There was no doubt about the existence of such followers. They stayed at the extremest range at which they could know when he changed course, and to what. They probably hoped the lifeboat’s communicator system wasn’t as far-reaching or as sensitive as those of donkeyships. And Dunne had a third obligation, to get back to Keyes in his bubble on the big rock fragment before Keyes’ oxygen gave out.
He was a day and a half from Outlook before he explained the situation in its entirety to Nike. In that time he’d done everything he could to carry out his original plan. He’d exhausted the bag of normal evasive tricks. Now the lifeboat drove—its drive a nagging, humming sound—through the mist which was the Rings. It should have given the impression that he’d given up hope of slipping away from those who followed him and was heading where he had to go. Dunne watched the radar screen of the lifeboat. It had a somewhat longer range than that of a donkeyship, but it didn’t bring in nearly as much information about the objects reported.
Only a short time after leaving Outlook, though, was needed to sort out trailing donkeyships from merely floating Ring-rocks. The rocks were left behind as the lifeboat drove on. The other space-craft kept pace with it.
The atmosphere in the lifeboat was peculiar. Dunne was bitterly angry, mostly with himself. If he’d simply said that Keyes was dead, nobody would have raised any question at all. But he’d let other space-miners suspect that he and Keyes had made a very considerable discovery. They immediately interpreted this to mean the Big Rock Candy Mountain. There was some substance to the legends about that fabulous lost mine in the sky. But it didn’t happen to have anything to do with what Dunne and Keyes had found.
The accompanying donkeyships followed happily. Their occupants told each other about Joe Griffiths. He’d brought to Outlook more crystals than all other space-miners had found in years. He’d gone back and come out again with an additional incredible treasure. He boasted that there was a hundred or a thousand times as much more waiting to be brought in. And then he had vanished on his third trip to what he called a mountain in the sky, the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
It wasn’t likely that he’d been killed by another miner, because nobody else made any spectacular findings afterward. Some believed he’d fallen a victim to gooks, but there was no very convincing evidence that things like gooks existed. There were occasional noises, picked up here and there, for which there was no explanation; but they didn’t have to have gooks as their cause. They might just possibly be caused by something else.
Dunne kept the keenest of watches on the radar screen of the lifeboat. He pointed out to Nike that this blip represented a natural Ring-fragment, because it moved at the proper orbital speed for an object this far from Thothmes. On the other hand, this indication had to be a donkeyship because it kept pace with the lifeboat. And that blip was a donkeyship.
“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.