Miners in the Sky

Miners in the Sky

Murray Leinster

The rock which was also a mine floated in a golden, sunlit mist. There was a brighter part Of the mist and behind that there was a sun, some scores of millions of miles away. There was a dimmer part of the haze, with two or three glittering specks where it was thinnest. They were stars, whose distance could only be expressed in light-years. All the rest of the mist or haze was equally bright, to the right and left, before and behind. The rest was bright and wholly featureless except for the rock. It was seventy feet in its longest dimension, and at its thinnest it measured possibly fifty feet. Its substance, save for a single streak of gray matrix, was crystalline brown stuff broken violently away from something else and larger.

It floated in emptiness. It did not fall, because it was in orbit around a planet hidden by the shining haze. There was nothing to explain its presence here, but men had found it.

In straggly painted letters somebody had marked “GH-37” on it, the letters and numerals plainly visible from a distance, And then somebody else had painted “DK-39” on the same surface, partly over the first. This was all on one side of the rock.

On the other side, past occupation was more obvious. There was the half of a transparent bubble stuck firmly to the rocky substance. It was fifteen feet across. Its rounded surface reached a height of perhaps eight feet. There was a thin, tubular, metal-and-plastic frame on one side, which amounted to a transparent airlock. And inside the bubble there were objects known only to man. A sleeping bag with A hood over the head end. A cubical object which was an air-freshener. There were tanks piled up, with pipes and stopcocks sticking out of their ends. They were marked “Oxygen.” There were cases marked to show that they did or had contained food.

But there was no movement anywhere about the rock. Seventy by fifty by forty feet, it had a mass of some thousands of tons. It turned deliberately on some indefinite axis, making a complete revolution once in ten minutes or so. Nothing happened.

The rock had no name of its own. It floated in a mist in a vacuum, a cloud in emptiness, a vast glowing disk of brightness in interplanetary space. It floated in the Rings of Thothmes, of which the Space Directory said without interest that it was a gas-giant planet in the solar system Niletus, that it was the fourth planet out from its sun, and that it was surrounded by huge rings of dust and debris from shattered moons. Which was to say that it was a ringed world like the First System’s ringed planet Saturn.

The rock with the painted letters and numerals on its side floated in a golden luminosity. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Even what was in the sleeping bag did not move. Not even to breathe.

Dunne scowled as he drove his donkeyship through the Rings of Thothmes. He scowled because he was headed for Outlook, where the pickup ship ought to arrive very soon, and the need to travel just now was disturbing. There’d be practically hysterical festivity when the pickup ship grounded; but this wasn’t a time for Dunne to be moving about. Sheer necessity had made him leave his partner, Keyes, back in emptiness on the Ring-fragment they’d found and were mining. There was a two-foot vein of abyssal matrix in plain view on that rock, and it would have been insane to leave such a treasure unguarded. It was marked, of course. It was marked “DK-39” over an earlier “GH-37,” but the markings didn’t really mean anything. There was no law in the Rings of Thothmes, and that was another reason for disturbance. Keyes had a strictly limited store of oxygen, and nobody else knew where he was.

But it happened to be necessary for somebody to go to Outlook for supplies, which could only be had when a pickup ship was there. From the rock Dunne and his partner had been working, it was a two-and-a-half-day drive to Outlook, through a golden mist conspicuously devoid of route-markers. But of the two men Dunne was the better astrogator. If Keyes had taken the ship and left Dunne behind, he mightn’t have been able to find his way back again before the oxygen gave out. Dunne wasn’t likely to miss the way. But if both of them had left their precious find, somebody else could have come along and taken it over, painting new initials and numbers—if he was prepared to fight for it.

So Keyes was back there in the bubble, two days behind, and Dunne drove hard to get to Outlook and the pickup ship. They had to have oxygen. They had to have food and mining supplies. Dunne had to get them from the pickup ship that brought them all the way from Horus, which was the next planet out from this particular sun. Incidentally, he had to dodge ill-intentioned persons who might want to make use of the lack of laws in this neighborhood. His errand was not only urgent but difficult, and he scowled as he drove. He needed not only to get supplies, but to get back to the rock without anybody trailing him there. If he managed it, he and Keyes would be moderately well-to-do by the time the pickup ship arrived again. If he didn’t—

He had to. With luck he might have no trouble at all. But he didn’t like some of the possibilities.

From where he drove, the Universe looked very improbable.

There was a bright and radiant mistiness all about, and’ the donkeyship swam through it. The haze seemed to have no limits anywhere, but Dunne drove for Outlook through it. Outlook was the floating mountain—one of the innumerable fragments in Thothmes’ Rings—which was the accepted spaceport for this area.

Some millions or tens or hundreds of millions of years before, certain formerly solid satellites of Thothmes had blundered inside Roche’s Limit for that particular primary-satellite system. They crumbled because of tidal strains that nothing-literally nothing-could withstand. They broke up. In the process they ground themselves in part to impalpable dust particles, and in part to gravel and fist-sized stones; and parts of them clung together to form boulders and larger masses up to the size of mountain ranges floating in their orbits.

The dust and the debris of this ancient disaster now formed the shining Rings around Thothmes, Each dust particle had its orbit, and every larger object its; and every particle of gravel or boulder or monster mass like Outlook went rolling through emptiness on a duly established path. They floated in the dust clouds which formed the Rings so much like those of Saturn back in the First System. And of course men found reason to risk their lives among them.

In the case of Thothmes, the reason was simple. Different objects floating in the Rings had different constitutions. Some were scraps of surface rock from long-vanished moons. Sometimes they were lumps of nickel-steel from the cores of the split-up moons. And here and there, in random distribution, there were objects made of abyssal rocks in contact with such metal core substances. Some of those abyssal combinations contained crystals. They existed only where worlds or moons had once existed. They could only be obtained where moons or worlds had shattered. They looked rather like lumped rock candy, but they were the most valuable objects in the galaxy. They’d made and they kept space-travel possible.

The ships that went singing to the galaxy’s very rim depended on the special properties of abyssal crystals for the generation of their drives. Without them there would be no space commerce or any colonies. Earth would be a crowded slum with people trampling each other underfoot because there were so many of them.

And on one good-sized fragment in the Rings, Dunne and Keyes had discovered a streak of the gray matrix in which abyssal crystals occurred. They’d already made a good thing of it. Now Keyes, back in the bubble, was guarding the find and working out more of the crystals while he waited for Dunne’s return. And Dunne didn’t like it at all.

He watched his radar screen sharply as the donkeyship drove on. There was a pebble a mile to his right. It might be half an inch in diameter. It could be ignored. A fist-sized object floated three miles to the left. That could be ignored, too.

Then a clucking came from his detectors. There was a much larger object on ahead. The instruments had analyzed their own findings and called for Dunne’s decision. Some object behind the mist had moved otherwise than in an orbit around Thothmes. It couldn’t be a rock. It was large enough to be a ship. It might have sent out a radar pulse. The clucking sound seemed indignant.

Dunne growled to himself. He got into a space-suit—fast. He watched his instruments as he wriggled into the armor against emptiness. He picked up the stubby miners’ bazooka which fired very small shells to crack open rocky masses for examination of their’ inward parts. He stuck small shells in appropriate places in his space-suit belt.

He took a last look at the instruments and went to the airlock. He clipped a lifeline in place. He closed the inner door and opened the outer. This was standard for the examination of bits of celestial debris, but a man with a bazooka in an open airlock door can be a very deadly fighting unit.

He stared ahead into a mere mistiness lighted by the sun. But presently there was a shadow which became a shape, and then something solid, floating in nothingness. It was an irregularly shaped mass of rock, practically the size of a donkeyship. A small one could hide behind it, if aligned just right.

Then the bit of solidness was two miles away. Dunne opened fire. He loosed three bazooka-shells at it. The small projectiles flashed away. Here where there was no gravity they would travel in mathematically straight lines. When the rocky object was only one mile away, the first of the bazooka-shells hit. The rocky mass crackled. It began to break. A second shell hit. The third.

The rock seemed to disintegrate, and behind it there was a donkeyship. This other ship had been lying in wait. Most likely it had heard the whine of Dunne’s ship’s drive before he heard of it. It had cut its drive and made itself into an ambush. But now it was the center of a mass of explosion-driven stones flying in all directions. And Dunne, forewarned and demonstrably able to take care of himself, was boring in on it.

The strange donkeyship fled, with a last shell from Dunne’s bazooka to urge it on. He closed the outer airlock door and opened the inner. He went back to his instrument board. He dismissed the incident from his mind.

There was no point in being upset about it. This was the Rings, and this was the time when lucky space-miners were carrying abyssal crystals to a pickup ship. This was when unlucky ones were apt to take desperate measures. He dismissed the whole matter. But he was very much concerned about Keyes.

He changed the course of his donkeyship. If he was to get back as he should, no one should be able to back-track him. The ship he’d just discouraged from lying in wait, for instance. Not many of the less desirable characters in the Rings had the stomach for a fight. But a donkeyship heading for Outlook often carried enough crystals to be worth a murder or two.

So Dunne headed for Outlook. From time to time he changed his course—always when his detectors. picked up no trace of any other ship’s drive. He drove more or less by dead reckoning, but he heard other ships in motion, and they sheered away. Which was wisdom.

But eventually there were several thin, buzzing whines picked up by his communicator at one time and relayed to him by loudspeaker. They were all drives in action and heading for one destination which was now near. After a little more, he heard a voice at the lower limit of hearability. It was calling exuberantly: “Hi! Who’s comin’ in?”

The call meant that somebody was aground on Outlook and another ship was within seeing distance. And then Dunne knew everything that was happening, and what would happen.

One donkeyship had landed. It had come in cautiously, with an airlock door open and a space-suited figure in the opening holding a bazooka ready for use. It approached very, very cautiously, as if the appearance of Outlook gave it pause. But that wasn’t the case. Everybody knew what Outlook was like. It was a mountain—a solid mass of nickel-steel from the very center of a dead moon’s heart. It was more than a mile long, and its shape was that of a nightmare. One end was like a cone, and the other like a roughly rounded-half-globe. And all its surfaces were twisted, shattered, tormented metal, except at one spot.

There was one place which was a sheer plane, an almost fiat surface created by some sliding, grinding collision a few scores of millions of years ago. That flat area, without a beacon or a building or any single marking to say that men had ever been there—that was the spaceport on Outlook. The first ship to arrive would approach its prospective landing place with great caution. Eventually it would land and make contact with its magnetic grapples. It would then settle itself where nobody could approach if from any direction unseen.

Then it would wait. Dunne, for one, knew exactly what went on. Presently another donkeyship appeared. When it was the merest speck on the glowing golden fog, the ship aground hailed it: “Hi! Who’s comin’ in?”

Dunne heard this, and the reply. The second ship called down an identification. It settled on another place, not too close to the first-landed ship. Then talk between the two ships began. At first it was cautious and restrained. But the men in each of the twin space-craft had gone long weeks with only each other’s voices to hear. They were hungry to listen to the new ones.