Miners in the Sky by Murray Leinster Page B

Nike. He held up the severed mooring line for her to see. He’d freed the lifeboat. With an infinite deliberation it began to move outward and away from the rock. It had partaken of that dark object’s rotating motion, and even one revolution in ten minutes was enough to separate the rock and the spaceboat.
    “He’s cast us off,” said Nike. “Now he’s going to his own boat. He moves fast.”
    “Get your helmet on!” commanded Dunne. “Tighten it! Breathe from your tanks!”
    Smithers’ voice came out of the control-room loudspeaker. He talked into his suit-phone and the communicator picked it up.
    “Gooks!” he cried shrilly. “Look out, fellas! There’s gooks here! They got me! Git away an’ bring help! There’s four ships full’a gooks here! They’re layin’ for you.”
    Dunne said coldly, “That’s not for us, but for what the radar says is coming. Smithers has gone chivalrous and swapped sides. He’s on our side now—for what good that may be! Get on your helmet and close the faceplate. If we get hit, the air will go. I showed you how to run the ship! I’ll shoot from the lock-door. You take the controls. I’ll tell you what to do!”
    He went into the airlock. In instants he had the outer door open. He had a lifeline clipped to an eyebolt. He had his bazooka—tied by a cord to his belt—ready for instant use.
    The spaceboat was then perhaps a yard from the giant rock that had his and Keyes’ initials on it. That was a claim of ownership to which nobody paid any attention if they could avoid it. He saw Smithers. That small person flung his ropeloops ahead of him and pulled on them with extraordinary speed and skill. He reached the mooring line of his battered donkeyship. He jerked at it and the rope was released. Then, clinging to it and climbing it hand-over-hand in monkeylike fashion, he swarmed out on it toward his donkeyship, The line did not sag, because there was no weight; but it twisted and writhed as he climbed.
    Dunne strained his ears. He heard no sound of any space-drive in his phones. But the radar had been explicit. Something sped toward this rock from many miles away, from invisibility behind the floating, sunlit, ever-present dust-fog of the Rings.
    Smithers reached his own airlock. He swung inside and the outer door closed, but not quite. He opened it again and snatched in the rope. He vanished, and the door closed again, this time firmly.
    Then his voice came almost instantly on the donkeyship’s transmitter instead of his helmet-phone.
    “You, Haney!” he cried shrilly, “you sheer off! You keep away from here! No tricks! There’s a lady here! Keep away!”
    Yet nothing seemed to be happening. There was a moving blip on the radar screen in the lifeboat. Dunne stood in the airlock door with a bazooka ready to be raised and fired. Nike, frightened, nevertheless went to the lifeboat’s control board to try to make use of the lessons Dunne had given her in the handling of a ship. The lifeboat floated with tremendous, dignified deliberation away from the Ring-rock, which moved very slowly around some axis it had discovered within itself. Smithers’ donkeyship hung suspended in emptiness, now that its mooring line had been drawn inside. And nothing happened. The stony mass hid a part of the glowing mist which seemed elsewhere to fill all the universe there was.
    When the action came, it was too swift to follow. At one instant there were only the three objects floating in nothingness: spaceboat, donkeyship, and huge mass of brown stone crystals with a slash of gray mixture on one side. Dunne raised his bazooka, waiting grimly for a target.
    There was a great flash of bright metal. A shape moving too fast and too near to be clearly seen, rushed past the edge of the floating rock. Flashings of light seemed to make a line along its length. Sparks flew. Some of them bounced from the mass of stone. Some seemed to sink into the lifeboat. There was a sort of gridiron of parallel