Nike said, “You’re going to show me how to use a bazooka. If you have to fight, I’m going to be fighting right beside you!”
He nodded. He completed the examination of the three semi-planetoids. No matric veins showed. He went on.
He showed Nike how to use a bazooka. He gave her fine points about aiming. He had her put on a space-suit and become accustomed to working the weapons with gauntleted hands. He had no expectation of benefit from her aid, but she wanted to learn.
Then the radar told of something in motion. It was orbital. It was huge. It was invisible.
It went past, in front of the lifeboat. Then there were noises. Rappings. Tappings. Minute things struck the lifeboat’s hull. They made sounds equivalent to a storm of hail on a metal roof. The sound had the quality of abrasive. It became horrible. It became deafening.
It went away again. It was a sand pocket; a group of thousands and ten-thousands of infinitesimal sand grains, racing together in orbit around Thothmes. Such things were known. They were one of the reasons for the ships of Ring-miners to accept orbital velocity as no velocity at all. A donkeyship could safely overtake a sand pocket if it travelled not much faster than the sand pocket itself. It could safely be overtaken by a sand pocket, again if the difference was not too great. But to strike one at genuinely high speed meant the effect of a monstrous sand blast on the hullplates, which might be abraded away to the thickness of tissue, and then give way and let the ship go airless.
They had passed through only the edge of this sand pocket, though. The hull would show streakings where it had been rasped away. But Dunne was enraged with himself for not recognizing the danger earlier.
And just before they reached the inner edge of the outermost Ring, when the sunlit cloud of impalpable dust particles filled all the sky before them—just before they were swallowed by the last Outer Ring of Thothmes, Dunne saw yet another monstrous object floating abstractedly in the thinnest part of the haze.
It was two miles from end to end. It was partly metal and partly stone. It was incredibly confused as to its outer surface. There were spires and peaks and protrusions. There were bulbous excrescences. There were hollows. There was a place where an arch of the tortured substance closed over an opening big enough for a space-liner to go through. There was an enormous cavern that seemed hollowed out to make a den for something unthinkable that lived in empty space.
But it was not of the right mineral formation to offer a prospect of abyssal crystals. Dunne went on past it. And then they were fully in the outermost of the Rings again. So many hundreds of miles away—half the span of a continent. The semi-asteroid Outlook rolled cumbersomely in the haze. Once in so many weeks a pickup ship from Horus came out to it, and all the inhabitants of the Rings gathered to have an hour of luxury and feasting and contact with people other than their donkeyship partners.
As of now, though, Outlook was deserted, and far away the lifeboat ventured through a golden, shining mist whose particles were too small to glitter as even the tiniest of snowflakes will do. There was nothing to be seen from the control room. The drive whined and whined, very much the duplicate of a donkeyship drive. The ceiling loudspeaker gave out only routine noises, none of them indicating the nearness of anything alive. The radar displayed just such blips and larger markings as it should where Dunne believed it to be—some three drive-days to Outlook and several more to the Ring-rock that Dunne and Keyes had worked together. Outlook lay between.
And Dunne had to take Nike to Outlook. It couldn’t be avoided. He viewed the prospect with extreme grimness. Haney wouldn’t be entirely certain of Dunne’s and Nike’s deaths. He’d fired a burst of machine gun fire into the lifeboat. The bubble on the rock must also have been shattered. But when he returned in calm confidence of murder neatly accomplished, he’d found—nothing. There was a donkeyship whine at the limit of detection. He’d followed it. It was Smithers. But he hadn’t found any trace of the lifeboat.
Dunne couldn’t know whether Smithers still lived, but he did know what he must do. He must somehow get to ground on Outlook, and he must get Nike into the pickup ship, and she must be alive when the airlock door closed behind her.
The logical strategy for Haney would be to go early to Outlook but not to go aground; rather, to float in the mist of the Rings until either Dunne arrived in the lifeboat or it was certain that he wouldn’t. If Dunne arrived, or Smithers if he wasn’t dead, Haney would open fire. The death rate of thirty per cent a year was too high. He could give any explanation for murder committed openly, and it was unlikely to be questioned. But if Dunne or even Smithers denounced him… The law couldn’t touch him, but somebody would kill him, thoughtfully, as a reasonable precaution against misbehavior where law did not run.
So Haney wasn’t in an entirely happy situation. But neither was Dunne. Haney’s donkeyship would be faster than the lifeboat, because of the small-sized crystal in Dunne’s drive. Haney had an overwhelming advantage in arms. Neither of them had any reason to be squeamish; in fact, both were under necessity not to be. It was a situation that was going to be deadly for somebody, and quite possibly for everyone concerned. Dunne racked his brains. He made insane, foolish schemes. He couldn’t believe in any of them.
It was two days after recrossing Cassini’s Division when the ceiling loudspeaker reported a donkeyship’s whine, very thin and far away. There were many donkeyships working out of Outlook. This might be any of them. They’d have a hundred thousand cubic miles of Ring space apiece to prospect in, and fifty thousand bits of debris—from sand grains to drifting mountains—to prospect or to mine. The Rings were not exactly overpopulated. Dunne held his course. The’ whining sound of his own ship, as heard inboard, almost drowned out the noises of the speaker. But it wasn’t likely to matter, so long as the other ship went by at a good and generous distance.
It didn’t. The whining from outside grew louder. Dunne listened. He looked at the radar screen. He didn’t like what he saw. He noted that the sound was irregular. It wasn’t right. He listened sharply. There was the whine, but there was something else. The something else became a voice, broadcasting shrilly.
Dunne cut his drive in automatic precaution. If this ship was asking for help, it had to be remembered that men had been known to answer distress calls and never show up at Outlook again.
Time passed. There were always long intervals between happenings in space. Nike went and practiced absorbedly with the bazooka, wearing her space-suit minus its helmet. She showed as much skill as anybody could who’d never actually fired a bazooka at a target.
The voice stopped, and the distant donkeyship drove on steadily, whining in the void. It became distinctly louder. Dunne checked with his radar. Yes. Something showed there, ahead and to the left. It should pass not many miles away. Then the shrill voice uttered words that were now quite distinct.
“Listen here!” cried the voice urgently. “Everybody listen! Haney’s been killin’ people! He killed Dunne an’ the girl that came out on the pickup ship last trip. He tried to kill me. He killed Keyes. Everybody watch out for Haney! He’s been killin’ people to get their crystals! Watch him!”
Then the voice came more loudly and more fearfully: “An’ you Haney! Everybody knows now! I been tellin’ this all over the Rings. If anything happens to me they’ll know you done it an’ what I’ve said is true! You better leave me alone!”
Dunne sat upright from a comfortable listening position. It was Smithers, of course. Somehow he’d evaded Haney’s savage pursuit. But of all insane things to do! He hesitated , a short time, then he flipped on the transmitter and said harshly, “Smithers!”