Miners in the Sky by Murray Leinster Page B

to the rock in which Keyes was now buried.
    The discovery of her brother’s death was a shock. When she was on the way to join him, she’d been absorbed in a situation which was desperate, but which she felt he would take care of. But now he was dead. There was nobody, anywhere, in whom she had reason to put trust. She and her brother were orphans. Keyes was the older, and he’d tried to take care of her in a world where the young and inexperienced were considered fair prey for sharpers. What inheritance they’d had, they’d been tricked or cheated out of. And Dunne had taken the last of their inheritance to put with his own money for the donkeyship now floating in small shattered pieces in the Rings. Her trip had been a chancey thing. But now she believed that. Dunne had practiced good faith toward her brother and herself. Too, she’d thrust herself into his current affairs. It wasn’t his fault or with his consent that she was here, and in this situation. Stowing away on the lifeboat had been her own idea. So she felt a complex mixture of distress and grief and terror and a horrifying isolation. Even from Dunne.
    It is the instinct of a man in difficulties to try to plan his way out of them. It is the instinct of a woman in difficulties to try to get somebody to help her out. Some men automatically look for help, and some women face their problems alone. But the instinct remains. And Nike had absolutely no one in any solar system in the galaxy to whom she felt that she could apply even for counsel.
    Unless it was Dunne. She’d added herself to his worries without his consent, and he’d told her angrily that she’d be sorry. She was. Even in a situation of no stress at all she’d have known the acute loneliness of a woman who no longer has any ties to anybody else. In the present state of things, she might justly have reacted with hysterics.
    But she didn’t. She kept out of Dunne’s way as much as was possible in a space lifeboat. She closeted herself in the rear cabin, and appeared only when called on. She spoke as little as possible, and only when Dunne spoke first. She believed she was acting to be a minimum of trouble and of irritation to him.
    She wasn’t. For a time he took her reserve to be grief about her brother. And in no small part it was. But presently he came to the dour conclusion that she was afraid of him—because of his angry reception when she came out of hiding as a stowaway. When two people are isolated from all the rest of the human race, there is bound to be friction unless they are very wise. But Nike wasn’t wise. Her upbringing and the present situation made her the least-prepared of all possible persons to establish new ties and acquire self-confidence.
    Time passed. Days. More days. Dunne stayed grimly close to the radar. He was waiting for somebody to come to make sure that their boobytrap had worked. The lifeboat was moored to a fragment of stratified surface-rock from a nameless and anciently destroyed moon of Thothmes.
    Dunne considered it necessary to stay there. Nike didn’t know why. There was nothing to do but watch a radar screen when he had to be absent from it, and listen to a communicator-speaker which gave out no sounds but rustlings from the sun and cracklings from Thothmes.
    It would have been bad enough if it had been only isolation. With a basic misunderstanding between them, it was intolerable.
    But Dunne stood it for a full eight standard days. Then, without consultation with Nike, he cast off from the lump of surface-rock. The lifeboat’s drive hummed.
    Nike appeared. She didn’t look well. She looked as if she kept herself from trembling by a violent effort.
    “Is there anything I can do?”
    Dunne nodded without cordiality.
    “I thought somebody would have come before now to find out if their boobytrap did its work.”
    She looked at him in silence.
    “You’re going back to Horus when the pickup ship comes,” he explained. “You’ll want money when