Miners in the Sky Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There were sounds transmitted as radio waves. The communicator’s loudspeaker in the ceiling reported them with a fine impartiality. It reported the rustling, whispering noises that came from the photosphere of the sun. It reported the tiny crackling sounds credited to lightning in monstrous storms on Thothmes. The speaker reported them. Then it said, “tweet… tweet… tweet…” and stopped.

  Dunne said reflectively, “That’s a queer thing! Nobody has the least idea what makes that noise! We’ve heard it more often than anybody else ever reported it. But why? Smithers says it’s gooks, Some people believe it. But if so, it’s the only evidence for the existence of gooks.”

  He stretched himself—carefully, because he hurt in a surprising number of places from his tow behind the wildly accelerating spaceboat, Nike watched him. She found that it was both comforting and astonishing to look at him.

  Now there was oxygen in the spaceboat at a pressure of three pounds per square inch. The accepted norm was fourteen point seven pounds pressure for the oxygen-nitrogen mixture to which the human race had adapted during some thousands of generations. But the nitrogen could be dispensed with. Breathing oxygen was perfectly satisfying. True, voices sounded a little off normal, and it would not have been possible to heat anything containing water, because water boiled while still little more than lukewarm.

  But there was oxygen to breathe, and no reason to anticipate a lack of it.

  And the drive was working again. The sack of matrix fragments Dunne had brought in was not a particularly rich sample from the vein. In all the sack there’d been no more than four abyssal crystals. Only one could be used between the drive’s thrust-blocks—the others were too small. That one was under half a gram, and the boat couldn’t be driven at high speed with so small a crystal. But it could be driven. Dunne had fitted it in between the thrust-blocks and actually turned on the drive for the fraction of a second. It worked. The sound would be unexpected and hardly identifiable unless it had considerable volume. Dunne didn’t believe so brief a noise would even be picked up at any great distance. Certainly nobody could have gotten a bearing on its source!

  Nike looked at him as he considered his various aches and bruises. Then he said, “I think I’ll try the radar long enough to get an idea of our speed. My idea of where we may be is pretty indefinite!”

  Nike said, “Can I help?”

  It was absurd, but Dunne didn’t notice. Neither of them referred to the fact that the spaceboat was hurtling blindly through the Rings with no radar in operation to warn them of possible collisions. But, on an average, there was not more than one object of appreciable size in two cubic miles of space in the Rings. This was enough to make mining for abyssal crystals profitable, but the likelihood of a collision was remote.

  Presently Dunne watched the radar screen for blips indicating exactly such floating o
bjects as had created the profession of mining in the sky. He didn’t know the direction the spaceboat had taken after the burst of machine-gun tracer-bullet fire. He didn’t know the speed it had attained or how far it had traveled. And there was nothing in view but mist by which to tell.

  The radar, though, showed blips. They were more widely separated than in the part of the Rings that Dunne and Keyes had worked in. They had motions of their own. They had orbital velocities suited to their distance from Thothmes. But something could be learned from their motion across the radar screen. Dunne learned it.

  The spaceboat’s speed was very high, relative to solid objects in the mist. Dunne computed, using guesses for quantities and hopes for mathematical signs. Eventually he shook his head.

  “We’ve come a devil of a long way!” he said. “We must have accelerated longer than I believed. We may have crossed the whole first Ring! Anyhow, we can decelerate without too much danger of anybody hearing us.”

  Nike did not answer, but her eyes followed him as he cut in the drive. It made—a brand-new noise. The sound of a drive depended on the size of the crystals which were its heart. A donkeyship whined. A lifeboat hummed. A space-liner or cargo ship boomed. These last required very large crystals to produce their thrust. But the drive in the lifeboat now made a whining, whimpering sound very much like that of a donkeyship. The crystal in its heart was substandard in size.

  Dunne nodded with an air of great satisfaction. He continued to watch the radar screen, and from time to time made computations. Once he stared incredulously at his own results. But he said nothing. There was nothing to be seen through the ports in the least unusual. Now and again he did look out, but all he saw was a warmly glowing absence of anything to look at.

  The interior of the boat was practically silent. The drive; yes. The small and meaningless sounds made by thunder and by highly complex atomic reactions in the sun; yes. But the eventlessness which is space travel obtained. All space travel consists of seconds of interest or of action, succeeded by seeming centuries of tedium. There was, just now, simply nothing to be done. Time itself seemed to consist of nothing that could happen.