Nike drew back. He reached up and caught her hand. He tugged at it. She bent down again. Their helmets touched.
“Oxygen!” he said tinnily. “It’s my turn to remind you!”
He grinned at her and she was astounded. But she went obediently to the remaining suit-tanks and replaced the one whose gauge indicated a pressure close to zero.
Far away, a battered donkeyship started its drive and began to move away from the seventy-foot floating rock. Then it stopped. It returned. The whine of its drive, translated into ultra-high-frequency waves, spread out from the rock. It stopped again. The grizzled Smithers called cautiously on his communicator:
“Dunne! Dunne! What happened t’you, Dunne?”
There was no reply. In the control room of his donkeyship, Smithers muttered to himself. He turned off the transmitter.
“Haney shouldn’t ha’ done that!” he said indignantly to nobody at all. “Not to somebody had a woman with ’im. He lied t’me! Didn’t say a word about a lady in the Rings! All he said was he wanted t’know if anybody was there! Anybody’d—” His tone changed to shrewdness. “Figured I’d get killed if somebody was there…” Then he protested, “No harm seein’ if anybody was there! Anybody’d shoot anybody who found out they was workin’ something good—anybody but me! I coulda ’voided a fight! I ain’t got time to hunt crystals. Gooks is what I’m after. Why shouldn’t I get me some extra oxygen ’voidin’ a fight between men?”
The donkeyboat floated near the rock. Nothing happened, whether visibly nearby, or producing radio waves that would travel vast distances before they became too faint for a donkeyship’s communicator to pick them up.
“I tell y’,” said Smithers angrily to the walls of his ship, “that fella Haney’s a bad egg! Dunne found th’ Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ fellas tried to track him, so he didn’t go to it. But Haney figured he’d kill ’im because he’d rather nobody had it than not him! Yes, suh! Dunne’s stayin’ away from the Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ Haney’s tryin’ to kill him so if he don’t have the Mountain, Dunne won’t neither!”
There were flaws in his logic, but it satisfied Smithers. Now he spoke again, with a fine conviction of his own shrewdness: “But now Dunne’s gone off. He burned crystals in his drive to get speed nobody else can afford to get, because they ain’t got crystals to burn! Yes, suh!”
Then he said confidentially to his donkeyship: “I’ll take me a look. Don’t blame him for bein’ sneaky about it. If I was to find the Mountain…”
He swung his rotund ship about. He did not bother with instruments or computations or any form of astrogation. He belonged in the Rings. He’d developed an instinct for finding his way about, regardless of the entire absence of landmarks. He had the feel of space in the Rings of Thothmes. Not many people lived long enough to develop so precious a talent.
He steadied the donkeyship on its proper course according to his notions. Its drive began to whine. He headed along the line taken by the lifeboat with Dunne and Nike in it.
“That’s it!” he told himself triumphantly. “Yes, suh! That’s it! Dunne’s found the Big Rock Candy Mountain, an’ fellas tried to trail him to it, so he ain’t goin’ back so’s he’ll throw folks off his track! So he does it! It’s done! Smart fella!” Then Smithers laughed appreciatively. “But not as smart as me !”
At just about that moment, Dunne was seated on the floor of the lifeboat, wearing his space-suit and crushing lumps of light-gray matrix with a hammer. The matrix came from the sack of abyssal mineral he’d dug out to provide a stake for Nike, when she would be sent back to Horus from the Rings. Because, of course, the Rings were no place for a woman to be. Among other reasons, there weren’t any laws there.
CHAPTER SIX
There were sounds transmitted as radio waves. The communicator’s loudspeaker in the ceiling reported them with a fine impartiality. It reported the rustling, whispering noises that came from the photosphere of the sun. It reported the tiny crackling sounds credited to lightning in monstrous storms on Thothmes. The speaker reported them. Then it said, “tweet… tweet… tweet…” and stopped.
Dunne said reflectively, “That’s a queer thing! Nobody has the least idea what makes that noise! We’ve heard it more often than anybody else ever reported it. But why? Smithers says it’s gooks, Some people believe it. But if so, it’s the only evidence for the existence of gooks.”
He stretched himself—carefully, because he hurt in a surprising number of places from his tow behind the wildly accelerating spaceboat, Nike watched him. She found that it was both comforting and astonishing to look at him.
Now there was oxygen in the spaceboat at a pressure of three pounds per square inch. The accepted norm was fourteen point seven pounds pressure for the oxygen-nitrogen mixture to which the human race had adapted during some thousands of generations. But the nitrogen could be dispensed with. Breathing oxygen was perfectly satisfying. True, voices sounded a little off normal, and it would not have been possible to heat anything containing water, because water boiled while still little more than lukewarm.
But there was oxygen to breathe, and no reason to anticipate a lack of it.
And the drive was working again. The sack of matrix fragments Dunne had brought in was not a particularly rich sample from the vein. In all the sack there’d been no more than four abyssal crystals. Only one could be used between the drive’s thrust-blocks—the others were too small. That one was under half a gram, and the boat couldn’t be driven at high speed with so small a crystal. But it could be driven. Dunne had fitted it in between the thrust-blocks and actually turned on the drive for the fraction of a second. It worked. The sound would be unexpected and hardly identifiable unless it had considerable volume. Dunne didn’t believe so brief a noise would even be picked up at any great distance. Certainly nobody could have gotten a bearing on its source!
Nike looked at him as he considered his various aches and bruises. Then he said, “I think I’ll try the radar long enough to get an idea of our speed. My idea of where we may be is pretty indefinite!”
Nike said, “Can I help?”
It was absurd, but Dunne didn’t notice. Neither of them referred to the fact that the spaceboat was hurtling blindly through the Rings with no radar in operation to warn them of possible collisions. But, on an average, there was not more than one object of appreciable size in two cubic miles of space in the Rings. This was enough to make mining for abyssal crystals profitable, but the likelihood of a collision was remote.
Presently Dunne watched the radar screen for blips indicating exactly such floating objects as had created the profession of mining in the sky. He didn’t know the direction the spaceboat had taken after the burst of machine-gun tracer-bullet fire. He didn’t know the speed it had attained or how far it had traveled. And there was nothing in view but mist by which to tell.
The radar, though, showed blips. They were more widely separated than in the part of the Rings that Dunne and Keyes had worked in. They had motions of their own. They had orbital velocities suited to their distance from Thothmes. But something could be learned from their motion across the radar screen. Dunne learned it.
The spaceboat’s speed was very high, relative to solid objects in the mist. Dunne computed, using guesses for quantities and hopes for mathematical signs. Eventually he shook his head.
“We’ve come a devil of a long way!” he said. “We must have accelerated longer than I believed. We may have crossed the whole first Ring! Anyhow, we can decelerate without too much danger of anybody hearing us.”