From that moment on, the Okies were no longer the collective citizens of a nomadic culture. They were just interstellar bums. There was no place for them in the galaxy any more.

Outside the galaxy, of course, the Okie commerce lanes had never penetrated—

The city was old—unlike the men and women who manned it, who had merely lived a long time, which is quite a different thing. And like any old intelligence, its past sins lay very near the surface, ready for review either in nostalgia or in self-accusation at the slightest cue. It was difficult these days to get any kind of information out of the City Fathers without having to submit to a lecture, couched in as high a moral tone as was possible to machines whose highest morality was survival.

Amalfi knew well enough what he was letting himself in for when he asked the City Fathers for a review of the Violations Docket. He got it, and in bells—big bells. The City Fathers gave him everything, right down to the day a dozen centuries ago when they had discovered that nobody had dusted the city’s ancient subways since the city had first gone into space. That had been the first time the Okies had heard that the city had ever had any subways.

But Amalfi stuck to the job, though his right ear ached with the pressure of the earphone. Out of the welter of minor complaints and wistful recollections 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 penalties—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.