Miners in the Sky Read Free

abruptly. Dunne felt the desperate impatience everybody knew at moments like this. He wanted to fling his ship into top-speed, crazy rush to get to Outlook first. But he held himself in check. He heard the pickup ship’s drive stop, and reverse, and he knew that the large space-vessel was matching velocity and approaching the slowly rolling mountain with care through the haze of moondust floating in space. He drove on and on, and a confused notification appeared on his radar screen. There was something very large ahead. It was too far away to be identified, but he knew what it had to be. Outlook. He heard the pickup ship’s drive go on for half-seconds, and other half-seconds, and he knew that it was maneuvering to match velocity and rate-of-turn with the mountainous mass of nickel-steel.
    There was an abrupt spurt of full-power drive, and then everything stopped. The communicator brought in fresh excited babblings of the men who’d come here to meet this ship. The pickup ship was aground.
    Hilarious questions assailed the pickup ship. How was the weather on Horus? How did the Panthers make out in the planetary series? Did the pickup ship have any cold beer? Men shouted orders for civilized meals that they wanted to describe item by item; it could be guessed that in their past isolation they’d dreamed of special dishes unavailable in the Rings, and by the time the ship arrived they were waiting as hungrily for some special foodstuff as for the oxygen and other needs the pickup ship came to Outlook to satisfy.
    Dunne came in, checking Velocity with fierce, full-power reversals of his ship’s drive. He hovered over the clustered donkeyships, arranged in an. incomplete circle on the nearly level space which was the spaceport of Outlook. He was sighted. Ribald greetings came to him from the childishly excited space-miners of the Rings. Who was he? Why was he late? Had he seen any gooks? He was too late. All the food supplies on the pickup ship were already spoken for. What was the news from the Big Rock Candy Mountain? References to that fabled Golconda were jokes, of course, but not altogether jokes. There was actually something, somewhere in the Rings, which had been christened the Big Rock Candy Mountain because it held the answer to every man’s dream of riches and magnificence. Dunne knew a little more about it than most, because his partner Keyes was the nephew of that Joe Griffiths who’d found it, and brought out untold wealth, and who’d gone back to get still more, and was never heard of again. Keyes didn’t want the relationship known because there’d be suspicion that he had. special useful information about the Mountain and was in the Rings to make use of it.
    But the Big Rock Candy Mountain was part of the ritual on Outlook. There were men who believed in it implicitly, and accepted every mouth-watering detail of the tradition. Some believed in it with reservations. But nobody wholly disbelieved, because there was fact behind the legend. There was no miner in the Rings who didn’t dream of finding riches incalculable in some Ring-fragment he was sure to come upon eventually—perhaps before the pickup ship came again.
    Dunne curtly gave his name and settled down on a place just beyond the donkeyships around the spaceport’s edge. It wasn’t one of the better landing places. He could see all that went on in the spaceport, but nearby there were crazy upcroppings of the kind usually called metal trees. They weren’t trees, but they were metal; and because of them, a man in a space-suit could get close, to Dunne’s donkeyship unseen. But it was the best place left.
    Voices babbled at him, struggling for humor and for wit. Dunne, eh? How many kilos of crystals had he brought back? The question was genial mockery. A gram of crystals wouldn’t be despised, and ten grams was a fair average for the Rings. A kilogram would be spoken of with awe for years to come if anybody actually brought in so much. In any