Miners in the Sky (8 page)

He felt a certain definite reluctance to do what he now must do. He hadn’t wanted Nike to think of any possible linkage between the blowing up of his donkeyship and what happened to Keyes, guarding the rock-fragment that was too valuable to be left unwatched. He’d thrust the suspicion away from his own mind as well as he could, but it was back.

The drive of the lifeboat began its moaning, humming sound. The boat surged ahead. He set the controls. He watched the radar screen, again working. He listened to the speaker over his head. Nike stood just behind him. He stood still, watching and listening, his hands unconsciously clenching and unclenching because he was very much afraid of what he was going to find out. He was fairly confident of his astrogation, but he didn’t like to think of what it
might
lead him to.

Presently, at the very utmost limit of the radar’s range, there was the beginning of an indication of something solid. Dunne swung the lifeboat in that exaggerated fashion needed for a change of course in space.

“Is that it?” asked Nike anxiously.

“Perhaps,” said Dunne.

His tone was unconsciously cold. The birdlike twittering he’d heard was unnatural. It was wrong. Somebody knew where Keyes was. That last, alone, could add up to disaster. Dunne smelled disaster. Something was wrong. Very wrong!

The lifeboat moved on, pointing on a course that seemed to have no connection with the direction of its motion. But the radar image began to take recognizable shape. There was still nothing to be seen out the viewports. That was merely pure golden haze. But the radar said that the lifeboat was moving toward something solid. Then it said toward something large. Then it said something near.

“It’s our rock, I think,” said Dunne quietly. He spoke into the communicator’s transmitter. “Keyes?”

There was no answer. He spoke again. Then he fell silent until the featureless haze ahead began to show a formless darkening at one particular spot. Then he said, very carefully, “I don’t like this, Nike. Watch, will you? I’m going to get into my space-suit.”

He went back. Nike, her heart in her throat, watched ahead while she heard Dunne getting into the suit which allowed him to work and move outside of the ship in emptiness. The last time, he’d stood in an airlock door and fired bazooka shells at donkeyships that trailed him. Now—

The dimness took shape. Nike said tensely, “We’re very close!”

Dunne came waddling into the control room, working himself swiftly into his space-suit, He reversed the lifeboat’s drive. The small space-vessel came to an almost complete stop only fifty yards or so from a mass of stony stuff many times the volume of the lifeboat. It was seventy feet high—“high” being the longest dimension of any object in space where there was no up or down. It was totally irregular in form. There were painted letters and numbers on it. Its mineral nature was obvious. The lifeboat drifted very, very slowly toward it.

“Aren’t you going to call again?” asked Nike anxiously.

“There are detectors,” said Dunne. “They should tell him we’re here.”

His voice was unnatural. This was wrong. It was very wrong. It was appalling.

The big, irregularly shaped lump of stone turned slowly in emptiness. There was a slash of gray along one side. It was that friable matrix material in which abyssal crystals were always found. The stony mass turned further. There was a bubble—a fifteen-foot dome of plastic, welded by its own nature to a hollow part of the stony surface. Inside it there were objects. A small-capacity air-freshener. Oxygen tanks. Mining equipment. A sleeping bag with its light-hood that allowed a man to provide himself with darkness to sleep in, even in a bubble in the Rings. There was something inside the sleeping bag, but the hood was pulled up.

“There he is!” said Nike, her voice trembling. “In the sleeping bag! See? He’s asleep!”

Dunne didn’t recognize his own voice. “I’m afraid not,” he said harshly. “It’s your brother, yes. But—he wouldn’t be asleep. No. He’s not asleep.”

He wasn’t. He was dead.

Dunne anchored the lifeboat to a projecting knob of faceted stone, casting a loop from the airlock door with a spaceman’s—specifically, a space-miner’s—trick of getting the loop into existence and then floating it to the thing to be gripped. It caught, and he gently brought the lifeboat close. He knotted the rope and went back into the lifeboat. Nike waited there, totally pale.

“Listen to me!” said Dunne sternly. “I’m going to see what’s happened. You stay here! You can listen. If you hear a drive or more of those twitterings—I’ll be back! I’ll hear it too in my headphones. But you stay here. Leave the lock-door alone. You can watch through the viewports, but don’t do anything. Not anything!”

She nodded, watching his expression with something of desperation in her own.

“Do you think he—”

“I don’t think anything yet,” said Dunne. “He should have heard us arrive. There was plenty of oxygen. I’ve got to find out what’s wrong.”

He went into the airlock again and checked—as always—the sealing of his helmet to the vacuum-suit. The suit ballooned out as the airlock pumped empty. There’d been much trouble with space-suits in the early days, when men tried to use full-pressure air in them. They swelled and the suit-arms tended to swing out widely, so that a man in a vacuum-suit was spread-eagled by the air pressure inside. He was like a man-shaped toy balloon, incapable of any purposeful motion. But with only three pounds pressure of oxygen instead of fifteen of oxygen-nitrogen mixture, all suits were manageable. Dunne checked his steering-jet—not to be used if it was possible to avoid it. He checked his belt-weapon. He fastened a lifeline. He went out of the lock, trailing the line behind him.

With no gravity he couldn’t very well walk. So he crawled toward the bubble, clutching an extrusion of its surface, testing it, and then trusting to it while he reached for another handhold. This was abyssal rock; and where the lifeboat was nearest, it had slowly crystalized under unthinkable pressure. The stone crystals were six to ten inches in length. The rock. as a mass was an intricately interlaced agglomerate of such crystals, ranging through various shades of brown. They had sword-sharp points and edges. A man could rip his vacuum-suit on any of a hundred keen-edged projections in a crawl of a dozen feet.

All about lay the sunlit mist. There was no solidity anywhere away from this rock and this spaceboat. The gaunt, glittering Ring-fragment and the lifeboat were the only things on which one could focus his eyes. They floated, rotating with enormous deliberation, linked together by a slender cord.

Dunne reached the bubble. It had been established here to make room for those activities a donkeyship has no room for. There was much gray matrix to a very little crystal-stuff. Much matrix had to be crushed and sifted to recover the crystals it contained. When there was enough material to be worked, one set up a bubble. One brought the gray matrix into the bubble in sacks, and there crushed it and made a first cleaning of the crystals. When there were many tons of the friable gray stuff to be worked, a bubble was much more practical than taking it into a donkeyship.

Dunne arrived at the bubble. He searched its interior with his eyes. He stayed outside.

Nike watched from a viewpoint in the control room. Nothing changed inside the bubble. The sleeping bag did not stir. Nothing stirred. Dunne looked like a human fly creeping on something mysteriously suspended from nowhere, from which he could fall to infinity if he missed a single handhold.

He pressed on the expanded plastic of the bubble. It pushed in. It did not push out again when he took his hand away. Nike watched, uncomprehending. Dunne made further exploration, still not attempting to enter by the fragile-seeming metal frame and plastic doors which provided an airlock into the bubble. On the farther side of the bubble he halted. He did something Nike could not see. He crawled back to the airlock and entered it.

Here his actions were extraordinary. He crawled around the inside edge of the bubble, where the dome came down to the rock and where nobody would ordinarily try to move. Still nothing moved, anywhere in the dome. He went around to the back of the sleeping bag, ignoring its motionless occupant.

He backed away with an object in his hands. There were wires attached to it. He’d detached them from outside the bubble. Now he removed the wired object from within. But he did not touch the sleeping bag nor lift its hood until all of these preliminaries were completed.

Now he lifted the hood and looked steadily down at what it had hidden. He replaced the hood. He went out of the airlock door, carrying the object from behind the sleeping bag.

In emptiness, then, he threw it away from the rock and the lifeboat together. He drew his belt-weapon. When it was two hundred feet away he fired at it.

The thing he’d brought away from the sleeping bag shattered itself to bits, with a monstrous blue-white flame of explosive. But there was no sound. There was no air to carry sound.

Dunne went sombrely into the lifeboat. Nike faced him as the inner lock-door opened. His expression was that of angry, bitter grief when he took his space-helmet off.

“We’re too late,” he said savagely. “Much too late.”

“He’s—dead, then,” said Nike. She swallowed. She became even paler. “When you didn’t come back right away, I thought it was bad news. When you—exploded that thing… I knew.”

“It was a boobytrap,” said Dunne coldly. “Designed to explode when I looked in the sleeping bag. There are some holes in the bubble. They could have been made by bullets like mine, but they’re larger.” He paused. “If somebody punctured the bubble, he’d have just thirteen seconds to get into a space-suit before he died, and he wouldn’t make it. But he’d hardly know what happened.”

Nike sobbed once.

“Then,” said Dunne, “whoever killed him planted a booby trap for me.”

His expression was bitterness itself. Nike swallowed and said, “What do we do now? Can he—can we bury him?” Then she said, choking; “I—I can’t think straight right now!”

“Don’t try,” said Dunne more gently. “I’ll take care of things. Everything! You get into a space-suit. I’ll come get you.”

She turned and went quickly, stumbling a little, into the rearmost part of the lifeboat.

Dunne swore exhaustively when she’d left. He went into the control room and extended the range of the radar to its greatest possible distance. He slowed down its period of sweep to get the utmost of reach. In the area it could report on, there were six indications of solid objects. None of them detectably changed position. They were actually in motion, of course, swinging in their orbits around the planet Thothmes. Two of them were obviously too small to be concerned about. One was as obviously even larger—much larger—than the rock to which the spaceboat was now tethered. The nearest appeared to be not much larger or smaller. But there was nothing in significant motion within the area the radar could examine.

He went out of the spaceboat again. There were tools in the bubble. It was a very convincing trap—or it had been. But Dunne did not bother to rage at the man or men who’d done this murder. The Rings were not centers of refinement or culture. Or of reluctance to violate the essential rules of fair play or good faith. But an attempt to commit murder by booby trap would not be admired even in the Rings.

He took tools from the bubble. Here was a crack in the rock not far away. It needed very little enlargement for his purpose. He labored carefully.

He brought Nike out. The two of them—with great courage on the part of Nike—conducted a funeral. Dunne packed rock fragments to seal the cover he put in place.

It was an extraordinary action in an extraordinary place. The two space-suited figures performed a ceremony of sorts in what to uninformed eyes would have seemed dumb-show. Dunne did not look like a man. He looked like a machine of metal which for technical reasons only was designed to resemble a man. He seemed, indeed, a strange type of robot, contemplating something incredible when the funeral was finished.

He made a gesture of which he seemed to be unconscious. Then, slowly, he helped Nike back to the spaceboat, arranging her lifeline with his so that their progress was not too grotesque.

When she was inside, he cast off the lifeboat’s mooring line. He hauled it in. He closed the outer airlock door. He opened the inner one. He went directly to the control room. The lifeboat’s drive began its droning hum. Nike came, speaking through the door behind him.

“Is there anything—”

He shook his head. He kept his eyes on the radar screen. He chose the nearest of the six solid objects the screen portrayed. He lined up the lifeboat’s course toward it. Presently he cut off the drive.

“I’m coasting,” he explained. “It cuts the drive-time at each end of the run.”

“Have you—decided what to do?”

He nodded, watching the radar screen.

“What is it?”

“It will develop,” he said grimly. “Just remember that we’re all scoundrels, out here in the Rings.”

He continued to watch the radar. One of the blips grew visibly nearer and more distinct. The rock they’d left behind became smaller. The other formerly stationary blips moved slowly with regard to the center of the screen, which represented the position of the lifeboat.

There was over twenty miles of sunlit fog between the two floating rocks. It was not possible to see anything at a distance of much more than a mile. So the lifeboat floated through a haze in which there was nothing to be seen at all; and with the drive off there were no sounds except the whispering, rustling noises made by short waves from the photosphere of the sun, and those tiny cracklings from storms on Thothmes.

Such tranquility and peacefulness, though, was not universal. There was a pickup ship on the way to Horus, whose skipper had worried for several days without finding a solution to his problem. He had to report letting Dunne have a lifeboat. He fretted about that. It was paid for, to be sure, but the Abyssal Minerals Commission might take a dim view of it regardless.

But he’d something much worse to disturb him. It was now appallingly clear that Nike was no longer on the pickup ship. It seemed most likely that she’d either stowed away or been kidnapped in the lifeboat. The skipper of the pickup ship was very much disturbed indeed.