The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Ten

A month and a half later Sost showed up unexpectedly at the mine with a delivery, pulling into the staging area just as dinner was ending for the teams that ate with John Heikkila's. Hal wandered comfortably out of the door of the dining hall and saw a familiar-looking truck shape before the office building and an even more familiar human shape getting out of it.

Hal started toward the truck, picking up speed as he went. Sost, however, disappeared into the office building carrying a large package before Hal got there, and Hal stood waiting until the older man came out again.

"Hey there," said Sost when he emerged, as casually as if they had parted fifteen minutes before. He rambled down the steps and came up to offer Hal a square, thick hand. "How's the Yow Dee been doing for you?"

"I like it here," said Hal, taking the hand. "Come on over to the canteen and sit down."

"Won't refuse," said Sost.

The canteen was half full of off-shift miners. Hal looked around for Tonina or anyone from his team, but saw none of them.

"Here," said Hal, finding them seats at an empty table with six places. "What would you like? There's only food - drinks and coffee, because of the mine regulations."

"Coffee's fine," said Sost, taking a seat.

Hal got them both coffee - or what was called coffee on Coby - and brought it back to their table in copper mugs with ceramic rims at the top so that lips would not be burned on the hot metal when the cups were filled.

"I didn't know you came way over here," he said to Sost.

"I'm liable to end up anywhere," Sost said, drinking from his own cup. "Like it here, do you?"

Just then Tonina came in the door.

"Tonina!" he called. She looked around, saw him, and Sost, and headed toward them. "Yes, it's a good mine… Tonina, sit down. I'd like you to meet Sost. Do you want something to drink?"

"Not right now," she said, joining them at the table. She and Sost looked at each other.

"I've heard the name," she said.

"I get around," said Sost. "I met the boy, here, just outside his holding station. Stupidest twenty-year-old I ever saw; and I told him so. We ended up getting on real well."

"Ah," said Tonina. She relaxed. Hal had noticed before how quick she was to tense up in any unusual situation. Normally she did not relax this quickly. "He's getting brighter every day."

"Don't say?" said Sost, drinking coffee.

"I do say," Tonina said. "He's rating right at the top among the muckers-out and he's only been here a little over a month."

"Six weeks," said Hal.

"I remember you now," Tonina said to Sost, "you used to come in regularly to the old Trid Mine. Nearly two years ago. I got started there. You remember Alf Sumejari, the head cook…"

They talked about people whose names were unknown to Hal. But he did not feel uncomfortable at being left out of the conversation. He sat listening comfortably, and when John Heikkila walked through the entrance a few minutes later he called the team leader over to join them.

"He's doing all right," John told Sost, whom he had evidently met before.

"About time then, isn't it?" said Sost.

"I'll be the judge of that," said John. "Are you going to be coming in here regularly, then?"

"Not on a regular schedule," Sost said. "But I'll be working this territory generally for quite a while. There'll be things to bring me to the Yow Dee."

He pushed his empty coffee mug away from him and stood up. John and Tonina were also getting to their feet and Hal scrambled to his. He had the sudden, sharp feeling that something he had not understood had gone on about him.

"You're leaving right away?" he said to Sost. "I thought we could take a few hours - "

"Got to keep schedule," said Sost. He nodded at John and Tonina. "See you in Port, sometime."

He went out the door. John and Tonina were already moving away in different directions into the room. Hal looked after them for a second, then followed Sost out.

"But when'll I see you again?" he asked Sost as the older man climbed into his truck.

"Any time. Not too long," said Sost.

He powered up the truck on its fans, turned it on its axis and drove out of the staging area. Hal. looked after him for several moments, then turned back to the canteen. He wanted to hear what John and Tonina thought of Sost. But as he got there, John came out and went across toward the office; and a second later Tonina also came out and went toward the bunkhouse.

Hal started to follow her, then read in the set of her back and shoulders that she was not in a mood for company. His steps slowed. He felt a little sadness. Since that first night following his fight she had never really let him within arm's length of her, although in all other ways she had been as warmly friendly as ever.

He watched her go. Walter InTeacher had coached him in the Exotic way of empathy, and he could feel deep in Tonina an old unhappiness that she had long ago given up any hope of conquering. She had simply lived with it until it had reached the point where she was all but unaware that it was still there. Still, he could feel how much of everything she did was directed by that ancient pain and the mechanisms she had developed to bury it. She would not have been willing to be helped with it now, even if Hal had known how to help her; and he did not. All he could do was feel the entombed ache in her and ache in sympathy with it.

By the next day, however, his empathic sense found something else to occupy itself as he rode down in the skip with the rest of the team. He could not miss noticing a difference in all of them toward him, today. But it was not an unfriendly difference. Hal shrugged internally; and, since it seemed to be harmless, he put it out of his mind.

When they got to the vein on which they were currently digging, he fitted himself automatically with a pair of tongs on each glove and turned around to the ledge, only to come within inches of bumping into Will Nanne. Hal had not exchanged a word with the other team leader since the day of his arrival; and he stopped, surprised and wary at seeing him here now, in the area of the Heikkila team.

"Well," said Will. Like Hal and the rest of them at the moment the helmet of his suit was thrown back; and his face was as unsmiling as ever. "You been here nearly two months now, haven't you?"

"About a month and a half, actually," said Hal.

"Time enough," said Will. "I need another torcher on my team. Want to shift over, and I'll train you?"

"Torcher?"

Hal stared at him. He had been having daydreams of the day when John Heikkila might offer him a chance to try working with a torch; and only a small part of that daydream was concerned with the larger percentage of the team's profits that would be coming to him if he became a torcher. The large part had had to do with the dream of being, in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of the other workers, a full-fledged miner.

For a moment he was strongly tempted; and then the whole weight of the friendships he had made with John and the rest of the team rejected the offer, even as he was voicing his incredulity.

"You don't want me?"

"I don't say it twice," Will said. "I've offered you a job. Take it or leave it."

"But you don't like me!" said Hal.

"Didn't. Do now," said Will. "Well, how about it? Work time's counting. I can't stand around here all shift waiting for you to make up your mind. Coming with me, or not?"

Hal took a deep breath.

"I can't," he said. "Thanks anyway. I'm sorry."

"You mean you won't."

"I mean I won't. But thanks for offering me the job - "

A strange thing was happening to Will Nanne's grim face. It was not changing, but laughter was coming out of it. Hal stared at the man, bewildered, and suddenly began to realize that there was merriment all around him. He looked again at Will, at the closed lips and scowling features with the snorts of laughter coming from the long nose. He looked around and saw the rest of his own team in a circle about him, not getting ready for work at all, their helmets all thrown back, and laughing.

John was one of them, standing almost at Hal's right elbow. But when he saw Hal's eyes on him, he sobered in turn and became almost as sour-faced as Will.

"All right, damn it!" he said. "I guess I got to give you a chance to try torching if everybody's going to be coming around here trying to hire you away from the team. Come on, everyone, let's get to work. Time's counting. Better luck next time, Will."

"I expect you'll be over to steal one of my team next," grumped Will; and turning, he went off, still snorting softly to himself.

Hal looked at John and grinned. He was beginning to understand.

"What're you looking so pleased about?" said John. "For two profit points, I'd fire you now and give you no place to go but with Will. How do I know you haven't been talking to him about changing teams, before this, behind my back?"

Hal only grinned more widely.

"All right," John said, turning away. "Let's see how happy you are after a shift of torching. Come on up on the ledge."

Hal followed him up to join the other torchers. They stood facing the wall, in front of about a body's width of rock apiece. John took a position at the left end of the line next to the stope wall.

"Put your helmet on," said John. "No. Put it on, then pick up your torch. Always do it that way. Now…" his voice came filtered through the suit mechanism, "watch me. Don't try to do any torching to start with, just watch how I do it. Don't knock your helmet back until you see me take mine off. When you see me put mine back on, put yours back on - and keep watching at all times. You understand?"

"Yes," said Hal, hearing his own voice hollow with excitement inside the helmet.

He obeyed. The wall before him - before each of them - was scored vertically and horizontally by earlier torch cuts; and its surface was a mosaic of different depths of rock, marking the planes where torch cuts had parted a surface chunk from the granite beneath. His eyes were on John.

John raised his torch to the wall, with its muzzle less than hand's length from the rock. A slim, golden pencil of visible light that was the guide for the cutting beam, which could not be seen, reached out and into the face of the stope before him - and a wave of heat that was like a body blow struck Hal, even through the protection of his suit, as the rock was vaporized in an incredibly thin section by the moving, invisible beam.

As he had grown more expert at mucking-out, there had been more and more occasions when Hal had been caught up with his own work and could simply stand for a moment and watch the torchers; and he had come to the conclusion that their work must be very easy compared to his own. In fact, he had puzzled over why it made sense to have two teams working alternate periods, when it would have seemed to have been more practical to simply work a single crew of six or seven men straight through the shift. He now discovered one reason why. The sudden heat blow from the outburst of hot gases from the vaporized rock was breathtaking, even inside the protective suit; and his first experience of it now explained why the torchers worked in spurts, cutting for a few minutes, then pausing, then cutting again.

It was some moments before he could manage to observe two more new things. One was the fact that John seemed to be cutting in a peculiar pattern that moved his torch about strangely on the face of rock before him, as if the areas to be cut were marked in some complicated sequence; and the other was that he shut his torch off each time before beginning to cut a new chunk. He had barely absorbed these facts when John stopped working abruptly; and simply stood, a mechanical-looking figure in his suit, facing the wall. Hal stared at him, not understanding, then became aware that the hiss and crackle of the torches to his right were also giving way to silence. He looked and saw that all the others of the current crew had stopped cutting, except the miner at the far end of the face. Then that man also shut his torch off.

Hal's glove twitched upward to knock back his helmet and give himself some air as he had seen the current crew do so many times. Then he realized that no one else had yet touched their helmets. He checked his movement and stood, gasping in the closed suit, watching John until John reached up and lifted back his own helmet. Hal imitated him and, looking around, taking deep breaths, saw the other torchers opening up as well.

For a few seconds, he breathed air that was only warm; then he saw John putting his helmet back on and followed suit. The torches took up their hiss and crackle again; and once more Hal watched and sweated under the momentary heat-blows before another helmetless break came. It seemed to last only seconds before they were buttoned up and at work again.

Before it came to be time for the other crew to replace them at the rock wall, Hal was soaked in sweat and as enervated as if he had worked a full half-shift at mucking-out, although he had done nothing but watch. But, as he became more accustomed to the heat-blows and the noise, his observation of the way the work went had been improving. He saw that a chunk would be carved out, wherever possible, by undercutting a projecting piece of rock; and then taking out as many other chunks as possible by cutting vertically down to the horizontal undercut. Where there was no way of undercutting, the torcher made slanting cuts into the face of the rock, until these intersected behind the chunk.

At the first touch of the cutting beam, there would be an explosion of gases from the vaporized rock; and for a moment the seeing was, not exactly foggy, but distorted; as if he was looking at the rock wall through the updrafts of heated gas and air. In the moment following the heat blow and the distortion, the view of the rock became solid again; but for a few seconds after that a sort of silver mist seemed to cling to the face of the rock, before vanishing.

It was not until the second time the crew including John and Hal attacked the wall that Hal put the sight of the silver mist together with the pattern of the torchers in knocking back their helmets. It was never until that haze had completely gone that any of them cracked their suits open. Hal's mind, galloping ahead with that observation, deduced that the silver mist must be condensation of some of the gasified rock, boiled out upon the surface of the face and chilled there by the liquified gas coolant projected around the cutting beam from its reservoir in the heavy body of the torch. Until the mist evaporated, there would be danger of some of the vaporized material being still in gas form, in the atmosphere before the stope wall.

As work wore on, Hal began to pick up more understanding of the pattern in which John was cutting into the rock face. The pattern seemed to be designed to keep him cutting always at the greatest possible distance from where the man on his right was cutting on his own section. Looking down along the face, Hal saw that the same patterning seemed to be at work to keep the others of the crew cutting at as close to maximum distance from each other as possible.

The lunch break finally came. John sat down to eat with his back to the tunnel wall beside Hal.

"Well," he said, tearing into a sandwich with his teeth, "how about it? You ready to try it?"

Hal nodded.

"If you think I can."

"Good," said John. "At least, you're not so all-fired sure you can just stand up there and do it. Now, I'll tell you what. Pay no attention to how fast the others are cutting. You cut only when I tell you to, and where I tell you to. Got that?"

"Yes," said Hal.

"All right." John finished his sandwich and got back to his feet. "Let's go, crew!"

He, Hal and the others returned to the face. Davies, who had taken over the mucking-out temporarily while Hal tried out with the torch, winked at Hal as Hal passed. Hal took the wink for encouragement and felt warmed by it.

At the face, guided by John's voice and pointing finger, Hal slowly began to choose and excavate pieces of the rock. He did not do well, in his own estimation. He found himself taking a dozen cuts to loosen a piece of rock that John might have taken out in three. But, gradually, as he worked, he began to get a little more efficient and economical in the use of the torch, although the patterns in which John directed his work remained beyond him.

As the shift wore toward its end the heat seemed to sap the strength out of him; it became enormous effort just to lift the torch and concentrate on the cuts John indicated he was to make. His cuts became clumsier; and, for the first time, he began to realize the danger of losing precise control of the torch, which, waved around carelessly in its on mode, could slice through suits, human flesh and bone with a great deal more ease than it could through rock - and the rock offered it no problem.

Through the window of his helmet as he continued cutting, he was aware of John watching him closely. John must know that exhaustion was making him uncertain; and at any minute now the team leader would be taking the torch away from him. Something in Hal surged in rebellion. At the next chance he had to knock back his helmet he deliberately drew a deep breath and let it out in slow, controlled fashion as he had been taught, both by Malachi and by Walter… and his mind smoothed out.

He had been letting himself become frantic because he could feel his strength dwindling. That was not the way he had been taught to handle situations like this. There were techniques for operating on only a remaining portion of his strength.

The answer was to concentrate what strength remained on what was essential, and close out his attention on anything unnecessary. It was something like controlled tunnel vision, making the most of what was available over the smallest possible area. Having breathed himself back into self-control, he closed up his suit, addressed the rock face again and let his mind spiral inward, his vision close in… until all he saw was the rock before his torch and John's directing hands, until all he heard was John's voice.

The heat became distant and unimportant. The fatigue ceased to exist except as an abstract phenomenon. The stope, the mine itself, the very fact that he was underground, became things unimportant and apart. Even the relief periods were brief, unimportant moments before he was back at the face of rock again. The real universe was restricted to that rock face, the torch, and the directions of John.

His grip on the torch steadied. His cuts regained their precision and certainty. In this smaller universe, his present strength and attention was enough and to spare to get the job done. He worked…

Suddenly, they had all stopped and put back their helmets; and they were not starting again. John and the other torchers were turning away from the rock face. Baffled, Hal opened up his perceptions; and staggered physically as the larger world came back into existence about him, a bone-weariness exploding all through him.

He was conscious of John catching his arm and holding him up, guiding him back from the ledge and down the ramp cut the day before to the level below. His legs were wobbly and the torch he had unthinkingly carried back from the rock face - when he should have left it there for the next day's first crew - seemed to weigh several tons. He laid it against the face of the rise in which the ramp was cut; then, overwhelmed, slid down into a sitting position himself with his back to the rise.

Everybody was gathering around him. In the crowd, strangely, were Tonina and Will Nanne, who had left them hours ago.

"Well," said Will's harsh voice. "He did it. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself."

"All right," said John, looking down at Hal. "I suppose you'll do. I hope you understand the whole team's going to have to carry you and lose production until you learn enough to do a fair shift of work?"

"Oh, leave him alone!" said Tonina. "Can't you let him be now that he's won the job?"

"I have?" Hal said, foggily.

"Well, you still got to throw a port party for the team," said Davies.

Escorted back to the skip by them all with Tonina on one side of him and John on the other, acting as bumpers to bounce him back on course when he staggered out of the direct line of march, Hal felt a sense of triumph beginning to rise within him and a deep feeling of affection for those around him. He was one of them at last. They were like family, and he felt for each of them as if each was a brother or a sister.

"Port party tonight," said an unfamiliar voice in the crowded skip. Evidently the whole mining camp had been in on the plans for his trial as a torcher.

"Wait until you make leader, if you ever do," said Tonina in his ear. "Then you have to get the whole crowd of underground workers at the mine drunk."

As they had left the rock face, Hal had felt that he had hardly the strength left to do anything but fall on his bed and sleep the clock around. But once back in the bunkhouse, showered and dressed for Port, he found himself coming back to life. In the end, as they boarded the subway in a group - the team, Tonina, and Will Nanne, who was evidently entitled to share in the party because of having been one of the actors in the traditional drama in which Hal had been offered his chance to try out as a torcher - Hal found himself feeling as well as ever, except for a slight sensation as if he had lost so much weight he might float off the ground, with any encouragement at all.