Miners in the Sky (14 page)

Nike spoke with difficulty.

“But—you’ve known this all along!”

“Would you have trusted me for an instant if I had admitted it? I’d have seemed like any ordinary scoundrel trying to get a rich wife. But for Haney—I didn’t know your brother was dead when I didn’t kill Haney! I didn’t know they’d been trying to kill you, back on Horus! But I did know Haney wasn’t the man to take you away from Outlook!”

He paced back and forth. Then he stopped and listened. The ceiling loudspeaker gave out rustlings and cracklings from the sun and the gas-giant Thothmes. But there was no longer any whine of donkeyship drives. They were too far away, now, to be picked up even by a lifeboat communicator.

“Do you think—”

“How’d I know?” asked Dunne irritably. “Smithers may have dodged to safety somehow, or he may not, I don’t know! It’s even conceivable that he tried to make Haney abandon the chase by telling him where we were—where we are!”

“What are we going to do?”

“Various things that ought to be stupid,” said Dunne. “We understand each other now, I think. It isn’t going to be easy to get out of the fix we’re in. I’ll probably have to do some things you won’t admire. I’m going to ask you to bear with me. We’re in a tight spot. Your brother knew he should kill Haney! Where there’s no law, such things sometimes have to be done! But he wouldn’t be a scoundrel like Haney, and Haney killed him, Now he’ll try to kill you. He has tried!” Then Dunne said coldly, “I’m not going to take on your brother’s handicap!”

Nike said, “You haven’t acted like a scoundrel toward me!”

Dunne shrugged.

All the way back in the First System—where ancient Earth circled the first yellow sun known to men—somebody invented a new device. It crushed deep minerals and separated abyssal crystals from the slurry. Diamonds were hard, but abyssal’ crystals cut them like butter; so grinding gears could be used that would destroy any other material whatsoever by turning it to mud, and the mud then filtered for crystals. It was an admirable device, but it didn’t fit on a donkeyship. It was too bulky. It wasn’t practical to take Ring minerals to it. Transportation cost too much. So it looked like the invention was futile.

On the planet the mills of the law also ground. They ground very slowly, but well. Sedate justices wore costumes dating far back, before the time of space-travel. They sat in solemn, formal ceremony. They heard the sworn testimony of men they had appointed to find out certain facts. They debated, using technical terms that had meaning only inside a courtroom. They made a formal decision which was phrased in a manner only intelligible to lawyers. But the decision became a final action on a financially important case.

It assigned divers sums and properties to Nike and her brother with the proviso that if during the consideration of the case one of them had died, the other was to receive the whole. If both had died, their heirs were to inherit. If they had no descendants then their collateral kindred should inherit in the same manner and degree as if there had been no such persons as Nike and her brother.

It was noted that one of the justices concurring in the decision remarked, while removing his judicial robe, that the decision practically offered a reward for murder, since neither Nike nor her brother were in court when the decision was reached. But there was a marked difference. It was that if anybody killed either of them on Horus, the law would hang that person if it caught him. On the Rings it wouldn’t because there was no law. The difference between Horus and the Rings of Thothmes was essentially that on Horus there was some danger attached to killings, while in the Rings the danger was that one might be killed. The distinction though, was one of theory only.

Dunne let the lifeboat drift across Cassini’s Division between the outermost and next inward of the Rings of Thothmes. The supply of oxygen remained adequate. Stored as water instead of gas under pressure, a lifeboat carried oxygen for all the passengers it was designed to carry—many more than Nike and Dunne. There was food for as many people. But there was nothing to do. Clocks told the time and mechanically separated one day from another, and each night from each day. There was no external distinction, but it is necessary for humans to comply with arbitrary intervals of activity and repose. People everywhere in the galaxy find it necessary to live by twenty-four-hour cycles because they are built that way.

Two such cycles passed before Dunne prepared to turn on the drive again, and the radar. The speaker in the ceiling had been left turned on throughout. It had reported nothing but outside radiation, whisperings from the sun, and cracklings from Thothmes. Once, during the second day, there’d been a distant “
tweet… tweet… tweet…
” But that was all. Dunne didn’t change the schedule he’d determined on. Some two hours or so later he turned on the drive and the entire atmosphere in the lifeboat seemed to change.

There was still nothing to be seen in the viewports, because they were deep in the second Ring, and that was as dense as the outermost. But the radar showed objects in the mist of this ring as in the other. The drive whined and whined exactly like a donkeyship. The quality of the sound, of course, was decided by the size of the crystal used in the drive. Dunne felt himself feeling more like a man and less like a fugitive. The idea of hiding from Haney’s machine gun and hence from Haney was excessively irritating. But with the boat’s drive in action he felt that he was engaged in outwitting Haney rather than in hiding from him.

The new sound of the drive, though, had one consequence he didn’t like. It no longer sounded like a lifeboat; but there was only the power of a donkeyship available, and the lifeboat was larger. So the acceleration of the lifeboat was diminished. In a straightaway chase, Haney could overtake it. And if he did overtake the spaceboat, he had a machine gun and bazooka-shells against the lifeboat’s bazooka alone. So a fight with Haney was to be avoided, if only for Nike’s sake.

She joined him as he made calculations from what the radar told him.

“Queer!” he told her. “We’re near enough to Thothmes to have just the orbital velocity of the rocks around us. I’ve done a lot of worrying about collisions that wasn’t necessary!”

He had. Even with only one sizable Ring-fragment in two cubic miles, there was always some chance of smashing into , solidity in Thothmes’ Rings. At any fraction of any second they could have hit an object from the size of a teaspoon to that of a mountain tumbling through the sky. But with the same speed and course, such a thing was unthinkable.

“I suspect,” said Nike, “that you’ve been keeping other worries to yourself, too.”

“Only one,” he told her.

“What’s that?”

He didn’t answer. She frowned a little, watching his expression. She looked at him often, nowadays. She was learning the meaning of his every look and gesture.

“Go on!”

“We have to get to the pickup ship if you’re to get back to Horus.”

“Where,” said Nike, “I’ll be in the same danger I ran away from Horus and to the Rings to escape.”

“I’ll go with you this time,” he told her.

“Then you’ll take care of it,” said Nike. “You’ve taken care of everything else.”

“Not too well, and this is different,” he told her with some grimness. “If Haney knows exactly where we’re going to be, he can go there and wait for us.”

She considered. “Well?”

Dunne spread out his hands.

“He knows when the pickup ship will be coming and when it will leave. He knows we’ve got to be there before it goes away again. If he gets there first, he can use bazooka-shells and his machine gun on us when we turn up. And since there’s no law in the Rings, it won’t be anybody’s business either to stop him or pay him off for it.”

Nike said confidently, “I think you’ll manage!”

“How?”

“To use one of your favourite expressions,” Nike told him, “I don’t know. But I think you’ll do all right.” Then she pointed to the radar screen. “What’s that?”

There was a peculiarly involuted blip off to the left. For its distance from the center of the screen, it looked remarkably large. Dunne swung the lifeboat.

“We’ve time to look at it,” he said in a dry voice. “I wouldn’t mind an extra crystal or two. It would be convenient to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain, just now.”

She frowned.

The curving nature of the radar indication became more marked as the blip moved nearer and nearer to the middle of the screen, and therefore to. the position of the lifeboat.

“It’s very big,” said Nike.

He nodded. He cut the drive. The lifeboat floated on. It seemed very quiet, until the air-freshener cut in and began to whirr. A shadow appeared in the haze ahead. It deepened. It expanded. It filled nearly half the cosmos. Then they saw what was behind the mist. It was a Ring-fragment, but like no other Dunne had ever seen. It was more than a mile in extent. Great globular masses protruded from a central core. There were sharp projections scores of yards in length. There were depressions which amounted to the mouths of caves. There was a place where things like ropes stood out stiffly, and diminished to cords, to threads, and the threads to hair-like fibers of stone. It looked as if something molten and adhesive had been torn away and left these threads behind as it wrenched free from the greater mass.

They regarded it in silence.

Then Nike said, “There are caves!”

“Yes…”

Then Dunne said, “It was a volcano, or part of one. When the moon it was part of broke up, it broke up too. The gas that was dissolved in the melted rock expanded. It’s not unlike pumice.” Then he added, “It’s not the Big Rock Candy Mountain!”

He swung the lifeboat away. He set a course with some care.

“You take a watch now,” he said briefly. “All you have to do is dodge anything as big as that rock. And keep heading this way. We ought to be far enough from Haney, now, not to worry about him. But if you see anything moving, especially toward us—”

Nike said suddenly, “Will you teach me how to use a bazooka? If we need to fight Haney, I could fight with you! I won’t be afraid!”

He put his hand warmly and approvingly on her shoulder. Then he took it quickly away.

“Right,” he said gruffly. “Good idea! I’ll teach you after this watch.”

He went back to the main cabin. He settled himself to rest. He seemed to have some trouble getting to sleep.

Nike, in the control room, stood quite still with a queer expression on her face. She put her own hand where Dunne’s had rested on her shoulder. She didn’t look uneasy. In fact, she looked oddly pleased.

A long time later she looked out into the main cabin. Dunne was asleep. Nike smiled warmly to herself. But then she turned back to the radar screen. She watched it faithfully.

The Rings of Thothmes floated in space. They were nearly two hundred thousand miles in diameter, but no more than four hundred miles thick. There were markings on the planet around which they floated, markings that could be seen even by the telescopes’ on Horus. Their positions changed. They were not solid objects. They were storm systems. The planet revolved swiftly on its axis, so swiftly that it was not really a ball; it was noticeably flattened at its poles. The diameter across its equator was a fifth greater than its diameter from pole to pole. Nobody knew the size of its actual solid mass, of course. There were many who denied that there was solidity at all. Taking its cloud surface as its size, the density of Thothmes was less than that of water. But some insisted that deep down there were rocks and metals and possibly even rills. Perhaps a planet the size of Horus was enclosed in a gas ball thousands of miles deep. Almost anything could exist under such a cloud cover which occasionally changed its appearance but never broke to show what was beneath it. But if such a cloud cover swirled to make markings that sometimes lasted for weeks, there must be storms of unimaginable violence below. And those who insisted that there was nothing solid there, unless gas-ice or the like, found themselves agreeing on one point only with those who imagined a miniature world that never saw the sun. The agreement was that there couldn’t be any gooks. From one standpoint, the elements necessary for life couldn’t exist on Thothmes. From the other, nothing could live in such weather.

On the planet Horus there was a mild flurry of publicity about Nike and her brother. The planet’s highest court had ruled that the money held for Joe Griffiths—who had found the Big Rock Candy Mountain—should be turned over to the two of them as his heirs. Both of them were in the Rings at the time. There were news specials about them, but most of the interest was in the fact that there was a Big Rock Candy Mountain, and that an enormous fortune had been taken from it by one Joe Griffiths, who thereupon vanished from the sight of men. One of the newscasters pointed out that the costs of all the legal inquiries had been paid from the fortune itself. It was no longer fabulous. The lawyers involved had received more money from it than would now be left for the brother and sister. They’d get only the remnant. But still it was a matter of some interest. A pickup ship on the way to the Rings picked up the news item.

And somewhere in the Rings there was a donkeyship in which agitation was continuous. This donkeyship contained Smithers. He was terrified. He’d believed in gooks. He’d had to believe in them because he couldn’t believe in anything else that would account for the death of his partner, years ago. But now he’d come to realize that gooks weren’t absolutely necessary to explain it. He himself had very narrowly escaped being killed by Haney these past few days.

Smithers was desperate. There was no law. There was nobody to whom he could appeal for justice. He debated anxiously with himself. He argued vociferously with nobody but himself to listen. In the end he came distractedly to the conclusion that he must arouse public opinion in the Rings. If enough Ring-miners knew of Haney’s murders, Haney would have to stop.

So Smithers set out fearfully to rouse public opinion.

Presently Dunne and Nike, on their way to a necessary but highly perilous rendezvous with the next pickup ship, presently came to the Cassini Division again. Dunne cut off all apparatus and listened exhaustively before he ventured out. Then, a quarter of the way across stars blinked at him. They were occulted by something gigantic, of which his radar gave cryptic information.