Miners in the Sky

by Murray Leinster

  Nike could have retired to the back cabin. But it would have been even more eventless there than in the main cabin, where at least she could see Dunne occasionally moving about. So she curled up on an upholstered seat and lay there with open eyes for a long while. But nothing happened.

  Presently she went to sleep.

  A great distance away, a donkeyship reversed its drive and came to what its instruments asserted was a stop. Haney was at the controls of this particular craft. It turned about and headed back toward the rock where Keyes had died and Dunne and Nike should be newly dead. Haney and his companion were confident. They’d performed a maneuver they’d previously done often enough so they could rely on its results.

  It was very simple and soundly based on the normal reactions of those on whom it was practiced. A donkeyships’ steady high-speed dash from beyond radar range would naturally be noted by men working a rock in the Rings. When they knew it would pass close by their workings, they’d cut off all radiating equipment and wait for it to go by. If it had slowed before arrival, it would have suggested grim happenings. But it didn’t. It came straight ahead, almost to graze this rock or that, but it gave no sign of a pause or any action at all. The working miners were reassured. So the smothering burst of machine-gun fire, fired as it went by, was total and successful surprise. If there was a bubble, it would be punctured. Where there was a ship, it would be drained of air. Where there were miners—a space-suit pierced by a bullet anywhere was inevitably a fatal wound. There’d never be a single shot fired in return. The killers could go right on, and then later return to find no living soul present to oppose them. They often found good quantities of abyssal crystals already separated from the gray matrix.

  It was a perfectly matter-of-fact device for the sort of men who’d use it. It couldn’t be prevented. It couldn’t be punished. There were no laws to cover it or law officers to enforce them. The fact accounted for part of the Rings’ death-rate of thirty per cent of the mining population every solar year.

  So Haney and his companion matter-of-factly drove back to the rock where Dunne and Keyes had worked, where Dunne and Nike had been a short while back, where a boobytrap should have done the work they’d just repeated to be wholly sure. It wasn’t difficult to find the way back. Haney watched the radar screen and recalled the arrangement of blips he’d passed as a man on a liquid ocean would remember the bearing and size of objects on a shoreline. He expected as a matter of course that Smithers would have died in the dash-past of Haney and his companion. He’d been useful. He’d made sure that there was somebody alive at the rock He shouldn’t be alive to ask for payment in oxygen or to protest what had been done with his assistance.

  But when the seventy-foot rock loomed up through the mist, it was solitary. There was no lifeboat owned by Dunne. No donkeyship belonging to Smithers. Nothing.

  It was a good rock. Two men working fast and without interruption could clean it out in a matter of days, especially if they worked wastefully and let much gray matrix escape in the process. But Haney seemed not to be much concerned with working a mine even as good as this one.

  He listened, disturbed and enraged. He caught the faintest imaginable whine of a donkeyship’s drive. He couldn’t imagine why there were no dead men—including Smithers—who should have been left behind by the burst of machine-gun fire.

  It wasn’t easy to understand. But it wasn’t desirable that anybody should escape. If Smithers reported that Haney had a machine gun and had used it in such-and-such a manner, at the next pickup ship gathering it would be discussed. It would be agreed that it was not desirable for Haney and his partner to go on living and practicing this device. There’d be no formality about it. Simply—the man who found it most convenient would kill Haney. Of course, if Dunne and Nike reported their part of the adventure, the need for Dunne to be killed would be even more evident. But he’d be killed anyhow.

  So Haney got a careful bearing on the excessively faint drive-whine and set out after it. It was certainly the only chance he had of correcting the mistake by which Smithers had survived. Dunne… Dunne must be dead, and Nike with him. Haney believed he had only to kill Smithers.

  This decision came before Dunne had completed temporary repairs to the lifeboat. The lifeboat hurtled onward with the velocity that the excess acceleration had given it. Smithers drove after it at the highest speed the non-crystal-burning drive of his ship would give him. He was a long way behind, until Dunne got settled and began to slow the spaceboat. Haney, in turn, was far behind Smithers. Things began to work out—with that enormous amount of pure tedium in between seconds of action and excitement.

  Dunne, waiting for his restored drive to cut the lifeboat’s speed down to a manageable figure, found himself trying to put things together in a rational fashion. His original beliefs about his situation—and Nike’s—didn’t seem to fit what was happening. The idea that his donkeyship had been blasted, on Outlook, to keep him from rejoining Keyes was not wholly plausible. It didn’t account for everything—for example, Haney’s offer of a deal to carry both of them to Keyes and return all three to Outlook next pickup-ship time. That wasn’t necessary. Haney’s effort to carry Nike from Outlook in the belief that she was going to join her brother—that didn’t fit in. If Haney’d tried that first, and made the proposal to include Dunne later—yes, that would be more reasonable. But the big thing was that after Keyes was killed, nobody went to work feverishly to clean out the crystals in the plainly visible vein of matrix. Haney had come on to Outlook after killing Keyes. He’d left a boobytrap…

  Then Dunne scowled to himself. Had Haney done that? Could it be someone else?

  The matter of Smithers was a complete answer. He’d talked to Haney by communicator. He’d come to the rock, to find out if there were anybody alive on it. He’d discovered that Nike was there—a girl in the Rings! And when Dunne put him out of the lifeboat, to prepare against an approaching radar blip, Smithers had yelped to surrounding space, “You Haney! You sheer off! You keep away from here! No tricks! There’s a lady here!”

  And that was proof. Not for a court of law, but there were no courts in the Rings. And the highest court on Horus had solemnly ruled that it had no jurisdiction over events or crimes or property in the Rings of Thothmes. Therefore, every man had to be his own judge and jury in such matters as affected him. And Haney affected Dunne.

  With Nike sleeping peacefully on an upholstered seat in the lifeboat’s main cabin, Dunne suddenly saw the situation from a new angle. The mine-rock he. and Keyes had found was a valuable find, to be sure. No Big Rock Candy Mountain, but a good rock just the same. But with Keyes dead and Dunne’s donkeyship destroyed, it was Haney’s if he chose to take it. He needn’t hurry. He needn’t deal with Dunne. He could have ignored Nike. He didn’t have to do anything if what he wanted was the rock and its slash of matrix. Especially, he needn’t have joined the pack of donkeyships that tried to trail Dunne to a discovery he hadn’t made. Haney knew he hadn’t made it. Why, then, had he followed? It wasn’t for Nike. If he’d thought of kidnapping her, he wouldn’t have flung machine-gun tracer bullets into the lifeboat, where she’d die as the air bled out to space, So Haney would think, anyhow.

  Then Dunne whistled softly to himself as recalled events put themselves together in a new pattern. The machine gun, for instance. It wasn’t standard equipment for a donkeyship. It was an antique. It was practically a museum piece. But Haney had brought it out to the Rings when he came. He came to hunt crystals, so it appeared, but also he’d come out with the most deadly piece of armament—outdated, but still most deadly against a donkeyship—he could carry. Why?

  The Big Rock Candy Mountain might be involved in the answer. Dunne moved to look at Nike. She was asleep. She looked very young and weary, but she slept with a child’s tranquility. Dunne couldn’t guess it, but it was because she no longer felt that she didn’t belong anywhere with anybody. She couldn’t have explained it herself, but it was true.

  He
had only to make one assumption he hadn’t thought of before, and everything changed. The assumption was that Haney hadn’t planned especially to kill him—Dunne. In the course of more important events, it might be desirable; but it wasn’t a major objective. A much more reasonable guess would be that Haney wanted to kill Nike.

  She’d come out to tell Keyes something that meant life or death. There was mail service, by the pickup ships, and she could have written. But she’d found it necessary to come out herself. She couldn’t go back, though Dunne urged it and offered to pay for her to return immediately. She wouldn’t go back! When Dunne forced the pickup ship’s skipper to sell him a lifeboat, she stowed away on it to keep from going back to Horus! She was willing to take any imaginable risk rather than go back. And she desperately wanted to see and talk to her brother. And Haney was responsible for his death and had surely tried. to secure Nike’s.

  Dunne was just beginning to work out the implications of the facts seen from this angle when there came the faintest of possible drive-whines from the loudspeaker. It progressed very slowly from the just-not-inaudible to the faintest clear. He stopped all speculation to hear it. Yes. There was a donkeyship almost out of detection range, but not quite. Dunne threw off his drive. He threw off the radar, which had not yet reported the whining donkeyship. He silenced the air-refresher unit. He waited.

  The whining sound grew gradually louder, in the course of hours. Then there came the thinnest of voices clamoring over the drive-whine;

  “Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne! Come in!”

  Dunne hesitated. Nike slept peacefully. There was silence. Velocity away from the outer rim of the Rings remained. The lifeboat, though, was pointed back toward its starting point—the outermost edge of the Rings. Outlook floated there, and other small and giant objects. But though the lifeboat aimed there and its drive operated, so far it hadn’t overcome its acquired momentum away. It traveled backward as it drove ahead. But its reverse speed diminished steadily.

  “Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne! Come in!”

  The call continued. Smithers had followed the lifeboat. Dunne heard him. The question was of Smithers’ allegiance, to Haney or to the first women he’d seen in years, who might seem to him to have an irresistible claim on his chivalry.

  Then there came a change in the mistiness outside. Dunne jerked his head about to stare. He saw stars, gradually becoming brighter than the dust-clouds which were the Rings.

  And then the lifeboat shot out backwards into the clear and dust-free ring of transparency between the two outer rings. It was called Cassini’s Division for the man who first observed it in the rings of Saturn. Its explanation waited for two hundred years.

  Here the impalpable, shining dust-particles ceased to be. For a distance of many, many miles, space was clear. But on beyond—it could be seen clearly—the second Ring began. In the interval the spaceboat would be visible. Here it could not hide in shining opacity. But if one looked steadily at the star-field, one could see stars sometimes blink. And stars in emptiness do not blink.

  Dunne clamped his jaws together. He waked Nike. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  “It’s my time to watch?” she asked.

  “No. But we’re past the first Ring. We’re likely to have company.”

  She started up. He led the way into the control room. The donkeyship whine was becoming fainter. It appeared not to be following the spaceboat in the exact proper line. But the voice accompanying it was still dear enough for every word to be understood.

  “Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne!” It went on and on.

  Nike looked at Dunne. He shrugged, and flipped on the transmitter.

  “Smithers,” he said coldly. “Do you hear me?”

  A pause. Then Smithers’ voice, overjoyed, “Dunne! How’ you doin’? Are you in trouble? You need any help? Is the lady all right?” Then Smithers said indignantly, “Haney played a dirty trick! He shouldn’t ha’ done that!”

  “I thought so myself, at the time,” said Dunne drily. “What’re you doing this far from where you were?”

  “I was comin’,” said Smithers’ voice, “to see if I could do anything for th’ lady. She’s all right?”

  “She’s all right,” agreed Dunne.

  “That’s fine! Now what?”

  Dunne paused. Then, “Goodbye,” he said curtly. “That’s what. Farewell. You go your way and I go mine. Stop following me. I haven’t found the Big Rock Candy Mountain! You won’t be led to it in a hundred million years of following me around. Understand? Goodbye!”

  He threw the switch that cut off the transmission from the communicator.

  Nike said, “Do you really think he—wishes us harm?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Dunne. “But I’m trying to cut down on the things that could do us harm; and having Smithers around, with even the noblest of motives, doesn’t seem to work out well. He doesn’t seem to realize that we’ve a sort of disguise. I don’t want him to realize it.”

  “Disguise? We have a disguise?”

  “The boat has,” Dunne told her. “The drive. You’ll notice when you think to listen.”

  But he didn’t turn the drive on again. He examined the radar screen and cut the radar off lest Smithers pick up its pulses. He left the drive off because it had been a moaning hum—peculiar to lifeboats—and now it was a whine almost identical to a donkeyboat’s, It was a disguise for everyone in the Rings except Smithers, and he could expose it if he chose.

  Dunne paced up and down the cabin, restlessly. Nike watched him. But suddenly she cocked her ears to the ceiling loudspeaker.

  “There’s another whine,” she said. “Or is it the same one?”

  Dunne listened. And there were now two faint whines in the Ring. But the loudspeaker also faithfully reported the rustling short waves from the sun and the tiny cracklings of lightning on Thothmes. It had reported birdlike twittering, to be sure, and that was out of all reason. But now there were definitely two donkeyship drives to be heard.

  “Smithers will be worried about that extra whine,” said Dunne reflectively.

  They heard a voice. Smithers’. It came above the whining drive of his ship. Smithers was alarmed.

  “Dunne?” he asked, “is that you? Did y’change your mind?”

  There was no answer. There remained the two whinings through the normal noises of space. Smithers sounded scared. If he’d been alone, Dunne might have answered him, even though he wasn’t positive that Smithers did not have a working agreement with Haney for the commission of crimes. If Nike hadn’t been in the lifeboat, he might have gambled on the idea that Smithers was the simple, obsessed individual he appeared to be. But he wouldn’t bet Nike’s life on it.

  Smithers’ voice came again from emptiness.

  “Haney? That you?”

  More silence. It lasted a long time. Ten minutes, perhaps twenty. Then Smithers cried out furiously, in the faintest of voices, “Whoever y’are, what you chasin’ me for? What’re you keepin’ right behind me for? I changed course then, an’ you changed right after me! What’s the idea?”

  No answer. There remained two whining sounds in space besides the abstracted, meaningless cracklings and whisperings of the void. There were two donkeyships unavoidably broadcasting their drive-noises on radio frequency. It seemed that Smithers sounded fainter than before, as if he were going farther away. It also seemed as if both drive—whines shared the diminution of his voice. But somehow it was evident that one of the donkeyships fled desperately, and that the other followed implacably after it.

  “Who are y’?” Smithers demanded shrilly, though his voice could barely be heard. “Who are you? What you chasin’ me for? Keep away, now! Keep away’!”

  Dunne’s expression was formidable. He muttered under his breath.

  “What’s happening?” asked Nike worriedly. “You look so angry!”

  Dunne took pains to relax convincingly before he
answered.

  “We’re pretty well all scoundrels in the Rings,” he said evenly. “This isn’t a place for the squeamish. Smithers is being chased, most probably by Haney. Smithers was so unwise as not to be in the line of the tracer bullets Haney pumped into us. He’d scouted our rock for Haney, you’ll remember, and reported that somebody was there. It’d been your brother’s and my rock. It was supposed to be our death. Haney had some need to be sure it was. So when Smithers reported us there he came along expecting to kill me, certainly, and rather more certainly you; and Smithers should have been killed with us to keep him from talking about the matter next pickup-ship time.”

  He stopped. The whispering sounds from the sun and the cracklings from Thothmes remained. But the two whinings which were donkeyship drives grew fainter. It was barely possible to hear a shrill voice protesting, threatening, and even pleading as it fled. But with ever-increasing distance, the words ceased to be distinct. There was only a thin shrill wailing. It went on toward nothingness, and the drive-sounds faded with it.

  Nike looked bewildered. “But you mean—he’s going to be murdered?”

  “Murder,” said Dunne sardonically, “is a legal definition. Where there’s no law, there’s no murder. Not even theft! Somebody is chasing Smithers, yes. It seems reasonable that whoever it is—I suspect Haney—intends to kill him, as he tried to kill us. If I were in Smithers’ place—”

  “What?”

  “Here in the Rings, if somebody chases you without explanation, you start shooting. That’s the custom. It’s also sense. You may have a small fortune in crystals in your ship. Or your pursuer may think you have, which is just as dangerous. But maybe Smithers knows that a fight with Haney would be fatal for him.”

  “If you and Smithers joined—”

  “No,” said Dunne curtly. “Haney has a machine gun. It’s an antique, and I can’t imagine where he got it; but it’s the deadliest weapon in the Rings.” He paced back and forth. “Remember, there’s no air here. There’s no gravity. A bullet once fired goes on forever. There’s no limit to its range. It hits as hard at a thousand miles as it does at a hundred feet. It’s an admirable weapon for close-range assassination, but it’s not one to be dodged at any distance. If I joined Smithers in fighting a man with a machine gun, we’d all wind up dead. And I’m enough of a scoundrel to have other plans for my future.”