And the cave had two occupants. There was a spacesuit standing upright. In it there was what had been a man. He stood, because there was no gravity to make him fall. Lying on dried-out-brittle cloth, there was another spectator; he had been murdered many years ago. Neither of these spectators were alarming. They were pathetic. Dunne turned Nike so she did not have to look.
“That’ll be Joe Griffiths,” he said wryly, “and a certain member of a donkeyship team who probably managed to trail him there. That somebody killed Griffiths, and then somebody killed somebody else, which left only one of them to own the Mountain.* But why he never showed up with a donkeyship load of crystals, I’ll never know!”
Nike stirred. She faced the peculiar, useless airlock through which they’d come. Dunne felt her startled movement. She reached up and turned off her helmet-light. Then his.
Some light appeared where the lifeboat so nearly blocked the entrance to the cave. The light changed. There was nothing outside to change it. It changed again. Something was moving at the mouth of the cave. It could only be human movement.
Dunne drew a deep breath. In the blackness of the cavern, now, he plucked Nike off her feet. He launched himself and her for the back of this peculiar rocky hollow. They floated, until his outstretched hand stopped them just before they collided with the stone wall.
Now his eyes and Nike’s were beginning to adjust to the darkness. Some light did filter in, past the lifeboat and beyond where the now useless airlock stood. Dunne and Nike had been long enough in this darkness to be able to see a little of what occurred. They could see vaguely what their helmet-lights had shown clearly.
He and Nike made noises, but only inside their spacesuits. They were breath-stoppingly loud. A metallic clanking seemed qualified to wake the two motionless figures who had been in this ultimate of treasure chests for years. But there was no air to carry sound. No noise came from outside.
Helmet-lights came into the outer part of the cave. Somebody had seen the painted “JG-27” and realized that they’d found the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The helmet-lights were round disks of brightness, slipping frictionlessly over every object they illuminated. The wall-less living room appeared—a plank floor with gimcrack furniture fastened to it. Then the helmet-lights moved, and steadied, and moved again, to limn out the incredible area of gray matrix and occasional dull gleams of imbedded crystals.
Haney and his companion—only Haney left his donkeyship for the pickup ship on Outlook—Haney and his companion went mad with delight and triumph. There could be no value set on the riches in plain view. It would have been ridiculous to speak of the money value in terms of millions. A larger order of magnitude would be necessary. Here were as many abyssal crystals in one place as all the Rings of all the ringed planets had yielded up to date. And the market would not be glutted. It couldn’t be. There could never be too many abyssal crystals.
In the darkness Dunne pulled Nike down to shelter behind a mass of rock. He stood up. Helmet-lights crossed and crisscrossed. The emotions of the men who’d found the greatest treasure known in the galaxy found expression. He heard inarticulate noises. He heard gaspings. He heard cursings. He heard the most horrible of blasphemy and obscenity.
And Dunne found himself raging because if Nike turned on her space-phone she would hear them.
He turned on this space-phone and shouted, and his own voice was deafening in the resounding space-helmet. It would be no less numbing in theirs.
“Quiet!” he snapped. Instantly, disks of light went crazily about the cavern, hunting for him. “I doubt you’ll have it any other way,” said Dunne grimly, “So—”
A light fell on him and a bazooka flashed. But when there is no weight, one must be braced in order to aim a bazooka. The rocket-shell went sliding crazily to a wall of black stone. It burned out in glaring blue-white flame. He felt Nike moving beside him. He raised his own weapon and fired. More glaring blue-white radiance. From the blackness of the tomb—which it was—the cave in the Big Rock Candy Mountain became lighted as brightly as if from a nearby sun.
Dunne fired again, and the little rocket-shell hit Haney’s follower in the chest. It went through his space-suit… his body and flamed for seconds thereafter.
He could see that Nike was struggling to rise and fight beside him. He suddenly realized that they were not dead. There’d been a standing figure in a space-suit in the cave when he entered it. Now two helmet-lamps played on it and bazooka-shells hit it. But the figure beside Dunne fired. It was Nike. Dunne fired simultaneously. And then Haney realized from where Dunne had been shooting. He aimed crazily and pulled the trigger. The hurtling tiny rocket-shell missed Dunne by yards. It went over his head. It struck gray matrix-stuff in the wall. A portable bazooka and shell, like this, would burn through three inches of solid steel. This one flared an abyssal crystal.
And there was light.
. The brightness of that light ended everything. It was in the cave wall behind and above Nike and Dunne. It was the most terrible light in the universe. A thousand thousand strobe lights fired together might provide a comparison.
But there could be no equivalent. The light of the one abyssal crystal turning all its stored energy to blue-white glare was the most violent, the most searing, the most blinding light in the universe. Dunne and Nike were made sightless for minutes.
But Haney who’d fired the bazooka-shell, did not see its reflections. He looked, as he fired, where the shell should strike. And he saw the light direct. He was looking when it appeared.
Dunne heard him scream, but Dunne was blinded too for the time being. Nike had no sensation of anything but an intolerable brilliance. It was minutes before either Dunne or Nike could see anything. Then the bright disks of their helmet-lights revealed Haney. He seemed to be trying to see. But he couldn’t.
When Dunne and Nike could see again quite clearly Haney was still unable to tell light from dark. He’d looked at the light from a crystal breaking down.
He would never see anything else again.
There were several donkeyships on the spaceport of Outlook when Dunne brought the donkeyship to a landing. Everybody was in the pickup ship, feasting on its foods and drinking its drinks; they didn’t notice when Dunne arrived, and therefore there was no excitement.
Dunne made his way into the ship by the personnel-lock. Presently he was in the skipper’s cabin.
“I’ve got a passenger for you,” he said curtly. “Man named Haney. And I want to send some crystals to Horus.”
He dumped a quantity on the skipper’s desk. It was not all that he and Nike had, of course. It wasn’t a tenth, or a hundredth. But the skipper’s mouth dropped open.
“I’ve found the Big Rock Candy Mountain,” explained Dunne as curtly as before. “Naturally, I don’t want to stay out here in the Rings. I’d be followed everywhere, and ultimately killed, so I’m going to drive my donkeyship to Horus. I want extra oxygen and food and such items. I think it would be wise for you to give me my stores quickly and let me get away before they—” he nodded in the direction of festivity—“hear about it and get too hard to handle.”