Miners in the Sky (13 page)

The Big Rock Candy Mountain might be involved in the answer. Dunne moved to look at Nike. She was asleep. She looked very young and weary, but she slept with a child’s tranquility. Dunne couldn’t guess it, but it was because she no longer felt that she didn’t belong anywhere with anybody. She couldn’t have explained it herself, but it was true.

He had only to make one assumption he hadn’t thought of before, and everything changed. The assumption was that Haney hadn’t planned especially to kill him—Dunne. In the course of more important events, it might be desirable; but it wasn’t a major objective. A much more reasonable guess would be that Haney wanted to kill Nike.

She’d come out to tell Keyes something that meant life or death. There was mail service, by the pickup ships, and she could have written. But she’d found it necessary to come out herself. She couldn’t go back, though Dunne urged it and offered to pay for her to return immediately. She wouldn’t go back! When Dunne forced the pickup ship’s skipper to sell him a lifeboat, she stowed away on it to keep from going back to Horus! She was willing to take any imaginable risk rather than go back. And she desperately wanted to see and talk to her brother. And Haney was responsible for his death and had surely tried. to secure Nike’s.

Dunne was just beginning to work out the implications of the facts seen from this angle when there came the faintest of possible drive-whines from the loudspeaker. It progressed very slowly from the just-not-inaudible to the faintest clear. He stopped all speculation to hear it. Yes. There was a donkeyship almost out of detection range, but not quite. Dunne threw off his drive. He threw off the radar, which had not yet reported the whining donkeyship. He silenced the air-refresher unit. He waited.

The whining sound grew gradually louder, in the course of hours. Then there came the thinnest of voices clamoring over the drive-whine;

“Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne! Come in!”

Dunne hesitated. Nike slept peacefully. There was silence. Velocity away from the outer rim of the Rings remained. The lifeboat, though, was pointed back toward its starting point—the outermost edge of the Rings. Outlook floated there, and other small and giant objects. But though the lifeboat aimed there and its drive operated, so far it hadn’t overcome its acquired momentum away. It traveled backward as it drove ahead. But its reverse speed diminished steadily.

“Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne! Come in!”

The call continued. Smithers had followed the lifeboat. Dunne heard him. The question was of Smithers’ allegiance, to Haney or to the first women he’d seen in years, who might seem to him to have an irresistible claim on his chivalry.

Then there came a change in the mistiness outside. Dunne jerked his head about to stare. He saw stars, gradually becoming brighter than the dust-clouds which were the Rings.

And then the lifeboat shot out backwards into the clear and dust-free ring of transparency between the two outer rings. It was called Cassini’s Division for the man who first observed it in the rings of Saturn. Its explanation waited for two hundred years.

Here the impalpable, shining dust-particles ceased to be. For a distance of many, many miles, space was clear. But on beyond—it could be seen clearly—the second Ring began. In the interval the spaceboat would be visible. Here it could not hide in shining opacity. But if one looked steadily at the star-field, one could see stars sometimes blink. And stars in emptiness do not blink.

Dunne clamped his jaws together. He waked Nike. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

“It’s my time to watch?” she asked.

“No. But we’re past the first Ring. We’re likely to have company.”

She started up. He led the way into the control room. The donkeyship whine was becoming fainter. It appeared not to be following the spaceboat in the exact proper line. But the voice accompanying it was still dear enough for every word to be understood.

“Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne!” It went on and on.

Nike looked at Dunne. He shrugged, and flipped on the transmitter.

“Smithers,” he said coldly. “Do you hear me?”

A pause. Then Smithers’ voice, overjoyed, “Dunne! How’ you doin’? Are you in trouble? You need any help? Is the lady all right?” Then Smithers said indignantly, “Haney played a dirty trick! He shouldn’t ha’ done that!”

“I thought so myself, at the time,” said Dunne drily. “What’re you doing this far from where you were?”

“I was comin’,” said Smithers’ voice, “to see if I could do anything for th’ lady. She’s all right?”

“She’s all right,” agreed Dunne.

“That’s fine! Now what?”

Dunne paused. Then, “Goodbye,” he said curtly. “That’s what. Farewell. You go your way and I go mine. Stop following me. I haven’t found the Big Rock Candy Mountain! You won’t be led to it in a hundred million years of following me around. Understand? Goodbye!”

He threw the switch that cut off the transmission from the communicator.

Nike said, “Do you really think he—wishes us harm?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Dunne. “But I’m trying to cut down on the things that
could
do us harm; and having Smithers around, with even the noblest of motives, doesn’t seem to work out well. He doesn’t seem to realize that we’ve a sort of disguise. I don’t want him to realize it.”

“Disguise? We have a disguise?”

“The boat has,” Dunne told her. “The drive. You’ll notice when you think to listen.”

But he didn’t turn the drive on again. He examined the radar screen and cut the radar off lest Smithers pick up its pulses. He left the drive off because it had been a moaning hum—peculiar to lifeboats—and now it was a whine almost identical to a donkeyboat’s, It was a disguise for everyone in the Rings except Smithers, and he could expose it if he chose.

Dunne paced up and down the cabin, restlessly. Nike watched him. But suddenly she cocked her ears to the ceiling loudspeaker.

“There’s another whine,” she said. “Or is it the same one?”

Dunne listened. And there were now two faint whines in the Ring. But the loudspeaker also faithfully reported the rustling short waves from the sun and the tiny cracklings of lightning on Thothmes. It had reported birdlike twittering, to be sure, and that was out of all reason. But now there were definitely two donkeyship drives to be heard.

“Smithers will be worried about that extra whine,” said Dunne reflectively.

They heard a voice. Smithers’. It came above the whining drive of his ship. Smithers was alarmed.

“Dunne?” he asked, “is that you? Did y’change your mind?”

There was no answer. There remained the two whinings through the normal noises of space. Smithers sounded scared. If he’d been alone, Dunne might have answered him, even though he wasn’t positive that Smithers did not have a working agreement with Haney for the commission of crimes. If Nike hadn’t been in the lifeboat, he might have gambled on the idea that Smithers was the simple, obsessed individual he appeared to be. But he wouldn’t bet Nike’s life on it.

Smithers’ voice came again from emptiness.

“Haney? That you?”

More silence. It lasted a long time. Ten minutes, perhaps twenty. Then Smithers cried out furiously, in the faintest of voices, “Whoever y’are, what you chasin’ me for? What’re you keepin’ right behind me for? I changed course then, an’ you changed right after me! What’s the idea?”

No answer. There remained two whining sounds in space besides the abstracted, meaningless cracklings and whisperings of the void. There were two donkeyships unavoidably broadcasting their drive-noises on radio frequency. It seemed that Smithers sounded fainter than before, as if he were going farther away. It also seemed as if both drive—whines shared the diminution of his voice. But somehow it was evident that one of the donkeyships fled desperately, and that the other followed implacably after it.

“Who are y’?” Smithers demanded shrilly, though his voice could barely be heard. “Who are you? What you chasin’ me for? Keep away, now! Keep away’!”

Dunne’s expression was formidable. He muttered under his breath.

“What’s happening?” asked Nike worriedly. “You look so angry!”

Dunne took pains to relax convincingly before he answered.

“We’re pretty well all scoundrels in the Rings,” he said evenly. “This isn’t a place for the squeamish. Smithers is being chased, most probably by Haney. Smithers was so unwise as not to be in the line of the tracer bullets Haney pumped into us. He’d scouted our rock for Haney, you’ll remember, and reported that somebody was there. It’d been your brother’s and my rock. It was supposed to be our death. Haney had some need to be sure it was. So when Smithers reported us there he came along expecting to kill me, certainly, and rather more certainly you; and Smithers should have been killed with us to keep him from talking about the matter next pickup-ship time.”

He stopped. The whispering sounds from the sun and the cracklings from Thothmes remained. But the two whinings which were donkeyship drives grew fainter. It was barely possible to hear a shrill voice protesting, threatening, and even pleading as it fled. But with ever-increasing distance, the words ceased to be distinct. There was only a thin shrill wailing. It went on toward nothingness, and the drive-sounds faded with it.

Nike looked bewildered. “But you mean—he’s going to be murdered?”

“Murder,” said Dunne sardonically, “is a legal definition. Where there’s no law, there’s no murder. Not even theft! Somebody is chasing Smithers, yes. It seems reasonable that whoever it is—I suspect Haney—intends to kill him, as he tried to kill us. If I were in Smithers’ place—”

“What?”

“Here in the Rings, if somebody chases you without explanation, you start shooting. That’s the custom. It’s also sense. You may have a small fortune in crystals in your ship. Or your pursuer may think you have, which is just as dangerous. But maybe Smithers knows that a fight with Haney would be fatal for him.”

“If you and Smithers joined—”

“No,” said Dunne curtly. “Haney has a machine gun. It’s an antique, and I can’t imagine where he got it; but it’s the deadliest weapon in the Rings.” He paced back and forth. “Remember, there’s no air here. There’s no gravity. A bullet once fired goes on forever. There’s no limit to its range. It hits as hard at a thousand miles as it does at a hundred feet. It’s an admirable weapon for close-range assassination, but it’s not one to be dodged at any distance. If I joined Smithers in fighting a man with a machine gun, we’d all wind up dead. And I’m enough of a scoundrel to have other plans for my future.”

Nike looked away. She looked uneasy to the point of panic.

Then Dunne said abruptly, “Nike, why does Haney want to kill you?”

Nike started. She stared at Dunne.

“I’m wondering about that,” he told her. “Not why Haney wants to kill me. Not why he thinks he has to kill Smithers. Why does he want you dead? And what’s the situation on Horus that made you feel you’d be safer in the Rings?”

Nike swallowed. Then she said, in a tone that was between despair and defiance, “They were—trying to kill me back on Horus. You won’t believe it, but it’s so! And I’m not crazy! They tried so cleverly! Things to look like accidents… But—they were going to kill me. I know you think I’m out of my mind.”

“Who was it?” asked Dunne. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Why? It sounds crazy! I don’t know who they were!”

“I do,” said Dunne. “Your brother trusted me. He told me the situation as he saw it. He asked my advice. I advised him to kill Haney.”

Nike said in a shaken voice, “Oh, no!”

“Oh yes!” said Dunne. “It would have solved everything. I should have killed him myself, on Outlook, when he was going to take you off pretending he’d take you to your brother. But I didn’t want to put your brother under an obligation to me. It was his job. But he didn’t do it when it was practical; so when I had good reason to do it on the spaceport, I let it go by. And you brother was already murdered! I regret very much that I didn’t kill Haney. There aren’t any laws here. I’d have helped establish customs that would grow into law. Too bad! They’re needed!”

“I don’t—I don’t understand!” protested Nike.

“Look!” said Dunne, with the air of someone being very patient under great provocation to be otherwise. “Your uncle was Joe Griffiths, wasn’t he? He found the Big Rock Candy Mountain, didn’t he? He sent more crystals back to Horus than the Rings have produced in any three other years! Isn’t that true? And he went back to the Mountain and brought out more, and he ordered furniture from Horus and bragged that he’d have the richest residence in the Galaxy, and he went back for a third load of crystals—and he was never seen again!”

Nike tried to swallow, and failed. Her throat was dry.

“Y-yes. That’s right.”

“The money for his crystals is held by the Abyssal Minerals Commission, on Horus. Quite a lot of money. It belongs to his heirs. The Commission has been trying to find out who should get it. Isn’t that right?”

Nike nodded, unable to speak.

“The job’s done,” said Dunne sourly. “You’ve some distant cousins—so far removed that they don’t count. The majesty of the law decided that unless some other equally close heirs turn up, you and your brother should get everything. But there was a possibility of others. The law ordered a search for them. It’s finally made sure that there aren’t any. So when the matter comes up in court again—it may be months, the law takes its time—a lot of money comes to you.”

Nike nodded. She spoke with extreme difficulty.

“But—”

“Yes,” said Dunne savagely. “There is a but! If you die before the official decision of the court—if both you and your brother die—your distant cousins get everything. They’re not people you’ve ever been proud of, and they married people you never would be proud of!”

“I’ve never known them—”

“You’ve met one: Haney. He’s married to one of your second cousins once removed. He came out to the Rings to see what could be done about your brother. Your brother told me who he was. And we’ve been very, very cagey about Haney! So I’ll make a guess that he managed to find out the rock we were working on before the last-but-one pickup ship. I guess that he sent word back to your distant cousins. It would go by mail, and it would be a very innocent message, but it would tell them he was about to kill your brother and for them to attend to you.”