The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  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.

  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 hi
mself 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.

  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 a
t 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.

  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.