Instantly there was pandemonium, with men getting into space-suits faster than should have been possible. Dunne heard the grizzled Smithers cursing furiously: “It’s gooks! Them gooks! They come to stop us workin’ in the Rings!”
Dunne paid no attention to him. He was getting into his own suit. He was one of the first ten men to crowd into the big cargo-lock that would let all of them out at once.
The inner lock-door closed. The outer opened, with a vast rushing-away of air. The men in the lock dived out, and the urgency they felt was made clear. Every man used his emergency jet. They are normally reserved for ultimate emergencies when a man’s lifeline parts or something else occurs to make it necessary for him to propel himself in space.
They flew like birds across the spaceport, every man bound for his own ship.
Dunne heard the click of an electric detonator.
He saw his ship fly to bits with a momentary flash of monstrous intensity and violence.
CHAPTER TWO
The rotund little donkeyship split up into fragments, some of which disappeared with the velocity of rifle bullets. Pure emptiness was left where it had been. No debris. No fragments. Nothing. The gravitational pull of Outlook could only draw objects to it with an acceleration of inches per standard year. Any moving object touching Outlook bounced. Every scrap of the shattered ship that hit anything rebounded away, and all the fragments together amounted to no more than new fragments in new orbits in the Rings of Thothmes.
Dunne came to ground where his ship had been. His magnetic boot-soles clung to the metal. He could see where the explosion had taken’ place, because the mirror-bright metal had been slightly oxidized by the flame of the ship’s detonated fuel store.
He ground his teeth. He began to hunt doggedly for some evidence, some clue to who had bombed his ship and why. There was nothing to be found. Naturally!
The delivery of ordered supplies to donkeyship operators continued. At another place, where there was law, there would probably have been an investigation, and the taking of evidence, and maybe a conclusion about the guilt or innocence of someone or other. But here nobody had authority to investigate. Nobody had authority to question witnesses. Certainly nobody had authority to punish.
So everyday business resumed. The cargo-lock of the pickup ship opened, and two men came’ out towing their bundled supplies by a rope. Two men could move tons, here where nothing had any weight. With magnetic boot-soles clanking on the metal substance of Outlook, a donkeyship man hauled his purchases to a waiting ship. His partner would have opened the loading lock-door. The mass of floating stuff went inside. The door closed. The donkeyship went away.
Other business went on, only it wasn’t quite ordinary business. There was the firm, irrational conviction of the miners of the Rings that Dunne and Keyes had found great treasure. The reason for the guess was that Dunne had come to Outlook alone, and had let it be implied that Keyes stayed behind to guard their fabulous discovery. Which was correct, except that their discovery wasn’t fabulous. Rich, perhaps, but by no means unprecedented.
Again and again the pickup ship’s large lock opened, and a man or men brought out oxygen tanks and water-containers and food-stores and mining supplies and the like. They towed them, floating, to their ships. One went inside and a lock-door opened. The supplies went in. The ships went away. This sequence of happenings went on steadily. But the ships didn’t really go away—at any rate, not all of them. Somehow the destruction of Dunne’s donkeyship increased their belief that the Big Rock Candy Mountain had been found. Dunne must make a bargain with somebody to take him back to it. Those he didn’t bargain with would follow and make their own decisions. They lingered, tens or scores of miles from Outlook, hidden in the golden glowing mist. Because Dunne had to do something. He had to deal with someone. The others would combine—perhaps!—against whoever he made a deal with.
He’d already decided on the beginning of a course of action, but he went tramping about the place from which his ship had been blasted as if unable to believe in his disaster.
A donkeyship lifted off and went away into the all-concealing haze. Only one thing about it was certain. It wasn’t going far. And it wasn’t heading in the direction in which it had been searching for—or working—abyssal, crystal-containing matrix. Dunne tramped around the oxidation smear on the bright metal, apparently looking for evidence. Another ship took off. Another.
A voice from the pickup ship’s communicator, booming in the headphones of Dunne’s helmet.
“Calling Dunne! Calling Dunne! Come in, Dunne!”
“What is it?” growled Dunne.
“How’s your oxygen?” asked the ship curtly, “You’ve been out there a long time.”
Dunne checked his oxygen tank. In the vacuum of space a man doesn’t carry a tankful of air to breathe. He carries oxygen. He breathes oxygen at three pounds pressure instead of air at fourteen point seven, and he saves the weight of the useless four-fifths of nitrogen that ordinary air contains.
“I’m all right,” growled Dunne. “I’ll come in presently. I’m thinking, right now.”
The carrier-wave from the ship clicked off. A moment later it hummed again in his headphones. The voice boomed once more.
“Dunne?”
“What?”
“Miss Keyes asks if you’ll pay for a donkeyship team to go and pick up her brother, since you can’t do it with your ship destroyed, and he’ll die if nobody does. Will you pay?”
Dunne could have groaned. Now everybody knew there was a girl on the pickup ship.
“Tell her no,” he snapped. “I’ll take care of the situation!”
A donkeyship released its magnetic grapples and floated away. It put on power and vanished. More objects came out of the pickup ship. Wire-wound oxygen tanks. Foodstuffs. Mining equipment. Fuel. Reaction drills. Bazooka-shells to split a moon fragment with their shaped charges and so allow the inside to be examined.
A figure in a space-suit came out, towing the mass of stuff. The towing figure swaggered a little, even with magnetic soles to induce a plodding gait instead. Dunne noted it. It was Haney. Haney got his supplies to his ship. His partner took charge of stowing them. Haney himself swaggered to Dunne and ostentatiously turned off his space-phone. He grinned at Dunne through the helmet face-plate. He beckoned.
Dunne irritably accepted the signal. Ordinarily, speech in emptiness goes by space-phone, radiating microwaves from a tiny antenna. Such speech can be picked up for miles. Here there was no air to carry sound, but it was still possible to speak direct. As in a liquid ocean, helmets touched together conveyed sounds by solid conduction. The quality of the sound was not remarkable, but at least it would not be overheard.
The helmets clanked into contact.
“A bad business!” said Haney. “Do you know who did it, or why?”
“I can guess why,” said Dunne savagely.
“Somebody,” said Haney’s tinny, unctuous voice through the helmets’ contact, “somebody knows what you’ve found and where it is. Eh?”
Dunne was silent for long seconds. Then he said, “We didn’t find the Mountain.”
“Okay,” said Haney blandly. “Cut us in on what you did find, and we’ll block the scheme the others have made and ferry you to your rock. You and the girl and supplies. We’ll land you. We’ll set up a bubble. Then we’ll stop by and pick you up next pickup-ship time, you and the girl and Keyes.”
“Is this charity?” asked Dunne coldly.
“It’s a gamble,” said Haney. “We get half the crystals you find while we’re gone. Half.”