Miners in the Sky Read online

  She said warningly, “Oxygen!”

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

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

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

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

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

  Dunne swore.

  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 fo
r 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 Ri
ngs 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.