Miners in the Sky

by Murray Leinster

  “But—it’s life or death!” The girl wrung her hands. “Really!”

  “I can’t think of anything else you can do,” said Dunne. “Nothing will keep me from going back to my partner. His life depends on my getting back. But I won’t take you. I know you’re his sister. I’ve seen your picture. Short of taking you into the Rings, there’s nothing I won’t do for you on his account. But that one thing I will not do! I won’t!”

  He turned away. He made his way back to the tumult and the shouting where all the Ring-miners behaved like drunken men because for one hour or thereabouts they did not have to stay on the alert lest they die.

  His own nerves jangled. They’d been taut enough before he arrived at Outlook. Now they were worse. He bitterly regretted that he’d left Keyes behind. It would have been wiser to risk the loss of their rock to a later claimant than to have made the blunder of not accounting for Keyes, and to have this situation arise.

  He’d brought a double handful of crystals to the ship. Added to the sum already to their credit with the Abyssal Minerals Commission, there was almost riches. If he and Keyes divided it, they’d each be moderately well-to-do. If Keyes divided again with his sister—and that was his intention—the sum for each wouldn’t be negligible. Keyes could quit the Rings and take care of his sister. Dunne knew that he wouldn’t quit, himself; but Keyes could, and he ought to.

  This girl… Donkeyships were bare and barren functional devices, by which two men could track down solid objects in the golden mist which was the Rings. Normally they’d inspect hundreds before they found one worth testing. And not all those they tested yielded any trace of the crystals all men coveted. And, once in a donkeyship in the Rings, there was no backing out. There was nowhere to go until another pickup ship arrived. The bedlam here and now was proof enough of the intolerable strain of life in a donkeyship in the Rings. But for men there was the bright and shining hope concerning the Big Rock Candy Mountain. That was at once a dream which kept men from suicidal despair, and—since Dunne was suspected of finding it—made this the worst of all possible times for Keyes’ sister to come up as a problem. When they were suspected of such infinite good fortune, the only place for her was somewhere else. Anywhere else!

  A grizzled spaceman came and sat beside Dunne. Dunne knew him. His name was Smithers and he was considered slightly cracked. He was the only donkeyship man in the Rings who habitually worked alone. He’d had a partner, and the partner disappeared; and from that time on, Smithers protested vociferously that his partner had been killed by gooks and that ultimately he’d avenge him. He talked about gooks—to anybody who’d listen, and probably between pickup ships he talked to himself.

  “They’re calmin’ down now,” confided the grizzled man of the revelers about them. “They acted crazy at the beginnin’, but they’re calmin’ down now.”

  Dunne nodded. He was inclined to grind his teeth because of his own folly. He’d given his order for oxygen and foodstuffs and mining supplies. His order was being made ready. Similar orders would be delivered to each donkeyship team, in the order of their arrival and delivery of their accumulation of crystals. Now Dunne had to wait his turn to receive them. But he’d become an object of suspicion. He was suspected of having found the Big Rock Candy Mountain. It was senseless. But it was very dangerous! Lonely, isolated men were apt to be cranks. This grizzled character was an example.

  “Have y’heard,” he demanded of Dunne, “that there was gooks sighted down yonder? Fella named Sam. told me so last pickup ship time. He heard ’em first. Their drive don’t make a whine like a human drive does. It goes tweet… tweet… tweet instead.” He nodded portentously. “This fella Sam heard it. An’ then he saw a gook ship. It come for him. He lit out an’ lost it. But it was a gook ship!”

  Then Smithers said, more portentously and more ominously still, “And Sam ain’t back this trip. He was here last time. He ain’t here this time. Somethin’ got him! It was gooks! We got to do somethin’ about gooks!”

  Dunne shook his head, not paying attention. It was wholly likely that somebody’d been joking with Smithers, and Smithers didn’t see it. There had always been rumors of gooks in the Rings. The word meant something like “ghost.” Communicators occasionally picked up noises for which there was no explanation, but it did not follow that there must be alien entities to make them. Gooks were supposed to be inhabitants of the planet Thothmes, and some people believed that they’d made space-ships and came sneaking about the Rings, spying on humans and on occasion sniping them. But the evidence for them wasn’t good.

  A world suitable for life to develop has to have heavy elements and rocks and metal compounds to provide the raw material for living things to be made of. But Thothmes, if one judged by its gravitational field, was not nearly as heavy as a same-sized globe of water. That ruled out the possibility of gooks. And it was believed that if there were a solid center under Thothmes’ turbulent veil of clouds, it must be frozen gas-ice or perhaps methane or ammonia. And life couldn’t originate or continue there!

  The grizzled Smithers went on with sudden passion: “You listen here! You found the Big Rock Candy Mountain! Maybe you think you goin’ to keep it secret! Maybe you left Keyes behind on it to keep anybody else from minin’ it. But there’s gooks goin’ around, snipin’ men’s ships! All of us together, we c’n handle a lot of gooks! But you try it by y’self—”

  Dunne said, “We didn’t find the Big Rock Candy Mountain!”

  Smithers ignored the statement. He said firmly, “Remember what happened to Joe Griffiths. He found the Mountain! Everybody knows it. There’s millions an’ millions pilin’ up interest on Horus, waitin’ for the courts to find out who it belongs to. But what happened to him? The gooks got him, that’s what happened to him! Now you an’ Keyes, you found the Mountain, Keyes stayed on it to keep anybody else from bargin’ in. You go back to him without us fellas along to help fight off the gooks, an’ what’ll happen to you? The gooks!”

  “We didn’t find the Big Rock Candy Mountain!” said Dunne.

  “You better,” said Smithers ominously, “you better let us in on it. There’s plenty there for everybody, But you try to keep it all to yourself an’—pfft! You’re gone! There’s gooks watchin’ that Mountain! They know we lookin’ for it! They ain’t goin’ to let us have it if they can help themselves! That means you! You open up an’ talk, an’ you can lead two dozen men back to that there Mountain, an’ we can hold off any number 0’ gooks an’ clean up. You tool But try it by y’self an’ the gooks’ll get you sure! Certain! They’ll get you!”

  “We haven’t found the Big Rock Candy Mountain!” said Dunne for the third time. “We simply haven’t found it!”

  The grizzled Smithers said shrewdly, his eyes gleaming, “That wasn’t a ship’s officer that took you aside just now, was it? He didn’t take you off to try to get outa you where you found the Mountain? Huh? You just had ordinary luck, bringin’ in just enough crystals to keep you goin’ till another pickup ship comes by. Huh? That ship’s officer didn’t take anybody else off for a private talk about how much crystal they brought back! He did take you! I’m tellin’ you, there’s gooks sneakin’ around the Rings, an’ around the Big Rock Candy Mountain! You let us in with you; an’ we can fight em’ off an’ get rich besides. But you try to go back there by y’self— What’d that ship’s officer tell you? Didn’t he tell you the same thing?”

  Dunne’s jaws clamped tightly. There was, perhaps, just one disclosure likely to make more trouble than belief in the Big Rock Candy Mountain. That one more menacing disclosure would be that there was a girl on the pickup ship. Nobody in the Rings had seen a girl since he’d been here. They’d been nearly hysterical simply because they were able to be out of their own ships for an hour or so while they bought supplies and oxygen. But if they saw a girl!

  Smithers said warningly, “You better let us in on it! There’s the gooks!”

  “We didn’t find the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” said
Dunne, drearily, “and you can go to hell.”

  Smithers, sputtering, went away. Later Dunne saw, him cornering other men. His idea was evidently to organize men who’d already resolved to track Dunne wherever he went after leaving the pickup ship.

  Time passed. Smithers went from one to another of the men who’d come to Outlook in their donkeyships, He talked volubly. Each buttonholed man listened tolerantly, But, nobody took Smithers too seriously. Some men let him talk to them while they continued to stuff themselves at the nearly denuded tables. A few hunted for something to put into the formerly filled glasses. There were one or two clusterings of men who’d calmed down from their first exuberance and now talked (Dunne was sure) of the totally unprovable guess every man was only too ready to make: that Dunne and Keyes had found the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  Presently a ship’s officer tapped a man on the shoulder. His ordered supplies were ready for him to take possession. He and his partner departed. Ordinarily they’d load up and get as far, as possible from Outlook before the next ship was supplied. That was to keep anybody from guessing where they mined a fragment floating in the Rings. Now, Dunne knew angrily, it wasn’t unlikely that they’d wait nearby to follow him when he departed. He began irritably to plan evasive tactics.

  A second pair of donkeyship partners was tapped. They also seemed to leave. It was unlikely that they’d go off about their private affairs. They’d try to involve themselves in Dunne’s, It was pure silliness. Dunne had made a single unqualified statement, and instantly he was suspected of the success every other man had dreamed of! It was partly his fault. But Nike’s situation wasn’t! He wouldn’t take her into the Rings! He was desperately uneasy about Keyes, but he wouldn’t take Keyes’s sister into the Rings!

  A loudspeaker barked: “Attention! Somebody’s moving about outside! If you want to check your ships, the lock’s ready!”

  Instantly there was pandemonium, with men getting into space-suits faster than should have been possible. Dunne heard the grizzled Smithers cursing furiously: “It’s gooks! Them gooks! They come to stop us workin’ in the Rings!”

  Dunne paid no attention to him. He was getting into his own suit. He was one of the first ten men to crowd into the big cargo-lock that would let all of them out at once.

  The inner lock-door closed. The outer opened, with a vast rushing-away of air. The men in the lock dived out, and the urgency they felt was made clear. Every man used his emergency jet. They are normally reserved for ultimate emergencies when a man’s lifeline parts or something else occurs to make it necessary for him to propel himself in space.

  They flew like birds across the spaceport, every man bound for his own ship.

  Dunne heard the click of an electric detonator.

  He saw his ship fly to bits with a momentary flash of monstrous intensity and violence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The rotund little donkeyship split up into fragments, some of which disappeared with the velocity of rifle bullets. Pure emptiness was left where it had been. No debris. No fragments. Nothing. The gravitational pull of Outlook could only draw objects to it with an acceleration of inches per standard year. Any moving object touching Outlook bounced. Every scrap of the shattered ship that hit anything rebounded away, and all the fragments together amounted to no more than new fragments in new orbits in the Rings of Thothmes.

  Dunne came to ground where his ship had been. His magnetic boot-soles clung to the metal. He could see where the explosion had taken’ place, because the mirror-bright metal had been slightly oxidized by the flame of the ship’s detonated fuel store.

  He ground his teeth. He began to hunt doggedly for some evidence, some clue to who had bombed his ship and why. There was nothing to be found. Naturally!

  The delivery of ordered supplies to donkeyship operators continued. At another place, where there was law, there would probably have been an investigation, and the taking of evidence, and maybe a conclusion about the guilt or innocence of someone or other. But here nobody had authority to investigate. Nobody had authority to question witnesses. Certainly nobody had authority to punish.

  So everyday business resumed. The cargo-lock of the pickup ship opened, and two men came’ out towing their bundled supplies by a rope. Two men could move tons, here where nothing had any weight. With magnetic boot-soles clanking on the metal substance of Outlook, a donkeyship man hauled his purchases to a waiting ship. His partner would have opened the loading lock-door. The mass of floating stuff went inside. The door closed. The donkeyship went away.

  Other business went on, only it wasn’t quite ordinary business. There was the firm, irrational conviction of the miners of the Rings that Dunne and Keyes had found great treasure. The reason for the guess was that Dunne had come to Outlook alone, and had let it be implied that Keyes stayed behind to guard their fabulous discovery. Which was correct, except that their discovery wasn’t fabulous. Rich, perhaps, but by no means unprecedented.

  Again and again the pickup ship’s large lock opened, and a man or men brought out oxygen tanks and water-containers and food-stores and mining supplies and the like. They towed them, floating, to their ships. One went inside and a lock-door opened. The supplies went in. The ships went away. This sequence of happenings went on steadily. But the ships didn’t really go away—at any rate, not all of them. Somehow the destruction of Dunne’s donkeyship increased their belief that the Big Rock Candy Mountain had been found. Dunne must make a bargain with somebody to take him back to it. Those he didn’t bargain with would follow and make their own decisions. They lingered, tens or scores of miles from Outlook, hidden in the golden glowing mist. Because Dunne had to do something. He had to deal with someone. The others would combine—perhaps!—against whoever he made a deal with.

  He’d already decided on the beginning of a course of action, but he went tramping about the place from which his ship had been blasted as if unable to believe in his disaster.

  A donkeyship lifted off and went away into the all-concealing haze. Only one thing about it was certain. It wasn’t going far. And it wasn’t heading in the direction in which it had been searching for—or working—abyssal, crystal-containing matrix. Dunne tramped around the oxidation smear on the bright metal, apparently looking for evidence. Another ship took off. Another.

  A voice from the pickup ship’s communicator, booming in the headphones of Dunne’s helmet.

  “Calling Dunne! Calling Dunne! Come in, Dunne!”

  “What is it?” growled Dunne.

  “How’s your oxygen?” asked the ship curtly, “You’ve been out there a long time.”

  Dunne checked his oxygen tank. In the vacuum of space a man doesn’t carry a tankful of air to breathe. He carries oxygen. He breathes oxygen at three pounds pressure instead of air at fourteen point seven, and he saves the weight of the useless four-fifths of nitrogen that ordinary air contains.

  “I’m all right,” growled Dunne. “I’ll come in presently. I’m thinking, right now.”

  The carrier-wave from the ship clicked off. A moment later it hummed again in his headphones. The voice boomed once more.

  “Dunne?”

  “What?”

  “Miss Keyes asks if you’ll pay for a donkeyship team to go and pick up her brother, since you can’t do it with your ship destroyed, and he’ll die if nobody does. Will you pay?”

  Dunne could have groaned. Now everybody knew there was a girl on the pickup ship.

  “Tell her no,” he snapped. “I’ll take care of the situation!”

  A donkeyship released its magnetic grapples and floated away. It put on power and vanished. More objects came out of the pickup ship. Wire-wound oxygen tanks. Foodstuffs. Mining equipment. Fuel. Reaction drills. Bazooka-shells to split a moon fragment with their shaped charges and so allow the inside to be examined.

  A figure in a space-suit came out, towing the mass of stuff. The towing figure swaggered a little, even with magnetic soles to induce a plodding gait instead. Dunne noted
it. It was Haney. Haney got his supplies to his ship. His partner took charge of stowing them. Haney himself swaggered to Dunne and ostentatiously turned off his space-phone. He grinned at Dunne through the helmet face-plate. He beckoned.

  Dunne irritably accepted the signal. Ordinarily, speech in emptiness goes by space-phone, radiating microwaves from a tiny antenna. Such speech can be picked up for miles. Here there was no air to carry sound, but it was still possible to speak direct. As in a liquid ocean, helmets touched together conveyed sounds by solid conduction. The quality of the sound was not remarkable, but at least it would not be overheard.

  The helmets clanked into contact.

  “A bad business!” said Haney. “Do you know who did it, or why?”

  “I can guess why,” said Dunne savagely.

  “Somebody,” said Haney’s tinny, unctuous voice through the helmets’ contact, “somebody knows what you’ve found and where it is. Eh?”

  Dunne was silent for long seconds. Then he said, “We didn’t find the Mountain.”

  “Okay,” said Haney blandly. “Cut us in on what you did find, and we’ll block the scheme the others have made and ferry you to your rock. You and the girl and supplies. We’ll land you. We’ll set up a bubble. Then we’ll stop by and pick you up next pickup-ship time, you and the girl and Keyes.”

  “Is this charity?” asked Dunne coldly.

  “It’s a gamble,” said Haney. “We get half the crystals you find while we’re gone. Half.”

  It was plausible. Had someone else made the offer, it might even be attractive. To take a man to and from his working—his mine—for half his take while there… It wasn’t bad under the circumstances. But Haney didn’t insist on the Mountain’s discovery, which might mean that he knew the facts. He might know what they’d found. And there was no assurance at all that he’d keep to such a bargain. Dunne knew better. There was no law in the Rings. There was nothing but his own self-respect to make a man keep a bargain when he could profit by breaking it.