Miners in the Sky by Murray Leinster Read Free Book Online Page B

call it back. There was no place to which this girl could be taken for safety or simply to keep her from interfering with the troubles and the dangers of normal life in the Rings of Thothmes.
    “I suppose,” said Dunne bitterly, “that you consider you’ve won the argument with me. Maybe you have. You’re going with me to see your brother! I’m taking you along because I can’t do anything else. But you’re going to be sorry!”
    He clenched his fists. He repeated, with emphasis, “You’re going to be damned sorry!”

CHAPTER THREE
    The galaxy went about its business, and Dunne went about his. There are various opinions about what the business of the cosmos may be, but there was no doubt about Dunne’s. At this particular time he needed, first, to stay alive and keep Nike from harm. He hadn’t asked for the latter responsibility, and he resented it. After that, it was necessary to get rid of the donkeyships prepared to follow him anywhere, under the delusion that ultimately he must lead them to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
    There was no doubt about the existence of such followers. They stayed at the extremest range at which they could know when he changed course, and to what. They probably hoped the lifeboat’s communicator system wasn’t as far-reaching or as sensitive as those of donkeyships. And Dunne had a third obligation, to get back to Keyes in his bubble on the big rock fragment before Keyes’ oxygen gave out.
    He was a day and a half from Outlook before he explained the situation in its entirety to Nike. In that time he’d done everything he could to carry out his original plan. He’d exhausted the bag of normal evasive tricks. Now the lifeboat drove—its drive a nagging, humming sound—through the mist which was the Rings. It should have given the impression that he’d given up hope of slipping away from those who followed him and was heading where he had to go. Dunne watched the radar screen of the lifeboat. It had a somewhat longer range than that of a donkeyship, but it didn’t bring in nearly as much information about the objects reported.
    Only a short time after leaving Outlook, though, was needed to sort out trailing donkeyships from merely floating Ring-rocks. The rocks were left behind as the lifeboat drove on. The other space-craft kept pace with it.
    The atmosphere in the lifeboat was peculiar. Dunne was bitterly angry, mostly with himself. If he’d simply said that Keyes was dead, nobody would have raised any question at all. But he’d let other space-miners suspect that he and Keyes had made a very considerable discovery. They immediately interpreted this to mean the Big Rock Candy Mountain. There was some substance to the legends about that fabulous lost mine in the sky. But it didn’t happen to have anything to do with what Dunne and Keyes had found.
    The accompanying donkeyships followed happily. Their occupants told each other about Joe Griffiths. He’d brought to Outlook more crystals than all other space-miners had found in years. He’d gone back and come out again with an additional incredible treasure. He boasted that there was a hundred or a thousand times as much more waiting to be brought in. And then he had vanished on his third trip to what he called a mountain in the sky, the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
    It wasn’t likely that he’d been killed by another miner, because nobody else made any spectacular findings afterward. Some believed he’d fallen a victim to gooks, but there was no very convincing evidence that things like gooks existed. There were occasional noises, picked up here and there, for which there was no explanation; but they didn’t have to have gooks as their cause. They might just possibly be caused by something else.
    Dunne kept the keenest of watches on the radar screen of the lifeboat. He pointed out to Nike that this blip represented a natural Ring-fragment, because it moved at the proper orbital speed for an object this far from Thothmes. On