Miners in the Sky

by Murray Leinster

  “It was a boobytrap,” said Dunne coldly. “Designed to explode when I looked in the sleeping bag. There are some holes in the bubble. They could have been made by bullets like mine, but they’re larger.” He paused. “If somebody punctured the bubble, he’d have just thirteen seconds to get into a space-suit before he died, and he wouldn’t make it. But he’d hardly know what happened.”

  Nike sobbed once.

  “Then,” said Dunne, “whoever killed him planted a booby trap for me.”

  His expression was bitterness itself. Nike swallowed and said, “What do we do now? Can he—can we bury him?” Then she said, choking; “I—I can’t think straight right now!”

  “Don’t try,” said Dunne more gently. “I’ll take care of things. Everything! You get into a space-suit. I’ll come get you.”

  She turned and went quickly, stumbling a little, into the rearmost part of the lifeboat.

  Dunne swore exhaustively when she’d left. He went into the control room and extended the range of the radar to its greatest possible distance. He slowed down its period of sweep to get the utmost of reach. In the area it could report on, there were six indications of solid objects. None of them detectably changed position. They were actually in motion, of course, swinging in their orbits around the planet Thothmes. Two of them were obviously too small to be concerned about. One was as obviously even larger—much larger—than the rock to which the spaceboat was now tethered. The nearest appeared to be not much larger or smaller. But there was nothing in significant motion within the area the radar could examine.

  He went out of the spaceboat again. There were tools in the bubble. It was a very convincing trap—or it had been. But Dunne did not bother to rage at the man or men who’d done this murder. The Rings were not centers of refinement or culture. Or of reluctance to violate the essential rules of fair play or good faith. But an attempt to commit murder by booby trap would not be admired even in the Rings.

  He took tools from the bubble. Here was a crack in the rock not far away. It needed very little enlargement for his purpose. He labored carefully.

  He brought Nike out. The two of them—with great courage on the part of Nike—conducted a funeral. Dunne packed rock fragments to seal the cover he put in place.

  It was an extraordinary action in an extraordinary place. The two space-suited figures performed a ceremony of sorts in what to uninformed eyes would have seemed dumb-show. Dunne did not look like a man. He looked like a machine of metal which for technical reasons only was designed to resemble a man. He seemed, indeed, a strange type of robot, contemplating something incredible when the funeral was finished.

  He made a gesture of which he seemed to be unconscious. Then, slowly, he helped Nike back to the spaceboat, arranging her lifeline with his so that their progress was not too grotesque.

  When she was inside, he cast off the lifeboat’s mooring line. He hauled it in. He closed the outer airlock door. He opened the inner one. He went directly to the control room. The lifeboat’s drive began its droning hum. Nike came, speaking through the door behind him.

  “Is there anything—”

  He shook his head. He kept his eyes on the radar screen. He chose the nearest of the six solid objects the screen portrayed. He lined up the lifeboat’s course toward it. Presently he cut off the drive.

  “I’m coasting,” he explained. “It cuts the drive-time at each end of the run.”

  “Have you—decided what to do?”

  He nodded, watching the radar screen.

  “What is it?”

  “It will develop,” he said grimly. “Just remember that we’re all scoundrels, out here in the Rings.”

  He continued to watch the radar. One of the blips grew visibly nearer and more distinct. The rock they’d left behind became smaller. The other formerly stationary blips moved slowly with regard to the center of the screen, which represented the position of the lifeboat.

  There was over twenty miles of sunlit fog between the two floating rocks. It was not possible to see anything at a distance of much more than a mile. So the lifeboat floated through a haze in which there was nothing to be seen at all; and with the drive off there were no sounds except the whispering, rustling noises made by short waves from the photosphere of the sun, and those tiny cracklings from storms on Thothmes.

  Such tranquility and peacefulness, though, was not universal. There was a pickup ship on the way to Horus, whose skipper had worried for several days without finding a solution to his problem. He had to report letting Dunne have a lifeboat. He fretted about that. It was paid for, to be sure, but the Abyssal Minerals Commission might take a dim view of it regardless.

  But he’d something much worse to disturb him. It was now appallingly clear that Nike was no longer on the pickup ship. It seemed most likely that she’d either stowed away or been kidnapped in the lifeboat. The skipper of the pickup ship was very much disturbed indeed.

  In a certain place on Horus, even greater agitation grew. There were people trying to act secretly, on Horus, as men were openly permitted to act in the Rings—as if there were no law. But they found themselves running into trouble. Their problem had to do with a girl, Nike Keyes, who because of their attempted disregard of laws had taken fright and gone to the Rings to join her brother. And this was very bad business—unless something lethal happened quickly.

  So in one place on the planet Horus, and one where the pickup ship drove through the void, and in one place in the Rings—no, two or ten or twenty places in the Rings—men talked disturbedly about Nike or about where Dunne might be. They didn’t all know they were talking about Nike, and some didn’t know that Dunne was involved; but they all knew some irritation and disturbance and uneasiness. But Nike occupied the back cabin of a lifeboat, and regarded Dunne with frightened eyes on the way to a second Ring-rock, where it developed that Dunne meant to moor the lifeboat and wait for the radar to tell him of another visitor to the rock in which Keyes was now buried.

  The discovery of her brother’s death was a shock. When she was on the way to join him, she’d been absorbed in a situation which was desperate, but which she felt he would take care of. But now he was dead. There was nobody, anywhere, in whom she had reason to put trust. She and her brother were orphans. Keyes was the older, and he’d tried to take care of her in a world where the young and inexperienced were considered fair prey for sharpers. What inheritance they’d had, they’d been tricked or cheated out of. And Dunne had taken the last of their inheritance to put with his own money for the donkeyship now floating in small shattered pieces in the Rings. Her trip had been a chancey thing. But now she believed that. Dunne had practiced good faith toward her brother and herself. Too, she’d thrust herself into his current affairs. It wasn’t his fault or with his consent that she was here, and in this situation. Stowing away on the lifeboat had been her own idea. So she felt a complex mixture of distress and grief and terror and a horrifying isolation. Even from Dunne.

  It is the instinct of a man in difficulties to try to plan his way out of them. It is the instinct of a woman in difficulties to try to get somebody to help her out. Some men automatically look for help, and some women face their problems alone. But the instinct remains. And Nike had absolutely no one in any solar system in the galaxy to whom she felt that she could apply even for counsel.

  Unless it was Dunne. She’d added herself to his worries without his consent, and he’d told her angrily that she’d be sorry. She was. Even in a situation of no stress at all she’d have known the acute loneliness of a woman who no longer has any ties to anybody else. In the present state of things, she might justly have reacted with hysterics.

  But she didn’t. She kept out of Dunne’s way as much as was possible in a space lifeboat. She closeted herself in the rear cabin, and appeared only when called on. She spoke as little as possible, and only when Dunne spoke first. She believed she was acting to be a minimum of trouble and of irritation to him.

  She wasn’t. For a time
he took her reserve to be grief about her brother. And in no small part it was. But presently he came to the dour conclusion that she was afraid of him—because of his angry reception when she came out of hiding as a stowaway. When two people are isolated from all the rest of the human race, there is bound to be friction unless they are very wise. But Nike wasn’t wise. Her upbringing and the present situation made her the least-prepared of all possible persons to establish new ties and acquire self-confidence.

  Time passed. Days. More days. Dunne stayed grimly close to the radar. He was waiting for somebody to come to make sure that their boobytrap had worked. The lifeboat was moored to a fragment of stratified surface-rock from a nameless and anciently destroyed moon of Thothmes.

  Dunne considered it necessary to stay there. Nike didn’t know why. There was nothing to do but watch a radar screen when he had to be absent from it, and listen to a communicator-speaker which gave out no sounds but rustlings from the sun and cracklings from Thothmes.

  It would have been bad enough if it had been only isolation. With a basic misunderstanding between them, it was intolerable.

  But Dunne stood it for a full eight standard days. Then, without consultation with Nike, he cast off from the lump of surface-rock. The lifeboat’s drive hummed.

  Nike appeared. She didn’t look well. She looked as if she kept herself from trembling by a violent effort.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Dunne nodded without cordiality.

  “I thought somebody would have come before now to find out if their boobytrap did its work.”

  She looked at him in silence.

  “You’re going back to Horus when the pickup ship comes,” he explained. “You’ll want money when you get there.”

  She moistened her lips. “I’ll manage. You needn’t—”

  “Then I’ll need oxygen and food,” he said impatiently. “I used up our credit—your brother’s and mine—to get this lifeboat. I have to have something to use for more credit, for supplies. In any case, I’m going back to dig out some matrix. Maybe I’ll get crystals enough for my supplies and something for you, on your brother’s account.”

  She said nothing.

  “I don’t like the idea,” he added grimly. “They should have come back to work the rock after killing your brother and trying to kill me. They haven’t. So I’m going to work the rock—with a bazooka at hand. You’ll watch the radar. When we’ve even a small stock of crystals, I’ll get you away from here until pickup-ship time. After that I’ll try to pay you for the money your brother invested as my partner. And I’m going to come back here and find out who killed him.”

  “It isn’t necessary,” she protested. “I owe you much more, for the air I’ve breathed and the food I’ve eaten and the—trouble I’ve been to you.”

  He drew in his breath sharply. Then he shrugged.

  “Wait till I send you a bill for that! Right now I have to take care of real things, not feelings!”

  His tone was dismissal. She went back to the rear cabin. He headed the lifeboat back toward the seventy-foot mass of abyssal minerals, with its streak of gray matrix promising wealth. Again the lifeboat’s drive hummed as it gathered speed to cross the twenty-odd miles of shining emptiness. Again it cut off. And again the space-boat coasted.

  Dunne listened and watched, watched and listened. There seemed to be nothing happening anywhere in the universe except a minute displacement of radar blips on the lifeboat’s radar screen. But many things really happened.

  Five hundred miles away, a donkeyship which had been coasting put on full power and fled when an unearthly “tweet… tweet… tweet…” came from its communicator. There was no explanation for the abnormal noise. Again, more miles in another direction, a donkeyship drove unguided while its crew fought insanely. They’d had nobody but each other to speak to for months. There was a ship that incredibly found matrix material on a hill-sized rock not fifty miles from Outlook. Two other ships found that their Ring-rocks had been cleaned out during their absence at Outlook. There was a place where a human body was pushed out of an airlock and the donkeyship from which it had come had put on power and gone away. There was a place where a hundred-ton boulder had begun to acquire speed in a new direction. A donkeyship pushed it. It moved on and on and on, increasing its speed for many miles. Then it smashed into a monumentally large other rock. The donkeyship which had turned it into a missile began busily to investigate its fragments.

  And the skipper of the pickup ship continued to sweat over the problem of explaining the disappearance of a woman passenger in interplanetary space. It was an extremely difficult thing to account for in terms that would leave him wholly blameless. And there was also the lifeboat he’d allowed Dunne to take.

  There were other happenings that could be told, but eventfulness is relative. Dunne, in the spaceboat that had waited so long for murderers to return to the scene of their crime, coasted. up to the mass of rock and metal on which he and Keyes had put their signatures. He moored the lifeboat. He landed on the rock. Savagely, because of his feeling of complete frustration, he began to break out lumps of gray matrix and stuff it in a sack for crushing and the separation of any abyssal crystals it might contain.

  He worked for a long time, angry because he didn’t understand Nike’s behavior. He didn’t realize that the death of her brother was not only a grief, but total isolation. She felt that she no longer belonged anywhere. She knew a desolation he couldn’t imagine. If he’d been shipwrecked on an uninhabited world, Dunne would not have been happy; but he’d have been self-sufficient. Nike wouldn’t. No woman would. And by the loss of the one person she was confident she mattered to, she’d lost all confidences in anything.

  Dunne labored furiously at the loosening of matrix material. He was too angry to notice the passage of time. But a man in a space-suit mustn’t forget how long he’s been breathing from the twin tanks on his space-suit’s shoulders. Dunne did.

  He was getting out an unusually large bit of matrix when he felt a singular movement of the lifeline holding him to the lifeboat. He hadn’t caused it. He swung swiftly, and the state of his mind was such that his hand went instantly to his belt-weapon.

  He was then crouched beside the vein of matrix which made this particular fragment of a former moon into a mine most men would commit murder to possess. On every hand, the mineralized surface curved downward and away from him. The horizon was nowhere more than ten feet away. Above that horizon all was shining emptiness. But he saw his lifeline cross it. And the line moved.

  Weapon in hand, he scrambled toward it. He was ready to kill. He expected to kill. He raged because Nike was in the ship and he should be there to protect her. And he raged additionally because he was not.

  Then he reached the place which had been his horizon. Below it he saw another space-suited figure. The spacesuit did not fit; it was too large. There were balloonings where the material of the suit allowed for movement. And the figure carried no weapons.

  He swore. The small figure was guiding itself by the lifeline whose movement had startled Dunne. Nike had left the ship to get to him, by following his lifeline. But she had no lifeline of her own.

  “Stand still!” commanded Dunne fiercely. “Are you crazy? No lifeline?”

  He went to where she’d stopped as if paralyzed with terror when he spoke. He gathered up the rope. He caught her by the arm. He drew her with himself back to the lock. He thrust her in and crowded in beside her. When the inner door could open he followed her into the cabin and instantly took off his helmet. She did not. He had to take it off himself.

  “Are you crazy?” he demanded hotly. “I told you to stay here! To watch the radar!”

  She compressed her lips and listened in silence. He found himself frightened, now that the danger was over. She could have drifted away.

  “I’d have had to come after you if you’d slipped!” he told her angrily. “We mightn’t have gotten back! What the devil did you leave the ship f
or?”

  “You told me,” she said defiantly, “when we were moored to the other rock, not to use the space-phone. Not ever. But you were gone a long time. And—I worried that you might have forgotten to look at your oxygen gauge.”

  He turned his head and looked at the gauge. The pressure needle was flat against the pin. The tanks read empty—both of them. In ten minutes more, or fifteen at most, he’d have collapsed from oxygen starvation; he would have had no warning, because it is excess of carbon dioxide rather than lack of oxygen that makes one feel suffocation. He felt a moment’s queasy sensation at the pit of his stomach.

  “I apologize,” he said ruefully. “You were right and I was wrong. And—it could have killed both of us.”

  She swallowed. “You said you’d have come after me if I’d drifted away. Why?”

  “For the same reason,” he told her, “that you came after me. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  She searched his face, then shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “It isn’t the same reason. But thanks, anyhow.”

  “You thank me?”

  Then he said harassedly, “See here! I want you to do me another favor, besides saving my life. Your brother and I were partners. Now that he’s gone, his part of the partnership falls to you. So—will you, as a favor, accept it? Be my partner until I can put you on the pickup ship to go back to Horus? You’ve been reproaching yourself. There’s no sense to it! You just proved I need a partner! Where would I be if you hadn’t thought about my oxygen—as a partner does?”

  She searched his face again. Then she shrugged her shoulders in a fashion curiously like the gesture he had made.

  “All right,” she said steadily. “Until then.”

  She paused. “And now I’ll fix something to eat.”

  She turned to the readier-unit which prepared meals on demand.

  “And I,” said, Dunne, “I’ll go get that sack of matrix I was about to bring aboard.”