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 ar
e 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.
Chapter Six
The Guest House in Halla Station proved to be a form of barracks for those who were not employees of local companies or offices. Hal learned, somewhat grimly, that the Guest House had been open to him all the time, since he had credit to pay for it. The Holding Area was only for job seekers, or former miners rehiring who had no credit. Everything at the Area, including the beer in the canteen, was free. This also included the package of food Jennison had charged him for. The Holding Area, in short, was for the Coby version of indigents—or those who knew no better, like himself.
"Hell," said Sosyetr, as they sat over a late meal in the clean and comfortable meal room of the Guest House, "didn't you ever think to ask the interviewer at Halla Station what you could buy?"
"No," said Hal. "I just took for granted he'd tell me whatever I needed to know. I was stupid."
"Sure," said Sosyetr, nodding. "You were stupid, all right. Stupidest twenty-year-old I ever met."
Hal looked up quickly from the chunk of processed meat he was cutting. But if there had been a grin on the older man's face, he had been too slow to surprise it.
He finished eating—Sosyetr had already finished a much smaller meal and was sitting with a cup of Coby coffee, watching him—and pushed the plate aside.
"Sost," he said, for the other had said this was the version he preferred to hear of a last name most people mispronounced—and he was not partial to Hans—"what happens from the time I report for job assignment to roll-call?"
This time he did see Sost grin.
"Going to ask some questions now?"
"From now on," said Hal.
Sost nodded.
''All right," he said. He drank from his coffee cup and set it down again. "You'll show up there tomorrow morning and everybody who can stand on their feet'll be out in front of the office. Agent'll call the roll, mark off anyone not there, and hand out assignments on the basis of the work orders he got since roll call the morning before. That's about it."
"Then what? What if I'm called for a work assignment?"
"Then you get travel papers with directions and t
ravel passes credited against your new job; and you take off for whatever company needed you enough to hire you."
"And when I get there?"
"You'll be assigned to a team on one of the shifts—unless the team captain throws you back. If that happens, they'll bounce you around until they find a team that'll take you."
"What if no one wants me?"
"You?" Sost looked at him. "Not likely. But if they did the company'd give you a week's wages and dump you at the nearest Holding Area. You get to start all over again."
He got up to get himself another cup of coffee from the wall dispenser and sat back down at the table they were sharing.
"Sost," said Hal, "what are the things that make you think I'm younger than twenty?"
Sost stared at him for a long moment.
"You want to know what to look out for?" he said at last. "I'll tell you. The first thing is, keep your mouth shut. Sure, I know your voice changed four-five years ago; but every time you say something you talk like a kid. Hell, you think like a kid. So don't talk, if you can help it."
Hal nodded.
"All right," he said. "I won't."
"And take your time," said Sost. "Don't start talking to everyone you meet like he was an old friend. I don't mean act suspicious all the time, either. Just—hold back a little. Wait a bit. Don't go jumping around with your body, either. You get a little older, you won't have that kind of energy to waste. Sit still when you sit. But the big thing is—watch that talking. Just get in the habit of not doing it."
"You talk a fair amount," Hal said.
"There you go," Sost said. "That's just the sort of thing a kid would say. That's just the wrong thing. What's it change things for you, what I do? As far as me talking, I know what to say. I can make noise with my mouth all day long and not give anything away I don't want to. You, you give everything you've got away, every time you open your lips."
Hal nodded.
"All right," he said.