Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 78: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

76 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION his right ear ached with the pressure of the earphone. Out of the welter of minor complaints and wistful recollec- tions of missed opportunities, certain things came through clearly and urgently. The city had never been officially cleared of its failure to observe the *““Vacate”’ order the cops had served on it during the reduction of Utopia. Later, during the same affair, the city had been hung with a charge of technical treason—not as serious as it sounded, but subject to inconvenient penalities—while on the neighboring planet of Hrunta, and had left the scene with the charge still on the docket. There had been a small trick pulled there, too, which the cops could hardly have forgotten : while it had not been illegal, it had created laughter at the expense of the cops in every Okie wardroom in the galaxy, and cops seldom like to be laughed at. Then there was the moving of He. The city had fulfilled its contract with that planet to the letter, but unfortu- nately that could never be proven; He was now well on its way across the intergalactic gap toward Andromeda, and could not testify on the city’s behalf. As far as the cops knew, the city had destroyed He, a notion the cops would be no less likely to accept simply because it was ridiculous. Worst of all, however, was the city’s participation in the March on Earth. The March had been a tragedy from beginning to end, and few of the several hundred Okie cities which had taken part in it had survived it. It had been a product of the galaxy-wide depression which had followed the collapse of the germanium standard. Amalfi’s city— already accused of several crimes in the star-system where the March had started, crimes which as a matter of fact the city had actu- ally been forced to commit—had gone along because it had had no better choice, and had done what it could to change the March from a mutual massacre to a collective bar- gaining session; but the massacre had occurred all the same. No one city, not even Amalfi’s, could have made its voice heard above the long roar of galactic collapse. There was the redeeming fact that the city, during the March, had found and extirpated one of the last residues of the Vegan tyranny. But it could never be proven; like the affair on He, the city had done so thorough a job that even the evidence was gone irrevocably. Amalfi sighed. In the end, it ap- peared that the Earth cops would remember Amalfi’s city for two things only. One: The city had a long Viola- tions Docket, and still existed to be brought to book on it. Two: The city had gone out toward the Greater Magellanic, just as a far older and blacker city had done centuries before —the city which had perpetrated the massacre on Thor V, the city whose memory still stank in the nostrils of cops and surviving Okies alike. Amalfi shut off the City Fathers in mid-reminiscence and removed the phone from his aching ear. The control boards of the city stretched before him, still largely useful, but dead forever in one crucial bloc—the bank that had once flown the city from star to new star. The city was grounded; it had no choice now but to accept, and then win, this poor planet for its own. If the cops would let it. The Magel- lanic Clouds were moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy; the gap was already so large that the city had had to cross it by using a dirigible planet as a booster-stage. It would take the cops time to decide that they should make that enormously long flight in pursuit of one miserable Okie. But in the end Cconnmiclooolkks.c© im