“I’ll go with you this time,” he told her.
“Then you’ll take care of it,” said Nike. “You’ve taken care of everything else.”
“Not too well, and this is different,” he told her with some grimness. “If Haney knows exactly where we’re going to be, he can go there and wait for us.”
She considered. “Well?”
Dunne spread out his hands.
“He knows when the pickup ship will be coming and when it will leave. He knows we’ve got to be there before it goes away again. If he gets there first, he can use bazooka-shells and his machine gun on us when we turn up. And since there’s no law in the Rings, it won’t be anybody’s business either to stop him or pay him off for it.”
Nike said confidently, “I think you’ll manage!”
“How?”
“To use one of your favourite expressions,” Nike told him, “I don’t know. But I think you’ll do all right.” Then she pointed to the radar screen. “What’s that?”
There was a peculiarly involuted blip off to the left. For its distance from the center of the screen, it looked remarkably large. Dunne swung the lifeboat.
“We’ve time to look at it,” he said in a dry voice. “I wouldn’t mind an extra crystal or two. It would be convenient to find the Big Rock Candy Mountain, just now.”
She frowned.
The curving nature of the radar indication became more marked as the blip moved nearer and nearer to the middle of the screen, and therefore to. the position of the lifeboat.
“It’s very big,” said Nike.
He nodded. He cut the drive. The lifeboat floated on. It seemed very quiet, until the air-freshener cut in and began to whirr. A shadow appeared in the haze ahead. It deepened. It expanded. It filled nearly half the cosmos. Then they saw what was behind the mist. It was a Ring-fragment, but like no other Dunne had ever seen. It was more than a mile in extent. Great globular masses protruded from a central core. There were sharp projections scores of yards in length. There were depressions which amounted to the mouths of caves. There was a place where things like ropes stood out stiffly, and diminished to cords, to threads, and the threads to hair-like fibers of stone. It looked as if something molten and adhesive had been torn away and left these threads behind as it wrenched free from the greater mass.
They regarded it in silence.
Then Nike said, “There are caves!”
“Yes…”
Then Dunne said, “It was a volcano, or part of one. When the moon it was part of broke up, it broke up too. The gas that was dissolved in the melted rock expanded. It’s not unlike pumice.” Then he added, “It’s not the Big Rock Candy Mountain!”
He swung the lifeboat away. He set a course with some care.
“You take a watch now,” he said briefly. “All you have to do is dodge anything as big as that rock. And keep heading this way. We ought to be far enough from Haney, now, not to worry about him. But if you see anything moving, especially toward us—”
Nike said suddenly, “Will you teach me how to use a bazooka? If we need to fight Haney, I could fight with you! I won’t be afraid!”
He put his hand warmly and approvingly on her shoulder. Then he took it quickly away.
“Right,” he said gruffly. “Good idea! I’ll teach you after this watch.”
He went back to the main cabin. He settled himself to rest. He seemed to have some trouble getting to sleep.
Nike, in the control room, stood quite still with a queer expression on her face. She put her own hand where Dunne’s had rested on her shoulder. She didn’t look uneasy. In fact, she looked oddly pleased.
A long time later she looked out into the main cabin. Dunne was asleep. Nike smiled warmly to herself. But then she turned back to the radar screen. She watched it faithfully.
The Rings of Thothmes floated in space. They were nearly two hundred thousand miles in diameter, but no more than four hundred miles thick. There were markings on the planet around which they floated, markings that could be seen even by the telescopes’ on Horus. Their positions changed. They were not solid objects. They were storm systems. The planet revolved swiftly on its axis, so swiftly that it was not really a ball; it was noticeably flattened at its poles. The diameter across its equator was a fifth greater than its diameter from pole to pole. Nobody knew the size of its actual solid mass, of course. There were many who denied that there was solidity at all. Taking its cloud surface as its size, the density of Thothmes was less than that of water. But some insisted that deep down there were rocks and metals and possibly even rills. Perhaps a planet the size of Horus was enclosed in a gas ball thousands of miles deep. Almost anything could exist under such a cloud cover which occasionally changed its appearance but never broke to show what was beneath it. But if such a cloud cover swirled to make markings that sometimes lasted for weeks, there must be storms of unimaginable violence below. And those who insisted that there was nothing solid there, unless gas-ice or the like, found themselves agreeing on one point only with those who imagined a miniature world that never saw the sun. The agreement was that there couldn’t be any gooks. From one standpoint, the elements necessary for life couldn’t exist on Thothmes. From the other, nothing could live in such weather.
On the planet Horus there was a mild flurry of publicity about Nike and her brother. The planet’s highest court had ruled that the money held for Joe Griffiths—who had found the Big Rock Candy Mountain—should be turned over to the two of them as his heirs. Both of them were in the Rings at the time. There were news specials about them, but most of the interest was in the fact that there was a Big Rock Candy Mountain, and that an enormous fortune had been taken from it by one Joe Griffiths, who thereupon vanished from the sight of men. One of the newscasters pointed out that the costs of all the legal inquiries had been paid from the fortune itself. It was no longer fabulous. The lawyers involved had received more money from it than would now be left for the brother and sister. They’d get only the remnant. But still it was a matter of some interest. A pickup ship on the way to the Rings picked up the news item.
And somewhere in the Rings there was a donkeyship in which agitation was continuous. This donkeyship contained Smithers. He was terrified. He’d believed in gooks. He’d had to believe in them because he couldn’t believe in anything else that would account for the death of his partner, years ago. But now he’d come to realize that gooks weren’t absolutely necessary to explain it. He himself had very narrowly escaped being killed by Haney these past few days.
Smithers was desperate. There was no law. There was nobody to whom he could appeal for justice. He debated anxiously with himself. He argued vociferously with nobody but himself to listen. In the end he came distractedly to the conclusion that he must arouse public opinion in the Rings. If enough Ring-miners knew of Haney’s murders, Haney would have to stop.
So Smithers set out fearfully to rouse public opinion.
Presently Dunne and Nike, on their way to a necessary but highly perilous rendezvous with the next pickup ship, presently came to the Cassini Division again. Dunne cut off all apparatus and listened exhaustively before he ventured out. Then, a quarter of the way across stars blinked at him. They were occulted by something gigantic, of which his radar gave cryptic information.
He approached the giant objects. They were three two-thousand-foot masses of stone in a singular close-placed arrangement. Minute as their gravity fields would be, they should have drawn together. But they obviously hadn’t. They must revolve very slowly about each other.
Dunne stopped and examined them through the viewports. Nike looked curiously at him.
“I could use a crystal or two,” he told her wryly. “If I had anything big enough we’d sound like a pickup ship. Or if smaller, I could still burn it up for speed if I had to. But we’ve only one crystal big enough to drive with.”