Nike did not answer, but her eyes followed him as he cut in the drive. It made—a brand-new noise. The sound of a drive depended on the size of the crystals which were its heart. A donkeyship whined. A lifeboat hummed. A space-liner or cargo ship boomed. These last required very large crystals to produce their thrust. But the drive in the lifeboat now made a whining, whimpering sound very much like that of a donkeyship. The crystal in its heart was substandard in size.
Dunne nodded with an air of great satisfaction. He continued to watch the radar screen, and from time to time made computations. Once he stared incredulously at his own results. But he said nothing. There was nothing to be seen through the ports in the least unusual. Now and again he did look out, but all he saw was a warmly glowing absence of anything to look at.
The interior of the boat was practically silent. The drive; yes. The small and meaningless sounds made by thunder and by highly complex atomic reactions in the sun; yes. But the eventlessness which is space travel obtained. All space travel consists of seconds of interest or of action, succeeded by seeming centuries of tedium. There was, just now, simply nothing to be done. Time itself seemed to consist of nothing that could happen.
Nike could have retired to the back cabin. But it would have been even more eventless there than in the main cabin, where at least she could see Dunne occasionally moving about. So she curled up on an upholstered seat and lay there with open eyes for a long while. But nothing happened.
Presently she went to sleep.
A great distance away, a donkeyship reversed its drive and came to what its instruments asserted was a stop. Haney was at the controls of this particular craft. It turned about and headed back toward the rock where Keyes had died and Dunne and Nike should be newly dead. Haney and his companion were confident. They’d performed a maneuver they’d previously done often enough so they could rely on its results.
It was very simple and soundly based on the normal reactions of those on whom it was practiced. A donkeyships’ steady high-speed dash from beyond radar range would naturally be noted by men working a rock in the Rings. When they knew it would pass close by their workings, they’d cut off all radiating equipment and wait for it to go by. If it had slowed before arrival, it would have suggested grim happenings. But it didn’t. It came straight ahead, almost to graze this rock or that, but it gave no sign of a pause or any action at all. The working miners were reassured. So the smothering burst of machine-gun fire, fired as it went by, was total and successful surprise. If there was a bubble, it would be punctured. Where there was a ship, it would be drained of air. Where there were miners—a space-suit pierced by a bullet anywhere was inevitably a fatal wound. There’d never be a single shot fired in return. The killers could go right on, and then later return to find no living soul present to oppose them. They often found good quantities of abyssal crystals already separated from the gray matrix.
It was a perfectly matter-of-fact device for the sort of men who’d use it. It couldn’t be prevented. It couldn’t be punished. There were no laws to cover it or law officers to enforce them. The fact accounted for part of the Rings’ death-rate of thirty per cent of the mining population every solar year.
So Haney and his companion matter-of-factly drove back to the rock where Dunne and Keyes had worked, where Dunne and Nike had been a short while back, where a boobytrap should have done the work they’d just repeated to be wholly sure. It wasn’t difficult to find the way back. Haney watched the radar screen and recalled the arrangement of blips he’d passed as a man on a liquid ocean would remember the bearing and size of objects on a shoreline. He expected as a matter of course that Smithers would have died in the dash-past of Haney and his companion. He’d been useful. He’d made sure that there was somebody alive at the rock He shouldn’t be alive to ask for payment in oxygen or to protest what had been done with his assistance.
But when the seventy-foot rock loomed up through the mist, it was solitary. There was no lifeboat owned by Dunne. No donkeyship belonging to Smithers. Nothing.
It was a good rock. Two men working fast and without interruption could clean it out in a matter of days, especially if they worked wastefully and let much gray matrix escape in the process. But Haney seemed not to be much concerned with working a mine even as good as this one.
He listened, disturbed and enraged. He caught the faintest imaginable whine of a donkeyship’s drive. He couldn’t imagine why there were no dead men—including Smithers—who should have been left behind by the burst of machine-gun fire.
It wasn’t easy to understand. But it wasn’t desirable that anybody should escape. If Smithers reported that Haney had a machine gun and had used it in such-and-such a manner, at the next pickup ship gathering it would be discussed. It would be agreed that it was not desirable for Haney and his partner to go on living and practicing this device. There’d be no formality about it. Simply—the man who found it most convenient would kill Haney. Of course, if Dunne and Nike reported their part of the adventure, the need for Dunne to be killed would be even more evident. But he’d be killed anyhow.
So Haney got a careful bearing on the excessively faint drive-whine and set out after it. It was certainly the only chance he had of correcting the mistake by which Smithers had survived. Dunne… Dunne must be dead, and Nike with him. Haney believed he had only to kill Smithers.
This decision came before Dunne had completed temporary repairs to the lifeboat. The lifeboat hurtled onward with the velocity that the excess acceleration had given it. Smithers drove after it at the highest speed the non-crystal-burning drive of his ship would give him. He was a long way behind, until Dunne got settled and began to slow the spaceboat. Haney, in turn, was far behind Smithers. Things began to work out—with that enormous amount of pure tedium in between seconds of action and excitement.
Dunne, waiting for his restored drive to cut the lifeboat’s speed down to a manageable figure, found himself trying to put things together in a rational fashion. His original beliefs about his situation—and Nike’s—didn’t seem to fit what was happening. The idea that his donkeyship had been blasted, on Outlook, to keep him from rejoining Keyes was not wholly plausible. It didn’t account for everything—for example, Haney’s offer of a deal to carry both of them to Keyes and return all three to Outlook next pickup-ship time. That wasn’t necessary. Haney’s effort to carry Nike from Outlook in the belief that she was going to join her brother—that didn’t fit in. If Haney’d tried that first, and made the proposal to include Dunne later—yes, that would be more reasonable. But the big thing was that after Keyes was killed, nobody went to work feverishly to clean out the crystals in the plainly visible vein of matrix. Haney had come on to Outlook after killing Keyes. He’d left a boobytrap…
Then Dunne scowled to himself. Had Haney done that? Could it be someone else?
The matter of Smithers was a complete answer. He’d talked to Haney by communicator. He’d come to the rock, to find out if there were anybody alive on it. He’d discovered that Nike was there—a girl in the Rings! And when Dunne put him out of the lifeboat, to prepare against an approaching radar blip, Smithers had yelped to surrounding space, “You Haney! You sheer off! You keep away from here! No tricks! There’s a lady here!”
And that was proof. Not for a court of law, but there were no courts in the Rings. And the highest court on Horus had solemnly ruled that it had no jurisdiction over events or crimes or property in the Rings of Thothmes. Therefore, every man had to be his own judge and jury in such matters as affected him. And Haney affected Dunne.