Miners in the Sky

CHAPTER FOUR

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.

In a certain place on Horus, even greater agitation grew. There were people trying to act secretly, on Horus, as men were openly permitted to act in the Rings—as if there were no law. But they found themselves running into trouble. Their problem had to do with a girl, Nike Keyes, who because of their attempted disregard of laws had taken fright and gone to the Rings to join her brother. And this was very bad business—unless something lethal happened quickly.

So in one place on the planet Horus, and one where the pickup ship drove through the void, and in one place in the Rings—no, two or ten or twenty places in the Rings—men talked disturbedly about Nike or about where Dunne might be. They didn’t all know they were talking about Nike, and some didn’t know that Dunne was involved; but they all knew some irritation and disturbance and uneasiness. But Nike occupied the back cabin of a lifeboat, and regarded Dunne with frightened eyes on the way to a second Ring-rock, where it developed that Dunne meant to moor the lifeboat and wait for the radar to tell him of another visitor to the rock in which Keyes was now buried.

The discovery of her brother’s death was a shock. When she was on the way to join him, she’d been absorbed in a situation which was desperate, but which she felt he would take care of. But now he was dead. There was nobody, anywhere, in whom she had reason to put trust. She and her brother were orphans. Keyes was the older, and he’d tried to take care of her in a world where the young and inexperienced were considered fair prey for sharpers. What inheritance they’d had, they’d been tricked or cheated out of. And Dunne had taken the last of their inheritance to put with his own money for the donkeyship now floating in small shattered pieces in the Rings. Her trip had been a chancey thing. But now she believed that. Dunne had practiced good faith toward her brother and herself. Too, she’d thrust herself into his current affairs. It wasn’t his fault or with his consent that she was here, and in this situation. Stowing away on the lifeboat had been her own idea. So she felt a complex mixture of distress and grief and terror and a horrifying isolation. Even from Dunne.

It is the instinct of a man in difficulties to try to plan his way out of them. It is the instinct of a woman in difficulties to try to get somebody to help her out. Some men automatically look for help, and some women face their problems alone. But the instinct remains. And Nike had absolutely no one in any solar system in the galaxy to whom she felt that she could apply even for counsel.

Unless it was Dunne. She’d added herself to his worries without his consent, and he’d told her angrily that she’d be sorry. She was. Even in a situation of no stress at all she’d have known the acute loneliness of a woman who no longer has any ties to anybody else. In the present state of things, she might justly have reacted with hysterics.

But she didn’t. She kept out of Dunne’s way as much as was possible in a space lifeboat. She closeted herself in the rear cabin, and appeared only when called on. She spoke as little as possible, and only when Dunne spoke first. She believed she was acting to be a minimum of trouble and of irritation to him.

She wasn’t. For a time he took her reserve to be grief about her brother. And in no small part it was. But presently he came to the dour conclusion that she was afraid of him—because of his angry reception when she came out of hiding as a stowaway. When two people are isolated from all the rest of the human race, there is bound to be friction unless they are very wise. But Nike wasn’t wise. Her upbringing and the present situation made her the least-prepared of all possible persons to establish new ties and acquire self-confidence.

Time passed. Days. More days. Dunne stayed grimly close to the radar. He was waiting for somebody to come to make sure that their boobytrap had worked. The lifeboat was moored to a fragment of stratified surface-rock from a nameless and anciently destroyed moon of Thothmes.

Dunne considered it necessary to stay there. Nike didn’t know why. There was nothing to do but watch a radar screen when he had to be absent from it, and listen to a communicator-speaker which gave out no sounds but rustlings from the sun and cracklings from Thothmes.

It would have been bad enough if it had been only isolation. With a basic misunderstanding between them, it was intolerable.

But Dunne stood it for a full eight standard days. Then, without consultation with Nike, he cast off from the lump of surface-rock. The lifeboat’s drive hummed.

Nike appeared. She didn’t look well. She looked as if she kept herself from trembling by a violent effort.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Dunne nodded without cordiality.

“I thought somebody would have come before now to find out if their boobytrap did its work.”

She looked at him in silence.

“You’re going back to Horus when the pickup ship comes,” he explained. “You’ll want money when you get there.”

She moistened her lips. “I’ll manage. You needn’t—”

“Then I’ll need oxygen and food,” he said impatiently. “I used up our credit—your brother’s and mine—to get this lifeboat. I have to have something to use for more credit, for supplies. In any case, I’m going back to dig out some matrix. Maybe I’ll get crystals enough for my supplies and something for you, on your brother’s account.”

She said nothing.

“I don’t like the idea,” he added grimly. “They should have come back to work the rock after killing your brother and trying to kill me. They haven’t. So I’m going to work the rock—with a bazooka at hand. You’ll watch the radar. When we’ve even a small stock of crystals, I’ll get you away from here until pickup-ship time. After that I’ll try to pay you for the money your brother invested as my partner. And I’m going to come back here and find out who killed him.”

“It isn’t necessary,” she protested. “I owe you much more, for the air I’ve breathed and the food I’ve eaten and the—trouble I’ve been to you.”

He drew in his breath sharply. Then he shrugged.

“Wait till I send you a bill for that! Right now I have to take care of real things, not feelings!”

His tone was dismissal. She went back to the rear cabin. He headed the lifeboat back toward the seventy-foot mass of abyssal minerals, with its streak of gray matrix promising wealth. Again the lifeboat’s drive hummed as it gathered speed to cross the twenty-odd miles of shining emptiness. Again it cut off. And again the space-boat coasted.

Dunne listened and watched, watched and listened. There seemed to be nothing happening anywhere in the universe except a minute displacement of radar blips on the lifeboat’s radar screen. But many things really happened.

Five hundred miles away, a donkeyship which had been coasting put on full power and fled when an unearthly “tweet… tweet… tweet…” came from its communicator. There was no explanation for the abnormal noise. Again, more miles in another direction, a donkeyship drove unguided while its crew fought insanely. They’d had nobody but each other to speak to for months. There was a ship that incredibly found matrix material on a hill-sized rock not fifty miles from Outlook. Two other ships found that their Ring-rocks had been cleaned out during their absence at Outlook. There was a place where a human body was pushed out of an airlock and the donkeyship from which it had come had put on power and gone away. There was a place where a hundred-ton boulder had begun to acquire speed in a new direction. A donkeyship pushed it. It moved on and on and on, increasing its speed for many miles. Then it smashed into a monumentally large other rock. The donkeyship which had turned it into a missile began busily to investigate its fragments.

And the skipper of the pickup ship continued to sweat over the problem of explaining the disappearance of a woman passenger in interplanetary space. It was an extremely difficult thing to account for in terms that would leave him wholly blameless. And there was also the lifeboat he’d allowed Dunne to take.

There were other happenings that could be told, but eventfulness is relative. Dunne, in the spaceboat that had waited so long for murderers to return to the scene of their crime, coasted. up to the mass of rock and metal on which he and Keyes had put their signatures. He moored the lifeboat. He landed on the rock. Savagely, because of his feeling of complete frustration, he began to break out lumps of gray matrix and stuff it in a sack for crushing and the separation of any abyssal crystals it might contain.

He worked for a long time, angry because he didn’t understand Nike’s behavior. He didn’t realize that the death of her brother was not only a grief, but total isolation. She felt that she no longer belonged anywhere. She knew a desolation he couldn’t imagine. If he’d been shipwrecked on an uninhabited world, Dunne would not have been happy; but he’d have been self-sufficient. Nike wouldn’t. No woman would. And by the loss of the one person she was confident she mattered to, she’d lost all confidences in anything.

Dunne labored furiously at the loosening of matrix material. He was too angry to notice the passage of time. But a man in a space-suit mustn’t forget how long he’s been breathing from the twin tanks on his space-suit’s shoulders. Dunne did.

He was getting out an unusually large bit of matrix when he felt a singular movement of the lifeline holding him to the lifeboat. He hadn’t caused it. He swung swiftly, and the state of his mind was such that his hand went instantly to his belt-weapon.

He was then crouched beside the vein of matrix which made this particular fragment of a former moon into a mine most men would commit murder to possess. On every hand, the mineralized surface curved downward and away from him. The horizon was nowhere more than ten feet away. Above that horizon all was shining emptiness. But he saw his lifeline cross it. And the line moved.

Weapon in hand, he scrambled toward it. He was ready to kill. He expected to kill. He raged because Nike was in the ship and he should be there to protect her. And he raged additionally because he was not.

Then he reached the place which had been his horizon. Below it he saw another space-suited figure. The spacesuit did not fit; it was too large. There were balloonings where the material of the suit allowed for movement. And the figure carried no weapons.

He swore. The small figure was guiding itself by the lifeline whose movement had startled Dunne. Nike had left the ship to get to him, by following his lifeline. But she had no lifeline of her own.

“Stand still!” commanded Dunne fiercely. “Are you crazy? No lifeline?”

He went to where she’d stopped as if paralyzed with terror when he spoke. He gathered up the rope. He caught her by the arm. He drew her with himself back to the lock. He thrust her in and crowded in beside her. When the inner door could open he followed her into the cabin and instantly took off his helmet. She did not. He had to take it off himself.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded hotly. “I told you to stay here! To watch the radar!”

She compressed her lips and listened in silence. He found himself frightened, now that the danger was over. She could have drifted away.

“I’d have had to come after you if you’d slipped!” he told her angrily. “We mightn’t have gotten back! What the devil did you leave the ship for?”

“You told me,” she said defiantly, “when we were moored to the other rock, not to use the space-phone. Not ever. But you were gone a long time. And—I worried that you might have forgotten to look at your oxygen gauge.”

He turned his head and looked at the gauge. The pressure needle was flat against the pin. The tanks read empty—both of them. In ten minutes more, or fifteen at most, he’d have collapsed from oxygen starvation; he would have had no warning, because it is excess of carbon dioxide rather than lack of oxygen that makes one feel suffocation. He felt a moment’s queasy sensation at the pit of his stomach.

“I apologize,” he said ruefully. “You were right and I was wrong. And—it could have killed both of us.”

She swallowed. “You said you’d have come after me if I’d drifted away. Why?”

“For the same reason,” he told her, “that you came after me. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

She searched his face, then shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “It isn’t the same reason. But thanks, anyhow.”

“You thank me?”

Then he said harassedly, “See here! I want you to do me another favor, besides saving my life. Your brother and I were partners. Now that he’s gone, his part of the partnership falls to you. So—will you, as a favor, accept it? Be my partner until I can put you on the pickup ship to go back to Horus? You’ve been reproaching yourself. There’s no sense to it! You just proved I need a partner! Where would I be if you hadn’t thought about my oxygen—as a partner does?”

She searched his face again. Then she shrugged her shoulders in a fashion curiously like the gesture he had made.

“All right,” she said steadily. “Until then.”

She paused. “And now I’ll fix something to eat.”

She turned to the readier-unit which prepared meals on demand.

“And I,” said, Dunne, “I’ll go get that sack of matrix I was about to bring aboard.”

She said warningly, “Oxygen!”

He removed the emptied tanks and twisted two others into place. He re-entered the airlock. He went outside.

Somehow everything looked different when he went out again from the lifeboat. But there was no real difference. There was the bubble he and Keyes had made, with the singular holes in it as if a belt-weapon had made them. There were the objects inside. There was even a sleeping bag with its hood turned up so a man in a bubble could rest his eyes in sleep. There was the sack of matrix. He moved toward it, his lifeline all secure.

And then he heard the whine of a donkeyship’s drive in his helmet-phone. It was very loud. It was very near. It was a ship that had been coasting across the space the yellow haze filled, and that now reversed its drive furiously to come to a stop.

Dunne put the maximum four bazooka-shells into his weapon’s magazine. He stood savagely ready to shoot on sight, which was the only practical way to defend oneself in the Rings. Then the drive-whine stopped just as it had reached a loudness to make his eardrums tingle. A voice bellowed: “The gooks are comin’! The gooks are comin’! They’re on the way! Come on out an’ get set to fight ’em! They’re comin’!”

Around a ragged comer of the Ring-rock there came the battered nose of a donkeyship.

Dunne swore.