“Who’s that?” By the sound, Smithers had gone into an ecstasy of terror. “Who—who’s that?”
“Smithers!” said Dunne again, with impatience and anger, “Shut up!”
He cut off the transmitter. He swore under his breath.
Nike came to the control-room door. She didn’t ask questions. She waited to be told what had happened. He told her, infinitely angry with Smithers for being such a fool, and almost as angry with himself for trying to stop him.
“If it hasn’t already happened, Haney will hear him!” fumed Dunne. “He’s inviting his own massacre! And nobody’ll believe him! He’s been such a fool about gooks that nobody’ll take him seriously! Not even if he’s killed!”
“Are you going to back him up?” asked Nike uneasily.
Dunne turned on her.
“I’ve got troubles enough!” he snapped. “I wouldn’t risk your little finger for a thousand like him!”
Nike nodded. She smiled very faintly.
“That’s being the scoundrel you said you’d be.”
Smithers’ voice again, despairing and desperate: “Dunne! Dunne! Is that you? Help me, Dunne! Haney almost got me. He’s still huntin’ me! An’ you too, Dunne! Let’s get together! We c’n fight him better! We got to protect that young lady!”
Dunne raged, “The fool! The idiot! The—”
He swung the lifeboat about. He cut in the drive. The boat surged ahead Dunne savagely regarded the radar screen. The blips on it began to creep in a new direction, compounded of the course on which the lifeboat had been traveling and the new direction of drive he’d just begun.
Nike was silent as he swung the lifeboat again and again. Course corrections have to be exaggerated, in emptiness. To turn at a right angle is practically impossible, and to get the effect of one requires a change of course of a hundred thirty-seven degrees to start with, to be reduced to ninety only bit by bit and after one’s original motion has been canceled out. But Dunne was attempting it. There was a floating object he could use as an aiming point. Such a point was necessary for maximum change-of-direction in the absolute absence of compass points or trustworthy indicators of speed. Dunne did have troubles enough without Smithers to complicate them. He headed as directly away from Smithers as he could.
The ceiling speaker continued to report the drive-whine of Smithers’ donkey-ship. He continued to call plaintively, with an increasing content of desperation. He wanted Dunne to answer him. To help him would mean exposing Nike to danger for Smithers’ sake. Dunne wouldn’t do it. He simply wouldn’t do it!
He gained speed away from the spot where Smithers called plaintively for him by name, and again and again mentioned the fact that there was a young lady in the ship whose help he implored.
Fury filled Dunne. If Smithers wanted to broadcast his position to all the Rings, having somehow escaped Haney’s pursuit a few days back, that was his business! But the fool was telling Haney—directly or otherwise—that Nike was still alive and with Dunne. And then—Dunne fairly foamed at the mouth with rage when Smithers was suddenly stricken with a new terror.
“You Dunne!” he wailed. “Are you Dunne? Your ship don’t sound like it did! It sounds like a donkeyship now! But you got a lifeboat! Dunne, answer me! Are you Dunne or are you Haney?”
The blips at the bow end of the radar screen grew larger. They united into a single irregular marking on the radar screen. That became huge. A shadow appeared against the mist. It was gigantic. The boat was headed for collision, and Dunne had to reverse his drive to dodge it. Then he heard Smithers fairly screaming. “You! You comin’ up behind me! Who’re you? Who’re you? Keep away from me! Keep away!”
Dunne had the tasks of a considerable ship’s crew thrust upon him at once. He could see the blip that was undoubtedly Haney’s donkey-ship. Another mark on the screen moved toward it—and it was not Dunne, It should have taken all of one man’s attention to keep that under observation. The blip that was Smithers darted from its former position. The other blip, drawing near to it, changed its course for interception.
“Dunne! Dunne!” wailed Smithers. “If this is kiddin’ me, quit it! Keep away from me!”
Another man or two should have watched the slow rotation of the monstrous object in the mist ahead. Still another could have been kept busy managing the lifeboat in its nearing of the fifteen-hundred-foot mass of minerals and metal. There was a columnar protrusion of metal which was as bright as polished platinum. There was a deep hollow, a Cave. There was a band of stone as black as jet.
Dunne grimaced unconsciously as he flung the lifeboat about in fashions not intended by her builders. He got the boat stopped in relation to the giant mass of mineralization. He reversed drive with the stem no more than feet from the precipitous rocky side of the monster. The boat backed toward the cave mouth. There was a heart-stopping clang of battering metal. Metallic shrieks and scrapings. An eerie shriek of tortured stone…
The lifeboat stopped with a jerk, which was hair-raising. Then it tried to turn and jammed itself in some fashion, and abruptly there was a feeling of solidity.
Dunne said from between set teeth, “Every other really big rock I’ve ever seen, except Outlook, has hollows in it that could be caves. When I saw how big this was I took a chance. It’s better than I expected. We’re sheltered here. Maybe we won’t be found. But even against a machine gun, I’d say our chances are not quite as bad as they were before.”
“We’re hiding from Haney?”
“That’s the question. Are we hidden?”
He didn’t look out the viewports. He stared at the radar screen. It had a very peculiar appearance. It was black all over, except for a fan-shaped search beam which went out of the cave entrance.
Nike listened. The ceiling speaker was nearly silent. Then there came cracklings, as from some storm of inconceivable violence on Thothmes, the cracklings died away. There came the rustling sounds originating on the sun; they in their turn were gone. A donkeyship’s whine with a babbling incoherency coming from it; it died out. A steady, savage drive-noise. Silence again.
The fifteen-hundred-foot half-mountain turned on its axis. Radio waves could enter the cavern into which Dunne had backed his lifeboat. But they could only enter from one direction at a time.
“We’re shielded by the rock,” said Dunne. “We can only receive from one direction. And it changes.”
The drive-whine of Smithers’s ship. He panted, “If that’s you, Dunne, say so! Tell me! If it ain’t—”
The steady, buzzing whine of a donkeyship with no voice accompanying it. The sound of crackling lightning bolts, then the rustling of the sun’s photosphere.
Something fled across the Ring-mist which could be seen from the ports of the lifeboat. Smithers’ voice came from it, squealing. It was his fate or destiny always to involve Dunne in events Dunne wished urgently to avoid. He’d done enough harm before, through panic; but now, without knowing it, he’d chosen a course that could not but bring his silent pursuer past the open-mouthed cavern, into which Dunne had moved for Nike’s safety.
The slow rotation of the rocky mass cut off Smithers’ voice. The sound of another donkeyship replaced it.
“Maybe,” said Dunne deliberately, “maybe we can turn this cave into a break. I’m going out to the mouth of it. It looks like Smithers is just running round and round this rock, with Haney after him. I may be able to interfere.”
“I go too!” said Nike, fiercely. “If you get killed, I will be too!”
It was true. Haney’s primary purpose was to kill Nike, to change the situation in a long-continued lawsuit back on Horus, of which, in turn, the object was to distribute certain treasure from the Big Rock Candy Mountain.