Miners in the Sky

by Murray Leinster

  “Are we headed for where my brother is?” asked Nike uneasily.

  Dunne shook his head. “Not yet. We have to get rid of this mob of donkeyship trailers first.”

  She hesitated for a long time. Then she said, “You won’t let him run out of air to breathe if you can’t get rid of them?”

  “If I don’t get rid of them,” said Dunne dourly, “all three of us are likely to die! Why do all of us carry weapons all the time? Why are men with crystals to be sent to Horus only allowed on board singly until everyone is due to lose by a pirating of the ship? And even then, why do they see only one or two of the crew, who’re waiting with ready weapons in case there’s an attempt of that sort?”

  Her expression was distinctly uneasy.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” said Dunne acidly, “we’re a pack of outlaws. We’re a pack of scoundrels. Cutthroats! There’s no law here. There can’t be! Ships disappear. Sometimes they’re found again—looted. Somebody’s killed the missing men for the crystals they’ve found, or for a rock they were working. Who? Nobody knows. Nobody cares! I shot my way through one ambush on the way to Outlook. It’s quite possible that somebody else didn’t, but the crystals they carried have been taken to Horus to be put to somebody else’s credit by the Abyssal Minerals Commission!”

  She looked incredulous.

  “We’re a hard crew here,” Dunne told her. “It’s said that the death rate in the Rings is thirty per cent a year. Some of that is accident, but a lot of it is murder! If we got to Keyes’ and my rock with half the Rings trailing us, would the extra visitors go politely away because we saw it first? The devil they would! In the Rings, finders are keepers—if they can keep what they find. If I get you to your brother, he and I will have to decide whether or not to abandon the rock we’ve been working—for your safety. If you’re there, and somebody came along, we’d have to fight them because they’d want to keep it secret too—but they’d be the secret-keepers.”

  She stared at him. Then she said, uncertainly, “It’s—hard to imagine.”

  “With an average life of three years in the Rings,” he said shortly, “a man has to get rich quick or he won’t. So everybody’s in a devil of a hurry to get rich. And they’ll take short-cuts when they can; and sometimes murder is a fast short-cut!”

  This was in the tiny control room of the lifeboat. The drive-sound was a moaning, humming noise, quite different from that made by the drive of a donkeyship. From time to time there was a stirring of air all through the boat; then the air-freshener was at work removing carbon dioxide and odors and excess moisture from the air. Once, during the past few hours, a blip on the radar screen had seemed to drift closer to the center. Dunne headed the lifeboat off to one side. Immediately other radar blips shifted position. The one that had moved first went back to its original position. So did the others. They wanted to follow the lifeboat to its destination. But there was one donkeyship that didn’t want Dunne to reach any destination at all.

  Dunne hadn’t pointed that out to Nike. The blowing-up of his donkeyship wouldn’t have told anyone where their rock was. So when Dunne’s ship was destroyed, the purpose wasn’t to find where he’d found his reputed treasure. It was to keep him from going to it. And anybody who wanted him kept away from a certain place, must know where that place happened to be.

  Which meant that somebody appeared to know where Keyes was. If it were true, Keyes might already be dead. The destruction of Dunne’s ship might simply have been intended to keep him away until the current possessors of the Rock had finished cleaning up the gray matrix and the crystals.

  It didn’t have to be so tragic. Keyes had become a good man in space, in the six months he’d been Dunne’s partner. He should have been able to take care of himself. He might be perfectly all right. But on the other hand, he might not.

  Dunne wasn’t going to suggest disaster to Nike, but he couldn’t help thinking about it. The worst of it was Nike’s presence. He owed it to Keyes to make sure whether he was all right. Inevitably, she shared any danger that came. If Keyes were dead, all the dangers they faced were futile. But there was no possible place to put Nike for safety while Dunne went about such matters as his self-respect demanded that he do.

  The lifeboat went on and on and on. It was trailed by donkeyships hidden from view by glowing mist, but unerringly pointed out by radar. Nike prepared food for the two of them and brought a plate to Dunne in the small control room.

  “Are we nearly there?” she asked hopefully.

  “We’re nearing where something may happen,” admitted Dunne. “But we’re not even heading toward your brother.”

  He lifted his eyes from the radar screen and stared out a viewport dead ahead. He seemed to strain his eyes. Then he said, “Look!”

  He pointed. Nike followed his pointing and shook her head. “I don’t see anything.”

  “There’s something bright out there. Remember that at Outlook you could see some faintly brighter dots when you looked straight away from the sun? They were stars. Outlook is close to the outer edge of the Rings. This is the side of them. It’s the same thing. We’ll see stars presently.”

  She didn’t understand. He tried to make it clearer. The lifeboat went on and on. Presently, dead ahead, there was a pinpoint in the haze which was brighter than the haze itself. Then there were two. Three. Half a dozen.

  “We’ll be out of the Rings in minutes,” said Dunne.

  He was right. Suddenly the ever-present golden fog seemed to fade. The fog ahead became more tenuous, and there were fixed bright spots. They were stars. And the mist thinned again, and more and more stars showed; and then within the quarter of an hour the haze vanished everywhere except behind them. They saw myriads of stars, against the blackness of space. They saw the Milky Way. They saw red stars and blue stars and green ones. There were yellow stars and pink, and there were areas in the sky where multitudinous bright specks of light seemed to cluster, and there were other places where stars were blotted out by who-knew-what in the heavens.

  They looked at the cosmos from clear space. But they seemed to be rising from a vast plain of mist. It spread out for thousands and thousands of miles. The total diameter of the Rings was about two hundred thousand miles; and all of them, seen from the side, looked perfectly flat and even. But much of the center was occupied by the planet Thothmes, only sixty or seventy thousand miles away. They saw it. This is one of the most magnificent spectacles men have yet found in the Galaxy.

  But Nike gasped. Nowhere but near a ringed planet could such a sight be seen. The curvature of any conceivable world set a limit to possible flatness. But the Rings of Thothmes were not limited. They were no more than four hundred miles thick, but they spread out to unthinkable remoteness. The two in the lifeboat saw the Rings as not even the pickup ships had occasion to see them. They were seen as objects; but no other object could ever seem so huge. They looked solid. They appeared to fill half the universe. It seemed that all the minute and glittering specks which were the stars gazed at Thothmes’ rings in perpetual astonishment.

  Nike stared and stared. Then Dunne grimly got into a space-suit.

  Nike said, “What—”

  “You can’t aim a bazooka by radar,” he told her, pulling the space-suit up past his chest. “You have to see what you’re aiming at. I’m going to discourage some of our followers.”

  She looked at once alarmed and bewildered.

  “You mean—you’re going to fight them?”

  “It won’t be a fight,” he assured her. “Unless with one of them only. All but that one are following us to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If they shot at us and hit us, they’d spoil their own fair dream. So they can’t afford to shoot. Only one of them knows where we’re actually trying to get to, the place where your brother’s waiting for us. So I can drive the others off. They’ll hope to pick up our trail again presently. And the one that wants to get us—maybe I’ll get!”

  He zipped the throat en
closure of his space-suit and picked up the space-helmet that went with it.

  “I’m taking a chance,” he added, “with your life as well as mine. And your brother’s. I’ll be careful!”

  He filled the belt-pockets with tiny bazooka shells. They were normal equipment for Ring-rock mining, breaking up Ring-fragments so their interior parts could be gotten at. But they were very handy weapons, too. Accuracy was necessary for their use in mining. Their range was almost indefinite. Their rocket fuel was also their explosive charge. They were designed for a purpose where a small cannon could have been used, and they could be used like artillery in a fire-fight in space.

  Dunne settled his helmet and sealed it with the customary half-turn. He moved toward the airlock’s inner door. He went into the lock and closed the door behind him.

  Nike wrung her hands. There was nothing for her to do, It was silent for a second or so; then the lock-pump whirred, exhausting the air in the airlock. Nike heard it stop, and the clatter of the undogging of the outer door. Then silence again.

  It was an appalling silence. When the air-freshener suddenly started its cycle of air-cleansing, she jumped. Then she went into the control room and peered out a viewport.

  She saw the stars by hundreds of millions. She saw a bright spot, so bright that it seemed to have a disk. It was the planet Horus of this same solar system, a mere few millions of miles away. She saw the Milky Way coming out beyond the edge of the Rings, and she saw the Rings as the most preposterous of objects. They were too big to be possible.

  But she pressed her face against the viewport to look astern. She saw nothing but the metal plating of the lifeboat. She felt a convulsive flash of fear. Her teeth chattered. Perhaps Dunne had stumbled and tumbled out to nothingness when he opened the outer airlock door! Then he’d be left to die in pure emptiness. She couldn’t locate him; and even if she did, she couldn’t handle the ship to try to pick him up again. She’d be alone in the lifeboat to wait until the air gave out. Designed as a life-boat to carry many people, that might be years. She’d go mad from solitude and despair…

  She moved to another viewport and gasped in relief. She saw Dunne. The airlock door was open. He stood in it. She saw the clips which held him safe against just what she’d irrationally feared.

  He did not look human. He seemed to be a thing of metal, monstrously shaped to resemble a man but in no detail to be like one. He had a miner’s bazooka in his metal-gauntleted hands. Matter-of-factly, he put shells in its magazine. He raised it. He plugged in the cord which would relay the telescopic sight image to a minute screen inside his helmet.

  He seemed to aim for a long time. Then there was a flare. A bazooka shell small enough to be held in the hand went away like a flash of lightning. Another. Another. Another. He loaded the bazooka for more shots.

  He raised it again and seemed to search for a second target. Again the four flashes as four more bazooka shells went away.

  He found a third target. More bazooka-shells flashed toward the distant stars. Yet again, and again, and again.

  He closed the outer lock-door. The inner door opened. He came in and closed it behind him. He took off his helmet. Nike gulped. She was deathly pale.

  “I should give you some lessons,” said Dunne, “in handling this ship.”

  He went into the control room and abruptly swung the ship end for end. He pointed it back toward the shining, misty, unbelievably enormous surface of the Rings.

  “We’re still going away,” he observed, “and we’ve got a good velocity toward nowhere. But it’ll be some time before the other ships realize that we’re heading back into the Rings. Seeing the stars will confuse them. We should gain a good bit on them.”

  Then he pointed out the viewport. There was an infinitesimal thread of white vapor coming toward the lifeboat. The donkeyship that had fired it was too far away to be seen with the naked eye. A second and third and fourth thread of vapor sped toward them. Dunne was unmoved.

  “They didn’t like it that I shot at them,” he said matter-of-factly, “but the men in the other ships won’t like it that Haney returned my fire. That tells me which ship is his. The other ships want to trail me, not kill me.”

  She tried to match his calm. “Haney?”

  “He’s the man who offered to take the two of us to your brother, and then bring all three of us back next pickup-ship time,” said Dunne evenly. “He’s my best guess. Here come the bazooka-shells.”

  He watched without apparent concern. Infinitely tiny rocket trails leaped toward the lifeboat. They went past, astern. One missed by hundreds of yards only. The others were more widely out of line.

  “It’s not easy to shoot at an accelerating or decelerating target,” said Dunne detachedly. “You can’t figure out how much to lead.”

  He went back to his subject. “When I didn’t take up those very kindly offers,” he said with the same detachment, “he offered to take you alone. I should have killed him then. But I was thinking about your brother and my smashed-up ship. I didn’t realize how completely he’d given himself away.”

  “I didn’t know he gave—”

  “He was the only one, the only man,” said Dunne, “who didn’t believe I’d found the Big Rock Candy Mountain. He took my word that I hadn’t found it. He offered a bargain he’d never have thought of if he believed I’d found it. So he must have known what Keyes and I had. I should have killed him,” repeated Dunne reflectively. “I simply didn’t think of it in time. Too bad!”

  He stripped off the space-suit and put it away.

  “I’m going to give you a lesson in ship-handling,” he said. “If you can drive while I act as artillery from the airlock door, we’ve a better chance of living.”

  He sat her at the control board and began to instruct her in such maneuvers as might be needed in a fire-fight or in the Rings. He could use only one airlock at a time from which to aim a bazooka. That necessarily left one side of the ship unarmed. He showed her how to rotate the lifeboat to swing the airlock to the other side. He showed her how to swing the ship to allow for bazooka fire directly ahead and directly astern. He showed her evasive tactics that sometimes worked when bazooka shells were flashing about through space.

  She accepted the lessons with what he felt was a fine yet unhappy resolution. But he was giving her lessons to keep her from thinking of Keyes, just then. Something had become evident to him, and he was trying to keep her from thinking of it. The thing was that his donkeyship had been destroyed to keep him from getting back to Keyes. To desire such a thing, somebody had to know where Keyes was. In fact, it looked as if someone had killed Keyes and wanted Dunne out of the way—whether killed or marooned—while the rock Keyes was guarding r, was worked out, cleaned up, finished.

  So Dunne taught Nike how to handle the ship so that she’d be too busy to reason out how likely it was that her brother might already be dead.

  She spoke suddenly, and not of the lesson in progress.

  “You said,” she observed, for no apparent reason, “that a man lives only three years on an average in the Rings. How long have you been here?”

  “Two,” said Dunne. “Your brother and I have done pretty well. If we can clean up this last rock we’ve found, he should be urged to quit.”

  “I’ll urge him,” said Nike. “There are only the two of us. Where were you before you came out to the Rings?”

  “Here and there,” said Dunne.

  He went over the instruments. He peered at the outer universe. He nodded.

  Now the lifeboat headed back toward the Rings; and most of the donkeyships awakened to the fact that Dunne intended to get them out of listening range of his drive by a maneuver not unlike “cracking the whip” on ice. But they’d lost ground, and some of them could only follow the chase by following ships that followed ships that could pick up the lifeboat’s humming drive. Ahead of the lifeboat lay that golden fog which was the Rings. It looked like a solid, unimaginable wall against which anything solid migh
t dash itself to pieces. But it wasn’t solid. It was the Rings. And now as the lifeboat was about to plunge in, there were wisps and tendrils of what looked like vapor but were actually dust clouds.

  The stars behind the lifeboat faded as mistiness encompassed it. The boat went on into the cloud-stuff.

  There an odd thing happened. The communicator reported the whining noise of donkeyship drives, and soft rustling whispers and very faint cracklings. All these sounds had their proper explanations. But now it reported a new sound entirely. There was an uncanny, monotonous, “tweet… tweet… tweet.” It was unearthly; It was weird. It was unbelievable that twitterings like those of a flying bird should be heard by the communicator in a lifeboat in the Rings.

  “What’s that?” asked Nike uneasily. “It sounds queer!”

  It stopped. And now the ship was deep in the mist. Dunne swung the ship. On full acceleration it shot ahead. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty… Dunne cut off the drive. There was nothing to be seen through the viewports but sunlit mistiness. The radar reported something moving away to the left. It was not visible. Dunne cut off the radar.

  And then the lifeboat went floating onward, masked against sight by the mist of the Rings, hidden against hearing by the cutting of its drive and even its radar, and concealed against discovery by the abandonment of every means by which it could discover its own danger. It floated in the fog, the mist, the haze. There were other solid objects floating in the same obscurity. Some of them were stones from the surface of long-shattered moons. Some were rocks from deeper strata. Some were metal masses.

  “We’re drifting,” said Dunne in a dry voice. “We’re not driving. We’re not using our radar or doing anything to distinguish us from any piece of floating rock hereabouts. Our admiring followers ought to plunge into the Rings with radars working and communicators listening for any sign of life. But they’ll hear each other, and their radars will detect each other, and they’ll be considerably confused. It’ll be some time before they think of looking for something floating around with an orbital velocity that isn’t the right one for something out here.”