Miners in the Sky (11 page)

And a long, long distance away, inside the spaceboat, Nike gathered herself up where the shock of explosive acceleration had flung her. She began to crawl uphill toward the controls again. Outside, Dunne’s lifeline stretched itself to its limit from the eyebolt. He dangled, moving feebly at its end.

There was no reaction to this event anywhere else. After all, the Rings were some four hundred miles thick, and they formed a shining golden disk nearly two hundred thousand miles across, though its center was largely occupied by the gas-giant world of Thothmes. In nearly two hundred million cubic miles of glowing haze, what happened to a single space-ship’s lifeboat was not apt to appear important. Yet it seemed that a somehow agitated “
tweet… tweet… tweet!
” sped out from somewhere nearby, and Smithers’ voice called dolefully, “Dunne! Dunne! What’s happened t’you?”

And there was no answer.

Nike crept to the lifeboat’s controls inch by inch. Struggling against the intolerable acceleration, she got within reach of the controls. She reached up and pulled a switch Dunne had shown her.

Instantly the drive ceased. The acceleration stopped. And then it seemed that the spaceboat, in ceasing to drive, began to fall and fall, toward infinity.

Outside, Dunne struggled feebly with the lifeline that had dragged him in the boat’s wake. The elastic rope shortened itself. It drew him back. It gave him a certain momentum relative to the spaceboat. He took up the slack and pulled harder. If there had been air outside, of course, he would have thrashed wildly about until the lifeline parted or he crashed against the boat’s steel hull. But here was only glowing vacuum. There was no resistance to his motion.

He caught the airlock doorframe. He got in. His bazooka bumped. He pulled it into the lock. He dragged the outer lock-door shut—and saw a hole in it.

It was a round hole not quite half an inch in diameter. But it meant that the airlock could never be filled with air so the inner door would come unlocked. He was locked out. By every rule known to spacemen it should not be possible to open the inner door to what was effectively empty space.

In a species of peevish fury and fretting horror, he struck the door handle.

And the door opened.

He stepped inside, unbelieving. The door shut behind him. He was suddenly and insanely aware that his suit ballooned and billowed at its flexible joinings. This was the way the suit was in empty space. The inside of the lifeboat was airless. It was empty space.

He saw movement. Nike had turned incredulously from where she’d cut off the drive. She gave a little cry and raised her hand to her space-helmet. She’d sealed it on Dunne’s command just before the attack from nowhere. Dunne shouted and leaped. He caught and held her hand from opening her helmet to the emptiness which had invaded and conquered the lifeboat.

“Wait! ” he snapped. “Look at your suit!”

He held her. He pointed to the proofs that there was no air, that the inside of the lifeboat was as empty of anything to breathe as space between a pair of stars. He cut off her helmet-phone. He cut off his own. Then he touched the metal of his helmet to the metal of hers.

“Keep your helmet shut!” he commanded. “We’ve lost our air! The hull’s punctured: The air’s all gone!”

The sound went by solid conduction from helmet to helmet. She stared at him. He said, more urgently still, “Don’t talk by space-phone! Maybe we can patch up!”

He released her. A space-suit, normally, would have oxygen in its tanks for two hours of breathing. The ship had none, if it had leaked as the. evidence indicated. Dunne had seen one opening in the hull. It looked like the holes in the bubble in which Keyes had died.

“Let’s see how bad the leaking is!”

She didn’t hear him say that, but she saw him examine the hole in the. outer lock-door. Then he went looking for more. He found them. Nearly a dozen, in all—round holes that looked as if they’d been drilled, but with fringes of torn metal that said they’d been punched. Anyone of them would have bled the ship’s air to space. Suddenly he realized how they’d been made. Everyone had been made within the fraction of a second, while something flashed past and away from the spot where he’d been waiting with a bazooka!

But there was more, and equally bad. The drive had acted in a wholly unprecedented fashion. The spaceboat had attained and still possessed a velocity they could not guess at, in a direction they could not determine, and it would be distinctly unwise to try to use the drive before the cause of its misbehavior could be found out.

The question of air was most urgent. Dunne searched for the cause of the punched round holes. He found something on the cabin floor that had obviously made one of them. It was a slug of hard, pointed metal with a hollow in its unpointed end in which some substance had plainly burned.

He touched helmets with Nike again. Solid conduction carried his voice to her.

“I’ve found out what hit us!” he told her. “Queer! It’s an antique weapon everybody’s forgotten. It’s like a belt-weapon except it can shoot an indefinite number of times. It’s called a machine gun. It shoots missiles, called tracer bullets in the old days. We couldn’t have kept from losing our air. We couldn’t have gotten into space-suits in time to survive!”

Nike did not speak.

“And it’s an antique!” insisted Dunne. “It’s like being shot with a bow and arrow! Maybe Haney’ll try to track us down to be sure we’re dead. We’ve a terrific built-up speed, though. If I can patch the holes, we may make out yet. This isn’t a donkeyship! It’s a lifeboat!”

He moved away. The lights in the lifeboat continued to burn. He hunted briskly for the emergency tools a lifeboat would carry. He found them. There were absurd provisions against the improbable. There were not only tools but seeds-as if a space-ship could be wrecked and a lifeboat make ground on an uninhabited world equivalent to a desert island, with an appropriate atmosphere and a 801-type sun and a tolerable temperature-range, but lacking all edible plants!

He also found emergency sealing-putty which does not harden unless some part of a mass of it is touched to metallic iron, when it polymerizes swiftly to a solid that adheres to anything and becomes almost as hard as iron itself. He took it to the airlock. A round ball of putty pushed into the bullet hole sealed it. He tapped it with the knuckles of his space-gauntlet. The bullet hole was patched. He went to the others, in turn. He had to tear away metal to get at some of the holes in the hull, but he worked swiftly.

He was absorbed in his task, but Nike could not understand it. She saw their situation clearly: When the oxygen in their suit-tanks was gone, they would die. She was alive now only because Dunne had ordered her to seal her helmet before they were attacked. But they could breathe only as long as their space-suits permitted. If there were a place to which they could go—and there wasn’t—they wouldn’t have been able to breathe long enough to reach it. There was nothing imaginable to be done. They could use some few reserve tanks and stay alive a little longer. But why? It would only postpone the inevitable—death! Anybody can die, but there are things one wants to do first! One can hate the frustration of an early death without being afraid of it.

Dunne finished patching the last hole. He went briskly back to the storage spaces of the spaceboat. Nike looked at the gauge of her oxygen tanks.

She saw Dunne, absorbed again, making electrical connections of heavy blue cables to things she recognized as fuel cells. In them, space-fuel could be used to produce electric current directly. During the time Dunne had waited vainly for radar signs of visitors, he’d done such things as he was doing now. Then, Nike hadn’t asked what it was. Now there seemed no point in asking. Then, she’d tried to avoid speech with Dunne, which was folly. Now rebellious, it seemed folly not to.

He moved back from the electrical connections and came toward her. She looked at him in desperation. He touched their helmets together.

“This is a lifeboat,” he said exuberantly, “and not a donkeyship. Lucky, eh?”

She realized drearily that he wanted her to agree with him. She nodded, but could not trust herself to speak.

“We use a pound of oxygen a day apiece,” he said with something like zest. “Donkeyships use oxygen in tanks under pressure. It’s cheaper. But a lifeboat has to be designed for a lot of people. Water’s more expensive but more. practical. It costs more to get oxygen from water, counting the fuel to electrolyze it, but a gallon of water and the fuel to get the oxygen from it weighs a lot less than eight pounds of oxygen in a pressure tank!”

It took time for these comments to become relevant. Then Nike said incredulously, “You mean—you’re putting air back into the ship?”

“Not air,” he corrected. “Oxygen. The same stuff we’re breathing now in our space-suits. We breathe it at three pounds pressure because we’ve no nitrogen to dilute it with. At full pressure and undiluted it would make us drunk, anyhow!”

“But—”

“We use a pound a day apiece,” Dunne repeated. “This being a lifeboat, we can turn out twenty-five if we must. We’re all right for oxygen!”

Nike knew relief that seemed almost shameful. But she said with a dry throat, “And the engine? The drive?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Dunne. “I have to see about that now.”

He went away, nodding to give reassurance. Nike stared at him in an entirely new fashion. It is the instinct of a woman to look to a man in emergencies. She had depended on her brother. She hadn’t known that there was anybody else in whom she could feel the same confidence. Dunne had been a stranger; now, abruptly, he was a person who provided air when the spaceboat was drained of it. He was the person who’d gotten a lifeboat to go find her brother when his donkeyship was destroyed and there was no other way. He’d even been prepared for the attack.

She watched as he uncovered the fuse-box which distributed electricity to various places in the spaceboat. There was a take-off for light, for the air-freshener, for heat and instrumentation and refuse-cycling. And of course, for the drive.

There was a neat round depression in the box cover. A bullet had penetrated the spaceboat’s hull and made a deep dent in the distributor. Then it had fallen to the floor.

Dunne took off the cover. The intricate wiring was pushed about. There was a short-circuit.

He corrected the short. He made an abortive movement with his hand, as if to scratch his head reflectively. He put the distributor box together. He hauled up a floor plate and inspected the drive under the floor. He shook his head. Gingerly, with his movements clumsy because of the gauntlets he must wear, he brought the thrust-blocks up to view. The copper blocks were almost red-hot.

Squatting, over them, he stared at what he saw. Nike went to look. She felt not only astonishment but something much more important and basic.

He spoke to her. Naturally, she couldn’t hear him. She touched her helmet to his.

“The current got shorted through the drive-crystal,” he told her, in a voice made tinny by the method of its passage to her. “Away over normal voltage—overloaded the crystal. It pushed like the devil, but it burned up in doing so. Look!”

He showed her the closely approaching copper blocks, with a single shred of greasy crystal in between.

“It’s ruined?” asked Nike.

“It’d have blown everything in minutes,” he said. “It was just burning out when you cut off the juice.”

He frowned down at the massive thrust-blocks, held apart by the most infinitesimal of single grains of the most precious mineral in the cosmos. A donkeyship needed a half-gram crystal to make its drive operate. A lifeboat needed something larger. A liner on an interplanetary run required a crystal or crystals costing more than its hull and interior and all its furnishings together. The almost-burned-out crystal between the spaceboat’s thrust-blocks was now no larger than a grain of sugar.

Nike drew back. He reached up and caught her hand. He tugged at it. She bent down again. Their helmets touched.

“Oxygen!” he said tinnily. “It’s my turn to remind you!”

He grinned at her and she was astounded. But she went obediently to the remaining suit-tanks and replaced the one whose gauge indicated a pressure close to zero.

Far away, a battered donkeyship started its drive and began to move away from the seventy-foot floating rock. Then it stopped. It returned. The whine of its drive, translated into ultra-high-frequency waves, spread out from the rock. It stopped again. The grizzled Smithers called cautiously on his communicator:

“Dunne! Dunne! What happened t’you, Dunne?”

There was no reply. In the control room of his donkeyship, Smithers muttered to himself. He turned off the transmitter.

“Haney shouldn’t ha’ done that!” he said indignantly to nobody at all. “Not to somebody had a woman with ’im. He lied t’me! Didn’t say a word about a lady in the Rings! All he said was he wanted t’know if anybody was there! Anybody’d—” His tone changed to shrewdness. “Figured I’d get killed if somebody was there…” Then he protested, “No harm seein’ if anybody was there! Anybody’d shoot anybody who found out they was workin’ something good—anybody but me! I coulda ’voided a fight! I ain’t got time to hunt crystals. Gooks is what I’m after. Why shouldn’t I get me some extra oxygen ’voidin’ a fight between men?”

The donkeyboat floated near the rock. Nothing happened, whether visibly nearby, or producing radio waves that would travel vast distances before they became too faint for a donkeyship’s communicator to pick them up.

“I tell y’,” said Smithers angrily to the walls of his ship, “that fella Haney’s a bad egg! Dunne found th’ Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ fellas tried to track him, so he didn’t go to it. But Haney figured he’d kill ’im because he’d rather nobody had it than not him! Yes, suh! Dunne’s stayin’ away from the Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ Haney’s tryin’ to kill him so if he don’t have the Mountain, Dunne won’t neither!”

There were flaws in his logic, but it satisfied Smithers. Now he spoke again, with a fine conviction of his own shrewdness: “But now Dunne’s gone off. He burned crystals in his drive to get speed nobody else can afford to get, because they ain’t got crystals to burn! Yes, suh!”