Miners in the Sky by Murray Leinster Page A

out. The two of them—with great courage on the part of Nike—conducted a funeral. Dunne packed rock fragments to seal the cover he put in place.
    It was an extraordinary action in an extraordinary place. The two space-suited figures performed a ceremony of sorts in what to uninformed eyes would have seemed dumb-show. Dunne did not look like a man. He looked like a machine of metal which for technical reasons only was designed to resemble a man. He seemed, indeed, a strange type of robot, contemplating something incredible when the funeral was finished.
    He made a gesture of which he seemed to be unconscious. Then, slowly, he helped Nike back to the spaceboat, arranging her lifeline with his so that their progress was not too grotesque.
    When she was inside, he cast off the lifeboat’s mooring line. He hauled it in. He closed the outer airlock door. He opened the inner one. He went directly to the control room. The lifeboat’s drive began its droning hum. Nike came, speaking through the door behind him.
    “Is there anything—”
    He shook his head. He kept his eyes on the radar screen. He chose the nearest of the six solid objects the screen portrayed. He lined up the lifeboat’s course toward it. Presently he cut off the drive.
    “I’m coasting,” he explained. “It cuts the drive-time at each end of the run.”
    “Have you—decided what to do?”
    He nodded, watching the radar screen.
    “What is it?”
    “It will develop,” he said grimly. “Just remember that we’re all scoundrels, out here in the Rings.”
    He continued to watch the radar. One of the blips grew visibly nearer and more distinct. The rock they’d left behind became smaller. The other formerly stationary blips moved slowly with regard to the center of the screen, which represented the position of the lifeboat.
    There was over twenty miles of sunlit fog between the two floating rocks. It was not possible to see anything at a distance of much more than a mile. So the lifeboat floated through a haze in which there was nothing to be seen at all; and with the drive off there were no sounds except the whispering, rustling noises made by short waves from the photosphere of the sun, and those tiny cracklings from storms on Thothmes.
    Such tranquility and peacefulness, though, was not universal. There was a pickup ship on the way to Horus, whose skipper had worried for several days without finding a solution to his problem. He had to report letting Dunne have a lifeboat. He fretted about that. It was paid for, to be sure, but the Abyssal Minerals Commission might take a dim view of it regardless.
    But he’d something much worse to disturb him. It was now appallingly clear that Nike was no longer on the pickup ship. It seemed most likely that she’d either stowed away or been kidnapped in the lifeboat. The skipper of the pickup ship was very much disturbed indeed.
    In a certain place on Horus, even greater agitation grew. There were people trying to act secretly, on Horus, as men were openly permitted to act in the Rings—as if there were no law. But they found themselves running into trouble. Their problem had to do with a girl, Nike Keyes, who because of their attempted disregard of laws had taken fright and gone to the Rings to join her brother. And this was very bad business—unless something lethal happened quickly.
    So in one place on the planet Horus, and one where the pickup ship drove through the void, and in one place in the Rings—no, two or ten or twenty places in the Rings—men talked disturbedly about Nike or about where Dunne might be. They didn’t all know they were talking about Nike, and some didn’t know that Dunne was involved; but they all knew some irritation and disturbance and uneasiness. But Nike occupied the back cabin of a lifeboat, and regarded Dunne with frightened eyes on the way to a second Ring-rock, where it developed that Dunne meant to moor the lifeboat and wait for the radar to tell him of another visitor