“Shoot, dammit!” said Smithers’ voice vexedly. “But you’ll wish you hadn’t! I’m comin’ aboard where we can talk in air!”
He did something mysterious to the rope he’d just made fast. He suddenly had two loops in his two hands. With an extraordinary deftness he snagged a rocky irregularity with the loop in his left hand, and then another with the loop in his right. He advanced, holding himself to the jagged surface of the Ring-rock with the two loops alternately. It was as if he walked with two canes, save that these held him from floating away instead of holding him up against a fall.
Dunne raised his bazooka, suggestively and grimly. The small man made an inarticulate sound of disgust. He continued to advance. He offered no threat. To shoot him would be murder in cold blood. Dunne did not pull trigger. He knew the indignant frustration of a man forced to yield ground to keep his self-respect.
The little man made his way with astounding agility, for weightlessness, to the lifeboat’s airlock door. There he stopped. And now, certainly, if he’d made the slightest move to enter and close the airlock, leaving Dunne outside, Dunne would have had no choice but to kill him.
But he didn’t. He held his hands shoulder-high and waited for Dunne to join him in the lock. And, grinding his teeth, Dunne did.
For thirty seconds the two of them were in close physical contact. The sack of matrix crowded them. Dunne’s bazooka couldn’t be used in the lock, of course, but Dunne had another weapon ready.
The inner lock-door opened and Dunne put his belt-weapon back into its slightly clinging holster. He tossed the sack of matrix inside.
The little man turned his space-helmet and took it off. He grinned. Dunne took off his own helmet.
“Now, what’s this?” he demanded coldly. “I’ve every reason to shoot you, Smithers! Every reason!”
“Everybody has,” said the little man briskly. “But nobody does! When I come to a rock that looks promisin’, I always start hollerin’ about gooks while I’m comin’ up to it. If there’s somebody workin’ it, they know it’s me an’ they think I’m cracked, so they don’t start shootin’. If there’s nobody there, it’s no harm done.”
“And do you explain this,” asked Dunne sardonically, “when there is somebody working a rock and they know you can tell where they’re working and more or less what they’ve got?”
Smithers nodded.
“Sure! Sure I tell ’em. I just told you! But it ain’t often there’s anybody there. An’ anyhow, everybody knows I’m huntin’ gooks, not crystals. I just do enough minin’ to get supplies from the pickup ships. I’m huntin’ gooks, They killed my partner. I got to get even for that! I come mighty close to gooks plenty of times. But they’re smart! They come up the Rings from Thothmes. They spy on us. They hide from us! Now an’ then they get a chance to kill somebody an’—pfft! He’s gone! Just now, just a coupla hours ago I heard one of their ships. Their drive ain’t like ours. It goes ‘tweet… tweet… tweet…’ Like a bird. I heard it an’ I went for it. It stopped. Presently I heard a donkeyship drive. I hailed it, on communicator. It was a fella named Haney. He’d heard the gook ship too. But it was gone, by then.”
“When was this?” It was Haney’s name that made Dunne ask.
“I guess you’d say this mornin’,” said the little man, beaming, “if we had mornin’s in the Rings.”
There was, naturally, no morning or evening or night in the Rings. There was perpetual sunlit haziness everywhere, reaching for hundreds of miles in three directions, and for thousands in a fourth, toward Thothmes.
“When you came this way, then,” said Dunne evenly, “you left Haney behind. Look, Smithers! Haney killed my partner and left a boobytrap here to kill me. I’m waiting for him now to come back and find out whether his boobytrap worked. You’d better go away.”
Then he hesitated, twice opening his mouth to speak and then closing it. Then he said as if with reluctance, “In fact, there’s somebody who’d probably be a good deal safer with you than with me.”
Nike’s voice said sharply, “No!”
The little man whirled. He blinked. His mouth dropped open. He craned his neck incredulously. Then he gasped, “It’s a woman! A woman in th’ Rings! A woman!”
“My partner’s sister,” said Dunne coldly. “She came to see him. We’ve found him dead—murdered.”
“I ain’t seen a woman in years!” said Smithers in a shocked voice. “It was while I was back on Horus. While my partner was gettin’ killed by the gooks. It’s a woman!”
“Which,” said Nike fiercely, “doesn’t mean that I’m leaving here with anybody! I’m a partner in this ship! I’m not going anywhere with anybody! You can’t make me!”
The little man said, with a sudden and exaggerated gentleness, “No, ma’m! He can’t make you do nothin’ you don’t want to do! We don’t have women to look after here on the Rings, ma’am. We kinda get out’a the habit. But he can’t make you do anything y’don’t want to!”
He beamed at her. Her hands clenched and unclenched. She breathed quickly. Dunne realized that she was frightened. But he believed it was terror of Smithers. The isolation of miners in the Rings did queer things to some people. Smithers wasn’t wholly predictable, but no man would be afraid of him. But Nike might be.
Dunne went into the control room, Just on the off-chance, he thought he’d better consult the radar screen. He came out, his eyes burning. He spoke curtly to Smithers. “You’d better move on now, Smithers. There’s somebody else coming. They’ll arrive any minute. And somebody’s going to be killed.”
“Who’s comin’?” demanded Smithers.
“Haney, I think,” Dunne told him. “And if it is Haney, I’m going to kill him for my partner, because nobody else is as likely to have killed Keyes.”
Smithers said in gentle reproach, “He ain’t a nice fella, but you hadn’t ought to kill ’im!”
“I’ve got my reasons,” said Dunne coldly. “You go on! Out! And get away from here altogether!”
The little man said urgently to Nike, “Ma’am, would you want me to go away from here altogether? Or do you want I should stay an’ help Dunne fight, if he has to? He might be mistaken about Haney. If somethin’s comin’ here it’s likely gooks. I heard ’em.”
“Get out!” snapped Dunne. “Now!”
He shoved the small man’s helmet down on his head and thrust him in the airlock. He pressed the pump-out button.
“Something’s coming,” he told Nike. “I stand in the lock-door to shoot. You know the rest.”
There came a tapping on the lifeboat’s outer hull. Nike ran into the control room where she could look out. Smithers was already outside. He’d thrown the emergency release, wasting air. He tapped again. He saw Nike. He held up the severed mooring line for her to see. He’d freed the lifeboat. With an infinite deliberation it began to move outward and away from the rock. It had partaken of that dark object’s rotating motion, and even one revolution in ten minutes was enough to separate the rock and the spaceboat.
“He’s cast us off,” said Nike. “Now he’s going to his own boat. He moves fast.”
“Get your helmet on!” commanded Dunne. “Tighten it! Breathe from your tanks!”
Smithers’ voice came out of the control-room loudspeaker. He talked into his suit-phone and the communicator picked it up.
“Gooks!” he cried shrilly. “Look out, fellas! There’s gooks here! They got me! Git away an’ bring help! There’s four ships full’a gooks here! They’re layin’ for you.”
Dunne said coldly, “That’s not for us, but for what the radar says is coming. Smithers has gone chivalrous and swapped sides. He’s on our side now—for what good that may be! Get on your helmet and close the faceplate. If we get hit, the air will go. I showed you how to run the ship! I’ll shoot from the lock-door. You take the controls. I’ll tell you what to do!”