Miners in the Sky (6 page)

Only a short time after leaving Outlook, though, was needed to sort out trailing donkeyships from merely floating Ring-rocks. The rocks were left behind as the lifeboat drove on. The other space-craft kept pace with it.

The atmosphere in the lifeboat was peculiar. Dunne was bitterly angry, mostly with himself. If he’d simply said that Keyes was dead, nobody would have raised any question at all. But he’d let other space-miners suspect that he and Keyes had made a very considerable discovery. They immediately interpreted this to mean the Big Rock Candy Mountain. There was some substance to the legends about that fabulous lost mine in the sky. But it didn’t happen to have anything to do with what Dunne and Keyes had found.

The accompanying donkeyships followed happily. Their occupants told each other about Joe Griffiths. He’d brought to Outlook more crystals than all other space-miners had found in years. He’d gone back and come out again with an additional incredible treasure. He boasted that there was a hundred or a thousand times as much more waiting to be brought in. And then he had vanished on his third trip to what he called a mountain in the sky, the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

It wasn’t likely that he’d been killed by another miner, because nobody else made any spectacular findings afterward. Some believed he’d fallen a victim to gooks, but there was no very convincing evidence that things like gooks existed. There were occasional noises, picked up here and there, for which there was no explanation; but they didn’t have to have gooks as their cause. They might just possibly be caused by something else.

Dunne kept the keenest of watches on the radar screen of the lifeboat. He pointed out to Nike that this blip represented a natural Ring-fragment, because it moved at the proper orbital speed for an object this far from Thothmes. On the other hand, this indication had to be a donkeyship because it kept pace with the lifeboat. And that blip was a donkeyship.

“Are we headed for where my brother is?” asked Nike uneasily.

Dunne shook his head. “Not yet. We have to get rid of this mob of donkeyship trailers first.”

She hesitated for a long time. Then she said, “You won’t let him run out of air to breathe if you can’t get rid of them?”

“If I don’t get rid of them,” said Dunne dourly, “all three of us are likely to die! Why do all of us carry weapons all the time? Why are men with crystals to be sent to Horus only allowed on board singly until everyone is due to lose by a pirating of the ship? And even then, why do they see only one or two of the crew, who’re waiting with ready weapons in case there’s an attempt of that sort?”

Her expression was distinctly uneasy.

“Why?”

“Because,” said Dunne acidly, “we’re a pack of outlaws. We’re a pack of scoundrels. Cutthroats! There’s no law here. There can’t be! Ships disappear. Sometimes they’re found again—looted. Somebody’s killed the missing men for the crystals they’ve found, or for a rock they were working. Who? Nobody knows. Nobody cares! I shot my way through one ambush on the way to Outlook. It’s quite possible that somebody else didn’t, but the crystals they carried have been taken to Horus to be put to somebody else’s credit by the Abyssal Minerals Commission!”

She looked incredulous.

“We’re a hard crew here,” Dunne told her. “It’s said that the death rate in the Rings is thirty per cent a year. Some of that is accident, but a lot of it is murder! If we got to Keyes’ and my rock with half the Rings trailing us, would the extra visitors go politely away because we saw it first? The devil they would! In the Rings, finders are keepers—if they can keep what they find. If I get you to your brother, he and I will have to decide whether or not to abandon the rock we’ve been working—for your safety. If you’re there, and somebody came along, we’d have to fight them because they’d want to keep it secret too—but they’d be the secret-keepers.”

She stared at him. Then she said, uncertainly, “It’s—hard to imagine.”

“With an average life of three years in the Rings,” he said shortly, “a man has to get rich quick or he won’t. So everybody’s in a devil of a hurry to get rich. And they’ll take short-cuts when they can; and sometimes murder is a fast short-cut!”

This was in the tiny control room of the lifeboat. The drive-sound was a moaning, humming noise, quite different from that made by the drive of a donkeyship. From time to time there was a stirring of air all through the boat; then the air-freshener was at work removing carbon dioxide and odors and excess moisture from the air. Once, during the past few hours, a blip on the radar screen had seemed to drift closer to the center. Dunne headed the lifeboat off to one side. Immediately other radar blips shifted position. The one that had moved first went back to its original position. So did the others. They wanted to follow the lifeboat to its destination. But there was one donkeyship that didn’t want Dunne to reach any destination at all.

Dunne hadn’t pointed that out to Nike. The blowing-up of his donkeyship wouldn’t have told anyone where their rock was. So when Dunne’s ship was destroyed, the purpose wasn’t to find where he’d found his reputed treasure. It was to keep him from going to it. And anybody who wanted him kept away from a certain place, must know where that place happened to be.

Which meant that somebody appeared to know where Keyes was. If it were true, Keyes might already be dead. The destruction of Dunne’s ship might simply have been intended to keep him away until the current possessors of the Rock had finished cleaning up the gray matrix and the crystals.

It didn’t have to be so tragic. Keyes had become a good man in space, in the six months he’d been Dunne’s partner. He should have been able to take care of himself. He might be perfectly all right. But on the other hand, he might not.

Dunne wasn’t going to suggest disaster to Nike, but he couldn’t help thinking about it. The worst of it was Nike’s presence. He owed it to Keyes to make sure whether he was all right. Inevitably, she shared any danger that came. If Keyes were dead, all the dangers they faced were futile. But there was no possible place to put Nike for safety while Dunne went about such matters as his self-respect demanded that he do.

The lifeboat went on and on and on. It was trailed by donkeyships hidden from view by glowing mist, but unerringly pointed out by radar. Nike prepared food for the two of them and brought a plate to Dunne in the small control room.

“Are we nearly there?” she asked hopefully.

“We’re nearing where something may happen,” admitted Dunne. “But we’re not even heading toward your brother.”

He lifted his eyes from the radar screen and stared out a viewport dead ahead. He seemed to strain his eyes. Then he said, “Look!”

He pointed. Nike followed his pointing and shook her head. “I don’t see anything.”

“There’s something bright out there. Remember that at Outlook you could see some faintly brighter dots when you looked straight away from the sun? They were stars. Outlook is close to the outer edge of the Rings. This is the side of them. It’s the same thing. We’ll see stars presently.”

She didn’t understand. He tried to make it clearer. The lifeboat went on and on. Presently, dead ahead, there was a pinpoint in the haze which was brighter than the haze itself. Then there were two. Three. Half a dozen.

“We’ll be out of the Rings in minutes,” said Dunne.

He was right. Suddenly the ever-present golden fog seemed to fade. The fog ahead became more tenuous, and there were fixed bright spots. They were stars. And the mist thinned again, and more and more stars showed; and then within the quarter of an hour the haze vanished everywhere except behind them. They saw myriads of stars, against the blackness of space. They saw the Milky Way. They saw red stars and blue stars and green ones. There were yellow stars and pink, and there were areas in the sky where multitudinous bright specks of light seemed to cluster, and there were other places where stars were blotted out by who-knew-what in the heavens.

They looked at the cosmos from clear space. But they seemed to be rising from a vast plain of mist. It spread out for thousands and thousands of miles. The total diameter of the Rings was about two hundred thousand miles; and all of them, seen from the side, looked perfectly flat and even. But much of the center was occupied by the planet Thothmes, only sixty or seventy thousand miles away. They saw it. This is one of the most magnificent spectacles men have yet found in the Galaxy.

But Nike gasped. Nowhere but near a ringed planet could such a sight be seen. The curvature of any conceivable world set a limit to possible flatness. But the Rings of Thothmes were not limited. They were no more than four hundred miles thick, but they spread out to unthinkable remoteness. The two in the lifeboat saw the Rings as not even the pickup ships had occasion to see them. They were seen as objects; but no other object could ever seem so huge. They looked solid. They appeared to fill half the universe. It seemed that all the minute and glittering specks which were the stars gazed at Thothmes’ rings in perpetual astonishment.

Nike stared and stared. Then Dunne grimly got into a space-suit.

Nike said, “What—”

“You can’t aim a bazooka by radar,” he told her, pulling the space-suit up past his chest. “You have to see what you’re aiming at. I’m going to discourage some of our followers.”

She looked at once alarmed and bewildered.

“You mean—you’re going to fight them?”

“It won’t be a fight,” he assured her. “Unless with one of them only. All but that one are following us to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If they shot at us and hit us, they’d spoil their own fair dream. So they can’t afford to shoot. Only one of them knows where we’re actually trying to get to, the place where your brother’s waiting for us. So I can drive the others off. They’ll hope to pick up our trail again presently. And the one that wants to get us—maybe I’ll get!”

He zipped the throat enclosure of his space-suit and picked up the space-helmet that went with it.

“I’m taking a chance,” he added, “with your life as well as mine. And your brother’s. I’ll be careful!”

He filled the belt-pockets with tiny bazooka shells. They were normal equipment for Ring-rock mining, breaking up Ring-fragments so their interior parts could be gotten at. But they were very handy weapons, too. Accuracy was necessary for their use in mining. Their range was almost indefinite. Their rocket fuel was also their explosive charge. They were designed for a purpose where a small cannon could have been used, and they could be used like artillery in a fire-fight in space.

Dunne settled his helmet and sealed it with the customary half-turn. He moved toward the airlock’s inner door. He went into the lock and closed the door behind him.

Nike wrung her hands. There was nothing for her to do, It was silent for a second or so; then the lock-pump whirred, exhausting the air in the airlock. Nike heard it stop, and the clatter of the undogging of the outer door. Then silence again.

It was an appalling silence. When the air-freshener suddenly started its cycle of air-cleansing, she jumped. Then she went into the control room and peered out a viewport.

She saw the stars by hundreds of millions. She saw a bright spot, so bright that it seemed to have a disk. It was the planet Horus of this same solar system, a mere few millions of miles away. She saw the Milky Way coming out beyond the edge of the Rings, and she saw the Rings as the most preposterous of objects. They were too big to be possible.

But she pressed her face against the viewport to look astern. She saw nothing but the metal plating of the lifeboat. She felt a convulsive flash of fear. Her teeth chattered. Perhaps Dunne had stumbled and tumbled out to nothingness when he opened the outer airlock door! Then he’d be left to die in pure emptiness. She couldn’t locate him; and even if she did, she couldn’t handle the ship to try to pick him up again. She’d be alone in the lifeboat to wait until the air gave out. Designed as a life-boat to carry many people, that might be years. She’d go mad from solitude and despair…

She moved to another viewport and gasped in relief. She saw Dunne. The airlock door was open. He stood in it. She saw the clips which held him safe against just what she’d irrationally feared.

He did not look human. He seemed to be a thing of metal, monstrously shaped to resemble a man but in no detail to be like one. He had a miner’s bazooka in his metal-gauntleted hands. Matter-of-factly, he put shells in its magazine. He raised it. He plugged in the cord which would relay the telescopic sight image to a minute screen inside his helmet.

He seemed to aim for a long time. Then there was a flare. A bazooka shell small enough to be held in the hand went away like a flash of lightning. Another. Another. Another. He loaded the bazooka for more shots.

He raised it again and seemed to search for a second target. Again the four flashes as four more bazooka shells went away.

He found a third target. More bazooka-shells flashed toward the distant stars. Yet again, and again, and again.

He closed the outer lock-door. The inner door opened. He came in and closed it behind him. He took off his helmet. Nike gulped. She was deathly pale.

“I should give you some lessons,” said Dunne, “in handling this ship.”

He went into the control room and abruptly swung the ship end for end. He pointed it back toward the shining, misty, unbelievably enormous surface of the Rings.

“We’re still going away,” he observed, “and we’ve got a good velocity toward nowhere. But it’ll be some time before the other ships realize that we’re heading back into the Rings. Seeing the stars will confuse them. We should gain a good bit on them.”

Then he pointed out the viewport. There was an infinitesimal thread of white vapor coming toward the lifeboat. The donkeyship that had fired it was too far away to be seen with the naked eye. A second and third and fourth thread of vapor sped toward them. Dunne was unmoved.

“They didn’t like it that I shot at them,” he said matter-of-factly, “but the men in the other ships won’t like it that Haney returned my fire. That tells me which ship is his. The other ships want to trail me, not kill me.”