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Okies,” he said. “You’d all starve if you didn’t know how to mine and crack
oil for food. Now give me a straight answer before I decide you’re a vagrant
and get tough.”
Amalfi said evenly,sword of the new world vis, “Our business is petroleum geology. Naturally we’ve
developed some side lines since we’ve been aloft, but they’re mostly natural
outgrowths of petroleum geology-on which subject we happen to be experts. We
trace and develop petroleum sources for planets which need the material.” He
eyed the cigar judiciously and thrust it back between his teeth.
“Incidentally, Lieutenant,
ITj
you’re wasting your breath threatening us with a vagrancy charge. You know as
well as we do that vagrancy laws are specifically forbidden by article one of
the Constitution.”
“Consitution?” the cop laughed. “If you mean the Earth Constitution, we
do^’ti’Tiave much contact with Earth out here. These are thef Acolyte stars,
see? Next question: have you any money?”
“Enough.”
“How much is enough?”
“If you want to know whether or not we have operating capital,chronicles of spellborn gold, our City
Fathers will give you the statutory yes or no answer if you can give them the
data on your system that they’ll need to make the calculation. The answer will
almost assuredly be yes. We’re not required to report our profit pool to you,
of course.”
“Now look,” the lieutenant said. “You don’t need to play the space lawyer with
me. All I want to do is get off this town. If you’ve got dough, I can clear
you-that is, if you got it through legal channels.”
“We got it on a planet called He,tcos gold, some distance from here. We were hired by
the Hevians to rub out a jungle which was bothering them. We did it by
regularizing their axis.”
“Yeah?” the cop said. “Regularized their axis, eh? I guess that must have been
some job.”
“It was,sotnw vis,” Amalfi said gravely. “We had to setacetus on He’s left-hand
frannistan.”
“Gee. Will your City Fathers show me the contract? Okay, then. Where are you
going?”
“To garage; we’ve a bum spindizzy. After that, out again. You people look like
you’re well past the stage where you’ve much use for oil.”
“Yeah, we’re pretty modernized here, not like some of these border areas you

The pistols told Amalfi several other things that he needed to know. Their
existence here could mean only one thing: that the Acolytes had had a recent
contact with one of those pollinating bees of the galaxy, an Okie city.
Furthermore, the probability was not high that it had been the sole Okie
contact the Acolytes had had for a long time, as Amalfi might otherwise have
assumed.
It took years to build up the technology to mass produce meson pistols so that
ordinary cops could pack them. It took more years still, years spent in fairly
frequent contact with other technologies,tcos gold, to make adoption of the pistol
possible at all. The pistol, then, confirmed unusually frequent contact with
other Okies, which, in turn,swg credits, meant that there was a garage planet here, as
Amalfi had hoped.
The pistol also told Amalfi something else, which he did
not much like. The meson pistol was not a good antipersonnel weapon.
It was much more suitable for demolition work.
The cops could still swagger in Amalfi’s office, but they could not stomp
effectively. The floor was too thickly carpeted. Amalfi never used the
ancient, plushy office, with its big black mahogany desk and other antiques,
except for official occasions. The control tower was his normal on-duty
habitat, but that was closed to non-citizens.
“What’s your business?” the police lieutenant barked at Hazleton. Hazleton,swg power leveling,
standing beside the desk,tales of pirates money, said nothing, but merely jerked his head toward
where Amalfi was seated, and resumed looking at the big screen back of the
desk.
“Are you the mayor of this burg?” the lieutenant demanded.
“I am,” Amalfi said, removing a cigar from his mouth and looking the
lieutenant over with lidless eyes. He decided that he did notejike the
lieutenant. His rump was too big. If a man is going to be barrel-shaped, he
ought to do a good job of it, as Amalfi had. Amalfi had no use for top-shaped
men.
“All right, answer the question, Fatty. What’s your business?”
“Petroleum geology.”
“You’re lying. You’re not dealing with some isolated, type Four-Q podunk now,
Okie. These are the Acolyte stars.”
Hazleton looked with pointedly vague puzzlement at the lieutenant, and then
back to the screen, which showed no stars at all within any reasonable
distance.
The by-play was lost on the cop. “Petroleum geology isn’t a business with

Okies on board will die just because of the stubbornness of the people in
charge.”
“Exactly,” Hazleton said.
“Even so, I think it’s a bogey,” Amalfi said gently. “I’ll grant you your
facts, Mark, but not your extrapolation. The cops can’t possibly follow us
from He’s old star to here. We didn’t know ourselves that we’d wind up among
the Acolytes. I doubt that the cops were even able to plot He’s course, let
alone our subsequent one. Isn’t that so?”
“Of course. But–”
“And if the Earth cops alerted every local police force in the galaxy to every
petty offender,” Amalfi continued with quiet implacability, “no local police
force would ever be able to do any policing. They’d be too busy, recording and
filing and checking new alerts coming in constantly from a million inhabited
planets. Their own local criminals would mostly go free, to become a burden
upon the filing systems of every other inhabited area.
“So, believe me, Mark, the cops around here have never even heard of us. We’re
approaching a normal situation, that’s all. The Acolyte cops haven’t the
slightest reason to
treat us as anything,,but just another wandering, law abiding Okie city-and
after all,star wars credits, that’s really all we are.”
“Good,” Hazleton said, his chest collapsing to expel a heavy sigh. ,
Amalft heard neitnW the word nor the sigh.
At the same instant, the big master screen, which had been showing the
swelling, granulating mass of the Acolyte star cluster, flashed blinding
scarlet over its whole surface, and the scrannel shriek of a police whistle
made the air in the control room seethe.
The cops swaggered and stomped on board the Okie city,cheap tales of pirates gold, and into Amalfi’s main
office in City Hall,chronicles of spellborn gold, as if the nothingness of the marches of the galaxy were
their personal property. Their uniforms were not the customary dress
coveralls-actually, space-suit liners-of the Earth police, however. Instead,
they were flashy black affairs,swg power leveling, trimmed with silver braid, Sam Browne belt,
and shiny boots. The blue-jowled thugs who had been jammed into these
tight-fitting creations reminded Amalfi of a period which considerably
antedated the Night of Jadjjii-or any other event in the history of space
flight.
And the thugs carried meson pistols. These heavy, cumbersome weapons could be
held in one hand, but two hands were needed to fire them. They were very
modern side arms to find in a border star cluster. They were only about a
century out of date. This made them thoroughly up-to-date as far as the city’s
own armament was concerned.

“The fees should be low enough to keep us solvent,” Amalfi said, thrusting his
lower lip out thoughtfully. “The Acolyte area is a backwater, but it was
settled originally by refugees from an anti-Earth pogrom in the Malar
system-an aftermath of the collapse of Vega, as I recall. There’s a record of
the pogrom in the libraries of most planets-you reminded me of it, Mark: the
Night of Hadjjii-which means that the Acolytes aren’t far enough away from
normal trading areas to be proper frontier stars.”
He paused, and his frown deepened. “Now that I come to think of it, the
Acolytes were an important minor source of power metals for part of this limb
of the galaxy at one time. They’ll have at least one garage planet,sword of the new world vis, Mark,
depend on it. They may even have work for the city to do.”
“Sounds good,” Hazleton said. “Too good, maybe. Actually, we’ve got to sit
down in the Acolytes,star wars credits, boss, because that Twenty-third Street machine won’t
carry us beyond them at anything above a snail’s pace. I asked the City
Fathers that while I was checking the treasury. This is the end of the line
for that gadget.”
He sounded tired. Amalfi looked at him.
“That’s not what’s worrying you, Mark,swg credits,” he said. “We’ve always had that
problem waiting for us somewhere in the future, and it isn’t one that’s
difficult of solution. What’s the real trouble? Cops, maybe?”
“All right, it’s cops,” Hazleton said, a little sullenly. “I
know we’re a long way away from any cops that know us by name. But have you
any idea of the total amount of unpaid fines we’re carrying? And I don’t see
how we can assume that any amount of distance is ‘too great’ for the cops to
follow us if they really want us-and it seems that they do.”
“Why, Mark?” Dee said. “After all, we’ve done nothing serious.”
“It piles up,” Hazleton said. “We haven’t been called on our Violations docket
in a long time. When we’re finally caught, we’ll have to pay in full, and if
that were to happen now,swg credits, we’d be bankrupt.”
“Pooh,” Dee said. Like anyone more or less recently naturalized, her belief in
the capacities of her adopted city-state was as finite as it was unbounded.
“We could find work and build up a new treasury. It might be hard going for a
while, but we’d survive it. People have been broke before, and come through it
whole.”
“People, yes; cities, no,” Amalfi said. “Mark is right on that point, Dee.
According to the law, a bankrupt city must be dispersed. It’s essentially a
humane law, in that it prevents desperate mayors and city managers from taking
bankrupt cities out again on long job-hunting trips, during which half of the

time, the massed stars receded far enough to make plain the gray scar of the
Rift as a long shadow on a spangled ground. At the end the Hevian sun was only
a tenth-magnitude point in it.
“Got it,rappelz money, I think. But we can’t swing the planet back. It’ll take us thousands
of years to cross to the next galaxy. We’ll have to abandon He, boss, or we’re
sunk.”
“All right. Get us aloft. Full drive.”
“Our contract—”
“Fulfilled-take my word for it now. Spin!”
The city sprang aloft. The planet of He did not dwindle in the city’s sky. It
simply vanished, snuffed out in the intergalactic gap. Miramon, if he lived,
would be the first of a totally new race of pioneers.
Amalfi moved then, back towards the controls, the barium casing cracking and
falling off him as he came back to life. The air of the city still stank of
Hawkesite, but the concentration of the gas already had been taken down below
the harmful level by the city’s purifiers. The mayor began to edge the city
away from the vector of He’s flight and the city’s own, back toward the home
lens.
Hazleton stirred restlessly.
“Your conscience bothering you, Mark?”
“Maybe,” Hazleton said. “Is there some escape clause in our contract with
Miramon that lets us desert him like
this? If there is,rose zulie, I missed it, and I read the fine print pretty closely.”
“No, there’s no escape clause,” Amalfi said abstractedly, shifting the space
stick by a millimeter or two. “The Hevians won’t be hurt. The spindizzy screen
will protect them from loss of heat and atmosphere-their volcanoes will keep
them warmer than they’ll probably like,rappelz rupees, and their technology is up to
producing all the light they’ll need. But they won’t be able to keep the
planet well enough lit to satisfy the jungle. That will die. By the time
Miramon and his friends reach the star that suits them in the Andromed-an
galaxy, they’ll understand the spindizzy well enough to put their planet back
into, the proper orbit. Or maybe they’ll like roaming better by that time, and
will decide to be an Okie planet. Either way, we licked the jungle for them,
just as we promised to do, fair and square.”
“We didn’t get paid,” the city manager pointed out. “And it’ll take a lot of
fuel to get back to any part of our own galaxy. The bindlestiff got off ahead
of us, and got carried way out of raSge of the cops in the process,cheap rappelz rupees, right on
our backs-with plenty of germanium, drugs, women, the no-fuel drive,
everything.”
“No, they didn’t,” Amalfi said. “They blew up the moment we moved He.”

Earth police could invest the planet of He.
The gravitic field “around the bindlestiff city knotted suddenly, painfully,rappelz gold,
in Amalfi’s brain, and began to rise away from the lake of boiling mud. The
’stiff was taking off. In a moment it would be gone through the rent in the
mine umbrella which only the tramps could see.
Amalfi pressed thetiutton-the only one, this time,buy rose online zuly, that had been connected to
anything.
Moving Day began.
Moving Day began with six pillars of glaring white, forty miles in diameter,
which burst through the soft soil at each compass point of He. Fabr-Suithe had
sat directly over the site of one of them. The bandit town was nothing but a
flake of ash in a split second, a curled black flake borne aloft on the top of
a white-hot piston.
The pillars lunged, roaring, into the heavens, fifty, a hundred, two hundred
miles,rohan crone, and burst at their tops like popcorn. The Hevian sky burned
thermite-blue with steel meteors. Outside, the space mines, cut off from the
world of which they had been satellites by the greatest spindizzy field in
history, fled away into the Rift.
And when the meteors had burned away, the sun was growing.
The world of He was on spindizzy drive,cheap wow gold, its magnetic moment transformed into
momentum. It was the biggest Okie “city” that had ever flown. There was no
time to feel alarm. The sun flashed by and was dwindling to a point before the
fact could be grasped. Then it was gone. The far wall of the Rift began to
swell and separate into individual points of light.
The planet of He was crossing the Rift.
Appalled, AmalfT fought to understand the scale of speed. He failed. The
planet of He was moving, that was all he could comprehend. It was moving at a
proper cruising speed for al”eity” of its size-a speed that gulped down light
years as if they were gnats. Even to think of controlling such a flight was
ridiculous.
Stars began to wink past He like fireflies. They had reached the other side of
the Rift. The planet began to curve gradually away from the main cloud. Then
the stars were all behind.
The surface of the saucer that was the galaxy began to come into view.
“Boss! We’re going out of the galaxy! Look–”
“I know it. Get me a fix on He’s old sun as soon as we’re high enough above
the Rift to see it again. After that it’ll be too late.”
Hazleton worked feverishly. It took him only half an hour, but during that

|hpur went by before its periphery touched the lake shore. Then black tendrils
stretched out into the tangled desolation of the jungle; the bindlestiff was
at last risking its own men in the struggle. What they were after was plain
enough, for the flies were all moving in the direction of the town where
Hazleton had dropped the women.
The bindlestiff city itself sat and waited. Even against the mass-pressure of
the planet of He, Amalfi’s sense of spatial orientation could pick up the
unmistakable, slightly nauseating sensation of spindizzy field under medium
drive, doming the seething mud.
Dawn was coming now. The riot around the town where the women had been dropped
dwindled a little. Then one of the task forces from the bindlestiff reached
it, and it flared all over again,runescape power leveling, worse than ever. The ’stiffs were fighting
their own allies.
Abruptly there was no Hevian town in the center of the riot at all. There was
only a mushrooming pillar of radioactive gas which made the screen race with
interference patterns. The ’stiffs h:: riot retreated b'owly toward the lake of boiling mud; the 'stiffs had their
women and were fighting a rear-guard action. The news, Amalfl knew, would
travel fast.
Amalfi's own city was shrouded in sick orange mist, lit with flashes of
no-color. The blistering gas could not pass the spindizzy screen in a body,
but it diffused through, molecule by heavy molecule. The mayor realized
suddenly that he had not heeded his own gas warning,buy rose zulie, and that there was
probably some harm coming to him. He started and moved slightly, and
discovered that he was completely encased. What…
Barium paste. Evidently Hazleton had known that Amalfi could not leave the
platform, and instead had plastered him with the paste in default of trying to
get a suit on him. Even his eyes were covered with a transparent visor, and a
feeling of distension in his nostrils bespoke a Kolman barium filter.
So much for the gas. The heavy tensions in and around
the bindlestiff city continued to gather; they would soon be unbearable.
Above, just outside the shell of circling mines, the first few police cruisers
were sidling down with great caution. The war in the jungle had already fallen
apart into meaninglessness. The abduction of the women by the tramps had
collapsed all Hevian rivalries. Bandits and civilized towns alike were bent
now upon nothing but the destruction of Fabr-Suithe and its allies.
Fabr-Suithe could hold them off for a long time, but it was clearly time for
the bindlestiff to leave-time for it to make off with its pleased and
wondering Hevian women,cheap runescape money, its anti-agathics, its germanium,runescape gold, and whatever else it
had managed to garner-tune for it to lose itself again hi the Rift before the