The only really acceptable work for a church member on other worlds was that of mercenary soldier - and then only if you had been sent out at the orders of your church or district. Three hundred years of starving for the interstellar credit that could be gained only by natives who worked on other worlds had not shaken this attitude. But in the last thirty-odd years those from Harmony and Association were suddenly cropping up on all the other inhabited planets in considerable numbers. They were even going to worlds of other cultures with the approval of their authorities, to study for such occupations as that of a semantic interpreter. It was a change that had puzzled the Exotic ontogeneticists, Hal remembered Walter the InTeacher telling him. No adequate socio-historical reason for the sudden change in behavior had yet been established.
It followed therefore that, as Immanuelson, Hal could be expected by fellow-Friendlies to be one of a younger, newer breed, infected with off-world habits and ideas, and not necessarily aware of recent events on Harmony - which could help cover any inconsistencies in his masquerade as the other man. "Off-world," as currently used on the two Friendly planets, meant any world but those of Harmony and Association.
Some work, he now saw, had already been done to adjust the papers to him. Each of the spaces for his identifying thumbprint were blank. He proceeded to press down on each of these sensitized squares in turn and watch the whorls of his thumbprints leap into visible existence on the papers as he took his hand away. He was now officially Howard Immanuelson. There was a strange little emotion involved in acknowledging the change. It was a feeling as if some part of him had been lost. Not the Hal Mayne part that was basic to him; but that part of him that had come into existence on Coby, and was now officially being removed from existence.
He put the papers into an inside pocket.
"Here's your credit," Sost said, passing over another set of papers, "reassigned to your Harmony name. There's still a lot left."
"Can you trust Jennison?" Hal asked, taking the credit papers.
"Wouldn't have dealt with him, otherwise," Sost said. "Don't worry. Freight Handlers has a lock on him."
"Can Freight Handlers be trusted?" Hal said; and stared a little as the other two laughed.
"Sost was Freight Handlers before Freight Handlers was invented," Tonina said. "He may not have the office and the title, but you don't need to worry about Freight Handlers as long as he's here."
"I just kept my hand in," said Sost, "and over the years you get to know people. Now, give me your own papers."
"We'd better destroy them," said Hal, passing them over.
"That's the idea. Now," said Sost, as he tucked the Tad Thornhill papers away. "We'll leave here, you and me. You've got passage on a ship to Harmony, and a ticket to Citadel, there. You know anything about Citadel?"
"I studied about it, once," said Hal. "It's a fair-sized city on the continent they call South Promise, in the low latitudes of the temperate zone."
"That's right; and it's the one city-sized place on Harmony this Immanuelson's work record doesn't show him as having been in. Once there you're on your own." Sost stood up, and Hal and Tonina followed suit. "We'll get you on board with the freight and slip the whole business of outgoing customs. Come on."
Hal turned toward Tonina. She had made him uncertain about trying to touch her; but now he would never see her again. He put his arms around her awkwardly and kissed her; and she held him strongly for a moment.
"Get going," she said, pushing him away.
He went out with Sost. Looking back he saw her still standing upright and motionless by the table, watching them go.
Chapter Thirteen
Hal sat in the jitney taking him down from orbit around Harmony to the city of Citadel. Curiously, in this moment of stepping into a totally new world, it was not his three years on Coby that were beginning to lose reality in his mind, it was the four days of interstellar space travel, with the frequent psychic shocks of the phase shifts that had brought him here. The trip had had the feel of unreality to it; and now he found it also difficult to think of the Friendly World to which he was rapidly descending as real; although he knew it would be so, for him, soon enough.
Something else was filling his mind and driving out anything else but the years just passed on Coby. For the first time in his life, on the trip from there to here, he had come to a stark understanding of why his three tutors had insisted that he go to the mines and work, instead of hiding on one of the Younger Worlds. Their reason had not been merely a matter of shielding him from the eyes of the Others until he was old enough to protect himself. No, the important factor in their decision had lain in what they had said about his need to grow up, to learn about people before he ventured forth to face his enemies.
Only now, after three years on the mining world, he could realize that he had been - up until the moment of the deaths of Obadiah, Malachi and Walter the InTeacher - a hothouse plant. He had been raised as an unusual boy, by unusual people. He had had no real, day-to-day experience or understanding of ordinary men and women; those who were the root stock of the race itself - those from among whom the unusual people like himself were occasionally produced, simply to be taken and used by the historic pressures of their time. Until Coby, such ordinary people had been as unknown to him as if they had been creatures from the furthest stars. Their goals had never been his goals, their sorrows his sorrows, their natures his nature. His lack of understanding of these differences had been an unacceptable defect; because now it came home to him, unsparingly, that it was these, not the gifted ones like himself and those who had brought him up, whom he would be fighting for in the years ahead.
It had been necessary that he begin by realizing his place among such ordinary people, that he learn to understand and feel with and for them, before he could be of any use to the race as a whole. For they were the race. In the mines he had come face to face with this. He had discovered it in Tonina, in John Heikkila, in Sost - in all of them. He had found unremarkable people there he could care about, and who cared about him - regardless of his abilities. People who, in the end, had made his escape possible when alone, with all his special talents, he would have failed.
The remembrance of that escape now made his eyes burn with regret that he had never told Sost, at least, how much the old man had come to mean to him. The manner of their leave taking had been almost casual. They had driven Sost's truck out to the ship he was now in, ostensibly to deliver a large but lightly sealed package, with Hal seated beside Sost and dressed in the gray coveralls of a freight handler. Together, they had carried the package in through the ship's loading entrance to the number one hold and been met there by the Chief Purser, who had evidently been expecting them.
At his direction Hal had taken off the coveralls, dropped them in a refuse container, and taken leave of Sost. He had followed the Chief to a portside cabin, been ushered in, and left with directions not to leave the cabin until after the first phase shift. He had obeyed; and, in fact, had stayed close to his cabin through the first third of the trip. The solitary hours had offered an opportunity for him to practice casting himself mentally into the persona of a tithe-payer of the Revealed Church Reborn.
He had the role model of Obadiah to draw on. Growing up with his three tutors, he had come, instinctively, to imitate each of them. To be like Obadiah, he had only to imagine himself as Obadiah - but the trick down on the surface of Harmony would be to carry that bit of imagination in his mind so constantly that even under moments of stress he would not slip out of character.