Miners in the Sky

CHAPTER SEVEN

All the way back in the First System—where ancient Earth circled the first yellow sun known to men—somebody invented a new device. It crushed deep minerals and separated abyssal crystals from the slurry. Diamonds were hard, but abyssal’ crystals cut them like butter; so grinding gears could be used that would destroy any other material whatsoever by turning it to mud, and the mud then filtered for crystals. It was an admirable device, but it didn’t fit on a donkeyship. It was too bulky. It wasn’t practical to take Ring minerals to it. Transportation cost too much. So it looked like the invention was futile.

On the planet the mills of the law also ground. They ground very slowly, but well. Sedate justices wore costumes dating far back, before the time of space-travel. They sat in solemn, formal ceremony. They heard the sworn testimony of men they had appointed to find out certain facts. They debated, using technical terms that had meaning only inside a courtroom. They made a formal decision which was phrased in a manner only intelligible to lawyers. But the decision became a final action on a financially important case.

It assigned divers sums and properties to Nike and her brother with the proviso that if during the consideration of the case one of them had died, the other was to receive the whole. If both had died, their heirs were to inherit. If they had no descendants then their collateral kindred should inherit in the same manner and degree as if there had been no such persons as Nike and her brother.

It was noted that one of the justices concurring in the decision remarked, while removing his judicial robe, that the decision practically offered a reward for murder, since neither Nike nor her brother were in court when the decision was reached. But there was a marked difference. It was that if anybody killed either of them on Horus, the law would hang that person if it caught him. On the Rings it wouldn’t because there was no law. The difference between Horus and the Rings of Thothmes was essentially that on Horus there was some danger attached to killings, while in the Rings the danger was that one might be killed. The distinction though, was one of theory only.

Dunne let the lifeboat drift across Cassini’s Division between the outermost and next inward of the Rings of Thothmes. The supply of oxygen remained adequate. Stored as water instead of gas under pressure, a lifeboat carried oxygen for all the passengers it was designed to carry—many more than Nike and Dunne. There was food for as many people. But there was nothing to do. Clocks told the time and mechanically separated one day from another, and each night from each day. There was no external distinction, but it is necessary for humans to comply with arbitrary intervals of activity and repose. People everywhere in the galaxy find it necessary to live by twenty-four-hour cycles because they are built that way.

Two such cycles passed before Dunne prepared to turn on the drive again, and the radar. The speaker in the ceiling had been left turned on throughout. It had reported nothing but outside radiation, whisperings from the sun, and cracklings from Thothmes. Once, during the second day, there’d been a distant “tweet… tweet… tweet…” But that was all. Dunne didn’t change the schedule he’d determined on. Some two hours or so later he turned on the drive and the entire atmosphere in the lifeboat seemed to change.

There was still nothing to be seen in the viewports, because they were deep in the second Ring, and that was as dense as the outermost. But the radar showed objects in the mist of this ring as in the other. The drive whined and whined exactly like a donkeyship. The quality of the sound, of course, was decided by the size of the crystal used in the drive. Dunne felt himself feeling more like a man and less like a fugitive. The idea of hiding from Haney’s machine gun and hence from Haney was excessively irritating. But with the boat’s drive in action he felt that he was engaged in outwitting Haney rather than in hiding from him.

The new sound of the drive, though, had one consequence he didn’t like. It no longer sounded like a lifeboat; but there was only the power of a donkeyship available, and the lifeboat was larger. So the acceleration of the lifeboat was diminished. In a straightaway chase, Haney could overtake it. And if he did overtake the spaceboat, he had a machine gun and bazooka-shells against the lifeboat’s bazooka alone. So a fight with Haney was to be avoided, if only for Nike’s sake.

She joined him as he made calculations from what the radar told him.

“Queer!” he told her. “We’re near enough to Thothmes to have just the orbital velocity of the rocks around us. I’ve done a lot of worrying about collisions that wasn’t necessary!”

He had. Even with only one sizable Ring-fragment in two cubic miles, there was always some chance of smashing into , solidity in Thothmes’ Rings. At any fraction of any second they could have hit an object from the size of a teaspoon to that of a mountain tumbling through the sky. But with the same speed and course, such a thing was unthinkable.

“I suspect,” said Nike, “that you’ve been keeping other worries to yourself, too.”

“Only one,” he told her.

“What’s that?”

He didn’t answer. She frowned a little, watching his expression. She looked at him often, nowadays. She was learning the meaning of his every look and gesture.

“Go on!”

“We have to get to the pickup ship if you’re to get back to Horus.”

“Where,” said Nike, “I’ll be in the same danger I ran away from Horus and to the Rings to escape.”

“I’ll go with you this time,” he told her.

“Then you’ll take care of it,” said Nike. “You’ve taken care of everything else.”

“Not too well, and this is different,” he told her with some grimness. “If Haney knows exactly where we’re going to be, he can go there and wait for us.”

She considered. “Well?”

Dunne spread out his hands.

“He knows when the pickup ship will be coming and when it will leave. He knows we’ve got to be there before it goes away again. If he gets there first, he can use bazooka-shells and his machine gun on us when we turn up. And since there’s no law in the Rings, it won’t be anybody’s business either to stop him or pay him off for it.”

Nike said confidently, “I think you’ll manage!”

“How?”

“To use one of your favourite expressions,” Nike told him, “I don’t know. But I think you’ll do all right.” Then she pointed to the radar screen. “What’s that?”

There was a peculiarly involuted blip off to the left. For its distance from the center of the screen, it looked remarkably large. Dunne swung the lifeboat.

“We’ve time to look at it,” he said in a dry voice. “I wouldn’t mind an extra crystal or two. It would be convenient to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain, just now.”

She frowned.

The curving nature of the radar indication became more marked as the blip moved nearer and nearer to the middle of the screen, and therefore to. the position of the lifeboat.

“It’s very big,” said Nike.

He nodded. He cut the drive. The lifeboat floated on. It seemed very quiet, until the air-freshener cut in and began to whirr. A shadow appeared in the haze ahead. It deepened. It expanded. It filled nearly half the cosmos. Then they saw what was behind the mist. It was a Ring-fragment, but like no other Dunne had ever seen. It was more than a mile in extent. Great globular masses protruded from a central core. There were sharp projections scores of yards in length. There were depressions which amounted to the mouths of caves. There was a place where things like ropes stood out stiffly, and diminished to cords, to threads, and the threads to hair-like fibers of stone. It looked as if something molten and adhesive had been torn away and left these threads behind as it wrenched free from the greater mass.

They regarded it in silence.

Then Nike said, “There are caves!”

“Yes…”

Then Dunne said, “It was a volcano, or part of one. When the moon it was part of broke up, it broke up too. The gas that was dissolved in the melted rock expanded. It’s not unlike pumice.” Then he added, “It’s not the Big Rock Candy Mountain!”

He swung the lifeboat away. He set a course with some care.

“You take a watch now,” he said briefly. “All you have to do is dodge anything as big as that rock. And keep heading this way. We ought to be far enough from Haney, now, not to worry about him. But if you see anything moving, especially toward us—”

Nike said suddenly, “Will you teach me how to use a bazooka? If we need to fight Haney, I could fight with you! I won’t be afraid!”

He put his hand warmly and approvingly on her shoulder. Then he took it quickly away.

“Right,” he said gruffly. “Good idea! I’ll teach you after this watch.”

He went back to the main cabin. He settled himself to rest. He seemed to have some trouble getting to sleep.

Nike, in the control room, stood quite still with a queer expression on her face. She put her own hand where Dunne’s had rested on her shoulder. She didn’t look uneasy. In fact, she looked oddly pleased.

A long time later she looked out into the main cabin. Dunne was asleep. Nike smiled warmly to herself. But then she turned back to the radar screen. She watched it faithfully.

The Rings of Thothmes floated in space. They were nearly two hundred thousand miles in diameter, but no more than four hundred miles thick. There were markings on the planet around which they floated, markings that could be seen even by the telescopes’ on Horus. Their positions changed. They were not solid objects. They were storm systems. The planet revolved swiftly on its axis, so swiftly that it was not really a ball; it was noticeably flattened at its poles. The diameter across its equator was a fifth greater than its diameter from pole to pole. Nobody knew the size of its actual solid mass, of course. There were many who denied that there was solidity at all. Taking its cloud surface as its size, the density of Thothmes was less than that of water. But some insisted that deep down there were rocks and metals and possibly even rills. Perhaps a planet the size of Horus was enclosed in a gas ball thousands of miles deep. Almost anything could exist under such a cloud cover which occasionally changed its appearance but never broke to show what was beneath it. But if such a cloud cover swirled to make markings that sometimes lasted for weeks, there must be storms of unimaginable violence below. And those who insisted that there was nothing solid there, unless gas-ice or the like, found themselves agreeing on one point only with those who imagined a miniature world that never saw the sun. The agreement was that there couldn’t be any gooks. From one standpoint, the elements necessary for life couldn’t exist on Thothmes. From the other, nothing could live in such weather.

On the planet Horus there was a mild flurry of publicity about Nike and her brother. The planet’s highest court had ruled that the money held for Joe Griffiths—who had found the Big Rock Candy Mountain—should be turned over to the two of them as his heirs. Both of them were in the Rings at the time. There were news specials about them, but most of the interest was in the fact that there was a Big Rock Candy Mountain, and that an enormous fortune had been taken from it by one Joe Griffiths, who thereupon vanished from the sight of men. One of the newscasters pointed out that the costs of all the legal inquiries had been paid from the fortune itself. It was no longer fabulous. The lawyers involved had received more money from it than would now be left for the brother and sister. They’d get only the remnant. But still it was a matter of some interest. A pickup ship on the way to the Rings picked up the news item.

And somewhere in the Rings there was a donkeyship in which agitation was continuous. This donkeyship contained Smithers. He was terrified. He’d believed in gooks. He’d had to believe in them because he couldn’t believe in anything else that would account for the death of his partner, years ago. But now he’d come to realize that gooks weren’t absolutely necessary to explain it. He himself had very narrowly escaped being killed by Haney these past few days.

Smithers was desperate. There was no law. There was nobody to whom he could appeal for justice. He debated anxiously with himself. He argued vociferously with nobody but himself to listen. In the end he came distractedly to the conclusion that he must arouse public opinion in the Rings. If enough Ring-miners knew of Haney’s murders, Haney would have to stop.

So Smithers set out fearfully to rouse public opinion.

Presently Dunne and Nike, on their way to a necessary but highly perilous rendezvous with the next pickup ship, presently came to the Cassini Division again. Dunne cut off all apparatus and listened exhaustively before he ventured out. Then, a quarter of the way across stars blinked at him. They were occulted by something gigantic, of which his radar gave cryptic information.

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.

The fifteen-hundred-foot half-mountain turned on its axis. Radio waves could enter the cavern into which Dunne had backed his lifeboat. But they could only enter from one direction at a time.

“We’re shielded by the rock,” said Dunne. “We can only receive from one direction. And it changes.”

The drive-whine of Smithers’s ship. He panted, “If that’s you, Dunne, say so! Tell me! If it ain’t—”

The steady, buzzing whine of a donkeyship with no voice accompanying it. The sound of crackling lightning bolts, then the rustling of the sun’s photosphere.

Something fled across the Ring-mist which could be seen from the ports of the lifeboat. Smithers’ voice came from it, squealing. It was his fate or destiny always to involve Dunne in events Dunne wished urgently to avoid. He’d done enough harm before, through panic; but now, without knowing it, he’d chosen a course that could not but bring his silent pursuer past the open-mouthed cavern, into which Dunne had moved for Nike’s safety.

The slow rotation of the rocky mass cut off Smithers’ voice. The sound of another donkeyship replaced it.

“Maybe,” said Dunne deliberately, “maybe we can turn this cave into a break. I’m going out to the mouth of it. It looks like Smithers is just running round and round this rock, with Haney after him. I may be able to interfere.”

“I go too!” said Nike, fiercely. “If you get killed, I will be too!”

It was true. Haney’s primary purpose was to kill Nike, to change the situation in a long-continued lawsuit back on Horus, of which, in turn, the object was to distribute certain treasure from the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Dunne picked up his bazooka. Nike had hers loaded before he’d more than picked his up. She showed him that she’d put it on safely. He said, warningly, “No space-phones!”

She reached up to her helmet. A light glowed. She looked inquiringly at him. Nothing could be much more useless than a helmet lamp for a space-suit to be used in the Rings. But it was simpler to use a space-helmet with an unneeded feature than to get others made, particularly when so small a number would be required. But a helmet light meant something now, with the spaceboat backed into a cavern.

Dunne nodded. He leaned over until their helmets touched.

“I want to say,” said Dunne deliberately, “—something I only admit because I think we’re going to be killed. I want to say that I like you very much. I’d like to have you near me permanently. In short—”

But then he put her into the airlock. He said no more until the outer door opened. He fastened the lifelines for both of them. He saw her making ineffectual gestures, and he saw her face and realized that she was crying and trying to wipe her tears through a space-helmet.

Dunne made his way toward the cavern’s mouth. Nike suddenly stiffened, staring toward the back of the cave. She made a curious inarticulate noise, but only she heard it. There were painted symbols on the rocky wall.

But Dunne was facing away from them. He reached the bow of the lifeboat. He saw something solid in the all-enveloping mist. It was a donkeyship. It fled, and careened to turn and get back behind the giant mass of minerals. It was Smithers’ ship. It vanished.

A misty moving other object appeared almost instantly. It was Haney’s ship. Like a hawk after a sparrow, it flung itself in pursuit. Both ships disappeared.

Dunne shook his head inside his helmet. He found a place in which to brace himself, for the use of his bazooka. And then, practically from under his feet, Smithers’ battered ship came eeling out again. It streaked for the concealing mist. A thing came after it. Streaks of smoke—bazooka-shell smoke—came after it. One missed and went on uselessly on toward nothing whatever. But a second one struck and its shaped charge vaporized a hole in the metal and poured its whole explosive force into the donkeyship. A second bazooka-shell struck the donkeyship’s belly as it tumbled. A third hit.

Smithers’ battered ship began to come apart in space. The pursuer appeared, incredibly, from the mist to one side. It fired twice—three times more before the mist obscured it again. What wreckage remained connected together went on toward shining oblivion beyond the haze. Twice, Dunne saw a movement in that strange fog. It was each time a ship swirling and circling around its enemy. There were momentary flashings of light, explosions even brighter than sunshine on the dust of Thothmes’ rings. Shells were being pumped into the remains of the fragments of the wreck.

Then—nothing. Dunne waited, his bazooka ready, his features contorted with pure hatred. The hatred wasn’t on account of Smithers. It was because Haney and his companions had committed cold-blooded murder before his eyes, and he hadn’t been able to stop them. And Nike would presently be another victim.

Then Nike pulled at his arm. He touched his helmet to hers.

He said grimly, “If Smithers could track us and try to overtake us so we’d fight for him, then Haney’s donkeyship trailed us too. They’ll come back.”

Nike shook her head impatiently. “No! Not that! Come here!”

She threw the light from her helmet to the back of the cave. Catching onto one handhold after another, she dragged him half the length of the lifeboat. She pointed at the rocky wall where were the initials and numbers “JG-27.” Nike narrowed the beam. The light played on gray stuff. Friable stuff. There were actually greasy seeming crystals in view. They actually stuck out of the matrix! And Nike swung the light beam again.

There was an airlock door, made of the same plastic material as the bubbles used in the mining process of the Rings of Thothmes.

Nike touched her helmet to Dunne’s.

“This is it!” said her voice in the tinny, resounding helmet. “Don’t you see? JG—Joe Griffiths! And 27. That’s the year he found it! This is the Big Rock Candy Mountain!”

And it was. But as Dunne gaped at it, a shadow went past the cave mouth. Dunne jerked his head about. A donkeyship went past the cavern, no more than twenty or thirty feet from the lifeboat’s nose. From the airlock of this other ship, a man threw something.

The donkeyship went on. The object that had been thrown revealed its nature by detonating with a monstrous violence. It shattered the entire bow of the lifeboat, back through the miniature control room. The stern of the lifeboat was cracked, and it bow parts were smashed.

Haney’s donkeyship was out of sight. Dunne knew that peculiar raging frustration of a man who considers that right and justice and decency have been outraged and realizes that nothing can be done about it. He and Nike had just found the Big Rock Candy Mountain, a fit subject for fables and tales to the end of time. Therefore, they owned it. But they would own it only until the material needed for breathing gave out. There was no need for Haney to do anything more. They were dead. It would be completely, as well as figuratively, true in a very short time.