaxala, a world in… well, very far from here. A violent and troubled place. We - a party of some nine dozen of us -set out, as people frequently did, to find a new world for ourselves.
All the planets in this system were completely unsuitable for our purpose, but we stopped on this world to replenish some necessary mineral supplies.
'Unfortunately our landing ship was damaged on its way into the atmosphere. Damaged quite badly, but still quite reparable.
'I was the engineer on board and it fell to me to supervise the task of repairing the ship and preparing it to return to our main ship. Now, in order to understand what happened next you must know something of the nature of a highly-automated society. There is no task that cannot be done more easily with the aid of advanced computerisation. And there were some very specific problems associated with a trip with an aim such as ours -'
'Which was?' said Dirk sharply.
The ghost in Michael blinked as if the answer was obvious.
'Well, to find a new and better world on which we could all live in freedom, peace and harmony forever, of course,' he said.
Dirk raised his eyebrows.
'Oh, that,' he said. 'You'd thought this all out carefully, I assume.'
'We'd had it thought out for us. We had with us some very specialised devices for helping us to continue to believe in the purpose of the trip even when things got difficult. They generally worked very well, but I think we probably came to rely on them too much.'
'What on earth were they?' said Dirk.
'It's probably hard for you to understand how reassuring they were.
And that was why I made my fatal mistake. When I wanted to know whether or not it was safe to take off, I didn't want to know that it might /not/ be safe. I just wanted to be reassured that it /was/. So instead of checking it myself, you see, I sent out one of the Electric Monks.'
