Miners in the Sky (15 page)

He approached the giant objects. They were three two-thousand-foot masses of stone in a singular close-placed arrangement. Minute as their gravity fields would be, they should have drawn together. But they obviously hadn’t. They must revolve very slowly about each other.

Dunne stopped and examined them through the viewports. Nike looked curiously at him.

“I could use a crystal or two,” he told her wryly. “If I had anything big enough we’d sound like a pickup ship. Or if smaller, I could still burn it up for speed if I had to. But we’ve only one crystal big enough to drive with.”

Nike said, “You’re going to show me how to use a bazooka. If you have to fight, I’m going to be fighting right beside you!”

He nodded. He completed the examination of the three semi-planetoids. No matric veins showed. He went on.

He showed Nike how to use a bazooka. He gave her fine points about aiming. He had her put on a space-suit and become accustomed to working the weapons with gauntleted hands. He had no expectation of benefit from her aid, but she wanted to learn.

Then the radar told of something in motion. It was orbital. It was huge. It was invisible.

It went past, in front of the lifeboat. Then there were noises. Rappings. Tappings. Minute things struck the lifeboat’s hull. They made sounds equivalent to a storm of hail on a metal roof. The sound had the quality of abrasive. It became horrible. It became deafening.

It went away again. It was a sand pocket; a group of thousands and ten-thousands of infinitesimal sand grains, racing together in orbit around Thothmes. Such things were known. They were one of the reasons for the ships of Ring-miners to accept orbital velocity as no velocity at all. A donkeyship could safely overtake a sand pocket if it travelled not much faster than the sand pocket itself. It could safely be overtaken by a sand pocket, again if the difference was not too great. But to strike one at genuinely high speed meant the effect of a monstrous sand blast on the hullplates, which might be abraded away to the thickness of tissue, and then give way and let the ship go airless.

They had passed through only the edge of this sand pocket, though. The hull would show streakings where it had been rasped away. But Dunne was enraged with himself for not recognizing the danger earlier.

And just before they reached the inner edge of the outermost Ring, when the sunlit cloud of impalpable dust particles filled all the sky before them—just before they were swallowed by the last Outer Ring of Thothmes, Dunne saw yet another monstrous object floating abstractedly in the thinnest part of the haze.

It was two miles from end to end. It was partly metal and partly stone. It was incredibly confused as to its outer surface. There were spires and peaks and protrusions. There were bulbous excrescences. There were hollows. There was a place where an arch of the tortured substance closed over an opening big enough for a space-liner to go through. There was an enormous cavern that seemed hollowed out to make a den for something unthinkable that lived in empty space.

But it was not of the right mineral formation to offer a prospect of abyssal crystals. Dunne went on past it. And then they were fully in the outermost of the Rings again. So many hundreds of miles away—half the span of a continent. The semi-asteroid Outlook rolled cumbersomely in the haze. Once in so many weeks a pickup ship from Horus came out to it, and all the inhabitants of the Rings gathered to have an hour of luxury and feasting and contact with people other than their donkeyship partners.

As of now, though, Outlook was deserted, and far away the lifeboat ventured through a golden, shining mist whose particles were too small to glitter as even the tiniest of snowflakes will do. There was nothing to be seen from the control room. The drive whined and whined, very much the duplicate of a donkeyship drive. The ceiling loudspeaker gave out only routine noises, none of them indicating the nearness of anything alive. The radar displayed just such blips and larger markings as it should where Dunne believed it to be—some three drive-days to Outlook and several more to the Ring-rock that Dunne and Keyes had worked together. Outlook lay between.

And Dunne had to take Nike to Outlook. It couldn’t be avoided. He viewed the prospect with extreme grimness. Haney wouldn’t be entirely certain of Dunne’s and Nike’s deaths. He’d fired a burst of machine gun fire into the lifeboat. The bubble on the rock must also have been shattered. But when he returned in calm confidence of murder neatly accomplished, he’d found—nothing. There was a donkeyship whine at the limit of detection. He’d followed it. It was Smithers. But he hadn’t found any trace of the lifeboat.

Dunne couldn’t know whether Smithers still lived, but he did know what he must do. He must somehow get to ground on Outlook, and he must get Nike into the pickup ship, and she must be alive when the airlock door closed behind her.

The logical strategy for Haney would be to go early to Outlook but not to go aground; rather, to float in the mist of the Rings until either Dunne arrived in the lifeboat or it was certain that he wouldn’t. If Dunne arrived, or Smithers if he wasn’t dead, Haney would open fire. The death rate of thirty per cent a year was too high. He could give any explanation for murder committed openly, and it was unlikely to be questioned. But if Dunne or even Smithers denounced him… The law couldn’t touch him, but somebody would kill him, thoughtfully, as a reasonable precaution against misbehavior where law did not run.

So Haney wasn’t in an entirely happy situation. But neither was Dunne. Haney’s donkeyship would be faster than the lifeboat, because of the small-sized crystal in Dunne’s drive. Haney had an overwhelming advantage in arms. Neither of them had any reason to be squeamish; in fact, both were under necessity not to be. It was a situation that was going to be deadly for somebody, and quite possibly for everyone concerned. Dunne racked his brains. He made insane, foolish schemes. He couldn’t believe in any of them.

It was two days after recrossing Cassini’s Division when the ceiling loudspeaker reported a donkeyship’s whine, very thin and far away. There were many donkeyships working out of Outlook. This might be any of them. They’d have a hundred thousand cubic miles of Ring space apiece to prospect in, and fifty thousand bits of debris—from sand grains to drifting mountains—to prospect or to mine. The Rings were not exactly overpopulated. Dunne held his course. The’ whining sound of his own ship, as heard inboard, almost drowned out the noises of the speaker. But it wasn’t likely to matter, so long as the other ship went by at a good and generous distance.

It didn’t. The whining from outside grew louder. Dunne listened. He looked at the radar screen. He didn’t like what he saw. He noted that the sound was irregular. It wasn’t right. He listened sharply. There was the whine, but there was something else. The something else became a voice, broadcasting shrilly.

Dunne cut his drive in automatic precaution. If this ship was asking for help, it had to be remembered that men had been known to answer distress calls and never show up at Outlook again.

Time passed. There were always long intervals between happenings in space. Nike went and practiced absorbedly with the bazooka, wearing her space-suit minus its helmet. She showed as much skill as anybody could who’d never actually fired a bazooka at a target.

The voice stopped, and the distant donkeyship drove on steadily, whining in the void. It became distinctly louder. Dunne checked with his radar. Yes. Something showed there, ahead and to the left. It should pass not many miles away. Then the shrill voice uttered words that were now quite distinct.

“Listen here!” cried the voice urgently. “Everybody listen! Haney’s been killin’ people! He killed Dunne an’ the girl that came out on the pickup ship last trip. He tried to kill me. He killed Keyes. Everybody watch out for Haney! He’s been killin’ people to get their crystals! Watch him!”

Then the voice came more loudly and more fearfully: “An’ you Haney! Everybody knows now! I been tellin’ this all over the Rings. If anything happens to me they’ll know you done it an’ what I’ve said is true! You better leave me alone!”

Dunne sat upright from a comfortable listening position. It was Smithers, of course. Somehow he’d evaded Haney’s savage pursuit. But of all insane things to do! He hesitated , a short time, then he flipped on the transmitter and said harshly, “Smithers!”

“Who’s that?” By the sound, Smithers had gone into an ecstasy of terror. “Who—who’s that?”

“Smithers!” said Dunne again, with impatience and anger, “Shut up!”

He cut off the transmitter. He swore under his breath.

Nike came to the control-room door. She didn’t ask questions. She waited to be told what had happened. He told her, infinitely angry with Smithers for being such a fool, and almost as angry with himself for trying to stop him.

“If it hasn’t already happened, Haney will hear him!” fumed Dunne. “He’s inviting his own massacre! And nobody’ll believe him! He’s been such a fool about gooks that nobody’ll take him seriously! Not even if he’s killed!”

“Are you going to back him up?” asked Nike uneasily.

Dunne turned on her.

“I’ve got troubles enough!” he snapped. “I wouldn’t risk your little finger for a thousand like him!”

Nike nodded. She smiled very faintly.

“That’s being the scoundrel you said you’d be.”

Smithers’ voice again, despairing and desperate: “Dunne! Dunne! Is that you? Help me, Dunne! Haney almost got me. He’s still huntin’ me! An’ you too, Dunne! Let’s get together! We c’n fight him better! We got to protect that young lady!”

Dunne raged, “The fool! The idiot! The—”

He swung the lifeboat about. He cut in the drive. The boat surged ahead Dunne savagely regarded the radar screen. The blips on it began to creep in a new direction, compounded of the course on which the lifeboat had been traveling and the new direction of drive he’d just begun.

Nike was silent as he swung the lifeboat again and again. Course corrections have to be exaggerated, in emptiness. To turn at a right angle is practically impossible, and to get the effect of one requires a change of course of a hundred thirty-seven degrees to start with, to be reduced to ninety only bit by bit and after one’s original motion has been canceled out. But Dunne was attempting it. There was a floating object he could use as an aiming point. Such a point was necessary for maximum change-of-direction in the absolute absence of compass points or trustworthy indicators of speed. Dunne did have troubles enough without Smithers to complicate them. He headed as directly away from Smithers as he could.

The ceiling speaker continued to report the drive-whine of Smithers’ donkey-ship. He continued to call plaintively, with an increasing content of desperation. He wanted Dunne to answer him. To help him would mean exposing Nike to danger for Smithers’ sake. Dunne wouldn’t do it. He simply wouldn’t do it!

He gained speed away from the spot where Smithers called plaintively for him by name, and again and again mentioned the fact that there was a young lady in the ship whose help he implored.

Fury filled Dunne. If Smithers wanted to broadcast his position to all the Rings, having somehow escaped Haney’s pursuit a few days back, that was his business! But the fool was telling Haney—directly or otherwise—that Nike was still alive and with Dunne. And then—Dunne fairly foamed at the mouth with rage when Smithers was suddenly stricken with a new terror.

“You Dunne!” he wailed. “Are you Dunne? Your ship don’t sound like it did! It sounds like a donkeyship now! But you got a lifeboat! Dunne, answer me! Are you Dunne or are you Haney?”

The blips at the bow end of the radar screen grew larger. They united into a single irregular marking on the radar screen. That became huge. A shadow appeared against the mist. It was gigantic. The boat was headed for collision, and Dunne had to reverse his drive to dodge it. Then he heard Smithers fairly screaming. “You! You comin’ up behind me! Who’re you? Who’re you? Keep away from me! Keep away!”

Dunne had the tasks of a considerable ship’s crew thrust upon him at once. He could see the blip that was undoubtedly Haney’s donkey-ship. Another mark on the screen moved toward it—and it was not Dunne, It should have taken all of one man’s attention to keep that under observation. The blip that was Smithers darted from its former position. The other blip, drawing near to it, changed its course for interception.

“Dunne! Dunne!” wailed Smithers. “If this is kiddin’ me, quit it! Keep away from me!”

Another man or two should have watched the slow rotation of the monstrous object in the mist ahead. Still another could have been kept busy managing the lifeboat in its nearing of the fifteen-hundred-foot mass of minerals and metal. There was a columnar protrusion of metal which was as bright as polished platinum. There was a deep hollow, a Cave. There was a band of stone as black as jet.

Dunne grimaced unconsciously as he flung the lifeboat about in fashions not intended by her builders. He got the boat stopped in relation to the giant mass of mineralization. He reversed drive with the stem no more than feet from the precipitous rocky side of the monster. The boat backed toward the cave mouth. There was a heart-stopping clang of battering metal. Metallic shrieks and scrapings. An eerie shriek of tortured stone…

The lifeboat stopped with a jerk, which was hair-raising. Then it tried to turn and jammed itself in some fashion, and abruptly there was a feeling of solidity.

Dunne said from between set teeth, “Every other really big rock I’ve ever seen, except Outlook, has hollows in it that could be caves. When I saw how big this was I took a chance. It’s better than I expected. We’re sheltered here. Maybe we won’t be found. But even against a machine gun, I’d say our chances are not quite as bad as they were before.”

“We’re hiding from Haney?”

“That’s the question. Are we hidden?”

He didn’t look out the viewports. He stared at the radar screen. It had a very peculiar appearance. It was black all over, except for a fan-shaped search beam which went out of the cave entrance.

Nike listened. The ceiling speaker was nearly silent. Then there came cracklings, as from some storm of inconceivable violence on Thothmes, the cracklings died away. There came the rustling sounds originating on the sun; they in their turn were gone. A donkeyship’s whine with a babbling incoherency coming from it; it died out. A steady, savage drive-noise. Silence again.