"Yes," she replied, with the door half open.
"You must have liked it here, or you wouldn't have come back."
"Wrong," she said, and almost grinned. "The other way around. They liked me here. That meant better shares in a team; and people I could trust, down in the mine, when I worked with them."
"Why'd you leave?"
The humor went out of her face suddenly.
"I left to go down to the main infirmary with someone," she said.
"Your husband?"
"Husband?" For a moment she looked startled. "No, my brother."
"Oh," said Hal. Some inner part of his emotional sensitivities was beginning to fly warning signals, but he blundered on. "Did your brother work here before you did?"
"No. I got him the job." She hesitated. "He was my younger brother. He was bound to go working in the mines after knowing I was. He was about your age when I first got him in here."
She looked at him grimly, again.
"Your real age," she said.
"And he's working in some other mine now?"
Her face was wiped clean of expression.
"He's dead."
"Oh." Hal felt the way someone teetering on the edge of a precipice might feel, hearing the ground break suddenly under his feet. He stammered, lamely, "I'm sorry."
"He took his damn helmet off. I'd told him a million times not to!"
She turned and went out, the door closing hard behind her.
He stood for a long moment, then slowly turned and began undressing for bed.
He woke to the sound of his alarm in the morning, dressed and stumbled down the hall, following the foot-traffic there, until it led him to the dining hall. The room was a place of long tables, loaded with eggs, fried vegetables, breads and what must certainly be processed meats in the forms of sausages and steaks. Evidently people simply took whatever seat was vacant, as they came in. It was not a time of conversation but of stoking up. Grateful for the silence, he surrounded an excellent and gargantuan meal, wistfully realizing even as he finally pushed his plate away from him, that—even with this—he would probably be starving again long before the lunch break came.
Something seemed to have happened overnight. This morning was all business, and the feeling he had had earlier of being shunned by everyone there no longer seemed to hold. No one paid any particular attention to him but no one avoided him, either. As he was leaving the dining hall, John Heikkila came and found him.
"You come with me," John said.
He led Hal off into the crowd of men who were heading for the far end of the bunkhouse. They emerged into a room filled with racks from which hung what looked like heavy cloth coveralls with boots, gloves and helmets, each helmet containing a wide transverse window for vision. John took him to the end of one rack, glanced at him, selected one of the coveralls and threw it at him.
"This is yours from now on," he said. "Come to me when we get off shift and I'll show you how to check it for leaks. You got to check after every shift. Now get it on, and come along with the rest on our team."
Hal obeyed. With the coverall on, it was not as easy to pick out the people he recognized, among the identically-clad figures around him. But John's wide, short shape was unmistakable. Hal followed it; and ended moving in a mass of bodies out through a farther tunnel that echoed and roared to the sound of their thick-soled boots, until they came to an open area where the walls were naked rock. In the center of the floor of the area was the large mouth of a steeply inclined shaft, surrounded by machinery. As Hal watched, there was a puff of what looked like white dust from the hole; and a second later, the cage of some sort of elevator rose through the opening until its floor stood level with that of the stone underfoot around it.
"Everybody in!" said John, his voice booming out with metallic echoes through the speaker valve of his helmet. They crowded clumsily into the cage. There was room for all of them, but they ended up pressed tightly together. Within the enclosed confines of his own suit, Hal could hear the loud sound of his own breathing; as if he panted, except that he had no reason to pant.
"You, Thornhill, stand clear of the side of the skip!"
It was John's voice again, booming out. Obediently, Hal pressed inward upon the bodies about him, and away from the metal bars that separated him from the roughly-cut rock walls of the inclined shaft.
"All right. All down!" boomed John.
The cage dropped suddenly, and kept dropping. Hal pressed against the bodies around him as he almost became airborne. He was already beginning to sweat inside his suit; but, curiously, there was an unexpected feeling of satisfaction in him.
He was being dropped rapidly into the deep rock of Coby. There was no longer any choice about what he was doing. He was committed. He was, in fact, a miner; one of the miners that surrounded him. Their work was the work he would be doing. He could imagine it coming, in time, to be second nature to him; and even now he seemed to feel the beginnings of a familiarity with it.
He had achieved at last what he had begun when he had run from Ahrens and Danno; and from what had happened on the terrace. He had hidden himself from the Others and taken charge of his own life. No one but he had brought himself to this point. No one but he would be directing himself from now on. He would be all by himself, apart and isolated from those around him, which was a sad and lonely thought. But at the same moment, for the first time, his survival and his future would be in his own hands alone. From this moment forward there was no going back. One way or another he would survive—and grow—and finally return to bring retribution to Bleys and the Others.
The realization was cold but strongly attractive. There was almost a feeling of triumph in him. The hidden, oceanic purpose that he felt at times, hidden deep in his mind, seemed content.
Chapter Eight
The skip dropped swiftly between the close, rough-cut rock walls, its interior lights illuminating the brown of their igneous rock, shot through with the occasional flicker of white that was the gold-bearing quartz. It was gold and sometimes silver that they dug for at the Yow Dee Mine, according to the information in Hal's employment papers. He tried to watch the swiftly passing rock to get a glimpse of whether the quartz he was seeing was indeed visibly veined with gold; but the skip was going down too quickly. He found himself up against the bars of the cage and, remembering John Heikkila's orders to stand away from these, stepped guiltily back.
He felt a hard jab in the center of his spine.
"Who in hell you think you're standing on, kip?"
He turned clumsily in his protective suit and found himself looking through his face shield at another face shield and the features of a lean, big-nosed man in not more than his early twenties, slightly shorter than Hal himself, with straight black hair and an angry expression.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I was just—"
"Sorry don't make it. Just stay off my foot."
Hal had not stepped on any foot. The years of exercises had trained him to be aware at all times of the balance of his own body and the character of what he supported himself on. If he had felt a foot beneath his own, he would have shifted clear of it instinctively before his weight had fully come down upon it. He stared into the other face, baffled; and stopped himself just before he protested that the other had imagined being stepped on.
"I will," he said.
The man growled something at him that was lost in its passage through the speaker valve of his suit and the pickups of Hal's. Hal backed a few inches toward the bars and the other turned away.
The skip's floor began to press up against their feet as its descent slowed. It came to a stop, and the gates by which they had entered it swung open. Following the other miners, the last one out because he had been farthest from the gates, Hal stepped from the overhead gloom of the skip shaft into a large, brilliantly-lit, high-ceilinged chamber that seemed to be the terminal for a number of trains of small cars, each train pointing through one of the many openings in the circular wall
of the chamber. The crowd that had filled the skip was now breaking up into smaller groups, each heading toward a different train of waiting cars, in a general mutter of conversation, from which he was sharply conscious of being apart. Some of the cars were already filled with miners from what must be previous skip-loads. With some relief, Hal saw that the black-haired individual who had complained about being stepped on in the skip was headed toward a partly-loaded train beside which Will Nanne waited.
Hal woke suddenly to the fact that he was being left alone by the skip. He looked for John Heikkila and located him, finally, heading with a contingent of miners toward a string of six cars. Hal hurried to catch up.
By the time he did, the others were already climbing into the cars. These were little more than open metal boxes on soft-tired wheels, their four sides sloping outward from above those wheels; wheels, sides and all painted green. Hal was the last to board of the twelve miners who apparently made up the Heikkila team, with the exception of John himself, who had stood frowning by the head car as everyone else climbed in.
"Come on, Tad!" he called, now. "Work-time's counting."
Hal climbed into the next to the last car, which he had to himself, the other miners in John's team having filled the first four cars, with the exception of a space for John in the first car. John, seeing Hal in, climbed in himself, and with a chorus of metallic clankings the train of cars jerked into movement without any command from John that Hal could make out.
They trundled into one of the openings, which turned out to be the end of a tunnel. Here, the sounds of their travel picked up, echoing into a roar cast back by the close rock walls. The floor of the car Hal was in bumped and jibed under him. The tunnel floor was plainly level, but not smooth, as the floor of the larger, terminal chamber had been; and the cars were without springs. Hal, who had sat down unthinkingly in his car, hastily moved to imitate the other miners in the cars ahead, whom he now saw were squatting, knees under their chins. This was a more comfortable, if less balanced way to travel, and he found that it paid to cross his arms and press his hands against the sides of the car to brace himself.
All the same, the ride was fascinating. Now that they were well into the tunnel, the train of cars was picking up speed. They swayed and lurched thunderously along between rocky walls, here less than two meters apart, their way illuminated every ten meters or so by what looked like thousand-year lights stuck to the naked rock of the ceiling, another two meters overhead. Once more, Hal searched the rock to see if he could see any signs of visible gold in the quartz veining. But here, he was not even able to discover any streaks of the quartz itself. He strained his eyes through the window of his suit—and suddenly became aware that in the cars ahead of him all the others had the hoods of their suits thrown back.
He hesitated, remembering Tonina's warning about taking off his helmet, then reminded himself she had been talking about not exposing himself to possibly lethal gases when the other miners were using their torches. Here in the tunnel it ought to be safe, since all the others had theirs off. He threw his own headgear back and peered at the passing rock. But it still appeared as he had seen it through the window of the suit. There was no veining of quartz visible in the granite of the rock.
But it was a relief to have the hood off. The air blowing past his face with the movement of their passage was cold and damp with a faintly musty, acidic smell. He began to have some notion of what it was going to be like to work and sweat sealed in his suit, if this was the way he felt after only a matter of minutes in it, with no exertion.
But there was an eeriness, a magic to being underground like this, rolling through the tunnelled rock at a speed that seemed to threaten to scrape them against the walls on curves. He thought of the story of Peer Gynt in the hall of the Mountain King, from the long poem by Henrik Ibsen; and the music Edvard Grieg had written for that scene thundered and pounded in his memory over the hum of the tires on the rock and the metallic clanking and creaking of the connected cars as they fled down the tunnel.
The cars of the train turned off abruptly into a narrower tunnel. They clanked along another short distance at reduced speed, then came out into a slightly enlarged area where a ramp led from the level they were on to another level about a meter and a half higher, like one step of a giant stairs. The cars rolled up the ramp, straight ahead for a few feet, then up another ramp, and so continued, mounting or descending ramps at small intervals until they stopped so suddenly that Hal was thrown against the front end of his car.
Ahead of the front car they seemed to have come to a solid wall of granite; but since everyone in the cars ahead was getting out, Hal could not be sure at first glance. He climbed out himself and went forward to discover that the front car had come to a stop with its front wheels almost touching a meter and a half rise of rock. It was another of the giant stairsteps, but this time there was no ramp rising to it, and the space at its top barely gave standing room before it reached a wall of stone scored up and down and crosswise until it looked as if someone had made a clumsy attempt at a vertical chessboard.
In an untidy pile at the foot of the meter-and-a-half step were various tools, which the other members of the team were already taking up. Hal watched curiously. Most of the tools were stubby, thick-bodied devices like handguns with thick, short barrels, which Hal guessed to be the torches Tonina Wayles had spoken of; and what seemed to be an equal number of prosthetic-like apparatuses, fitted onto a left-handed glove with the fingers ending in five long, metal spines which curved inward until their points almost touched.
These made no sense. Then, Hal saw those who had put them on beginning to manipulate them. The spines spread open and closed, apparently independently of any action by the gloved fingers. In some cases their needle-sharp points glowed cherry red for a second, then white, then dulled back to ordinary metal color. Each of the miners who put these on tested them several times, looking like creatures half-human, half-insect, groping at thin air; then climbed up onto the step of rock and faced the scored wall.
The rest of the team, except for the six now on the ledge and John Heikkila, had gone back past Hal about ten meters down the tunnel and sat down with their helmets thrown back. John, standing by the front car below the ledge, looked about and saw Hal.
"All right, kip!" he said. "Over here!"
Hal went forward to him, wondering.
"Put your helmet on. Keep it on."
In spite of himself, Hal glanced back at the six other team members who were sitting with their backs to the rock and talking, farther back in the tunnel. He put the helmet on and John's voice came to him through the earphones of his head-covering with the slight unnaturalness of sounds heard over the phone circuits between the two closed suits.
"You don't know anything about this, do you, Thornhill?"
"No," said Hal.
"All right. Your job's to muck out while the torches are working." John reached up and closed his own helmet over his head. Up on the ledge, the six torch-bearers had had their helmets closed for some time. They were standing looking down at John and Hal, obviously waiting.
"Ordinarily, I'd be up there with the first shift with the torches," John said. "But I'll stay down here with you until you get the hang of it. Now, the blocks are going to come off the ledge as they cut them out, until the ledge gets wide enough so they can't sling them all the way back off the edge. When that happens, we'll cut a ramp and you'll be going up to work right behind the torchers. But for now, the blocks'll be coming off the stops to you, and you want to keep your feet out from under. You understand?" He paused.
Hal nodded.
"Yes," he said.
"All right. The other thing to look out for is that the blocks'll still be hot when they come. So don't try to handle them except with tongs. These are tongs…"
He picked up a couple of the spined apparatuses.
"Hold out your hands."
Hal did, and John pushed one of the devices onto the end of each of H
al's gloves. There was a hand-shaped indentation in the end of each device, Hal discovered, into which his suit glove fitted; thumb, forefinger, middle finger, and the last two fingers as a unit—each slipped into one of the four indentations. Experimentally, he flexed the fingers of his right hand and the four clawlike extensions spread and closed in response.
"Waldos," he said.
"No, they're tongs," said John. "Now you use them to pick up the blocks. Watch me. All right, Torchers, get moving!"
He was fitting a pair of the devices onto the gloves of his own suit as he spoke. He barely had them on before the hiss and crackle of the torches burning into the rock exploded up on the ledge; and a moment or two later one of the torchers kicked a block of granite about the size of a grapefruit back over the edge to fall almost at Hal's feet. Easily, John scooped it up in the four pincers of his tongs. He held it out before Hal.
"Don't touch it," he said. "Just look at it. See the vein in it?"
Hal looked. He could see a line of quartz streaking through the piece of granite.
"Is there gold in that?" he asked, fascinated.
"You're damn right," said John, "and probably some silver, but you can't see traces of that. Look, you see the color in the quartz, there?"
Hal squinted at the quartz, uncertain as to what he should be looking for.
"I think so," he said. John tossed the block into the first car.
"You'll learn," he said.
Several more chunks of rock carved from the wall had landed at their feet while they had been talking. John scooped them up, showed them momentarily to Hal and then tossed them into the car. The next one, however, he again held out to Hal for more extended examination.
"See?" he said. "No veining. Those you ditch."
With a flip of his tongs, he threw the last block over against the wall of the tunnel.
"That's sorting," he said, continuing to work steadily now, for now the blocks were coming in a continuous stream off the ledge. "It'll take you a while to learn it, but you'll get it. The team only gets paid for the good ore it brings back. Any dead rock just takes up space in the cars and cuts our production for the day. But don't sweat it to begin with. Just do the best you can for now. The quicker you learn, though, the better off the team's going to be and the more the rest of us are going to like you. Now, you try it with some of these blocks."