In emptiness, then, he threw it away from the rock and the lifeboat together. He drew his belt-weapon. When it was two hundred feet away he fired at it.
The thing he’d brought away from the sleeping bag shattered itself to bits, with a monstrous blue-white flame of explosive. But there was no sound. There was no air to carry sound.
Dunne went sombrely into the lifeboat. Nike faced him as the inner lock-door opened. His expression was that of angry, bitter grief when he took his space-helmet off.
“We’re too late,” he said savagely. “Much too late.”
“He’s—dead, then,” said Nike. She swallowed. She became even paler. “When you didn’t come back right away, I thought it was bad news. When you—exploded that thing… I knew.”
“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.