It was the beginning of a breakneck trip to Port. At more than a hundred kilometers of tunnel distance from the Yow Dee, Sost stopped, put Hal in back, covered him up with some old tarpaulins, and pulled that truck aboard a branch of the subway at the next station they came to. Half an hour later the two of them walked into a small bar in Port, one which attempted to look something like a cross between a rathskeller and a jungle clearing. Tonina was already there, waiting for them at a table.
Hal looked at her searchingly as they sat down with her. The years of her marriage seemed not to have made any real difference in her, as far as his eye could tell. Somehow, he had expected that they would.
"Thank God!" she said as they sat down. "I was beginning to think you hadn't made it."
"I couldn't risk getting on the subway until I was clear," said Sost. "I had to cover more ground on fans than they'd think I could cover, before we could risk taking the train."
He chuckled.
"Nothing like a reputation for being slow and sure," he said. "Always knew the time would be it'd come in handy."
"Can I ask what all this is about, now?" Hal said.
"Take your drinks, first. Make it look like you're drinking," said Tonina.
She had been coding at the table waiter as they sat down; and three glasses of beer had already risen to the surface of the table some seconds since. Hal and Sost obeyed her.
"You're going to have to get off Coby," she told Hal, once he had raised the glass to his lips and set it down again. "Someone either wants you, or wants you dead. I don't know which, and I don't want to know who; but you're going to have to move fast!"
Hal stared at her. Then his gaze moved to Sost. Even though Hal never explicitly told the older man his name, he had accepted the fact that Sost would have seen it on the credit papers Hal had entrusted to him.
"You told her?" he said.
"Her and thirty-forty other people," Sost answered. "Somebody's got to look out for you."
He grinned a little at Hal.
"Don't take it so hard," Sost said. "I didn't let on to anyone, including Tonina, that this Hal Mayne had anything to do with you. But I put the name out in what you might call a sort of spider web to catch any questions about him showing up here on Coby."
"Only Sost has that kind of connections," said Tonina, tartly. "You're lucky."
"But that means thirty to forty people who can tell whoever's asking that they've heard the name," said Hal.
"Not before they tell me," answered Sost. "And that gives us the head start we need. As Tonina says, I've been around here long enough to have connections - good connections." He stared for a second directly into Hal's eyes.
"You figure Tonina'd tell whoever was interested about Hal Mayne before she'd tell me?"
"No," said Hal, ashamed.
Hal sat, saying nothing. A thousand times in his mind he had imagined the moment in which he would learn that the Others had concluded he was on Coby; but the present scene was one he had never imagined. He had taken for granted that when it came time for him to run again, he would have been the one to have discovered danger close upon him; and he would have some idea of the situation in which he was caught. But now, it seemed everyone else knew more than he did.
"What happened?" he asked at last. "How'd you find out someone was looking for me?"
"An inquiry into the whereabouts of someone named Hal Mayne came into the Record Section of the Company Headquarters where my husband's in charge. It ended up as just one on a list of names sent to him for authorization to release information from Company records, to whoever was inquiring about the names. He recognized your name and checked with me, first. I told him to destroy your records and all record of the inquiry. He's done that. John will destroy all records at the Yow Dee; and no one there will think twice. Miners quit without warning every day."
"What do I owe your husband?" said Hal. Nearly three years had taught him a great deal of how business was done on Coby.
"Nothing," said Tonina. "He did it because I asked him to."
"Thank you," said Hal. "And thank him for me. I'm sorry I suggested - "
"Never mind that," said Tonina. "Then I got in touch with Sost and Sost looked into it."
She nodded at Sost and Hal looked over at the older man.
"I did a little checking through some friends of mine," Sost said. "The Port marshals are all looking for you, all right; and they mean business. Someone high up's either had his arm twisted or been paid off handsomely."
"But if they can't find my records?"
"Even with no records," said Sost. "It looks like they know, or they've guessed the time you came to Coby. They do know what mines were hiring then. They're doing things at each of those mines - somebody from off-Coby's coaching them, is my guess - that they think'll smoke you out. They don't know what you look like or anything about you; but it figures they know some things about how you'll act when other things happen. That arrest and execution of Neif was aimed at smoking you out."
Hal felt a chill. He remembered the power of the arms holding him from crying out, from trying to do something before the cone rifles could fire.
"That's why you and John were right behind me?" he asked.
Sost nodded.
"Right. I just got there a second before. There wasn't time to explain things to you. We just went after you and did what we had to. Lucky John was handy. I'm not as young as I used to be."
"All right," said Tonina. "Now you know. Let's get down to how we get you off-world. The faster you move, the safer you'll be."
Sost nodded. He reached inside his shirt and came out with three packets of papers, which he dropped on the table before Hal.
"Take your pick," he said. "I've been spending some of that credit of yours. Jennison - you remember Jennison?"
Hal nodded. He had never forgotten the man in charge at the Holding Station. Apparently Jennison had known what he was talking about when he had said that Hal would be doing business with him later.
"This is his main business. Running a Holding Station lets him pick up a lot of things. But papers are the most valuable."
"How does he get them?" Hal asked.
"Sometimes someone comes through with more than one set and needs money. Sometimes somebody dies and the papers don't get turned in. Lots of ways."
"And never mind that," said Tonina. "Hal, Jennison sent you three different sets to look at. Pick the one you can get the most use out of."
"And I'll take the other two back to him," added Sost.
Hal picked up the packets one by one and looked at them. All were identifications and related papers for men in their early twenties. One was a set from New Earth, a set from Newton, and another from Harmony, one of the two Friendly Worlds. He remembered - in fact, his mind had moved back in time; and, evoked by his early training in recall, he seemed to hear the voices of his tutors again as he had conceived them in his room of the Final Encyclopedia. In particular, he heard the voice of Obadiah saying that there were people of his on Harmony who would never give Hal up.
"This one," said Hal.
He looked more closely at the Harmony packet as Sost took the other two back. Its papers were for someone twenty-three years old and named Howard Beloved Immanuelson, a tithing member of the Revealed Church Reborn, with an occupation as a semantic interpreter and a specialty in advising off-world personnel divisions of large companies. In one sense, these particular papers were a fortunate find. It was only in the past thirty years that the two Friendly Worlds had - almost inexplicably - reversed a centuries-old pattern of behavior that held those of their natives who chose work off-world as being less than respectable in religious conviction and fervor.