“I’ve never known them—”
“You’ve met one: Haney. He’s married to one of your second cousins once removed. He came out to the Rings to see what could be done about your brother. Your brother told me who he was. And we’ve been very, very cagey about Haney! So I’ll make a guess that he managed to find out the rock we were working on before the last-but-one pickup ship. I guess that he sent word back to your distant cousins. It would go by mail, and it would be a very innocent message, but it would tell them he was about to kill your brother and for them to attend to you.”
Nike spoke with difficulty.
“But—you’ve known this all along!”
“Would you have trusted me for an instant if I had admitted it? I’d have seemed like any ordinary scoundrel trying to get a rich wife. But for Haney—I didn’t know your brother was dead when I didn’t kill Haney! I didn’t know they’d been trying to kill you, back on Horus! But I did know Haney wasn’t the man to take you away from Outlook!”
He paced back and forth. Then he stopped and listened. The ceiling loudspeaker gave out rustlings and cracklings from the sun and the gas-giant Thothmes. But there was no longer any whine of donkeyship drives. They were too far away, now, to be picked up even by a lifeboat communicator.
“Do you think—”
“How’d I know?” asked Dunne irritably. “Smithers may have dodged to safety somehow, or he may not, I don’t know! It’s even conceivable that he tried to make Haney abandon the chase by telling him where we were—where we are!”
“What are we going to do?”
“Various things that ought to be stupid,” said Dunne. “We understand each other now, I think. It isn’t going to be easy to get out of the fix we’re in. I’ll probably have to do some things you won’t admire. I’m going to ask you to bear with me. We’re in a tight spot. Your brother knew he should kill Haney! Where there’s no law, such things sometimes have to be done! But he wouldn’t be a scoundrel like Haney, and Haney killed him, Now he’ll try to kill you. He has tried!” Then Dunne said coldly, “I’m not going to take on your brother’s handicap!”
Nike said, “You haven’t acted like a scoundrel toward me!”
Dunne shrugged.
CHAPTER SEVEN
All the way back in the First System—where ancient Earth circled the first yellow sun known to men—somebody invented a new device. It crushed deep minerals and separated abyssal crystals from the slurry. Diamonds were hard, but abyssal’ crystals cut them like butter; so grinding gears could be used that would destroy any other material whatsoever by turning it to mud, and the mud then filtered for crystals. It was an admirable device, but it didn’t fit on a donkeyship. It was too bulky. It wasn’t practical to take Ring minerals to it. Transportation cost too much. So it looked like the invention was futile.
On the planet the mills of the law also ground. They ground very slowly, but well. Sedate justices wore costumes dating far back, before the time of space-travel. They sat in solemn, formal ceremony. They heard the sworn testimony of men they had appointed to find out certain facts. They debated, using technical terms that had meaning only inside a courtroom. They made a formal decision which was phrased in a manner only intelligible to lawyers. But the decision became a final action on a financially important case.
It assigned divers sums and properties to Nike and her brother with the proviso that if during the consideration of the case one of them had died, the other was to receive the whole. If both had died, their heirs were to inherit. If they had no descendants then their collateral kindred should inherit in the same manner and degree as if there had been no such persons as Nike and her brother.
It was noted that one of the justices concurring in the decision remarked, while removing his judicial robe, that the decision practically offered a reward for murder, since neither Nike nor her brother were in court when the decision was reached. But there was a marked difference. It was that if anybody killed either of them on Horus, the law would hang that person if it caught him. On the Rings it wouldn’t because there was no law. The difference between Horus and the Rings of Thothmes was essentially that on Horus there was some danger attached to killings, while in the Rings the danger was that one might be killed. The distinction though, was one of theory only.
Dunne let the lifeboat drift across Cassini’s Division between the outermost and next inward of the Rings of Thothmes. The supply of oxygen remained adequate. Stored as water instead of gas under pressure, a lifeboat carried oxygen for all the passengers it was designed to carry—many more than Nike and Dunne. There was food for as many people. But there was nothing to do. Clocks told the time and mechanically separated one day from another, and each night from each day. There was no external distinction, but it is necessary for humans to comply with arbitrary intervals of activity and repose. People everywhere in the galaxy find it necessary to live by twenty-four-hour cycles because they are built that way.
Two such cycles passed before Dunne prepared to turn on the drive again, and the radar. The speaker in the ceiling had been left turned on throughout. It had reported nothing but outside radiation, whisperings from the sun, and cracklings from Thothmes. Once, during the second day, there’d been a distant “tweet… tweet… tweet…” But that was all. Dunne didn’t change the schedule he’d determined on. Some two hours or so later he turned on the drive and the entire atmosphere in the lifeboat seemed to change.
There was still nothing to be seen in the viewports, because they were deep in the second Ring, and that was as dense as the outermost. But the radar showed objects in the mist of this ring as in the other. The drive whined and whined exactly like a donkeyship. The quality of the sound, of course, was decided by the size of the crystal used in the drive. Dunne felt himself feeling more like a man and less like a fugitive. The idea of hiding from Haney’s machine gun and hence from Haney was excessively irritating. But with the boat’s drive in action he felt that he was engaged in outwitting Haney rather than in hiding from him.
The new sound of the drive, though, had one consequence he didn’t like. It no longer sounded like a lifeboat; but there was only the power of a donkeyship available, and the lifeboat was larger. So the acceleration of the lifeboat was diminished. In a straightaway chase, Haney could overtake it. And if he did overtake the spaceboat, he had a machine gun and bazooka-shells against the lifeboat’s bazooka alone. So a fight with Haney was to be avoided, if only for Nike’s sake.
She joined him as he made calculations from what the radar told him.
“Queer!” he told her. “We’re near enough to Thothmes to have just the orbital velocity of the rocks around us. I’ve done a lot of worrying about collisions that wasn’t necessary!”
He had. Even with only one sizable Ring-fragment in two cubic miles, there was always some chance of smashing into , solidity in Thothmes’ Rings. At any fraction of any second they could have hit an object from the size of a teaspoon to that of a mountain tumbling through the sky. But with the same speed and course, such a thing was unthinkable.
“I suspect,” said Nike, “that you’ve been keeping other worries to yourself, too.”
“Only one,” he told her.
“What’s that?”
He didn’t answer. She frowned a little, watching his expression. She looked at him often, nowadays. She was learning the meaning of his every look and gesture.
“Go on!”
“We have to get to the pickup ship if you’re to get back to Horus.”
“Where,” said Nike, “I’ll be in the same danger I ran away from Horus and to the Rings to escape.”