"You're crazy," Larry the Leech muttered again, then jerked his head toward the dressing rooms.

"You'll never regret this," I said.

"I regret it already."

This being a Crocker show, it goes without saying that we were a lot more than forty-five minutes from Broadway. Hell, we were just about forty-five hours from Pluto. That's how long it had taken my last message to my agent to reach the System, and an equal time for the news to reach me that he wasn't answering his phone. No big surprise there; I'd been "on the road," as it were, for almost ten years now, and my agent hadn't been answering when I left. (The question I'd wanted him to answer? Simple, really: "Who booked me into this toilet?")

The plumbing fixture in question was know as Brementon. Who knows why? Humans have this need to name everything, no matter how little that thing may deserve it. When I saw the name on the travel itinerary it brought to mind a peaceful little hamlet. German, perhaps. Happy burghers in lederhosen, smiling frauleins in dirndls and pigtails and wooden shoes, cottages draped in swastika bunting. In reality, if they'd added "Maximum Security Prison" to the place's name they'd have been closer to the truth. About a quarter of it was a prison. We hadn't seen that part as yet, but if it was worse than the rest of the place, the mind reeled. B-town, as the players came to call it, could have provided the very definition of the word "boondock," except that the stop before B-town had actually been called Boondocks.

Brementon was a random collection of junk, natural and artificial, welded together in the cometary zone and pressed into service as a "City" by the escaped criminals, madmen, perverts, and other misfits who liked to call themselves Outlanders. Brementon, Boondocks, and ten thousand other similar wandering junkyards constituted the most far-flung "community" humanity had ever known.