He had not been challenged physically again since his first fight with Neif. The miners on his team, the staff, the business people, the inhabitants of the entertainment places he frequented in Port, all seemed to like him and get on well with him. But he made few casual friends and no more close friends. His regular visits to Port usually were in the company of John, Sost, or one or two of his own team members, when they were in the company of anyone he knew at all. Word about Tonina came to him from time to time, but he had not seen her since she had left the Yow Dee to get married.
More and more, he had fallen into the habit of prowling about in solitary fashion, walking for hours in the Port streets and corridors and dropping in on drinking establishments as the whim took him.
These particular establishments began to seem more and more alike as he got to know them. They all catered to the hunger of the Coby-dwellers for sight of an open sky, for a world with atmosphere and with the growing things of a planetary surface. Whatever else their interior was like, it would almost always offer the illusions of sky and a natural body of water, plus growing plants, real or illusory.
Away from their work the Coby miners were lonely and nostalgic individuals. He had been sitting in one of the bars one time when a miner there passed out, leaving unattended the stubby stringed instrument on which he had been playing; and Hal had discovered for himself the usefulness of such a tool.
Walter InTeacher had taught him the basics of music and given him a nodding acquaintance with several instruments, including the classic Spanish guitar. It had not been hard to retune the stubby device in the bar to a more familiar mode and play it. He discovered that the miners would listen to him as long as he wanted to sing, provided the songs were ballad-like and simple.
After that, with Sost's help, he managed to buy a real guitar to carry around on his bar expeditions. In a sense, that purchase marked his trading of the making of individual friends for the making of friends with a general audience, wherever he went - and this was a change that was becoming necessary.
The reason was that as he grew up it became harder for him to talk on the ordinary level of what passed for conversation among the miners, particularly on their times-off. He had begun to find that whenever he talked he had a tendency to make the others around him uncomfortable. They were not interested in the same topics that he was, or in the questions to which his mind naturally drifted. The singing became something he could hide behind and still be social.
More than that. Once fully launched, he began almost without thinking to start putting much of the classical poetry he knew by heart to music. Much of it was singable - or could be made singable with a little surgery on the words and lines. From there it was only a short step further to start writing poetry again himself, in forms that could be sung.
It was an illusion, he told himself, to think that great art could not find its expression in the simplest of materials. The most complex feelings and thoughts were, in the end, only human feelings and thoughts, and as such, by definition could be rendered in the commonest and most familiar of terms, and still carry the overburden of their theme.
"Your songs are always different," said a hostess in one of the bars to him, one evening.
He read the message she hardly knew she was giving him. She, too, found him different enough to be attractive from a distance, but too different for comfort, up close. Hostesses like herself were only to be found in the luxury bars and the demand for them among the customers anywhere far exceeded the supply. But they flocked around Hal. Flocked… and went away again. Wistfully, he watched them go. He would have given far more than they dreamed to find even one of them with whom he could discover again the closeness he had experienced with Tonina after his fight with Neif. But it was never there. He did not know what was missing and, as far as he could discover, the hostesses did not know either - or perhaps they knew, but could not tell him.
He found himself growing more and more apart from those around him, with the exception of John and Sost; but did not know what to do about it. Then Neif came back into all their lives.
Neif had left the Yow Dee shortly after losing the fight with Hal. He had evidently worked at a number of mines before drifting back to the Yow Dee, where he found a spot on the team of someone who had not been a leader when Hal had first come there. The shift his team was on was one nearly eight hours at variance with the shift Hal's was on, and Hal hardly saw him. Then, without any hint of any such thing being in the wind, marshals from the headquarters of the company that owned Yow Dee mine showed up and arrested Neif on charges of stealing pocket gold.
Pocket gold was the gold occasionally found in the mines in size larger than that of the tracing in the veins. In effect, pocket gold was any small nugget. The charge against Neif was that he had been doing this for some time.
In all these years, Hal had forgotten how different the legal pattern was on Coby. It was a shock to find himself being herded out of the bunkhouse without warning, the morning after the arrest, by what seemed to be a small army of company marshals equipped not with sidearms, but with cone rifles.
"What's going on?" he asked the first person he had a chance to speak to, one of his own team members.
"They're going to shoot him," said the miner, a heavy-set, dark man looking stupid with sleep and shock.
"They can't…" Hal's voice stopped in his throat. Now that they were outside, they could see Neif being brought from the office building and positioned with his back to the slag pile on the far side of the staging area.
Neif's hands were not tied, but he moved awkwardly as if in a daze. He was left where he had been placed by the two marshals who had brought him out. Three other marshals with cone rifles formed a line facing him and about ten meters from him, and put their rifles to their shoulders with the unanimity of people who were used to working together.
Something like an earthquake of emotion moved suddenly in Hal. He opened his mouth to cry out; and at the same time started to plunge forward. But neither shout nor plunge was finished.
From behind, two arms like hawsers folded about him and the powerful hand of one of those arms closed about his throat, cutting off his voice. There was nothing amateurish about the actions of those arms and that hand. He stamped backwards with his right heel to break an ankle of whoever was holding him and free himself; but his heel found nothing, and in almost the same second the fingers at his throat pressed on a nerve. He found himself fading into unconsciousness.
He came to, it seemed, only a second later. He was still held - but now held upright - by the powerful arms. Neif lay still, face down on the ground of the staging area. The marshals were bringing up a closed truck for the body, and the crowd was melting away, back into the bunkhouse. He turned furiously and saw facing him not only John, but Sost.
"You just keep your mouth shut," said Sost, before Hal could get a word out, "and come with me."
The years with Malachi had taught Hal when not to stop and ask questions. There was in Sost's expression and voice a difference he had never seen or heard in the truck driver before. He followed without a word, accordingly, as Sost led the way around the end of the cookhouse to where his truck was standing. John had followed them to the truck and stood watching as Sost and Hal climbed into it.
"See you in town," said John, as Sost lifted the truck on its fans.
"With luck, maybe," said Sost. He turned the vehicle and drove off, away from the Yow Dee.
He took the corridor toward the nearest station, but branched off before they reached the station, down a tunnel Hal was not acquainted with. For the first time Hal saw him open up the truck. They hummed down the corridor at a speed that turned its walls into tan blurs; and Hal found himself marvelling that someone as old as Sost could have the reflexes to keep the truck from scraping the nearby walls at that speed.