Miners in the Sky (12 page)

Then he said confidentially to his donkeyship: “I’ll take me a look. Don’t blame him for bein’ sneaky about it. If I was to find the Mountain…”

He swung his rotund ship about. He did not bother with instruments or computations or any form of astrogation. He belonged in the Rings. He’d developed an instinct for finding his way about, regardless of the entire absence of landmarks. He had the feel of space in the Rings of Thothmes. Not many people lived long enough to develop so precious a talent.

He steadied the donkeyship on its proper course according to his notions. Its drive began to whine. He headed along the line taken by the lifeboat with Dunne and Nike in it.

“That’s it!” he told himself triumphantly. “Yes, suh! That’s it! Dunne’s found the Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ fellas tried to trail him to it, so he ain’t goin’ back so’s he’ll throw folks off his track! So he does it! It’s done! Smart fella!” Then Smithers laughed appreciatively. “But not as smart as me !”

At just about that moment, Dunne was seated on the floor of the lifeboat, wearing his space-suit and crushing lumps of light-gray matrix with a hammer. The matrix came from the sack of abyssal mineral he’d dug out to provide a stake for Nike, when she would be sent back to Horus from the Rings. Because, of course, the Rings were no place for a woman to be. Among other reasons, there weren’t any laws there.

There were sounds transmitted as radio waves. The communicator’s loudspeaker in the ceiling reported them with a fine impartiality. It reported the rustling, whispering noises that came from the photosphere of the sun. It reported the tiny crackling sounds credited to lightning in monstrous storms on Thothmes. The speaker reported them. Then it said, “
tweet… tweet… tweet…
” and stopped.

Dunne said reflectively, “That’s a queer thing! Nobody has the least idea what makes that noise! We’ve heard it more often than anybody else ever reported it. But why? Smithers says it’s gooks, Some people believe it. But if so, it’s the only evidence for the existence of gooks.”

He stretched himself—carefully, because he hurt in a surprising number of places from his tow behind the wildly accelerating spaceboat, Nike watched him. She found that it was both comforting and astonishing to look at him.

Now there was oxygen in the spaceboat at a pressure of three pounds per square inch. The accepted norm was fourteen point seven pounds pressure for the oxygen-nitrogen mixture to which the human race had adapted during some thousands of generations. But the nitrogen could be dispensed with. Breathing oxygen was perfectly satisfying. True, voices sounded a little off normal, and it would not have been possible to heat anything containing water, because water boiled while still little more than lukewarm.

But there was oxygen to breathe, and no reason to anticipate a lack of it.

And the drive was working again. The sack of matrix fragments Dunne had brought in was not a particularly rich sample from the vein. In all the sack there’d been no more than four abyssal crystals. Only one could be used between the drive’s thrust-blocks—the others were too small. That one was under half a gram, and the boat couldn’t be driven at high speed with so small a crystal. But it could be driven. Dunne had fitted it in between the thrust-blocks and actually turned on the drive for the fraction of a second. It worked. The sound would be unexpected and hardly identifiable unless it had considerable volume. Dunne didn’t believe so brief a noise would even be picked up at any great distance. Certainly nobody could have gotten a bearing on its source!

Nike looked at him as he considered his various aches and bruises. Then he said, “I think I’ll try the radar long enough to get an idea of our speed. My idea of where we may be is pretty indefinite!”

Nike said, “Can I help?”

It was absurd, but Dunne didn’t notice. Neither of them referred to the fact that the spaceboat was hurtling blindly through the Rings with no radar in operation to warn them of possible collisions. But, on an average, there was not more than one object of appreciable size in two cubic miles of space in the Rings. This was enough to make mining for abyssal crystals profitable, but the likelihood of a collision was remote.

Presently Dunne watched the radar screen for blips indicating exactly such floating objects as had created the profession of mining in the sky. He didn’t know the direction the spaceboat had taken after the burst of machine-gun tracer-bullet fire. He didn’t know the speed it had attained or how far it had traveled. And there was nothing in view but mist by which to tell.

The radar, though, showed blips. They were more widely separated than in the part of the Rings that Dunne and Keyes had worked in. They had motions of their own. They had orbital velocities suited to their distance from Thothmes. But something could be learned from their motion across the radar screen. Dunne learned it.

The spaceboat’s speed was very high, relative to solid objects in the mist. Dunne computed, using guesses for quantities and hopes for mathematical signs. Eventually he shook his head.

“We’ve come a devil of a long way!” he said. “We must have accelerated longer than I believed. We may have crossed the whole first Ring! Anyhow, we can decelerate without too much danger of anybody hearing us.”

Nike did not answer, but her eyes followed him as he cut in the drive. It made—a brand-new noise. The sound of a drive depended on the size of the crystals which were its heart. A donkeyship whined. A lifeboat hummed. A space-liner or cargo ship boomed. These last required very large crystals to produce their thrust. But the drive in the lifeboat now made a whining, whimpering sound very much like that of a donkeyship. The crystal in its heart was substandard in size.

Dunne nodded with an air of great satisfaction. He continued to watch the radar screen, and from time to time made computations. Once he stared incredulously at his own results. But he said nothing. There was nothing to be seen through the ports in the least unusual. Now and again he did look out, but all he saw was a warmly glowing absence of anything to look at.

The interior of the boat was practically silent. The drive; yes. The small and meaningless sounds made by thunder and by highly complex atomic reactions in the sun; yes. But the eventlessness which is space travel obtained. All space travel consists of seconds of interest or of action, succeeded by seeming centuries of tedium. There was, just now, simply nothing to be done. Time itself seemed to consist of nothing that could happen.

Nike could have retired to the back cabin. But it would have been even more eventless there than in the main cabin, where at least she could see Dunne occasionally moving about. So she curled up on an upholstered seat and lay there with open eyes for a long while. But nothing happened.

Presently she went to sleep.

A great distance away, a donkeyship reversed its drive and came to what its instruments asserted was a stop. Haney was at the controls of this particular craft. It turned about and headed back toward the rock where Keyes had died and Dunne and Nike should be newly dead. Haney and his companion were confident. They’d performed a maneuver they’d previously done often enough so they could rely on its results.

It was very simple and soundly based on the normal reactions of those on whom it was practiced. A donkeyships’ steady high-speed dash from beyond radar range would naturally be noted by men working a rock in the Rings. When they knew it would pass close by their workings, they’d cut off all radiating equipment and wait for it to go by. If it had slowed before arrival, it would have suggested grim happenings. But it didn’t. It came straight ahead, almost to graze this rock or that, but it gave no sign of a pause or any action at all. The working miners were reassured. So the smothering burst of machine-gun fire, fired as it went by, was total and successful surprise. If there was a bubble, it would be punctured. Where there was a ship, it would be drained of air. Where there were miners—a space-suit pierced by a bullet anywhere was inevitably a fatal wound. There’d never be a single shot fired in return. The killers could go right on, and then later return to find no living soul present to oppose them. They often found good quantities of abyssal crystals already separated from the gray matrix.

It was a perfectly matter-of-fact device for the sort of men who’d use it. It couldn’t be prevented. It couldn’t be punished. There were no laws to cover it or law officers to enforce them. The fact accounted for part of the Rings’ death-rate of thirty per cent of the mining population every solar year.

So Haney and his companion matter-of-factly drove back to the rock where Dunne and Keyes had worked, where Dunne and Nike had been a short while back, where a boobytrap should have done the work they’d just repeated to be wholly sure. It wasn’t difficult to find the way back. Haney watched the radar screen and recalled the arrangement of blips he’d passed as a man on a liquid ocean would remember the bearing and size of objects on a shoreline. He expected as a matter of course that Smithers would have died in the dash-past of Haney and his companion. He’d been useful. He’d made sure that there was somebody alive at the rock He shouldn’t be alive to ask for payment in oxygen or to protest what had been done with his assistance.

But when the seventy-foot rock loomed up through the mist, it was solitary. There was no lifeboat owned by Dunne. No donkeyship belonging to Smithers. Nothing.

It was a good rock. Two men working fast and without interruption could clean it out in a matter of days, especially if they worked wastefully and let much gray matrix escape in the process. But Haney seemed not to be much concerned with working a mine even as good as this one.

He listened, disturbed and enraged. He caught the faintest imaginable whine of a donkeyship’s drive. He couldn’t imagine why there were no dead men—including Smithers—who should have been left behind by the burst of machine-gun fire.

It wasn’t easy to understand. But it wasn’t desirable that anybody should escape. If Smithers reported that Haney had a machine gun and had used it in such-and-such a manner, at the next pickup ship gathering it would be discussed. It would be agreed that it was not desirable for Haney and his partner to go on living and practicing this device. There’d be no formality about it. Simply—the man who found it most convenient would kill Haney. Of course, if Dunne and Nike reported their part of the adventure, the need for Dunne to be killed would be even more evident. But he’d be killed anyhow.

So Haney got a careful bearing on the excessively faint drive-whine and set out after it. It was certainly the only chance he had of correcting the mistake by which Smithers had survived. Dunne… Dunne must be dead, and Nike with him. Haney believed he had only to kill Smithers.

This decision came before Dunne had completed temporary repairs to the lifeboat. The lifeboat hurtled onward with the velocity that the excess acceleration had given it. Smithers drove after it at the highest speed the non-crystal-burning drive of his ship would give him. He was a long way behind, until Dunne got settled and began to slow the spaceboat. Haney, in turn, was far behind Smithers. Things began to work out—with that enormous amount of pure tedium in between seconds of action and excitement.

Dunne, waiting for his restored drive to cut the lifeboat’s speed down to a manageable figure, found himself trying to put things together in a rational fashion. His original beliefs about his situation—and Nike’s—didn’t seem to fit what was happening. The idea that his donkeyship had been blasted, on Outlook, to keep him from rejoining Keyes was not wholly plausible. It didn’t account for everything—for example, Haney’s offer of a deal to carry both of them to Keyes and return all three to Outlook next pickup-ship time. That wasn’t necessary. Haney’s effort to carry Nike from Outlook in the belief that she was going to join her brother—that didn’t fit in. If Haney’d tried that first, and made the proposal to include Dunne later—yes, that would be more reasonable. But the big thing was that after Keyes was killed, nobody went to work feverishly to clean out the crystals in the plainly visible vein of matrix. Haney had come on to Outlook after killing Keyes. He’d left a boobytrap…

Then Dunne scowled to himself. Had Haney done that? Could it be someone else?

The matter of Smithers was a complete answer. He’d talked to Haney by communicator. He’d come to the rock, to find out if there were anybody alive on it. He’d discovered that Nike was there—a girl in the Rings! And when Dunne put him out of the lifeboat, to prepare against an approaching radar blip, Smithers had yelped to surrounding space, “You Haney! You sheer off! You keep away from here! No tricks! There’s a lady here!”

And that was proof. Not for a court of law, but there were no courts in the Rings. And the highest court on Horus had solemnly ruled that it had no jurisdiction over events or crimes or property in the Rings of Thothmes. Therefore, every man had to be his own judge and jury in such matters as affected him. And Haney affected Dunne.

With Nike sleeping peacefully on an upholstered seat in the lifeboat’s main cabin, Dunne suddenly saw the situation from a new angle. The mine-rock he. and Keyes had found was a valuable find, to be sure. No Big Rock Candy Mountain, but a good rock just the same. But with Keyes dead and Dunne’s donkeyship destroyed, it was Haney’s if he chose to take it. He needn’t hurry. He needn’t deal with Dunne. He could have ignored Nike. He didn’t have to do anything if what he wanted was the rock and its slash of matrix. Especially, he needn’t have joined the pack of donkeyships that tried to trail Dunne to a discovery he hadn’t made. Haney knew he hadn’t made it. Why, then, had he followed? It wasn’t for Nike. If he’d thought of kidnapping her, he wouldn’t have flung machine-gun tracer bullets into the lifeboat, where she’d die as the air bled out to space, So Haney would think, anyhow.

Then Dunne whistled softly to himself as recalled events put themselves together in a new pattern. The machine gun, for instance. It wasn’t standard equipment for a donkeyship. It was an antique. It was practically a museum piece. But Haney had brought it out to the Rings when he came. He came to hunt crystals, so it appeared, but also he’d come out with the most deadly piece of armament—outdated, but still most deadly against a donkeyship—he could carry. Why?