“Is that it?” asked Nike anxiously.
“Perhaps,” said Dunne.
His tone was unconsciously cold. The birdlike twittering he’d heard was unnatural. It was wrong. Somebody knew where Keyes was. That last, alone, could add up to disaster. Dunne smelled disaster. Something was wrong. Very wrong!
The lifeboat moved on, pointing on a course that seemed to have no connection with the direction of its motion. But the radar image began to take recognizable shape. There was still nothing to be seen out the viewports. That was merely pure golden haze. But the radar said that the lifeboat was moving toward something solid. Then it said toward something large. Then it said something near.
“It’s our rock, I think,” said Dunne quietly. He spoke into the communicator’s transmitter. “Keyes?”
There was no answer. He spoke again. Then he fell silent until the featureless haze ahead began to show a formless darkening at one particular spot. Then he said, very carefully, “I don’t like this, Nike. Watch, will you? I’m going to get into my space-suit.”
He went back. Nike, her heart in her throat, watched ahead while she heard Dunne getting into the suit which allowed him to work and move outside of the ship in emptiness. The last time, he’d stood in an airlock door and fired bazooka shells at donkeyships that trailed him. Now—
The dimness took shape. Nike said tensely, “We’re very close!”
Dunne came waddling into the control room, working himself swiftly into his space-suit, He reversed the lifeboat’s drive. The small space-vessel came to an almost complete stop only fifty yards or so from a mass of stony stuff many times the volume of the lifeboat. It was seventy feet high—“high” being the longest dimension of any object in space where there was no up or down. It was totally irregular in form. There were painted letters and numbers on it. Its mineral nature was obvious. The lifeboat drifted very, very slowly toward it.
“Aren’t you going to call again?” asked Nike anxiously.
“There are detectors,” said Dunne. “They should tell him we’re here.”
His voice was unnatural. This was wrong. It was very wrong. It was appalling.
The big, irregularly shaped lump of stone turned slowly in emptiness. There was a slash of gray along one side. It was that friable matrix material in which abyssal crystals were always found. The stony mass turned further. There was a bubble—a fifteen-foot dome of plastic, welded by its own nature to a hollow part of the stony surface. Inside it there were objects. A small-capacity air-freshener. Oxygen tanks. Mining equipment. A sleeping bag with its light-hood that allowed a man to provide himself with darkness to sleep in, even in a bubble in the Rings. There was something inside the sleeping bag, but the hood was pulled up.
“There he is!” said Nike, her voice trembling. “In the sleeping bag! See? He’s asleep!”
Dunne didn’t recognize his own voice. “I’m afraid not,” he said harshly. “It’s your brother, yes. But—he wouldn’t be asleep. No. He’s not asleep.”
He wasn’t. He was dead.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dunne anchored the lifeboat to a projecting knob of faceted stone, casting a loop from the airlock door with a spaceman’s—specifically, a space-miner’s—trick of getting the loop into existence and then floating it to the thing to be gripped. It caught, and he gently brought the lifeboat close. He knotted the rope and went back into the lifeboat. Nike waited there, totally pale.
“Listen to me!” said Dunne sternly. “I’m going to see what’s happened. You stay here! You can listen. If you hear a drive or more of those twitterings—I’ll be back! I’ll hear it too in my headphones. But you stay here. Leave the lock-door alone. You can watch through the viewports, but don’t do anything. Not anything!”
She nodded, watching his expression with something of desperation in her own.
“Do you think he—”
“I don’t think anything yet,” said Dunne. “He should have heard us arrive. There was plenty of oxygen. I’ve got to find out what’s wrong.”
He went into the airlock again and checked—as always—the sealing of his helmet to the vacuum-suit. The suit ballooned out as the airlock pumped empty. There’d been much trouble with space-suits in the early days, when men tried to use full-pressure air in them. They swelled and the suit-arms tended to swing out widely, so that a man in a vacuum-suit was spread-eagled by the air pressure inside. He was like a man-shaped toy balloon, incapable of any purposeful motion. But with only three pounds pressure of oxygen instead of fifteen of oxygen-nitrogen mixture, all suits were manageable. Dunne checked his steering-jet—not to be used if it was possible to avoid it. He checked his belt-weapon. He fastened a lifeline. He went out of the lock, trailing the line behind him.
With no gravity he couldn’t very well walk. So he crawled toward the bubble, clutching an extrusion of its surface, testing it, and then trusting to it while he reached for another handhold. This was abyssal rock; and where the lifeboat was nearest, it had slowly crystalized under unthinkable pressure. The stone crystals were six to ten inches in length. The rock. as a mass was an intricately interlaced agglomerate of such crystals, ranging through various shades of brown. They had sword-sharp points and edges. A man could rip his vacuum-suit on any of a hundred keen-edged projections in a crawl of a dozen feet.
All about lay the sunlit mist. There was no solidity anywhere away from this rock and this spaceboat. The gaunt, glittering Ring-fragment and the lifeboat were the only things on which one could focus his eyes. They floated, rotating with enormous deliberation, linked together by a slender cord.
Dunne reached the bubble. It had been established here to make room for those activities a donkeyship has no room for. There was much gray matrix to a very little crystal-stuff. Much matrix had to be crushed and sifted to recover the crystals it contained. When there was enough material to be worked, one set up a bubble. One brought the gray matrix into the bubble in sacks, and there crushed it and made a first cleaning of the crystals. When there were many tons of the friable gray stuff to be worked, a bubble was much more practical than taking it into a donkeyship.
Dunne arrived at the bubble. He searched its interior with his eyes. He stayed outside.
Nike watched from a viewpoint in the control room. Nothing changed inside the bubble. The sleeping bag did not stir. Nothing stirred. Dunne looked like a human fly creeping on something mysteriously suspended from nowhere, from which he could fall to infinity if he missed a single handhold.
He pressed on the expanded plastic of the bubble. It pushed in. It did not push out again when he took his hand away. Nike watched, uncomprehending. Dunne made further exploration, still not attempting to enter by the fragile-seeming metal frame and plastic doors which provided an airlock into the bubble. On the farther side of the bubble he halted. He did something Nike could not see. He crawled back to the airlock and entered it.
Here his actions were extraordinary. He crawled around the inside edge of the bubble, where the dome came down to the rock and where nobody would ordinarily try to move. Still nothing moved, anywhere in the dome. He went around to the back of the sleeping bag, ignoring its motionless occupant.
He backed away with an object in his hands. There were wires attached to it. He’d detached them from outside the bubble. Now he removed the wired object from within. But he did not touch the sleeping bag nor lift its hood until all of these preliminaries were completed.
Now he lifted the hood and looked steadily down at what it had hidden. He replaced the hood. He went out of the airlock door, carrying the object from behind the sleeping bag.