"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 identifying 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.