Then there was the moving of He. The city had fulfilled its contract with that planet to the letter, but unfortunately 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 actually 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 bargaining 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 appeared that the Earth cops would remember Amalfi’s city for two things only. One: The city had a long Violations 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.