The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Five

As the spaceship to New Earth pulled away from Earth orbit preparatory to its first phase shift into interstellar space, the awareness of his utter loneliness moved in on Hal all at once. In the Final Encyclopedia, thanks to Tam and Ajela, he had not felt completely alone; and until he had gotten to the Final Encyclopedia the anesthesia of shock and his training had held the realities of his new orphan's status at a numb distance from his emotions. But now, unexpectedly a full appreciation of it flooded him.

That first night on shipboard he dreamed a vivid, colorful dream in which it turned out that the events on the terrace and the deaths of Malachi, Obadiah and Walter had been nothing but a nightmare from which he had just awakened. He felt foolish, but inexpressibly relieved to discover that the three of them were still alive and all was well.

Then he awoke to reality, and lay in the darkness, listening to the faint breathing of the ventilating system of the ship, echoing out through the grille on the near wall of his stateroom. Emptiness and desolation filled him. He pulled the bedcovers over his head like a very young child, and lay there, cold, in his misery, until, at some unknown, later time, he fell asleep again, to other dreams he did not remember on awakening.

But from then on the awareness of his isolation and vulnerability was always with him. He was able to push it into a back corner of his mind, but there it settled, as if in some dark corner, where Bleys and the rest of the Others seemed also to crouch, waiting. He realized now that he had made a serious mistake in not asking that this passage from the Encyclopedia be booked for him under a false name.

The situation was not completely irreparable, of course. Once he got to New Earth, he could cancel the reservations made under the name of Hal Mayne, and then make new reservations to Coby under an alias. At most, then, this ship's records would only show Hal Mayne as going no farther than New Earth. But the record of his having been outbound from Old Earth aboard this ship would remain, for the Others to find.

A cooler part of his mind told him that even travelling under his real name as he was now, the passenger record would not be easy for Bleys to run down. It was not that ship's records were not kept and that the Others could not eventually get access to them all. It was simply that, given the mass of interstellar shipping and the complexity of individual records on fourteen worlds, it became a statistical nightmare to search through all of these in an attempt to trace or locate a single individual.

Nonetheless, he made up his mind to be as inconspicuous as possible until he reached Coby and, once there, to lose himself under a completely false identity. Being inconspicuous would mean, of course, that he should restrict his contacts with other people aboard, as much as possible; but that was a small hardship. At this moment he felt no great desire to make the acquaintances of his fellow passengers, or those who staffed the ship.

It was a prudent decision, but in making it he had not considered how much such solitary behavior would leave him to his own thoughts and feelings during the days that followed. At times he would find himself unexpectedly immersed in grief, an unbearable grief that would mutate gradually into an icy, compelling rage, that in its own strange way seemed familiar, although he could not recall having felt anything like it before. It made him shiver, thinking of Bleys and the Others, and all their kind. A desire to destroy them and everything connected with them would seize him so powerfully that he could think of nothing else.

As ye have done to me and mine. …

The words seemed to arise out of some ancient part of him like a stained and weathered carving on the stone of his soul. He would follow the advice of the ghosts of Malachi, Obadiah, and Walter to hide until he was strong enough to fight back against those who had done this; and then he would destroy them as they had destroyed all those he had ever loved. Just as Ajela had reminded him that Tam Olyn had once set out to destroy the entire Friendly culture. Tam had changed and turned back from what he had started to accomplish, but Hal would never do so.

Walter's teaching had warned against letting destructive emotions grow and take charge of him; and he had been trained in ways to control them. But he found now that in the worst moments of his grief, the rage was the only thing that could push it from him - and at such times the grief seemed too great to be borne.

Still, in all, the trip to New Earth was not that long in actual subjective, shipboard time. Most of the passengers on board were bound beyond that world, to Freiland, which was now the richer and more commercially active of the two worlds under the star of Sirius. But the ships stopped at New Earth first, because New Earth was the major transshipment point for that solar system; and, like Hal, all those who were going on to other destinations would be making their change to other vessels there, rather than at Freiland.

Hal had hoped to find at least one other person aboard who was going to Coby, or who had known that planet first hand, so that he could ask what the life there was actually like for miners. But none of the other transshipping passengers were bound in his direction - he had asked the purser to check the ship's list to make sure. In the end, when he took the jitney down to New Earth City for the three days he must wait for his vessel to Coby, he was as much alone and knew as little as he had when he had come on board.

But New Earth City itself caught his attention, even driving the memory of the events on the terrace and the Encyclopedia temporarily into the background of his thoughts. It was a space-base city, which meant it had its primary commercial activity in off-world shipping. The sky was busy with passenger and cargo jitneys going to and from parking orbit; the streets were equally full of a multitude of shipping agents. He had no trouble finding passage under a different name on a ship headed for Coby, after he had cancelled his original reservations.

The city, itself, lay in the uplands of the north temperate zone of that world, in mid-continent, at the confluence of the two large rivers that together with their tributaries provided a watershed for nearly one-third of the continent's land mass. Hal remembered from his geography studies that the city was supposed to be very cold in winter. But now it was mid-summer, the air dusty and windy with the odor unique to vegetation of that latitude on the planet. He sat in sidewalk restaurants, drinking the local fruit and vegetable juices and watching the people who passed.

In spite of his training, the romantic part of him had always clung to the thought that there would be markedly noticeable differences to be seen in the people on the younger inhabited planets. But New Earth was an unspecialized world and the majority of the people on it looked as much like full-spectrum humans as those of Earth. They looked the same; essentially, they talked the same; and, with slight variations in cut and style, they wore the same sort of clothes. Only occasionally did he see an individual who dressed and acted as if he or she clearly belonged to one of the true Splinter Cultures - Friendly, Exotic, or Dorsai - and these stood out sharply from those about them.

Nonetheless, it was a strange and foreign place, New Earth City - the sunlight, the smells, the activity, all had differences about them that caught at his imagination and compelled it. He could see no signs of the decay Tam Olyn had spoken of, the approach of an Armageddon, an end to present civilization, or even to the human race itself. Dismissing the puzzle at last from his mind, he turned to a more immediate question. He tried telling those he met that he was a University-level student from Earth on a thesis-trip, testing his ability to pass for someone in his late teens or early twenties, and was gratified when no one questioned this.

Part of him, he had found out long since, was a chameleon; an imaginative actor who could be seduced by an infinite number of roles. He had three days, local time, to pass before his new transport to Coby would be leaving orbit; and, even in three days, he came close to being strongly tempted to stay where he was for a month or two, learning to fit in with what he saw around him and experiencing New Earth living from within its society.

But the thought that Bleys might already have set - no matter how idly - a search in progress for him, plus the pull of that same amorphous, oceanic purpose in him which had set him unthinkingly to packing as the time approached to board the jitney to the New Earth-bound ship; these sent him up to the ship to Coby in time; and a few hours later, he was once more between the stars, heading toward the first phase shift that would bring him eventually to work in the mines of that airless world.

The ship he travelled on now was not a passenger liner, like the one on which he had left Earth orbit, but a cargo vessel that carried a small complement of passengers in accommodations comparable to those of the ship's officers. The only other passengers were three commercial representatives who spent all their time gambling with gravityless shotballs in the lounge. The officers and crew were indifferent to conversation with the passengers. They had their own professional clubbishness, and except at meals he never saw them; and so, at the end of five days, they came to Coby.

- Not just to an orbit around Coby, however. At the mining world, it developed, spaceships did not park in orbit and wait for jitneys from the surface. They not only went down like military craft, directly to the surface, they went one step further. They descended below the world's surface. Everything built on Coby had been built underground, and as the ship Hal was on gingerly nudged its way close to the Moon-like landscape of the planet, that landscape developed a crack before them from which light shone upward. Barely hovering, it seemed, on its maneuvering powerways, the ship slid into an opening, as the jitney from Earth had slipped into the opening of the port of the Final Encyclopedia.

The moment they were inside, the opening closed again behind them. With pressure barriers, there had been minimal loss of air; but for a world that needed to make all its air and water out of crustal chemicals, even small losses would be important, Hal thought. But then he forgot problems having to do with the crustal extraction of chemicals; for the place into which they had come was another matter entirely than the entry port of the Encyclopedia.

This was like nothing so much as a full-sized surface military or commercial spaceport, hollowed out of the solid stuff of the world, with a spacepad of remarkable dimensions, its edges thick with fitting yards. In the viewing screen of his room, with which Hal was watching their landing, spaceships could be seen lying in the cradles of those yards and being fitted with the metal parts and fabrications that Coby could supply more cheaply than any of the other worlds.

It had been ironic, Obadiah had said once, harshly, that the human race had been so slow to realize how favored was the planet of its birth. Not only in terms of air, water, climate and the wealth of its ecology - but in the availability of its metals. The first people settling on the younger worlds had been quick to discover that the metals they needed were neither so available in that quantity that Earth had accustomed them to, nor so cheaply easy to extract from the rocky mantle of their planets. On twelve of the fourteen worlds, the human race had metal-hungry societies; and on a few of those worlds, like both of the Friendly planets and on the Dorsai, that poverty was so great that they could not have existed in a modern interstellar community if they had not been able to buy much of what they needed for their technological life off-planet. The fourteen worlds could only remain one community if they could trade together; and the one currency they had in common was professional skills, packaged in the minds and bodies of their own people. So the worlds had specialized.

Physicians and specialists in the soft sciences came from schools on the Exotics. Statisticians from the Friendlies. Professional military from the Dorsai. An individual working on a world other than his or her own earned not only a personal income in that planet's local currency, but interstellar credit for the world that had raised and trained her or him, And on the basis of that interstellar credit metal-poor worlds like New Earth bought what they needed from Coby…

Their cargo spaceship was already settling onto the field below; and with the other passengers, Hal left the ship. He found immigration officials waiting at the foot of the landing stair; but the checks made were brief and simple.

"Visa?" The heavy-bodied, gray-haired official who greeted him took the visa he had purchased on New Earth, under the name of Tad Thornhill, from Hal's hand. "Visiting or staying?"

"Staying," Hal said. "I want to look for a job here."

The woman ran the papers through the transverse slot of her desk and passed them back to Hal. Endless repetitions of the same words had worn her voice to a near-monotone.

"Check the directory in the Terminal for the nearest Assignments Office outside of the port area," she said. "If you change your mind or for any reason stay in the port area, you must register and leave Coby again within eight days, or face deportation. If you leave the port area, you may only return on pass from your work superiors. Next!"

Hal moved on and the commercial representatives behind him took his place.

Inside the terminal building, the directory - when he queried its console - printed in its screen the words: Halla Station Assignment Office, Halla Station: Tube Line C: report for job interview at destination. It also extruded a small hard-copy card with the same information printed on it.

Hal took the card and tucked it into his bag. The port area looked interesting, especially the fitting yards. He thought of trying to get a job there, rather than in the mines. But a little more thought brought back to mind the fact that he was here to become invisible to the Others; and in a port area, pinned down by job-required identification and security observation, would not be the best place to hide.

In fact, he thought, remembering the lessons that had been drilled into him, he would undoubtedly minimize the danger of being traced here by the Others if he got out of the port area as fast as possible. He went searching for, and found the subway-like station that was the terminal of Tube C, took passage in one of the long, silver cars that floated there in their magnetic rings, and an hour and a half later got out two thousand kilometers away, at Halla Station Terminal.

The Assignment Office was in one corner of the Terminal, four desks in an open area. Three had no one at them. One had a man interviewing another man, who by his appearance and the travel bag on the floor beside his chair was a job applicant like Hal. Hal waited until the other applicant had finished and been sent out through a rear door in the Terminal. Then he came up to the desk, handed his papers to the interviewer and sat down without waiting to be asked.

The man behind the desk did not seem to resent Hal's not waiting for an invitation. He scanned the papers, made out in the name of Tad Thornhill, ran them through the slot on his desk and then looked over at Hal. He was in his early thirties, a short, slim individual with a narrow, white face and a shock of red hair - the sort of face that might have been friendly, if it had not been for an expression of indifference that seemed to have worn lines in it.

"You're sure you want to work in the mines?" he asked.

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't," Hal said.

The interviewer rattled busily away at the keys of his console and a hard copy document emerged from his desk top.

"Sign here, and here. If you change your mind in less than a week, you will be charged for food and lodging and any other expenses incurred by you. Do you understand?"

"Yes." Hal reached out to put his thumbprint in the signature area. The interviewer blocked the motion with his own hand.

"Are you aware that the society here on Coby is different from what you may have encountered on any of the other worlds? That, in particular, the process of laws is different?"

"I've read about it," said Hal.

"On Coby," went on the interviewer, as if Hal had not spoken, "you are immune to off-world deportation by reason of legal papers of any kind originating other than on this planet. However, all legal power here is vested in the management of the Company you work for and in the Planetary Consortium of Companies to which the Company you will work for belongs. The legal authority to whom you will be directly responsible for your actions is the Company Judge-Advocate, who combines in himself the duties of criminal investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury. If you are cited by him, you are presumed guilty until you can prove your innocence. You will be held wholly at his disposal for whatever length of time he desires, and you are liable to questioning by any means he wishes to use in an effort to elicit whatever information he needs. His judgment on your case is final, not subject to review and may include the death penalty, by any process he may specify; and the Company is under no obligation to notify anyone of your death. Do you understand all this?"

Hal stared at the man. He had read all this before as part of his studies, everything that the interviewer had just told him. But it was an entirely different matter to sit here and have these statements presented to him as present and inescapable realities. A cool breeze seemed to breathe on the back of his neck.

"I understand," he said.

"Very good. You'll remember then," said the interviewer, "that what you may have been accustomed to as personal rights no longer exist for you once you have put your thumbprint on this contract. I have offered you terms for a minimum work commitment of one standard Coby year at apprentice wages. There are no shorter work commitments. Do you wish to contract for a longer term?"

"No," said Hal. "But I can renew my contract at the end of a year without losing anything, can't I?"

"Yes." The interviewer took his guarding hand away from the signature area. "Your thumbprint here, please."

Hal looked at the man. There is a unique human being within each sane member of the human race, Walter the InTeacher used to say. Try, and you can reach him, or her. He thought of trying to make the effort now, but he could find nothing in the man before him to touch.

He reached out, put his thumbprint on the contract and signed.

"This is your copy," said the interviewer, detaching it from his desk and passing it to him. "Go out the door to the rear and follow the signs in the corridor to the office of the Holding Area."

Hal followed the directions. They led him down a well-lighted tunnel about four meters wide to a much wider entrance in the right wall of the tunnel. Turning in at the entrance, he saw what appeared to be an enclosed office to his right, and a considerably larger enclosed area to his left, through the doorless entrance of which came the sound of music and voices. Straight ahead, but further on, he could see what seemed to be a double row of large cages made of floor to ceiling metal bars, but with their doors, for the most part, standing open.

He assumed that the office on the right was the one he had been directed to in the Holding Area; but curiosity led him toward the doorway of the place opposite, with the noisy interior. He automatically approached its doorway from an angle, out of training, and stopped about three meters away to look in; but he need not have been cautious. None of those inside were paying any attention to anything outside.

Apparently, it was simply a recreation place. It was well-filled with people, but with only one woman visible, and the rest men. There was a bar and most of those there seemed to be drinking out of silvery metal mugs that must have held at least half a liter. On any other world, such mugs would have been expensive items indeed - perhaps here they were simply a cheap way to cut down on breakage.

Hal turned back to the office, knocked on its door when he could find no annunciator stud, and - when he heard nothing - let himself in.

Within was a wall to wall, waist-high counter dividing the room crosswise, with two desks behind it. Only one desk was occupied, and the man at it was middle-aged, balding and heavy-set. He had the look of someone who did little but sit at desks. He glanced up at Hal.

"We don't knock here," he said. He extended his hand without getting up. "Papers."

Hal leaned over the counter and managed to pass them over without taking his feet off the floor. The man behind the counter accepted them and ran them through the slot in his desk.

"All right," he said, handing them back - Hal had to stretch himself across the counter once more to retrieve them - "find yourself a bunk out back. Rollcall and assignments at eight-thirty in the morning. My name's Jennison - but you call me Superintendent."

"Thank you," said Hal, reflexively, and for the first time Jennison lifted his gaze from his desk and actually looked at him.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Twenty," said Hal.

"Sure." Jennison nodded.

"Is there any place I could get something to eat?" Hal asked.

"I'll sell you a package meal," Jennison said. "Got credit?"

"You just saw my papers."

Jennison punched his key pad and looked into the screen on his desk.

"All right," he said. "I've debited you the cost of one package meal." He swiveled his float around and touched the wall behind him, which opened to show a food storage locker. He took a white, sealed package from the locker and tossed it to Hal.

"Thanks," said Hal.

"You'll get out of that habit," said Jennison.

"What habit?" asked Hal.

Jennison snorted a short laugh and went back to his work without answering.

Hal took his package and his bag and went out of the office, and into the back area, among the cages. When he came to them he found that each one held two double-decker bunks on each side of the cage, so that each had sleeping space for eight individuals. The bunks stood against the side walls of the cage with a little space of the wall of bars before them, and beyond them to where the cell ended in the solid wall that must be backed by the rock of the cave excavated to make this area. The first few cages he came to had two or three occupants in each, all of them sleeping heavily. He continued on back until he could see that there was no cage without at least one person in it.

He finally chose a cage in which the only occupant was a man sitting on one of the bottom bunks toward the back. The cage door was open and Hal came in, a little hesitantly. The man, a leathery-looking individual in his late thirties or early forties, had been carving on a piece of what looked like gray metal, but which must have been quite soft. Now, the knife and the metal bar hung motionless in his hands as he watched Hal enter. His face was expressionless.

"Hello," said Hal. "I'm Tad Thornhill. I just signed a contract for work, here."

The other did not say anything. Hal gestured toward the bottom bunk opposite the one on which the man sat.

"Is this taken?" he asked.

The man stared at him a second longer, still without expression, then he spoke.

"That one?" he said. His voice was hoarse, as if disuse had left it rusty. "No, that doesn't belong to anybody."

"I'll take it then." Hal tossed his bag to the head end of the bunk, in the corner against the back wall. He sat down, and began to open the sealed meal package. "I haven't eaten since I left the ship."

The other man again said nothing, but went back to his carving. Hal spread the package open and saw through the transparent seal that it was some kind of stew with a baked vegetable that looked like a potato in its skin, some bread, and a small bar of what looked like chocolate, but certainly must be synthetic. He could feel the package heating automatically in his hands, now that the outer seal had been broken. He waited the customary sixty seconds, broke the transparent inner seal, and began eating. The food was tasteless and without much texture, but the heat of it was good, and it filled his empty stomach. He suddenly realized he had forgotten to ask Jennison for something to drink.

He looked across at the other man, busy shaping his piece of soft metal into something that looked like a statuette of a man.

"Is there anything to drink around here?" he asked.

"Beer and liquors up in the canteen, front, if you've got the credit," said the other without looking up.

"I mean something like fruit juice, coffee, water - something like that," said Hal.

The other looked at him and jerked his knife up and to his right, pointing chest-high on the wall just beyond them. Rising, Hal found an aperture in the wall, and a stud beside it. He looked about for something to use as a cup, found nothing and finally ended up folding a crude cup out of the outer shell of the meal package. He pressed the stud, and water fountained up in a small arc. He caught it in his jury-rigged cup and drank. It tasted strongly of iron.

He sat down again, finished his meal with the help of several more cupfuls of the water, then bundled the package and containers in his hands and looked around him.

"Throw it under the bunk," said the man across from him.

Hal stared; but the other was bent over his carving and paying no attention. Reluctantly, for it was hard for him to believe that the advice was correct, he finally did as the man had suggested. Then he lay down on the bunk, with his bag prudently between his head and the wall of bars that separated him from the next cages, and gazed at the dark underside of the bunk above him.

He was about to drop off to sleep when the sound of footsteps made him open his eyes again and look toward his feet. A short, somewhat heavy man was just entering the door of the cage. This newcomer stopped just inside the door and stared at Hal.

"He asked me if that bunk was anybody's," said the man doing the carving. "I told him no, it wasn't anybody's."

The other man laughed and climbed up into the top bunk next to the one below which the carver sat. He thrashed around momentarily, but ended up on his side, looking down into the cage, and lay there with his eyes open.

Hal closed his eyes again, and tried to sleep; but with the arrival of the second man, his mind had started to work. He made himself lie still and willed his arms, legs, and body to relax, but still he did not sleep. The powerful feeling of grief and loneliness began to take him over once more. He felt naked in his isolation. This place was entirely different from the Final Encyclopedia where he had at least found intelligent, responsible people like those with whom he had grown up; and where he had even found those who could be friends, like Ajela and Tam. Here, he felt almost as if he had been locked into a cage with wild animals, unpredictable and dangerous.

He lay watching as other men came into the cage from time to time, and took bunks. Out of the habits of his training, he kept automatic count, and even though his eyes were half-closed, he knew after a while that all the other bunks had been filled. By this time there was a good deal of low-voiced conversation amongst the other occupants of the cage, and from the cages on either side of them. Hal tried to pay no attention. He made, in fact, an effort to block the voices out; and he was beginning at last to think that he might be on the verge of drifting off to sleep when his outer leg was sharply poked.

"You!" He recognized the rusty voice of the man on the lower bunk opposite and opened his eyes. "Sit up and talk for a minute. Where you from?"

"Earth," said Hal. "Old Earth." Effortfully, he pulled himself up and swung his legs over the edge to sit on the side of the bunk.

"Old Earth, is it? This is the first time you've been on Coby?"

"Yes," said Hal. Something about this conversation was wrong. There was a falseness about the other man's tone that triggered off all the alertness that Malachi had trained into him. Hal could feel his heartbeat accelerating, but he forced himself to yawn.

"How d'you like it here?"

The carver had shifted his position to the head of his bed, so that he now sat with his back braced against one of the upright posts at the end of his bunk, the darkness of the solid rock wall half a meter behind him. He continued to carve.

"I don't know. I haven't seen much of it, here," Hal said. He turned, himself, so as to face more directly the man and the end wall behind him. He did not want to make enemies in this new environment, but the feeling of uneasiness was strong, and he wished the other would come to the point of this sudden impulse to make conversation.

"Well, you've got a lot to see. A lot," said the carver. "If you've never been here before, and haven't seen much, I take it you've never been down in a mine, either."

"No," said Hal. "I haven't."

He was conscious that the conversation had died in the other bunks. The rest of the men in the cage must either be asleep, or listening. Hal felt the concentration of attention upon him. Like a wild animal, himself, or like a very young child, he was paying less attention to what the man was saying to him, than he was to how the other was saying it - the tone of voice, the way the man sat, and all the other non-verbal signals he was broadcasting.

"… you're in for something you'll never forget, first time you go down in a mine," the carver was saying. "Everybody thinks we just punch buttons down there, nowdays. Hell, no, we don't punch buttons. On Coby we don't just punch buttons. You'll see."

"What do you mean?" Hal asked.

"You'll see - " said the carver. One of the other occupants of the room, in an upper bunk near the door, unexpectedly began to whistle, and the carver raised his voice. "Most of the time you're working in a stope so tight you can't stand up in it, carving out the ore, and the heat from the rock gas your torch's boiling off as it cuts builds up until it could cook you."

"But that sort of work's easily done by machines," said Hal, remembering part of his studies. "All it needs - "

"Not on Coby," said the carver. "On Coby, you 'n me are cheaper than machines. You'll see. They hang a man here for being late to work too many times."

Hal stared at the other. He could not believe what he had just heard.

"That's right, you think about it," said the carver, whittling away. "You think all that they told you about the Judge-Advocate can't be true? Listen, he can pull your fingernails out, or anything else, to make you talk. It's legal here; and they do it just on general principles in case you've got something to tell them they don't know about, once you're arrested. Three days under arrest and I've seen a man age twenty years - "

It all happened very quickly. Later on, Hal was to guess that the uneasy animal/child part of him must have caught some slight sound that warned him; but at the time all he knew was that something made him glance around suddenly, toward the entrance end of the cage. In the instant, he saw the faces of all the other occupants looking over the edges of their bunks, watching avidly; and, almost upon him from the entrance, coming swiftly, a tall, rawboned man in his forties, with a wedge-shaped face twisted with insane fury, one of the metal mugs held high in one hand, sweeping toward the back of Hal's head.

Hal reacted as instinctively as he might have put out a hand to keep himself from falling. From a time before he could remember, he had exercised under the direction of Malachi; and his exercises had long since lost all conscious connection with the real purpose for which they had originally been designed. They were simply physical games that made him feel good, the way swimming or running did. But now, when there was no time for thought, his body responded automatically.

There was a suddenness of action; no blurring - everything very clear and very fast. He had risen, turned and caught hold of the oncoming man before he had hardly realized it himself, levering and carrying the heavy attacking body forward into the air on its own momentum, to smash against the rock wall. The man struck with a heavy, sodden sound and collapsed at the foot of the wall, to lie there without any motion whatsoever.

Again, with no conscious time lag, Hal found himself turned back and watching all the others in the cage, wire-taut, balanced and waiting. But the rest lay as they had been, motionless, some still with the avid look not yet gone from their faces. But, as he watched, it faded where it still existed, leaving them all looking at him, dull-faced and stupid with astonishment.

Hal continued to stand, motionless, where he was. He felt nothing, but he would have reacted at the slightest movement from any of them; and each of them there seemed to understand this. They breathed through open mouths without sound, watching him… and the moment stretched out, and stretched out, as some of the tension in the cage began to trickle away like sands from a broken hourglass.

Gradually, the man on the bottom bunk farthest from Hal on his right slowly put one leg out and lowered a foot to the floor, slowly followed it with the second, and gradually stood up. Carefully, he backed away until he had passed out through the door of the cage. Then he turned and walked away swiftly. Hal stayed as he was, without moving, while, one by one, the others cautiously departed in turn. He was left at last alone, with the motionless figure on the floor.

The occupants of the other cages around him were utterly silent. He looked right and left and everyone he saw was looking away from him. He turned to stare down again at the body lying huddled against the wall. For the first time it occurred to him that the man might be dead. He had been flung head-first against a stone wall - it could be that his neck had broken.

All emotion in Hal was still lost in wariness and tension, but now, gradually, his mind was beginning to work again. If the man who had attacked him was dead… Hal had only been defending himself. But if the others who had been in the cage should all testify that he had been the aggressor…

Plainly, he understood now that they all must have known that the man was coming, and that he would be likely to attack anyone using his bunk. He had been drunk, drugged or paranoid, possibly all three; and they had all been waiting for his return and probable attack on Hal. Perhaps, thought Hal emptily, they were all friends of his. Possibly they had even sent word to him that some stranger had taken his place - since obviously the carver had deliberately lied to Hal and even tried to set him up to be hit from behind, by moving so that Hal would have to turn his back to the cage entrance.

If the others should now all swear that Hal had picked a fight and killed this man deliberately… no, it was impossible. Justice, even here, could not be that unreasonably blind.

But the thought again of the right of the Judge-Advocate to use any means he wished to extract answers from someone under arrest returned to him, prickling the skin on the back of his neck.

Could he get back to the port, and off-planet? Not without using his visa as Tad Thornhill, and the moment he did that, he would undoubtedly be arrested.

Common sense came suddenly like a cooling draft of air into his fevered mind. He squatted down and put his fingers on the neck of the man on the floor, feeling for the left carotid artery. It pulsed strongly against his fingertips; and when he put his hand over the other's mouth, he could feel the stir of breath against his palm. A deep sigh came out of him. The attacker had only been knocked out, after all. Hal's knees weakened with relief.

But, on the heels of that relief came a strong urge to get out of this place enclosing him. He turned quickly, and went out the door and up between the row of cages. The people in them had begun talking after their immediate moment of silence following the attack. But they stopped talking again now, as he passed, and this time their eyes watched him as he went by. When he reached the front of the area the canteen was still as noisy as ever, but the office was now dark, and looked as if it had been locked for the night. He hesitated, then walked on and out into the corridor, turning down it in the opposite direction to that from which he had come.

This way, the corridor seemed to run on forever in a straight line ahead of him, and there was nobody within sight in it, as far as his eye could see. He picked up speed as he went along until his long legs were swinging him forward at a rate of nearly seven kilometers an hour.

He had no idea yet where he was going, or why he was going there. He was driven only by an instinct to get away; and he was still charged to the teeth with the adrenaline his body had released in him under his instinct to defend himself. Even now, there was no fury in him, only a steady, sick feeling; and the sole relief from that feeling was to keep striding on, kilometer after kilometer, forcing his body into a mode that would make it forget the fight-or-flight reaction.

Time went by, and, little by little, the sick feeling began to fade. He was left with only a dullness, an empty sort of feeling such as might come after recovery from a hard blow in the solar plexus. He felt hollow inside. His mind brought him no solutions to the situation in which he now supposed he was. Whether his attacker had been insane or not, he had to assume that the others in the cage might well be his friends and would lie about what had happened, if only to protect themselves. They might even be waiting to revenge themselves on Hal when he got back - and there were six of them, not counting whoever else there might be in the other cages who might also know them and want to help them. Nor, probably, could he look for any protection from Jennison, who had given a strong impression of holding himself apart from Hal and everyone else in the Holding Area.

But there was no safe place to go to, except off-Coby. He had been warned that he could not return to the port area without the permission of his superiors. But they might not yet know at the port that he had signed a contract, and he could buy passage on some outbound ship. Otherwise - in this owned and artificial environment, there would be no such thing as existence outside of the social order. And there was no other place for him to go that he knew of, although presumably this corridor led to somewhere else on Coby.

Probably the best thing he could do was to keep on walking. This corridor had to lead someplace. Once there, with authorities who might be at least neutral about what had happened back at Halla Station Holding Area, he could plead his case and perhaps get a fair hearing…

He stopped suddenly, his nerves wire-tight. As he strained to listen, he could now pick up a faint noise coming from ahead of him; and his eyes, now that he tried to see as far as possible down the corridor ahead, seemed to make out something like a dancing dot. He held still, closed his eyes for three counted seconds and then slowly opened them again, comparing the first moment of sight with the last thing he had seen before closing his eyelids. There was no doubt that the dot was there.

Something was coming his way, making a faint humming noise as it did so. Even in his present state, a corner of Hal's mind paused to puzzle over the sound, for it was like no noise he had heard before; but at the same time it had a ring of familiarity that he could not pin down.

In any case, there was nothing he could do but wait for its coming. The dot was expanding at a rate that implied it was coming faster than he could run from it. Hal stood where he was; and, after a little, the puzzle of the sound was solved, for as it came closer, it changed; and he both identified it and realized why he had not been able to earlier.

What he was hearing was simply the sound of an air-cushion vehicle moving toward him. But by some freak of acoustics in the long, straight tunnel, the breathy whisper of the underjets was changed and amplified into a resonance that from a distance rang like a musical humming. The tunnel was acting like the pipe of a flute or the drone on a bagpipe. Now, however, as the vehicle came closer, the humming note began to be lost in the normal, breathy sound of the downward air-rush of the jets, and the total noise became identifiable for what it was.

At the same time, the vehicle itself was growing large enough to be recognized. As with sound, vision was evidently subject to tricks played on it by a corridor of this sort. The still, horizontal layers of air about him, extended into the distance, seemed to have an effect something like that of the heated air of the daytime desert. Even though the vehicle and its rider was now close enough to be seen for what they were - a simple four-place open truck and driver - still their outlines seemed to waver and change as if Hal was looking at a mirage. On impulse he started to walk again, toward the oncoming vehicle, and the outlines began to firm up.

Hal and the truck drew together. As they got close enough that the distortions of air in the corridor no longer bent the truck and its operator into odd shapes, the driver was revealed to be a man at least in his sixties, wearing a gray coverall and a gray cap. Below the cap his face was a remarkably young face grown old. At first glance it looked ancient, but then something almost boyish would glint out from among the lines and leathery skin. Truck and Hal came level, and the driver brought the vehicle to a stop.

Hal also stopped; and looked warily back at the man.

"What are you doing here?" the driver spoke in a half-shout; and his voice was the battered remnant of a tenor.

"Walking," said Hal.

"Walking!" The driver stared at Hal. "How long?"

"I don't know," said Hal. He had to make an effort to remember. "An hour, maybe two."

"An hour! Two hours!" The driver was still in a half-shout, still staring at him. "You know you're nearly twenty kilometers from Halla Station? That's where you're from, aren't you - Halla Station?"

Hal nodded.

"Then where d'you think you're walking to?"

"The next station," said Hal.

"Next station's a hundred and twenty kilometers!"

Hal said nothing. The driver considered him for a few seconds more.

"You'd better get in. I'll take you back to Halla Station. Get in, now!"

Hal considered. A hundred and twenty kilometers without food, and above all without water, was something he could not hope to walk. He went slowly around the rear end of the truck and came up to find the driver trying to lever a large package out of the front seat beside him, into the back part of the vehicle.

Hal pushed it over for him and climbed up into the open seat. The driver started up again.

"I'm Hans Sosyetr," the driver said. "Who're you?"

"Tad Thornhill," said Hal.

"Just got here, didn't you? Brand new, aren't you?"

"Yes," said Hal.

They drove along for a little while in silence.

"How old are you?" said the driver.

"Twenty," said Hal - and remembered he was no longer on Earth - "standard years."

"You aren't twenty," said the driver.

Hal said nothing.

"You aren't nineteen. You aren't eighteen. How the hell old really are you?"

"Twenty," said Hal.

Hans Sosyetr snorted. They drove along in silence for a way. The truck breathed steadily under them.

"What happened?" Sosyetr said. "Some damn thing happened, don't tell me it didn't. You were at the Holding Area and something happened. So what was it?"

"I almost killed a man," said Hal. The sick feeling returned to his stomach as the whole moment came alive for him briefly, once more.

"Did you kill him?"

"No," said Hal. "He was just knocked out."

"What happened?"

"I looked around and saw him starting to hit me with one of those metal mugs from the canteen," Hal said. He was surprised that he was answering this man so freely; but there was now an exhausted feeling coming over him, and, besides, Hans Sosyetr's age and direct questions seemed to make it hard not to answer the older man.

"So?"

"I threw him against a wall. It knocked him out."

"So you started to walk to Moon Transfer?"

"Moon Transfer?" Hal looked at him. "Is that the name of the next station?"

"What else? So you started to walk there. Why? Somebody chasing you?"

"No. They all got up and went out of the cage after it happened. They backed out and went away."

"Backed away?" Sosyetr looked over at him. "Who was this kip you threw against the wall?"

"I don't know," said Hal.

"What's he look like?"

"About my height," said Hal. "No, maybe a little taller. And heavier, of course. About thirty or forty standard years. Dark face, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom."

"And you threw him against a wall?" said Sosyetr. "Bigger and older than you, and you just threw him against a wall. How'd you manage to do a thing like that?"

Hal was suddenly cold and tight inside with caution.

"It just happened," he said. "I was lucky."

"Luckiest twenty-year-old I ever ran into. Why don't you tell me the whole thing?"

Hal hesitated; and then the wall of caution inside him unexpectedly dissolved. He felt a sudden, desperate urge to explain the whole thing to someone, and he found himself telling the older man about everything that had happened, from the time he stepped into the cage and asked the man carving metal if the bunk was empty.

"So," said Sosyetr, when he was done. "Why'd you leave? Why'd you start walking out that way?"

"Those others in the cage had to be friends of whoever it was I threw against the wall," said Hal.

"Friends? In a Holding Area? And I thought you said they ran like rabbits."

"I didn't say they all ran like rabbits… the point is, if they are his friends, they might swear I started it."

"Swear? Who to?"

"The Judge-Advocate."

"What's the Judge-Advocate to do with all this?"

Hal turned his head to stare at the old face beside him. "I hurt a man pretty badly. I could have killed him."

"So? In a Holding Area? They haul people out of there every morning."

Hal continued to stare. After a moment he managed to get his voice to work.

"You mean - nobody cares?"

Sosyetr laughed, a laugh high in his throat.

"Nobody important. What those kips do, or what happens to them, is their own business. Once they get on a payroll, if they make trouble, Judge-Advocate might take an interest."

He looked over at Hal.

"Judge-Advocate's pretty important. About the only law you're likely to have anything to do with is Mine Personnel Manager, or maybe company police."

Hal sat, gradually absorbing this new information. There was a hard core forming in him now around the wariness that the attack in the cage had woken in him.

"If there's no law to speak of in a Holding Area," he said, "it was a good thing I left. There'd be nothing to keep his friends from doing anything they want to me."

Sosyetr laughed again.

"Don't sound to me like friends - or that they'd much want to do anything to you, the way you say they ran off."

"I told you," said Hal. "They didn't run."

"Six of them, and they left? If they went then, I don't think you got much to worry about when you go back."

"No," said Hal. "I'm not going back. Not tonight, anyway."

Sosyetr blew a breath out, gustily.

"All right," he said. "You wait while I unload this stuff in Halla Station, maybe give me a hand unloading, and I'll sign for you to get a room at the Guest House until morning. You can give me a debit tab against your first wages. You want to be back at the Holding Area for job assignment at eight-thirty a.m., though."

Hal looked at the older man with abrupt astonishment and gratitude, but Sosyetr was scowling at the front of the truck with his head cocked on one side as if listening for some noise in the underjets that should not have been there. Hal sat back in his truck seat, a sense of relief making him feel limp. Out of the wariness in him, out of what he had just learned from Sosyetr, from the attack of the man with the metal mug, and from the behavior of the other six men in the cage, a new awareness was just beginning to be born in him.

For the moment, he was only aware of this as a general feeling. But, in a strange way, as it grew and began to come to focus in him, the images of Malachi, Walter and Obadiah seemed to move back a little. Time and experience were already beginning to come between him and his recent memories of them - when he had as yet not really come to accept the fact that they were gone. A sadness too deep for expression moved in him, and held its place there all the rest of the silent ride with Sosyetr into Halla Station.