"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 t
ransparent 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 foun
d 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.