"All right, team leaders," he called, his dry, harsh baritone carrying out over the other sounds of the crowd. "Where are you? Who's short?"
The general crowd moved back, leaving four men standing each a little apart from the other. One was the rawboned fifty-year-old who had spoken to Hal. The others were between that age and thirty; one, a lean, dark man in his forties; one who looked like a somewhat younger version of Sost—a burly blond-headed individual in his thirties; and a short, very wide-bodied and powerful-looking individual with a round head and jet-black hair who could have been any age between thirty and sixty.
"All right. Who's got priority for first assignment?" called the man on the steps. "You—Beson, isn't it?"
"Me," said the lean, dark man.
"All right." The man on the steps looked at a piece of printout in his hand. "Tonina Wayle!"
With a satisfied look on her face, the one woman among the kips, who had been continuing to watch Hal, crossed over to Beson. Several of the men from the crowd behind the four team leaders greeted her as if she was an old acquaintance.
"Next? Charlei?" The burly, Sost-like man nodded. "You draw Morgan Amdur. Morgan Amdur, which one are you?"
The man next to Hal stepped forward a little.
"All right," said the burly man, dryly. The man next to Hal crossed over.
"Anyo Yuan. Step out there!"
The man farthest from Hal among the kips took a pace forward.
"John, he's yours."
"All right," said the wide-bodied leader with the black hair. Anyo Yuan, who was evidently as new to this as Hal, hesitated, looking around him uncertainly.
"Go on over to John Heikkila, Yuan," said the man on the step. "Tad Thornhill."
Hal stepped forward.
"Will, he's yours. Thornhill, your leader is Will Nanne—"
"Don't want him!" The words from the tall, rawboned man were loud enough to echo from the walls of the surrounding buildings. Hal felt the sick drop of stomach that comes with the sudden fall of a fast elevator.
Chapter Seven
"Cause or peremptory?" the gray-haired man was demanding.
"I hear he's a trouble-maker." Once more, Will Nanne's voice was painfully clear over all the open area.
"All right," said the man on the steps. "Thornhill, you step back. Wallace Carter?"
The smallest of the kips stepped out as Hal retreated.
"Yours, Charlei."
"All right."
"Johannes Hevelius."
"Yours, Beson."
"He'll do."
The other two crossed over. Hal was left standing nakedly alone.
"All right. Last call on Thornhill. You're all still short at least one worker. Will Nanne, you don't want him?"
"No."
"Beson?"
"Not for me."
"Charlei?"
"Not for me."
"John? Last chance."
The powerful, short man turned and walked with a rolling gait over to Will Nanne.
"Tell me what you heard about him," he said.
Nanne leaned down and spoke quietly in Heikkila's ear. The shorter man listened, nodded, and turned to the man on the step.
"I'll take him."
Hal moved slowly across the flat surface of the space toward John Heikkila. The powerful-looking leader who had claimed him was talking to Anyo Yuan. Hal stood waiting until the conversation was done, and then Heikkila turned and saw him.
"You come with me," he said.
He led Hal, not toward the bunkhouse, to which everyone else was now moving—the man on the steps having gone back into the Management Office—but in the opposite direction, across to an empty far corner of the enclosure. Then he stopped and turned to face Hal. He looked at Hal in silence for a moment.
"You like to fight?" he said. His voice was tenor-toned, but hard.
"No," said Hal. He was torn between his desire to sound convincing to Heikkila and his attempt to maintain the tight-lipped taciturn image Sost had urged on him.
"That's not what I hear. Will tells me you put a man in the infirmary down at Halla Station Holding Area, yesterday."
"He tried to hit me with a metal mug when I wasn't looking," said Hal. "It was just an accident he ended up in the hospital."
Heikkila stared at him coldly for an extended moment.
"You think you could put me in the infirmary?"
Hal stared at him, suddenly weary with a weariness much older than his years. The other was standing with his face barely eight inches from Hal's. The round, black hair of his head came barely to Hal's eye-level; but his great chest and arms seemed to blot out half the scene behind him. He would carry nearly as much weight again as Hal, in experienced adult bone and muscle; and there was a dangerousness about the way he stood that marked plain upon him the fact that he was something more than a merely ordinarily competent fighter. Someone like this—again, the knowledge, like the answer, came from a time older than Hal's years, older than the lessons of Malachi—would have to be killed, killed quickly, by someone as light and young as Hal if there was to be any hope of stopping him at all. He was waiting now for assurance that Hal would know better than to pick a fight with him. Hal did—but he could not lie in answering. Not if he was to work and live with this man from now on.
"If you came for me the way that man at the Holding Station did," Hal said heavily, "I'd have to try. But I don't want to fight—anybody."
Heikkila continued to stare harshly. Slowly, then, the harshness went and something a little like puzzlement came into the round face.
"It's a good thing, then," he said slowly, at last. "Because there's no fighting on my team. We don't have time to fight. We don't have time for anything but getting the ore out. You understand me?"
Hal nodded. Unexpectedly, he found he wanted to be on this man's team rather than that of any other leader he had seen there.
"If you'll give me a chance," he told Heikkila, "you'll see I'm telling the truth. I'm not a troublemaker."
Heikkila watched him for a second more.
"You calling Will Nanne a liar?"
"I don't know what he heard," said Hal. "But whatever it was he can't have heard it as it happened."
"That so?" Heikkila still stared at him; but the last of the dangerousness Hal had felt like a living presence in the team leader was gone. "Damn if I understand. How big was this kip you laid out?"
"About my height," said Hal, "but older."
"Oh. Real old?"
"Not real old…" said Hal—and then suddenly realized he might be implying too much in an opposite direction. "But he came at me without any warning, from behind. I was just trying to save myself. He hit a wall."
"You're saying he put himself in the infirmary?"
"Yes… in a way."
Heikkila nodded.
"Damn," he said, again. He studied Hal. "How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"Twenty!" Heikkila snorted.
"—next year," said Hal, desperately.
"Sure," said Heikkila. "Sure you are."
He sighed gustily, from the depths of his wide chest.
"All right, come on with me, then," he said. "But it's rough working in the mines. You better know that."
He turned and led the way across the open space toward the bunkhouse.
"That woman, the first one to get picked. She's been a miner, before, hasn't she?" asked Hal, catching up with him.
"Sure," said Heikkila. "Right here at the Yow Dee."
"If she can do it," Hal said, thinking of her relative smallness, "I can."
Heikkila snorted again. It was almost a laugh.
"You think so?" he said. "Well, you just worry about showing me you're willing to work, or you'll be off my team after the first shift. My team bids top quota at this mine. You make it through the first shift and I'll give you two weeks to toughen in. If you don't do it by then—out!"
As they got close to the bunkhouse, Hal found himself at last i
dentifying something that had bothered him from first landing on Coby. Because the habitable area of the planet was underground, there was no real outdoors. Odors and sunlight and a dozen other small, natural signals did not intrude their differences here to remind him that he was no longer on Earth. In spite of this, an unrelenting sense of alienness had been with him from the first moment of his leaving the ship. Now, suddenly, he realized the cause of it.
There were almost no shadows. Here in this open space, a thousand sources of illumination in the cave roof far overhead gave a light that came from all angles and did not change. Even where there were shadows, these, too, were permanent. Here, there would be neither night nor day. It occurred to him suddenly that it might be almost a relief to go down into the mine and get away from this upper area where time seemed forever at a standstill.
They had reached the bunkhouse. He followed John Heikkila in, through a lounge area into a narrow corridor, with lines of doors in each wall, some open but most closed, entrances to what seemed to be a series of single person rooms. They continued along to the end of the corridor before John stopped and let them both into a room which was half again as large as the ones Hal had glimpsed through open doors as they walked down the corridor. This room held not only a bed, a couple of comfortable chair floats and a small writing desk, as the other rooms had, but also a large, business-style desk; and it was at this desk that Heikkila now sat down, extended one square, thick hand, and said the word that Hal was coming to hear even in his sleep.
"Papers."
Hal got them out and passed them over. The leader passed them through the transverse slot in his desk, fingered some code on his pad of keys, beside the slot, and returned the papers to Hal. A hard-copy of a single printed page came up through the slot and he handed this also to Hal.
"You're hired as kip," said John. "One-fiftieth team share and an open charge against all necessary equipment, supplies and living expenses."
He held out his hand to Hal, who gripped it automatically. "I'm John," he said. "You're Tad. Welcome to the team."
"John…" said Hal. He looked at the hard copy in his hand.
"I don't understand," he said. "Doesn't the mine management hire me—"
"We bid and sub-contract here, team by team, just like most of the honest mines do," said John, looking up at him. "You work for the team. I work for the team. The only difference between you and me is I'm leader—I do all the paperwork and make all the decisions. And I get the biggest share."
He got to his feet.
"We're on day shift for the rest of this two-week," he said. "Another pair of three-days. Better set your caller for four-thirty, if you want to make breakfast by five hundred hours and lineup by five-thirty with all your equipment. Come on, I'll show you your place."
He got up from the desk, and led the way out into the hall and down to one of the doors. Opening it, he revealed a room in which everything was neat and ready for occupancy.
"Bunkhouse maintenance takes care of ordinary cleanup," he said. "You make an unusual mess, you settle it with them; whether you clean up yourself, or pay them extra out of your own account. Better settle it yourself, because if they come to me with it, it's going to cost you even more."
Hal nodded. He laid his bag down on the bed. The sheets, he saw, were synthetic fabric knits.
John looked at him. The team leader's dark brown eyes were as bleak as an arctic night; and there was no way to tell if there had ever been any emotion in them or not.
"Better get some sleep," John said. He went out, closing the door behind him.
Hal put his travel bag in the small closet and stretched out on top of the bed's coverings.
He felt in him a desperate need for time to sort out in his own mind what had happened to him. Evidently, the Leader called Will Nanne had gotten word of what had happened at the Holding Area of Halla Station; and if that was so, this world of mines must be an incredible whispering gallery. How could word travel so fast? And why?
He puzzled over it, but found himself drifting off to sleep in spite of the questions in his mind. He was just about lost to slumber when it occurred to him that it might be one of Jennison's sources of income, selling information on the men he assigned to the team leaders at the mines he assigned them to. But Jennison had seemed to want to be on Hal's side, the last time Hal had talked to him—the assignment man had flatly said that he expected them to do some business together in the future. If so, why would he pass on a report that had come very close to costing Hal the job he, Jennison, had assigned him to?
Sost had said that if Hal was not hired, he would be sent back to the nearest Holding Area to be processed again. In this case, would the Holding Area have been Halla Station again? And if so, could Jennison have set the whole thing up to impress Hal with his power to produce or withhold good jobs?
Hal was dropping into sleep with this question, too, unanswered, when a knock at the door jarred him into instant, wary wakefulness.
"Thornhill?" said a woman's voice through the panel. "You in there? Can I come in?"
He got up and opened the door. Tonina Wayle was standing outside; and as if she assumed that the opened door was an invitation, she walked in, closed it firmly behind her and sat on the float closest to his bed.
"Thought I'd say a word or two to you," she said.
She stared at him, almost the way John had, for a second without saying anything more. Then she spoke again.
"You're from Old Earth, aren't you?"
"You can tell?" he said. She laughed, surprising him; for the laugh was not unkindly.
"I can guess—now," she said. "Maybe a lot of the others couldn't. Give you another two weeks here and nobody'll be able to guess."
She sobered, suddenly.
"You've never been in a mine before, have you?" she asked.
"No."
"Well, you're not starting too badly. John Heikkila's one of the best. I'm on Beson McSweeney's team now, so I won't say anything one way or another between them; but you can be proud of being on John's."
"That story," said Hal, "of what I did to that man who jumped me down at the Holding Area—it was an accident he got hurt, actually. I told Heikkila—John—that, but I don't know if he believed me."
"If it's the truth, he'll end up believing it," said Tonina. She ran her eyes over him. "I don't find it too easy to believe, myself. How—"
"I'm twenty," said Hal, quickly. "I just look young for my age."
Tonina shrugged.
"Well, as I say, you'll get a fair shake from John. He wants production, but so does any other Leader," she said. "Did he tell you what you'd be doing?"
"No," said Hal.
"I thought not," she said. "There's none better, but he's been in the mines so long he forgets there're people who don't know. Well, he won't expect much of you your first shift tomorrow, anyway, so there's no need to worry."
"What do I do?"
"You'll be mucking out behind the men with torches," she said. "They'll be cutting ore from the rockface, and it'll be up to you to get what they cut out sorted and back into the carts."
She paused and looked at him.
"You don't even follow that much, do you?" she said. "When you and your team go down into the mine, the skip'll take you to the level your team's working on. After you leave the skip you'll ride the carts—they're like a train without tracks to run on, a train with cars that look like open metal bins. They'll each carry two men at once. You'll ride the carts back through the levels—tunnels to you—until you come to the end of the one where your team's bid to work on a section of the vein. The vein's the way the ore with the metal in it runs through the rock. It never runs level, so you're nearly always working on what's called a stope, that's sort of like a step up or a step down to get at the ore, and you cut out what's there until you have to go on and make another stope."
He nodded, fascinated.
"But what's 'mucking out'?" he asked.
"The top m
en in the team'll be carving rock—working ahead in the stope with laser torches—"
She laughed at the look on his face.
"Yes, real laser torches, right out of three hundred years ago. Here on Coby's the only place on all the worlds where miners cost less than equipment; and a laser's the only safe type of torch for anyone to use for cutting. You'll be behind the top men, gathering up the ore they've cut out of the rock. Just be damn sure you do two things. Keep the gloves of your suit on, no matter how you sweat inside your suit. You start handling a rock barehanded and get burned, you'll know it. And be God damn sure you don't take your helmet off, ever!"
Her last word came with a vehemence that startled him.
"All right," he said. "I won't."
"You'll see the lead people, and maybe some of the others, throwing their helmets back from time to time. But don't you do it. They know when it's safe, because they know what they've just been cutting. You don't. I don't care how miserable it gets inside that headpiece, you keep it on. Otherwise you'll see them take theirs off, you'll take yours off, and then all of a sudden they've got theirs back on; but by then it's too late for you. You'll've inhaled some of the hot gases the torches boil out when they cut the rock; and it's too late."
"I see," said Hal.
"You better." She got to her feet. "Well, I've got to turn in myself. We work a twenty-hour day here, three days on, three days off; and on a three-day stint you better learn to sleep any time you can. You can catch up on your threes-off. I guess John'll keep an eye on you, this first day at least, about taking off your helmet. But nobody can watch you all the time; so you better get in the habit of taking care of yourself."
She went toward the door. Hal stood up.
"Wait—" he said. All his resolution about being taciturn and reserved had slipped away from him. She had been the first person to show anything like kindness to him at this mine, and he felt he could not let her go without knowing her better. "Uh—you used to work at this mine before, John Heikkila said."