"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.