The marshal stepped back. Sost lifted the truck on its fans and drove off.
"Who's Amma Wong?" asked Hal, as they turned the corner of the block onto one of the arterial roads.
"Director of Freight Handling at the Port here," said Sost.
"You know her?"
"I work for her."
"Oh," said Hal, not much wiser than he had been before his first question. His stomach once more reminded him of its existence. "Could we stop and pick up something to eat?"
"Hungry?" Sost looked sideways at him. "Once I park the truck on the freight car, you can get something to eat from the machine on the subway train."
Hal stared at him.
"You're taking us all the way back to the mine?" he said. "You're going to put the truck and all on the subway?"
"Right," Sost nodded.
They drove along in silence for a minute or two.
"Thought you'd have gone home with Tonina," said Sost.
"She left early," said Hal. "What made you think I'd leave early when it's my party?"
Sost chuckled.
"Drinkingest twenty-year-old I ever saw," he said, half to himself. He looked at Hal. "Thought she wanted to talk to you privately about something."
"She did?" Hal stared back at him. "But she didn't say anything to me. When did she tell you she wanted to talk to me privately?"
"Saw her in Port, here, last week."
"Last week?" Hal shook his head. He had not thought Tonina had been in Port in any of the weeks recently. "What did she want to talk to me about?"
"Didn't say," answered Sost.
Chapter Twelve
Hal woke the next morning to the alarm of his chronometer and only by the sternest exercise of will got himself out of bed. By the time he was showered and dressed for work, however, he felt a great deal better.
He was digging into breakfast in the cookhall, when he became aware of Davies, across the table staring at him. Davies' face was pale and his eyes were red.
Hal slowed down in the face of that stare and finally stopped completely.
"What is it?" he asked Davies.
"I never," said Davies, "in my life saw a man with a hangover eat like that."
Hal felt embarrassed, as he usually did when people paid attention to his appetite.
"I'm hungry this morning," he said. It was his usual excuse when the matter came up - hungry this morning, this noon, or this evening.
"How do you feel?" demanded Davies.
Hal stopped to consider himself.
"Sort of washed out," he said. Actually, there was a curious feeling in him, a sort of feeling of satisfied exhaustion as if he had just finished Casting out a gang of inner devils.
"How about your head - your headache?"
"I don't have a headache," Hal said.
Davies continued to stare at him.
"And you're really hungry."
"I guess I am," said Hal.
By this time the rest of the miners within earshot, most of them fellow team members, were listening. Hal had the uncomfortable feeling that once more he had done something to mark himself as different from the rest of them.
He forgot the matter, however, as the day's work started. He was still a complete beginner with the cutting torch and it took all his efforts to do a full shift of work. In the days and weeks that followed that began to improve. It came slowly, but eventually he could cut in patterns that meshed efficiently with those of his neighbors on either hand at the rock face, and still keep up with the rest of them.
Some days before he reached that point, however, Tonina had rapped on his door late after one shift was over and drawn him out for a walk on the staging area; now, between shifts, deserted.
Under the high, eternal, ceiling lights of the cavern they paced back and forth together and she looked at him strangely.
"I'm leaving the Yow Dee," she said. "Moving to Port. I was going to tell you about it, the night you made torcher, but I didn't get a chance to talk to you."
"Sost said you might have wanted to talk to me."
"He did?" Her voice was sharp. "What did he say?"
"Just that he didn't know why. I thought," Hal said, "I shouldn't just go asking, that you'd tell me yourself if you really wanted to."
"Yes," her voice and eyes softened. "You would think like that."
They walked a little more in silence.
"I'm getting married," she said. "I almost got married a couple of months ago. That's why I came to the Yow Dee here. I wasn't sure. Now I am. I'm marrying a man named Blue Ennerson. He's in Headquarters, at Port."
"Headquarters?" Hal said.
She smiled a little.
"Yow Dee and about three dozen other mines and Port businesses are all part of one company," she said. "The Headquarters for that company's in Port. Blue's Section Chief of the Record Section."
"Oh," said Hal. He felt inadequate, and not only because of his youth. He had learned that most women miners, who were a minority among the other mine workers, tended to marry upwards, into staff or management. Tonina was evidently going to be one such.
"I'm leaving tomorrow, "she said.
"Tomorrow?"
"I didn't have a chance to tell you before this. You were either working, eating or sleeping, since you've become torcher."
"Yes."
There was a bleakness in him. He felt he should say something, but had no idea what was said on occasions like this. Eventually, they went back to their rooms; and before he was up the next morning she was gone.
He had expected that the mine would be hollow and empty without her, and it was - at first. But as the months wore on, it became home in almost a real sense and the other team members, although they changed frequently as some left and new workers joined, became almost the family he had imagined them the day he made torcher. At the same time, he was becoming skilled at his work. Within six months he was offered a chance to compete for the position of leader in the voting among the miners to form a new team. To his own surprise, he won; and it was exactly as Tonina had predicted. He found he was expected to make the whole mine drunk. This time he did not have to drink with everyone else; but he did have to foot the bill.
Happily, there were still the funds he had brought to Coby, to draw upon. The next time he had seen Sost after the night in Port, he had asked the older man's advice on a way to hide his funds; and it had ended as a scheme whereby he transferred them, in installments over a period of months, to Sost himself, who set them up in an account under his own name.
"You're going to have to trust me," said Sost, bluntly. "But then, you're going to have to trust somebody if you really want to hide those credits. If you find somebody else you feel safer with, just let me know and we'll make the shift. Won't hurt my feelings."
"I don't think I'm likely to find anyone else," said Hal.
It was a true prediction. As a team leader, he was set a little at arm's length, necessarily, from the others on his team. Also, he was thrown more in the company of the other leaders like John and Will. He found that he welcomed the privacy this gave him as he continued to grow up.
And he was, indeed, continuing to grow up. The pretense that he had been twenty when he came had to contend with the fact that he continued growing physically, in all ways. Not only did he put on weight and muscle; in the next two and a half years his height shot up, until by the time he was nearly nineteen he was over two meters in height and evidently still growing.
Still, he looked young. He was still, in spite of his height, in the thinness of youth. The width of his shoulders and the mine-developed strength of his long arms did not make up for the youngness of his face and a certain innocence that also seemed to be an inescapable part of him.