“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 enclosure 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.”