With Nike sleeping peacefully on an upholstered seat in the lifeboat’s main cabin, Dunne suddenly saw the situation from a new angle. The mine-rock he. and Keyes had found was a valuable find, to be sure. No Big Rock Candy Mountain, but a good rock just the same. But with Keyes dead and Dunne’s donkeyship destroyed, it was Haney’s if he chose to take it. He needn’t hurry. He needn’t deal with Dunne. He could have ignored Nike. He didn’t have to do anything if what he wanted was the rock and its slash of matrix. Especially, he needn’t have joined the pack of donkeyships that tried to trail Dunne to a discovery he hadn’t made. Haney knew he hadn’t made it. Why, then, had he followed? It wasn’t for Nike. If he’d thought of kidnapping her, he wouldn’t have flung machine-gun tracer bullets into the lifeboat, where she’d die as the air bled out to space, So Haney would think, anyhow.
Then Dunne whistled softly to himself as recalled events put themselves together in a new pattern. The machine gun, for instance. It wasn’t standard equipment for a donkeyship. It was an antique. It was practically a museum piece. But Haney had brought it out to the Rings when he came. He came to hunt crystals, so it appeared, but also he’d come out with the most deadly piece of armament—outdated, but still most deadly against a donkeyship—he could carry. Why?
The Big Rock Candy Mountain might be involved in the answer. Dunne moved to look at Nike. She was asleep. She looked very young and weary, but she slept with a child’s tranquility. Dunne couldn’t guess it, but it was because she no longer felt that she didn’t belong anywhere with anybody. She couldn’t have explained it herself, but it was true.
He had only to make one assumption he hadn’t thought of before, and everything changed. The assumption was that Haney hadn’t planned especially to kill him—Dunne. In the course of more important events, it might be desirable; but it wasn’t a major objective. A much more reasonable guess would be that Haney wanted to kill Nike.
She’d come out to tell Keyes something that meant life or death. There was mail service, by the pickup ships, and she could have written. But she’d found it necessary to come out herself. She couldn’t go back, though Dunne urged it and offered to pay for her to return immediately. She wouldn’t go back! When Dunne forced the pickup ship’s skipper to sell him a lifeboat, she stowed away on it to keep from going back to Horus! She was willing to take any imaginable risk rather than go back. And she desperately wanted to see and talk to her brother. And Haney was responsible for his death and had surely tried. to secure Nike’s.
Dunne was just beginning to work out the implications of the facts seen from this angle when there came the faintest of possible drive-whines from the loudspeaker. It progressed very slowly from the just-not-inaudible to the faintest clear. He stopped all speculation to hear it. Yes. There was a donkeyship almost out of detection range, but not quite. Dunne threw off his drive. He threw off the radar, which had not yet reported the whining donkeyship. He silenced the air-refresher unit. He waited.
The whining sound grew gradually louder, in the course of hours. Then there came the thinnest of voices clamoring over the drive-whine;
“Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne! Come in!”
Dunne hesitated. Nike slept peacefully. There was silence. Velocity away from the outer rim of the Rings remained. The lifeboat, though, was pointed back toward its starting point—the outermost edge of the Rings. Outlook floated there, and other small and giant objects. But though the lifeboat aimed there and its drive operated, so far it hadn’t overcome its acquired momentum away. It traveled backward as it drove ahead. But its reverse speed diminished steadily.
“Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne! Come in!”
The call continued. Smithers had followed the lifeboat. Dunne heard him. The question was of Smithers’ allegiance, to Haney or to the first women he’d seen in years, who might seem to him to have an irresistible claim on his chivalry.
Then there came a change in the mistiness outside. Dunne jerked his head about to stare. He saw stars, gradually becoming brighter than the dust-clouds which were the Rings.
And then the lifeboat shot out backwards into the clear and dust-free ring of transparency between the two outer rings. It was called Cassini’s Division for the man who first observed it in the rings of Saturn. Its explanation waited for two hundred years.
Here the impalpable, shining dust-particles ceased to be. For a distance of many, many miles, space was clear. But on beyond—it could be seen clearly—the second Ring began. In the interval the spaceboat would be visible. Here it could not hide in shining opacity. But if one looked steadily at the star-field, one could see stars sometimes blink. And stars in emptiness do not blink.
Dunne clamped his jaws together. He waked Nike. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.
“It’s my time to watch?” she asked.
“No. But we’re past the first Ring. We’re likely to have company.”
She started up. He led the way into the control room. The donkeyship whine was becoming fainter. It appeared not to be following the spaceboat in the exact proper line. But the voice accompanying it was still dear enough for every word to be understood.
“Dunne! Dunne! Smithers callin’! Come in, Dunne!” It went on and on.
Nike looked at Dunne. He shrugged, and flipped on the transmitter.
“Smithers,” he said coldly. “Do you hear me?”
A pause. Then Smithers’ voice, overjoyed, “Dunne! How’ you doin’? Are you in trouble? You need any help? Is the lady all right?” Then Smithers said indignantly, “Haney played a dirty trick! He shouldn’t ha’ done that!”
“I thought so myself, at the time,” said Dunne drily. “What’re you doing this far from where you were?”
“I was comin’,” said Smithers’ voice, “to see if I could do anything for th’ lady. She’s all right?”
“She’s all right,” agreed Dunne.
“That’s fine! Now what?”
Dunne paused. Then, “Goodbye,” he said curtly. “That’s what. Farewell. You go your way and I go mine. Stop following me. I haven’t found the Big Rock Candy Mountain! You won’t be led to it in a hundred million years of following me around. Understand? Goodbye!”
He threw the switch that cut off the transmission from the communicator.
Nike said, “Do you really think he—wishes us harm?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Dunne. “But I’m trying to cut down on the things that could do us harm; and having Smithers around, with even the noblest of motives, doesn’t seem to work out well. He doesn’t seem to realize that we’ve a sort of disguise. I don’t want him to realize it.”
“Disguise? We have a disguise?”
“The boat has,” Dunne told her. “The drive. You’ll notice when you think to listen.”
But he didn’t turn the drive on again. He examined the radar screen and cut the radar off lest Smithers pick up its pulses. He left the drive off because it had been a moaning hum—peculiar to lifeboats—and now it was a whine almost identical to a donkeyboat’s, It was a disguise for everyone in the Rings except Smithers, and he could expose it if he chose.
Dunne paced up and down the cabin, restlessly. Nike watched him. But suddenly she cocked her ears to the ceiling loudspeaker.
“There’s another whine,” she said. “Or is it the same one?”
Dunne listened. And there were now two faint whines in the Ring. But the loudspeaker also faithfully reported the rustling short waves from the sun and the tiny cracklings of lightning on Thothmes. It had reported birdlike twittering, to be sure, and that was out of all reason. But now there were definitely two donkeyship drives to be heard.