Miners in the Sky

CHAPTER FIVE

It was the donkeyship of the grizzled space-miner named Smithers, who alone in the Rings habitually worked without a partner. The battered bow of his donkeyship told of innumerable boulders pushed into shattering collisions with each other, for getting at their vitals.

“I heard ’em! ” his voice announced fiercely. “They picked up my drive! They’re comin’ after me! You fellas get set to fight ’em with me an’ we can handle ’em! But we got to fight! Might’s well fight together. Get set!”

Dunne caught up his bag of gray matrix. He hauled violently on the lifeline fastening him to an eyebolt beside the airlock door. He floated, pulling himself toward the spaceboat.

The grizzled man’s voice became a fierce yelping.

“Get set, heah me? Get set! I see you there, haulin’ y’self in! Git your bazooka an’ shells! Three of us fightin’ got more chance than one!”

Then he apparently really saw the lifeboat for the first time and realized that it was no donkeyship such as the miners of the Rings invariably used. A lifeboat wouldn’t even be a familiar object to him. Lifeboats belong in the elongated blisters on the hulls of passenger liners and cargo ships of space; Passengers on ocean ships, in long-ago times, never saw a lifeboat of that era afloat. They were kept hauled up on blocks on the boat decks. Passengers in space never saw lifeboats at all, because they were kept in the blisters from which they should be launched, but very rarely ever were.

“What the hell,” demanded the voice truculently. “What kind’a boat is that?”

His reverse-drive went on again. for the fraction of a second. The motion of the battered donkeyship stopped completely. It lay floating a hundred feet from the plastic bubble and the metal-stone substance of the rock. That rock should have made Keyes and Dunne moderately well-to-do, but so far it had cost Keyes his life and might have ended Dunne’s.

Dunne arrived at the airlock door of the lifeboat. He braced himself. Then he said very grimly into his helmet-phone, “This is a private rock, Smithers. I’m working it. If I didn’t know you I wouldn’t be talking. I’d be shooting! Move on!”

A pause. Then the battered donkeyship’s airlock opened. A figure in a space-suit appeared. It clipped a lifeline to an eyebolt and soared toward the floating rock that was also a mine. Dunne scowled. The soaring, monkeylike space-suited figure was familiar. The donkeyship was familiar. And Dunne was ready to kill. But a man ready to kill one specific man is not often anxious to kill anybody else. There is a feeling of economy, perhaps, as if one had an allowance of only one killing to be done with impunity, and therefore isn’t to be used on just anyone.

“I said this is a private rock, Smithers!” snapped Dunne.

The moving space-suit touched solidity. With an astonishing deftness and. agility it tossed a double loop around a protrusion of stone. With a strictly spaceman’s jerk, he had the loops tightened. Then the undersized space-suit faced Dunne.

“Shoot, dammit!” said Smithers’ voice vexedly. “But you’ll wish you hadn’t! I’m comin’ aboard where we can talk in air!”

He did something mysterious to the rope he’d just made fast. He suddenly had two loops in his two hands. With an extraordinary deftness he snagged a rocky irregularity with the loop in his left hand, and then another with the loop in his right. He advanced, holding himself to the jagged surface of the Ring-rock with the two loops alternately. It was as if he walked with two canes, save that these held him from floating away instead of holding him up against a fall.

Dunne raised his bazooka, suggestively and grimly. The small man made an inarticulate sound of disgust. He continued to advance. He offered no threat. To shoot him would be murder in cold blood. Dunne did not pull trigger. He knew the indignant frustration of a man forced to yield ground to keep his self-respect.

The little man made his way with astounding agility, for weightlessness, to the lifeboat’s airlock door. There he stopped. And now, certainly, if he’d made the slightest move to enter and close the airlock, leaving Dunne outside, Dunne would have had no choice but to kill him.

But he didn’t. He held his hands shoulder-high and waited for Dunne to join him in the lock. And, grinding his teeth, Dunne did.

For thirty seconds the two of them were in close physical contact. The sack of matrix crowded them. Dunne’s bazooka couldn’t be used in the lock, of course, but Dunne had another weapon ready.

The inner lock-door opened and Dunne put his belt-weapon back into its slightly clinging holster. He tossed the sack of matrix inside.

The little man turned his space-helmet and took it off. He grinned. Dunne took off his own helmet.

“Now, what’s this?” he demanded coldly. “I’ve every reason to shoot you, Smithers! Every reason!”

“Everybody has,” said the little man briskly. “But nobody does! When I come to a rock that looks promisin’, I always start hollerin’ about gooks while I’m comin’ up to it. If there’s somebody workin’ it, they know it’s me an’ they think I’m cracked, so they don’t start shootin’. If there’s nobody there, it’s no harm done.”

“And do you explain this,” asked Dunne sardonically, “when there is somebody working a rock and they know you can tell where they’re working and more or less what they’ve got?”

Smithers nodded.

“Sure! Sure I tell ’em. I just told you! But it ain’t often there’s anybody there. An’ anyhow, everybody knows I’m huntin’ gooks, not crystals. I just do enough minin’ to get supplies from the pickup ships. I’m huntin’ gooks, They killed my partner. I got to get even for that! I come mighty close to gooks plenty of times. But they’re smart! They come up the Rings from Thothmes. They spy on us. They hide from us! Now an’ then they get a chance to kill somebody an’—pfft! He’s gone! Just now, just a coupla hours ago I heard one of their ships. Their drive ain’t like ours. It goes ‘tweet… tweet… tweet…’ Like a bird. I heard it an’ I went for it. It stopped. Presently I heard a donkeyship drive. I hailed it, on communicator. It was a fella named Haney. He’d heard the gook ship too. But it was gone, by then.”

“When was this?” It was Haney’s name that made Dunne ask.

“I guess you’d say this mornin’,” said the little man, beaming, “if we had mornin’s in the Rings.”

There was, naturally, no morning or evening or night in the Rings. There was perpetual sunlit haziness everywhere, reaching for hundreds of miles in three directions, and for thousands in a fourth, toward Thothmes.

“When you came this way, then,” said Dunne evenly, “you left Haney behind. Look, Smithers! Haney killed my partner and left a boobytrap here to kill me. I’m waiting for him now to come back and find out whether his boobytrap worked. You’d better go away.”

Then he hesitated, twice opening his mouth to speak and then closing it. Then he said as if with reluctance, “In fact, there’s somebody who’d probably be a good deal safer with you than with me.”

Nike’s voice said sharply, “No!”

The little man whirled. He blinked. His mouth dropped open. He craned his neck incredulously. Then he gasped, “It’s a woman! A woman in th’ Rings! A woman!”

“My partner’s sister,” said Dunne coldly. “She came to see him. We’ve found him dead—murdered.”

“I ain’t seen a woman in years!” said Smithers in a shocked voice. “It was while I was back on Horus. While my partner was gettin’ killed by the gooks. It’s a woman!”

“Which,” said Nike fiercely, “doesn’t mean that I’m leaving here with anybody! I’m a partner in this ship! I’m not going anywhere with anybody! You can’t make me!”

The little man said, with a sudden and exaggerated gentleness, “No, ma’m! He can’t make you do nothin’ you don’t want to do! We don’t have women to look after here on the Rings, ma’am. We kinda get out’a the habit. But he can’t make you do anything y’don’t want to!”

He beamed at her. Her hands clenched and unclenched. She breathed quickly. Dunne realized that she was frightened. But he believed it was terror of Smithers. The isolation of miners in the Rings did queer things to some people. Smithers wasn’t wholly predictable, but no man would be afraid of him. But Nike might be.

Dunne went into the control room, Just on the off-chance, he thought he’d better consult the radar screen. He came out, his eyes burning. He spoke curtly to Smithers. “You’d better move on now, Smithers. There’s somebody else coming. They’ll arrive any minute. And somebody’s going to be killed.”

“Who’s comin’?” demanded Smithers.

“Haney, I think,” Dunne told him. “And if it is Haney, I’m going to kill him for my partner, because nobody else is as likely to have killed Keyes.”

Smithers said in gentle reproach, “He ain’t a nice fella, but you hadn’t ought to kill ’im!”

“I’ve got my reasons,” said Dunne coldly. “You go on! Out! And get away from here altogether!”

The little man said urgently to Nike, “Ma’am, would you want me to go away from here altogether? Or do you want I should stay an’ help Dunne fight, if he has to? He might be mistaken about Haney. If somethin’s comin’ here it’s likely gooks. I heard ’em.”

“Get out!” snapped Dunne. “Now!”

He shoved the small man’s helmet down on his head and thrust him in the airlock. He pressed the pump-out button.

“Something’s coming,” he told Nike. “I stand in the lock-door to shoot. You know the rest.”

There came a tapping on the lifeboat’s outer hull. Nike ran into the control room where she could look out. Smithers was already outside. He’d thrown the emergency release, wasting air. He tapped again. He saw Nike. He held up the severed mooring line for her to see. He’d freed the lifeboat. With an infinite deliberation it began to move outward and away from the rock. It had partaken of that dark object’s rotating motion, and even one revolution in ten minutes was enough to separate the rock and the spaceboat.

“He’s cast us off,” said Nike. “Now he’s going to his own boat. He moves fast.”

“Get your helmet on!” commanded Dunne. “Tighten it! Breathe from your tanks!”

Smithers’ voice came out of the control-room loudspeaker. He talked into his suit-phone and the communicator picked it up.

“Gooks!” he cried shrilly. “Look out, fellas! There’s gooks here! They got me! Git away an’ bring help! There’s four ships full’a gooks here! They’re layin’ for you.”

Dunne said coldly, “That’s not for us, but for what the radar says is coming. Smithers has gone chivalrous and swapped sides. He’s on our side now—for what good that may be! Get on your helmet and close the faceplate. If we get hit, the air will go. I showed you how to run the ship! I’ll shoot from the lock-door. You take the controls. I’ll tell you what to do!”

He went into the airlock. In instants he had the outer door open. He had a lifeline clipped to an eyebolt. He had his bazooka—tied by a cord to his belt—ready for instant use.

The spaceboat was then perhaps a yard from the giant rock that had his and Keyes’ initials on it. That was a claim of ownership to which nobody paid any attention if they could avoid it. He saw Smithers. That small person flung his ropeloops ahead of him and pulled on them with extraordinary speed and skill. He reached the mooring line of his battered donkeyship. He jerked at it and the rope was released. Then, clinging to it and climbing it hand-over-hand in monkeylike fashion, he swarmed out on it toward his donkeyship, The line did not sag, because there was no weight; but it twisted and writhed as he climbed.

Dunne strained his ears. He heard no sound of any space-drive in his phones. But the radar had been explicit. Something sped toward this rock from many miles away, from invisibility behind the floating, sunlit, ever-present dust-fog of the Rings.

Smithers reached his own airlock. He swung inside and the outer door closed, but not quite. He opened it again and snatched in the rope. He vanished, and the door closed again, this time firmly.

Then his voice came almost instantly on the donkeyship’s transmitter instead of his helmet-phone.

“You, Haney!” he cried shrilly, “you sheer off! You keep away from here! No tricks! There’s a lady here! Keep away!”

Yet nothing seemed to be happening. There was a moving blip on the radar screen in the lifeboat. Dunne stood in the airlock door with a bazooka ready to be raised and fired. Nike, frightened, nevertheless went to the lifeboat’s control board to try to make use of the lessons Dunne had given her in the handling of a ship. The lifeboat floated with tremendous, dignified deliberation away from the Ring-rock, which moved very slowly around some axis it had discovered within itself. Smithers’ donkeyship hung suspended in emptiness, now that its mooring line had been drawn inside. And nothing happened. The stony mass hid a part of the glowing mist which seemed elsewhere to fill all the universe there was.

When the action came, it was too swift to follow. At one instant there were only the three objects floating in nothingness: spaceboat, donkeyship, and huge mass of brown stone crystals with a slash of gray mixture on one side. Dunne raised his bazooka, waiting grimly for a target.

There was a great flash of bright metal. A shape moving too fast and too near to be clearly seen, rushed past the edge of the floating rock. Flashings of light seemed to make a line along its length. Sparks flew. Some of them bounced from the mass of stone. Some seemed to sink into the lifeboat. There was a sort of gridiron of parallel streaks of light going away into the mist beyond the lifeboat. And something else flashed toward infinity and was gone.

And then the lifeboat moved. It seemed to leap. Dunne was flung back and out of the airlock. He fell, with his bazooka—tied to his belt as it was—lost to his fingers. The line from his belt to the eyebolt on the lifeboat tightened. It came taut with a violence that almost cut him in two. But it did stretch. The lifeboat, though, flung forward with a sort of frenzied energy, with greater acceleration than its drive was ever intended to produce. It drove off to nowhere with such velocity that it seemed to shrink in size like a broken toy balloon, and there was nothing left where it had been except the seventy-foot mass of stone with painted letters and numerals on it, and a donkeyship from which a bewildered and plaintive voice began to call, “Dunne! Dunne! What’s happened? Where are y’?”

And a long, long distance away, inside the spaceboat, Nike gathered herself up where the shock of explosive acceleration had flung her. She began to crawl uphill toward the controls again. Outside, Dunne’s lifeline stretched itself to its limit from the eyebolt. He dangled, moving feebly at its end.

There was no reaction to this event anywhere else. After all, the Rings were some four hundred miles thick, and they formed a shining golden disk nearly two hundred thousand miles across, though its center was largely occupied by the gas-giant world of Thothmes. In nearly two hundred million cubic miles of glowing haze, what happened to a single space-ship’s lifeboat was not apt to appear important. Yet it seemed that a somehow agitated “tweet… tweet… tweet!” sped out from somewhere nearby, and Smithers’ voice called dolefully, “Dunne! Dunne! What’s happened t’you?”

And there was no answer.

Nike crept to the lifeboat’s controls inch by inch. Struggling against the intolerable acceleration, she got within reach of the controls. She reached up and pulled a switch Dunne had shown her.

Instantly the drive ceased. The acceleration stopped. And then it seemed that the spaceboat, in ceasing to drive, began to fall and fall, toward infinity.

Outside, Dunne struggled feebly with the lifeline that had dragged him in the boat’s wake. The elastic rope shortened itself. It drew him back. It gave him a certain momentum relative to the spaceboat. He took up the slack and pulled harder. If there had been air outside, of course, he would have thrashed wildly about until the lifeline parted or he crashed against the boat’s steel hull. But here was only glowing vacuum. There was no resistance to his motion.

He caught the airlock doorframe. He got in. His bazooka bumped. He pulled it into the lock. He dragged the outer lock-door shut—and saw a hole in it.

It was a round hole not quite half an inch in diameter. But it meant that the airlock could never be filled with air so the inner door would come unlocked. He was locked out. By every rule known to spacemen it should not be possible to open the inner door to what was effectively empty space.

In a species of peevish fury and fretting horror, he struck the door handle.

And the door opened.

He stepped inside, unbelieving. The door shut behind him. He was suddenly and insanely aware that his suit ballooned and billowed at its flexible joinings. This was the way the suit was in empty space. The inside of the lifeboat was airless. It was empty space.

He saw movement. Nike had turned incredulously from where she’d cut off the drive. She gave a little cry and raised her hand to her space-helmet. She’d sealed it on Dunne’s command just before the attack from nowhere. Dunne shouted and leaped. He caught and held her hand from opening her helmet to the emptiness which had invaded and conquered the lifeboat.

“Wait! ” he snapped. “Look at your suit!”

He held her. He pointed to the proofs that there was no air, that the inside of the lifeboat was as empty of anything to breathe as space between a pair of stars. He cut off her helmet-phone. He cut off his own. Then he touched the metal of his helmet to the metal of hers.

“Keep your helmet shut!” he commanded. “We’ve lost our air! The hull’s punctured: The air’s all gone!”

The sound went by solid conduction from helmet to helmet. She stared at him. He said, more urgently still, “Don’t talk by space-phone! Maybe we can patch up!”

He released her. A space-suit, normally, would have oxygen in its tanks for two hours of breathing. The ship had none, if it had leaked as the. evidence indicated. Dunne had seen one opening in the hull. It looked like the holes in the bubble in which Keyes had died.

“Let’s see how bad the leaking is!”

She didn’t hear him say that, but she saw him examine the hole in the. outer lock-door. Then he went looking for more. He found them. Nearly a dozen, in all—round holes that looked as if they’d been drilled, but with fringes of torn metal that said they’d been punched. Anyone of them would have bled the ship’s air to space. Suddenly he realized how they’d been made. Everyone had been made within the fraction of a second, while something flashed past and away from the spot where he’d been waiting with a bazooka!

But there was more, and equally bad. The drive had acted in a wholly unprecedented fashion. The spaceboat had attained and still possessed a velocity they could not guess at, in a direction they could not determine, and it would be distinctly unwise to try to use the drive before the cause of its misbehavior could be found out.

The question of air was most urgent. Dunne searched for the cause of the punched round holes. He found something on the cabin floor that had obviously made one of them. It was a slug of hard, pointed metal with a hollow in its unpointed end in which some substance had plainly burned.

He touched helmets with Nike again. Solid conduction carried his voice to her.

“I’ve found out what hit us!” he told her. “Queer! It’s an antique weapon everybody’s forgotten. It’s like a belt-weapon except it can shoot an indefinite number of times. It’s called a machine gun. It shoots missiles, called tracer bullets in the old days. We couldn’t have kept from losing our air. We couldn’t have gotten into space-suits in time to survive!”

Nike did not speak.

“And it’s an antique!” insisted Dunne. “It’s like being shot with a bow and arrow! Maybe Haney’ll try to track us down to be sure we’re dead. We’ve a terrific built-up speed, though. If I can patch the holes, we may make out yet. This isn’t a donkeyship! It’s a lifeboat!”

He moved away. The lights in the lifeboat continued to burn. He hunted briskly for the emergency tools a lifeboat would carry. He found them. There were absurd provisions against the improbable. There were not only tools but seeds-as if a space-ship could be wrecked and a lifeboat make ground on an uninhabited world equivalent to a desert island, with an appropriate atmosphere and a 801-type sun and a tolerable temperature-range, but lacking all edible plants!

He also found emergency sealing-putty which does not harden unless some part of a mass of it is touched to metallic iron, when it polymerizes swiftly to a solid that adheres to anything and becomes almost as hard as iron itself. He took it to the airlock. A round ball of putty pushed into the bullet hole sealed it. He tapped it with the knuckles of his space-gauntlet. The bullet hole was patched. He went to the others, in turn. He had to tear away metal to get at some of the holes in the hull, but he worked swiftly.

He was absorbed in his task, but Nike could not understand it. She saw their situation clearly: When the oxygen in their suit-tanks was gone, they would die. She was alive now only because Dunne had ordered her to seal her helmet before they were attacked. But they could breathe only as long as their space-suits permitted. If there were a place to which they could go—and there wasn’t—they wouldn’t have been able to breathe long enough to reach it. There was nothing imaginable to be done. They could use some few reserve tanks and stay alive a little longer. But why? It would only postpone the inevitable—death! Anybody can die, but there are things one wants to do first! One can hate the frustration of an early death without being afraid of it.

Dunne finished patching the last hole. He went briskly back to the storage spaces of the spaceboat. Nike looked at the gauge of her oxygen tanks.

She saw Dunne, absorbed again, making electrical connections of heavy blue cables to things she recognized as fuel cells. In them, space-fuel could be used to produce electric current directly. During the time Dunne had waited vainly for radar signs of visitors, he’d done such things as he was doing now. Then, Nike hadn’t asked what it was. Now there seemed no point in asking. Then, she’d tried to avoid speech with Dunne, which was folly. Now rebellious, it seemed folly not to.

He moved back from the electrical connections and came toward her. She looked at him in desperation. He touched their helmets together.

“This is a lifeboat,” he said exuberantly, “and not a donkeyship. Lucky, eh?”

She realized drearily that he wanted her to agree with him. She nodded, but could not trust herself to speak.

“We use a pound of oxygen a day apiece,” he said with something like zest. “Donkeyships use oxygen in tanks under pressure. It’s cheaper. But a lifeboat has to be designed for a lot of people. Water’s more expensive but more. practical. It costs more to get oxygen from water, counting the fuel to electrolyze it, but a gallon of water and the fuel to get the oxygen from it weighs a lot less than eight pounds of oxygen in a pressure tank!”

It took time for these comments to become relevant. Then Nike said incredulously, “You mean—you’re putting air back into the ship?”

“Not air,” he corrected. “Oxygen. The same stuff we’re breathing now in our space-suits. We breathe it at three pounds pressure because we’ve no nitrogen to dilute it with. At full pressure and undiluted it would make us drunk, anyhow!”

“But—”

“We use a pound a day apiece,” Dunne repeated. “This being a lifeboat, we can turn out twenty-five if we must. We’re all right for oxygen!”

Nike knew relief that seemed almost shameful. But she said with a dry throat, “And the engine? The drive?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Dunne. “I have to see about that now.”

He went away, nodding to give reassurance. Nike stared at him in an entirely new fashion. It is the instinct of a woman to look to a man in emergencies. She had depended on her brother. She hadn’t known that there was anybody else in whom she could feel the same confidence. Dunne had been a stranger; now, abruptly, he was a person who provided air when the spaceboat was drained of it. He was the person who’d gotten a lifeboat to go find her brother when his donkeyship was destroyed and there was no other way. He’d even been prepared for the attack.

She watched as he uncovered the fuse-box which distributed electricity to various places in the spaceboat. There was a take-off for light, for the air-freshener, for heat and instrumentation and refuse-cycling. And of course, for the drive.

There was a neat round depression in the box cover. A bullet had penetrated the spaceboat’s hull and made a deep dent in the distributor. Then it had fallen to the floor.

Dunne took off the cover. The intricate wiring was pushed about. There was a short-circuit.

He corrected the short. He made an abortive movement with his hand, as if to scratch his head reflectively. He put the distributor box together. He hauled up a floor plate and inspected the drive under the floor. He shook his head. Gingerly, with his movements clumsy because of the gauntlets he must wear, he brought the thrust-blocks up to view. The copper blocks were almost red-hot.

Squatting, over them, he stared at what he saw. Nike went to look. She felt not only astonishment but something much more important and basic.

He spoke to her. Naturally, she couldn’t hear him. She touched her helmet to his.

“The current got shorted through the drive-crystal,” he told her, in a voice made tinny by the method of its passage to her. “Away over normal voltage—overloaded the crystal. It pushed like the devil, but it burned up in doing so. Look!”

He showed her the closely approaching copper blocks, with a single shred of greasy crystal in between.

“It’s ruined?” asked Nike.

“It’d have blown everything in minutes,” he said. “It was just burning out when you cut off the juice.”

He frowned down at the massive thrust-blocks, held apart by the most infinitesimal of single grains of the most precious mineral in the cosmos. A donkeyship needed a half-gram crystal to make its drive operate. A lifeboat needed something larger. A liner on an interplanetary run required a crystal or crystals costing more than its hull and interior and all its furnishings together. The almost-burned-out crystal between the spaceboat’s thrust-blocks was now no larger than a grain of sugar.

Nike drew back. He reached up and caught her hand. He tugged at it. She bent down again. Their helmets touched.

“Oxygen!” he said tinnily. “It’s my turn to remind you!”

He grinned at her and she was astounded. But she went obediently to the remaining suit-tanks and replaced the one whose gauge indicated a pressure close to zero.

Far away, a battered donkeyship started its drive and began to move away from the seventy-foot floating rock. Then it stopped. It returned. The whine of its drive, translated into ultra-high-frequency waves, spread out from the rock. It stopped again. The grizzled Smithers called cautiously on his communicator:

“Dunne! Dunne! What happened t’you, Dunne?”

There was no reply. In the control room of his donkeyship, Smithers muttered to himself. He turned off the transmitter.

“Haney shouldn’t ha’ done that!” he said indignantly to nobody at all. “Not to somebody had a woman with ’im. He lied t’me! Didn’t say a word about a lady in the Rings! All he said was he wanted t’know if anybody was there! Anybody’d—” His tone changed to shrewdness. “Figured I’d get killed if somebody was there…” Then he protested, “No harm seein’ if anybody was there! Anybody’d shoot anybody who found out they was workin’ something good—anybody but me! I coulda ’voided a fight! I ain’t got time to hunt crystals. Gooks is what I’m after. Why shouldn’t I get me some extra oxygen ’voidin’ a fight between men?”

The donkeyboat floated near the rock. Nothing happened, whether visibly nearby, or producing radio waves that would travel vast distances before they became too faint for a donkeyship’s communicator to pick them up.

“I tell y’,” said Smithers angrily to the walls of his ship, “that fella Haney’s a bad egg! Dunne found th’ Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ fellas tried to track him, so he didn’t go to it. But Haney figured he’d kill ’im because he’d rather nobody had it than not him! Yes, suh! Dunne’s stayin’ away from the Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ Haney’s tryin’ to kill him so if he don’t have the Mountain, Dunne won’t neither!”

There were flaws in his logic, but it satisfied Smithers. Now he spoke again, with a fine conviction of his own shrewdness: “But now Dunne’s gone off. He burned crystals in his drive to get speed nobody else can afford to get, because they ain’t got crystals to burn! Yes, suh!”

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.