Miners in the Sky (4 page)

Smithers ignored the statement. He said firmly, “Remember what happened to Joe Griffiths.
He
found the Mountain! Everybody knows it. There’s millions an’ millions pilin’ up interest on Horus, waitin’ for the courts to find out who it belongs to. But what happened to him? The gooks got him, that’s what happened to him! Now you an’ Keyes, you found the Mountain, Keyes stayed on it to keep anybody else from bargin’ in. You go back to him without us fellas along to help fight off the gooks, an’ what’ll happen to you? The gooks!”

“We didn’t find the Big Rock Candy Mountain!” said Dunne.

“You better,” said Smithers ominously, “you better let us in on it. There’s plenty there for everybody, But you try to keep it all to yourself an’—pfft! You’re gone! There’s gooks watchin’ that Mountain! They know we lookin’ for it! They ain’t goin’ to let us have it if they can help themselves! That means you! You open up an’ talk, an’ you can lead two dozen men back to that there Mountain, an’ we can hold off any number 0’ gooks an’ clean up. You tool But try it by y’self an’ the gooks’ll get you sure! Certain! They’ll get you!”

“We haven’t found the Big Rock Candy Mountain!” said Dunne for the third time. “We simply haven’t found it!”

The grizzled Smithers said shrewdly, his eyes gleaming, “That wasn’t a ship’s officer that took you aside just now, was it? He didn’t take you off to try to get outa you where you found the Mountain? Huh? You just had ordinary luck, bringin’ in just enough crystals to keep you goin’ till another pickup ship comes by. Huh? That ship’s officer didn’t take anybody else off for a private talk about how much crystal they brought back! He did take you! I’m tellin’ you, there’s gooks sneakin’ around the Rings, an’ around the Big Rock Candy Mountain! You let us in with you; an’ we can fight em’ off an’ get rich besides. But you try to go back there by y’self— What’d that ship’s officer tell you? Didn’t he tell you the same thing?”

Dunne’s jaws clamped tightly. There was, perhaps, just one disclosure likely to make more trouble than belief in the Big Rock Candy Mountain. That one more menacing disclosure would be that there was a girl on the pickup ship. Nobody in the Rings had seen a girl since he’d been here. They’d been nearly hysterical simply because they were able to be out of their own ships for an hour or so while they bought supplies and oxygen. But if they saw a girl!

Smithers said warningly, “You better let us in on it! There’s the gooks!”

“We didn’t find the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” said Dunne, drearily, “and you can go to hell.”

Smithers, sputtering, went away. Later Dunne saw, him cornering other men. His idea was evidently to organize men who’d already resolved to track Dunne wherever he went after leaving the pickup ship.

Time passed. Smithers went from one to another of the men who’d come to Outlook in their donkeyships, He talked volubly. Each buttonholed man listened tolerantly, But, nobody took Smithers too seriously. Some men let him talk to them while they continued to stuff themselves at the nearly denuded tables. A few hunted for something to put into the formerly filled glasses. There were one or two clusterings of men who’d calmed down from their first exuberance and now talked (Dunne was sure) of the totally unprovable guess every man was only too ready to make: that Dunne and Keyes had found the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Presently a ship’s officer tapped a man on the shoulder. His ordered supplies were ready for him to take possession. He and his partner departed. Ordinarily they’d load up and get as far, as possible from Outlook before the next ship was supplied. That was to keep anybody from guessing where they mined a fragment floating in the Rings. Now, Dunne knew angrily, it wasn’t unlikely that they’d wait nearby to follow him when he departed. He began irritably to plan evasive tactics.

A second pair of donkeyship partners was tapped. They also seemed to leave. It was unlikely that they’d go off about their private affairs. They’d try to involve themselves in Dunne’s, It was pure silliness. Dunne had made a single unqualified statement, and instantly he was suspected of the success every other man had dreamed of! It was partly his fault. But Nike’s situation wasn’t! He wouldn’t take her into the Rings! He was desperately uneasy about Keyes, but he wouldn’t take Keyes’s sister into the Rings!

A loudspeaker barked: “Attention! Somebody’s moving about outside! If you want to check your ships, the lock’s ready!”

Instantly there was pandemonium, with men getting into space-suits faster than should have been possible. Dunne heard the grizzled Smithers cursing furiously: “It’s gooks! Them gooks! They come to stop us workin’ in the Rings!”

Dunne paid no attention to him. He was getting into his own suit. He was one of the first ten men to crowd into the big cargo-lock that would let all of them out at once.

The inner lock-door closed. The outer opened, with a vast rushing-away of air. The men in the lock dived out, and the urgency they felt was made clear. Every man used his emergency jet. They are normally reserved for ultimate emergencies when a man’s lifeline parts or something else occurs to make it necessary for him to propel himself in space.

They flew like birds across the spaceport, every man bound for his own ship.

Dunne heard the click of an electric detonator.

He saw his ship fly to bits with a momentary flash of monstrous intensity and violence.

The rotund little donkeyship split up into fragments, some of which disappeared with the velocity of rifle bullets. Pure emptiness was left where it had been. No debris. No fragments. Nothing. The gravitational pull of Outlook could only draw objects to it with an acceleration of inches per standard year. Any moving object touching Outlook bounced. Every scrap of the shattered ship that hit anything rebounded away, and all the fragments together amounted to no more than new fragments in new orbits in the Rings of Thothmes.

Dunne came to ground where his ship had been. His magnetic boot-soles clung to the metal. He could see where the explosion had taken’ place, because the mirror-bright metal had been slightly oxidized by the flame of the ship’s detonated fuel store.

He ground his teeth. He began to hunt doggedly for some evidence, some clue to who had bombed his ship and why. There was nothing to be found. Naturally!

The delivery of ordered supplies to donkeyship operators continued. At another place, where there was law, there would probably have been an investigation, and the taking of evidence, and maybe a conclusion about the guilt or innocence of someone or other. But here nobody had authority to investigate. Nobody had authority to question witnesses. Certainly nobody had authority to punish.

So everyday business resumed. The cargo-lock of the pickup ship opened, and two men came’ out towing their bundled supplies by a rope. Two men could move tons, here where nothing had any weight. With magnetic boot-soles clanking on the metal substance of Outlook, a donkeyship man hauled his purchases to a waiting ship. His partner would have opened the loading lock-door. The mass of floating stuff went inside. The door closed. The donkeyship went away.

Other business went on, only it wasn’t quite ordinary business. There was the firm, irrational conviction of the miners of the Rings that Dunne and Keyes had found great treasure. The reason for the guess was that Dunne had come to Outlook alone, and had let it be implied that Keyes stayed behind to guard their fabulous discovery. Which was correct, except that their discovery wasn’t fabulous. Rich, perhaps, but by no means unprecedented.

Again and again the pickup ship’s large lock opened, and a man or men brought out oxygen tanks and water-containers and food-stores and mining supplies and the like. They towed them, floating, to their ships. One went inside and a lock-door opened. The supplies went in. The ships went away. This sequence of happenings went on steadily. But the ships didn’t really go away—at any rate, not all of them. Somehow the destruction of Dunne’s donkeyship increased their belief that the Big Rock Candy Mountain had been found. Dunne must make a bargain with somebody to take him back to it. Those he didn’t bargain with would follow and make their own decisions. They lingered, tens or scores of miles from Outlook, hidden in the golden glowing mist. Because Dunne had to do something. He had to deal with someone. The others would combine—perhaps!—against whoever he made a deal with.

He’d already decided on the beginning of a course of action, but he went tramping about the place from which his ship had been blasted as if unable to believe in his disaster.

A donkeyship lifted off and went away into the all-concealing haze. Only one thing about it was certain. It wasn’t going far. And it wasn’t heading in the direction in which it had been searching for—or working—abyssal, crystal-containing matrix. Dunne tramped around the oxidation smear on the bright metal, apparently looking for evidence. Another ship took off. Another.

A voice from the pickup ship’s communicator, booming in the headphones of Dunne’s helmet.

“Calling Dunne! Calling Dunne! Come in, Dunne!”

“What is it?” growled Dunne.

“How’s your oxygen?” asked the ship curtly, “You’ve been out there a long time.”

Dunne checked his oxygen tank. In the vacuum of space a man doesn’t carry a tankful of air to breathe. He carries oxygen. He breathes oxygen at three pounds pressure instead of air at fourteen point seven, and he saves the weight of the useless four-fifths of nitrogen that ordinary air contains.

“I’m all right,” growled Dunne. “I’ll come in presently. I’m thinking, right now.”

The carrier-wave from the ship clicked off. A moment later it hummed again in his headphones. The voice boomed once more.

“Dunne?”

“What?”

“Miss Keyes asks if you’ll pay for a donkeyship team to go and pick up her brother, since you can’t do it with your ship destroyed, and he’ll die if nobody does. Will you pay?”

Dunne could have groaned. Now everybody knew there was a girl on the pickup ship.

“Tell her no,” he snapped. “I’ll take care of the situation!”

A donkeyship released its magnetic grapples and floated away. It put on power and vanished. More objects came out of the pickup ship. Wire-wound oxygen tanks. Foodstuffs. Mining equipment. Fuel. Reaction drills. Bazooka-shells to split a moon fragment with their shaped charges and so allow the inside to be examined.

A figure in a space-suit came out, towing the mass of stuff. The towing figure swaggered a little, even with magnetic soles to induce a plodding gait instead. Dunne noted it. It was Haney. Haney got his supplies to his ship. His partner took charge of stowing them. Haney himself swaggered to Dunne and ostentatiously turned off his space-phone. He grinned at Dunne through the helmet face-plate. He beckoned.

Dunne irritably accepted the signal. Ordinarily, speech in emptiness goes by space-phone, radiating microwaves from a tiny antenna. Such speech can be picked up for miles. Here there was no air to carry sound, but it was still possible to speak direct. As in a liquid ocean, helmets touched together conveyed sounds by solid conduction. The quality of the sound was not remarkable, but at least it would not be overheard.

The helmets clanked into contact.

“A bad business!” said Haney. “Do you know who did it, or why?”

“I can guess why,” said Dunne savagely.

“Somebody,” said Haney’s tinny, unctuous voice through the helmets’ contact, “somebody knows what you’ve found and where it is. Eh?”

Dunne was silent for long seconds. Then he said, “We didn’t find the Mountain.”

“Okay,” said Haney blandly. “Cut us in on what you did find, and we’ll block the scheme the others have made and ferry you to your rock. You and the girl and supplies. We’ll land you. We’ll set up a bubble. Then we’ll stop by and pick you up next pickup-ship time, you and the girl and Keyes.”

“Is this charity?” asked Dunne coldly.

“It’s a gamble,” said Haney. “We get half the crystals you find while we’re gone. Half.”

It was plausible. Had someone else made the offer, it might even be attractive. To take a man to and from his working—his mine—for half his take while there… It wasn’t bad under the circumstances. But Haney didn’t insist on the Mountain’s discovery, which might mean that he knew the facts. He might know what they’d found. And there was no assurance at all that he’d keep to such a bargain. Dunne knew better. There was no law in the Rings. There was nothing but his own self-respect to make a man keep a bargain when he could profit by breaking it.

And there was the girl Nike, She definitely shouldn’t go off in Haney’s donkeyship.

Dunne said, “No.”

He let it go at that. Haney grimaced inside his helmet. He moved away. His partner was already stowing the supplies purchased for their ship. Haney went to his partner and touched helmets with him, for conversation not to be picked up by the pickup ship or Dunne.

Haney went back to the pickup ship. He mounted the ship-ladder. His partner completed getting stores aboard.

Something made Dunne stare after Haney. Nike was desperate to find her brother. Some. unimaginable emergency had driven her to ask to go into. the Rings with Dunne, to find her brother and to keep from traveling back to Horus and then back out to Outlook again. She didn’t realize how dangerous such a thing would be. She’d never been where there was no law and order. She couldn’t imagine the risks a completely lawless environment implied. They were bad enough for a man. They’d be impossible for a girl. But she was desperate, or thought she was. She’d have risked trusting herself to Dunne. When he refused to take her, had she tried to make a bargain with Haney?

Dunne began to cross the spaceport above which the golden haze hovered perpetually. He saw the pickup ship’s personnel lock again. He noted that Haney’s stores were all aboard, and his partner was in the act of dogging the lock-door shut.

Haney came out of the pickup ship. Behind him there came another figure in a space-suit. Haney helped it down the ladder with exaggerated chivalry—but there was need of assistance, at that. The first time one uses magnetized shoes in no gravity, clumsiness is inevitable.