Then a clucking came from his detectors. There was a much larger object on ahead. The instruments had analyzed their own findings and called for Dunne’s decision. Some object behind the mist had moved otherwise than in an orbit around Thothmes. It couldn’t be a rock. It was large enough to be a ship. It might have sent out a radar pulse. The clucking sound seemed indignant.
Dunne growled to himself. He got into a space-suit—fast. He watched his instruments as he wriggled into the armor against emptiness. He picked up the stubby miners’ bazooka which fired very small shells to crack open rocky masses for examination of their’ inward parts. He stuck small shells in appropriate places in his space-suit belt.
He took a last look at the instruments and went to the airlock. He clipped a lifeline in place. He closed the inner door and opened the outer. This was standard for the examination of bits of celestial debris, but a man with a bazooka in an open airlock door can be a very deadly fighting unit.
He stared ahead into a mere mistiness lighted by the sun. But presently there was a shadow which became a shape, and then something solid, floating in nothingness. It was an irregularly shaped mass of rock, practically the size of a donkeyship. A small one could hide behind it, if aligned just right.
Then the bit of solidness was two miles away. Dunne opened fire. He loosed three bazooka-shells at it. The small projectiles flashed away. Here where there was no gravity they would travel in mathematically straight lines. When the rocky object was only one mile away, the first of the bazooka-shells hit. The rocky mass crackled. It began to break. A second shell hit. The third.
The rock seemed to disintegrate, and behind it there was a donkeyship. This other ship had been lying in wait. Most likely it had heard the whine of Dunne’s ship’s drive before he heard of it. It had cut its drive and made itself into an ambush. But now it was the center of a mass of explosion-driven stones flying in all directions. And Dunne, forewarned and demonstrably able to take care of himself, was boring in on it.
The strange donkeyship fled, with a last shell from Dunne’s bazooka to urge it on. He closed the outer airlock door and opened the inner. He went back to his instrument board. He dismissed the incident from his mind.
There was no point in being upset about it. This was the Rings, and this was the time when lucky space-miners were carrying abyssal crystals to a pickup ship. This was when unlucky ones were apt to take desperate measures. He dismissed the whole matter. But he was very much concerned about Keyes.
He changed the course of his donkeyship. If he was to get back as he should, no one should be able to back-track him. The ship he’d just discouraged from lying in wait, for instance. Not many of the less desirable characters in the Rings had the stomach for a fight. But a donkeyship heading for Outlook often carried enough crystals to be worth a murder or two.
So Dunne headed for Outlook. From time to time he changed his course—always when his detectors. picked up no trace of any other ship’s drive. He drove more or less by dead reckoning, but he heard other ships in motion, and they sheered away. Which was wisdom.
But eventually there were several thin, buzzing whines picked up by his communicator at one time and relayed to him by loudspeaker. They were all drives in action and heading for one destination which was now near. After a little more, he heard a voice at the lower limit of hearability. It was calling exuberantly: “Hi! Who’s comin’ in?”
The call meant that somebody was aground on Outlook and another ship was within seeing distance. And then Dunne knew everything that was happening, and what would happen.
One donkeyship had landed. It had come in cautiously, with an airlock door open and a space-suited figure in the opening holding a bazooka ready for use. It approached very, very cautiously, as if the appearance of Outlook gave it pause. But that wasn’t the case. Everybody knew what Outlook was like. It was a mountain—a solid mass of nickel-steel from the very center of a dead moon’s heart. It was more than a mile long, and its shape was that of a nightmare. One end was like a cone, and the other like a roughly rounded-half-globe. And all its surfaces were twisted, shattered, tormented metal, except at one spot.
There was one place which was a sheer plane, an almost fiat surface created by some sliding, grinding collision a few scores of millions of years ago. That flat area, without a beacon or a building or any single marking to say that men had ever been there—that was the spaceport on Outlook. The first ship to arrive would approach its prospective landing place with great caution. Eventually it would land and make contact with its magnetic grapples. It would then settle itself where nobody could approach if from any direction unseen.
Then it would wait. Dunne, for one, knew exactly what went on. Presently another donkeyship appeared. When it was the merest speck on the glowing golden fog, the ship aground hailed it: “Hi! Who’s comin’ in?”
Dunne heard this, and the reply. The second ship called down an identification. It settled on another place, not too close to the first-landed ship. Then talk between the two ships began. At first it was cautious and restrained. But the men in each of the twin space-craft had gone long weeks with only each other’s voices to hear. They were hungry to listen to the new ones.
Another ship. Two more. Many! The emptiness about Outlook became filled with short-wave conversation. Suddenly there were jests, there were jokes, and there was exaggerated, change-hungry laughter. Some of the jokes had been old before space-travel began. Very few of them were genuinely new, but men howled with laughter at them. There were questions, Did so-and-so still do this or still do that? Did somebody else still have nightmares and start fighting in his sleep? Remember the time—? Had anybody seen so-and-so? He wasn’t here last pickup ship. Was he here now?
Questions like that weren’t approved. They didn’t fit the mood of Outlook at pickup-ship time. The men now aground waited impatiently to get out of the rotund little ships that had been mere movable prisons for many weeks past. They didn’t want to hear that this or that team of donkeyship men had vanished. The presumption could only be that they were dead.
There was also a tacit agreement not seriously to ask what luck others had had. Anybody who boasted would practically invite less-fortunate others to trail him when he left. They’d want to know where he found the precious crystals all the galaxy bid for, But there were always two questions asked of everybody as they arrived. The first was, had they seen any gooks? This was considered very humorous. Had anybody seen any gooks? Laughter. The other question was, had they found the Big Rock Candy Mountain. This was excruciatingly amusing to men waiting hungrily to get out of their ships if only for minutes.
Dunne knew that these things went on, though he hadn’t yet reached Outlook. They were traditional.
Then his drive-detectors picked up the booming sound of the pickup ship. Its drive sounded quite unlike that of a donkeyship, It was bringing oxygen and food and mining supplies and mail, but mostly it was bringing a change, a relief, a temporary forgetting of life in the Rings of Thothmes. It was coming from Horus, the next planet out from the sun.
Its drive-sound, as the detectors reported it, was a deep-toned rumble. It came swiftly nearer. The voices of men aground on Outlook stopped abruptly. Dunne felt the desperate impatience everybody knew at moments like this. He wanted to fling his ship into top-speed, crazy rush to get to Outlook first. But he held himself in check. He heard the pickup ship’s drive stop, and reverse, and he knew that the large space-vessel was matching velocity and approaching the slowly rolling mountain with care through the haze of moondust floating in space. He drove on and on, and a confused notification appeared on his radar screen. There was something very large ahead. It was too far away to be identified, but he knew what it had to be. Outlook. He heard the pickup ship’s drive go on for half-seconds, and other half-seconds, and he knew that it was maneuvering to match velocity and rate-of-turn with the mountainous mass of nickel-steel.