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.
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.