The ghost of Lancelot Biggs

BY NELSON S. BOND
The shade of that gangling genius of the spaceways—Lancelot Biggs—comes back to haunt his old ship mates.
Folks say I'm hard-boiled; well, maybe so. My mama told me a long time ago—when I was a brat in three-cornered britches—that if you keep your upper lip rigid and a steely glint in the old optics and le craque sage dripping from your tongue, not many people will be hopping around, pushing chips off your shoulder and daring you to take off your glasses.
And mama was right. So I'm commonly known as that smart-Aleck Bert Donovan, and folks think I'm hard-boiled—but I didn't feel like any ten-minute egg the afternoon Diane Hanson, her pop, Cap Hanson, skipper of the freighter Saturn , and I came home from Lancelot Biggs' funeral.
Lancelot Biggs was dead. Or missing for more than seven weeks in the gray nothingness of negative space—which is the same thing. He had hurled himself into this desolate matrix universe deliberately, sacrificing himself to save the lives of his friends and shipmates when we were all doomed to die horribly by crashing headlong into massive Jupiter.
Lancelot Biggs was dead; or else missing in the gray nothingness of negative space....
Since the life-skiff in which he had entombed himself was tiny, poorly provisioned and inadequately supplied with water, there was no longer the faintest glimmer of hope that he might, somehow and miraculously, have survived. Even had he found some way of escaping the minus boundaries of the weird nega-universe into which he had fled. Therefore, today he had been formally buried . In spirit, so to speak, or by remote control. The way the old boys in the 19th Century used to bury lost mariners. With a long cortege and a tall stone, engraven with the words: Here lies So-and-so—Lost at Sea.
Only this being the enlightened 22nd Century and we being a bit more reasonable, Biggs' marker read: In Memory of Lt. Lancelot Biggs—Lost in Space.
So we were a sad looking trio when we came back to the apartment which Lanse Biggs and I used to share near Long Island Spaceport. Cap Hanson had lost the finest First Mate to ever tread the ramps of a space-lugger, I had lost the best friend a man had ever had, and Diane—well, her loss was the greatest. She had lost the man she loved, the lean, gangling man to whom, had not fate's grim hand intervened, she would now be married.