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 for?”
“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.”
She said warningly, “Oxygen!”
He removed the emptied tanks and twisted two others into place. He re-entered the airlock. He went outside.
Somehow everything looked different when he went out again from the lifeboat. But there was no real difference. There was the bubble he and Keyes had made, with the singular holes in it as if a belt-weapon had made them. There were the objects inside. There was even a sleeping bag with its hood turned up so a man in a bubble could rest his eyes in sleep. There was the sack of matrix. He moved toward it, his lifeline all secure.
And then he heard the whine of a donkeyship’s drive in his helmet-phone. It was very loud. It was very near. It was a ship that had been coasting across the space the yellow haze filled, and that now reversed its drive furiously to come to a stop.
Dunne put the maximum four bazooka-shells into his weapon’s magazine. He stood savagely ready to shoot on sight, which was the only practical way to defend oneself in the Rings. Then the drive-whine stopped just as it had reached a loudness to make his eardrums tingle. A voice bellowed: “The gooks are comin’! The gooks are comin’! They’re on the way! Come on out an’ get set to fight ’em! They’re comin’!”
Around a ragged comer of the Ring-rock there came the battered nose of a donkeyship.
Dunne swore.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was the donkeyship of the grizzled space-miner named Smithers, who alone in the Rings habitually worked without a partner. The battered bow of his donkeyship told of innumerable boulders pushed into shattering collisions with each other, for getting at their vitals.
“I heard ’em! ” his voice announced fiercely. “They picked up my drive! They’re comin’ after me! You fellas get set to fight ’em with me an’ we can handle ’em! But we got to fight! Might’s well fight together. Get set!”
Dunne caught up his bag of gray matrix. He hauled violently on the lifeline fastening him to an eyebolt beside the airlock door. He floated, pulling himself toward the spaceboat.
The grizzled man’s voice became a fierce yelping.
“Get set, heah me? Get set! I see you there, haulin’ y’self in! Git your bazooka an’ shells! Three of us fightin’ got more chance than one!”
Then he apparently really saw the lifeboat for the first time and realized that it was no donkeyship such as the miners of the Rings invariably used. A lifeboat wouldn’t even be a familiar object to him. Lifeboats belong in the elongated blisters on the hulls of passenger liners and cargo ships of space; Passengers on ocean ships, in long-ago times, never saw a lifeboat of that era afloat. They were kept hauled up on blocks on the boat decks. Passengers in space never saw lifeboats at all, because they were kept in the blisters from which they should be launched, but very rarely ever were.
“What the hell,” demanded the voice truculently. “What kind’a boat is that?”
His reverse-drive went on again. for the fraction of a second. The motion of the battered donkeyship stopped completely. It lay floating a hundred feet from the plastic bubble and the metal-stone substance of the rock. That rock should have made Keyes and Dunne moderately well-to-do, but so far it had cost Keyes his life and might have ended Dunne’s.
Dunne arrived at the airlock door of the lifeboat. He braced himself. Then he said very grimly into his helmet-phone, “This is a private rock, Smithers. I’m working it. If I didn’t know you I wouldn’t be talking. I’d be shooting! Move on!”
A pause. Then the battered donkeyship’s airlock opened. A figure in a space-suit appeared. It clipped a lifeline to an eyebolt and soared toward the floating rock that was also a mine. Dunne scowled. The soaring, monkeylike space-suited figure was familiar. The donkeyship was familiar. And Dunne was ready to kill. But a man ready to kill one specific man is not often anxious to kill anybody else. There is a feeling of economy, perhaps, as if one had an allowance of only one killing to be done with impunity, and therefore isn’t to be used on just anyone.
“I said this is a private rock, Smithers!” snapped Dunne.
The moving space-suit touched solidity. With an astonishing deftness and. agility it tossed a double loop around a protrusion of stone. With a strictly spaceman’s jerk, he had the loops tightened. Then the undersized space-suit faced Dunne.