seemed to be hidden in a rising haze of star dust.
“Above” there was nothing; a nothing as final as the slamming of a door. It was the empty ocean of space that washes between galaxies.
The Rift was, in effect, a valley cut in the face of the galaxy. A few stars swam in it, light millennia apart—stars which the tide of human colonization could never have reached. Only on the far side was there likely to be any inhabited planet, and, consequently, work for the city.
On the near side there was still the police. It was not, of course, the same contingent which had consolidated Utopia and the Duchy of Gort; such persistence by a single squadron of cops, over a trail which had spanned nearly three centuries, would have been incredible for so small a series of offenses on the city’s part. Nevertheless, there was a violation of a Vacate order still on the books, and a little matter of a trick … and the word had been passed. To turn back was out of the question for the city.
Whether or not the police would follow the city even as far as the Rift, Amalfi did not know. It was, however, a good gamble. Crossing a desert of this size would probably be impossible for so small an object as a ship, out of a sheer inability to carry enough supplies; only a city which could grow its own had much chance of surviving such a crossing.
Soberly Amalfi contemplated the oppressive chasm which the screens showed him. The picture came in from a string of proxies, the leader of which was already parsecs out across the gap. And still the far wall was featureless, just beginning to show a faintly granular texture which gave promise of resolution into individual stars at top magnification.
“I hope the food holds out,” he muttered. “If we make this one, it’ll make the most colossal story any Okie ever had to tell. They’ll be calling us the Rifters from one end of the galaxy to the other.”
Beside him, Hazleton drummed delicately upon the arm of his chair. “And if we don’t,” he said, “they’ll be calling us the biggest damned fools that ever got off the ground—but we won’t be in a position to care. Still, we do seem to be in good shape for it, boss. The oil tanks are almost full, and the
“Sure,” Amalfi said, irritated. “We won’t starve if everything goes right.” He paused; there had been a stir behind him, and he turned around. Then he smiled.
There was something about Dee Hazleton that relaxed him. She had not yet seen enough actual space cruising to acquire the characteristic deep Okie star-burn, nor yet to lose the wonder of being now, by Utopian standards, virtually immortal, and so she seemed still very pink and young and unharried.
Someday, perhaps, the constant strain of wandering from star to star, from crisis to crisis, would tell on her, as it did upon all Okies. She would not lose the wanderlust, but the wanderlust would take its toll.
Or perhaps her resiliency was too great even for that. Amalfi hoped so.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I’m only kibitzing.”
The word, like a great part of Dee’s vocabulary, was a mystery to Amalfi. He grinned and turned back to Hazleton. “If we hadn’t been sound enough to risk crossing,” he went on, “I’d have let us be captured; we could have paid the fine on the Vacate violation, just barely, and with luck we could have gotten a show-cause injunction against breaking us up slapped on the cops for that ‘treason’ charge. But just look at that damned canyon, Mark. We’ve never been as long as fifty years without a planetfall before, and this crossing is going to take all of the hundred and four the Fathers predicted. The slightest accident, and we’ll be beyond help—we’ll be out where no ship could reach us.”
“There’ll be no accident,” Hazleton said confidently.
“There’s fuel decomposition—we’ve never had a flash fire before, but there’s always a first time. And if that Twenty-third Street spin-dizzy conks out again, it’ll damn near double the time of the crossing—”
He stopped abruptly. Through the corner of his eye, a minute pinprick of brightness poked insistently into his brain. When he looked directly at the screen, it was still there, though somewhat dimmed as its image moved off the fovea centralis of his Retma. He pointed.
“Look—is that a cluster? No, it’s too small and sharp. If that’s a single free-floating star, it’s close.”
He snatched up a phone. “Give me Astronomy. Hello, Jake. Can you figure me the distance of a star from the source of an ultraphone videocast?”
“Why, yes,” the voice on the phone said. “Wait, and I’ll pick up your image. Ah—I see what you’re after: something at ten o’clock, can’t tell what yet. Dinwiddie pickups on your proxies? Intensity will tell the tale.” The astronomer chuckled like a parrot on the rim of a cracker barrel. “Now if you’ll just tell me how many proxies you have ahead, and how far they—”
“Five. Full interval.”
“Hm-m. A big correction, then.” There was a long, itching silence. Amalfi knew that there would be no hurrying Jake. He was not the city’s original astronomer; that man had fallen victim to a native of a planet called St. Rita’s after he had insisted once too often to said native that St. Rita’s was not the center of the universe. Jake had been swapped from another city for an atomic-pile engineer and two minor photosynthetics technicians under the traditional “rule of discretion,” and he had turned out to be interested only in the behavior of the more remote galaxies. Persuading him to think about the immediate astronomical situation of the city was usually a hopeless struggle; he seemed to feel that problems of so local a nature were nearly beneath notice.
The “rule of discretion” was an Okie tradition which Amalfi had never before invoked, and never since, for it seemed to him to smell suspiciously of peonage. It had evolved, the City Fathers said, from the trading of baseball players, a term which meant nothing to Amalfi. The results of his one violation of his own attitude toward the rule sometimes seemed to him to smack of divine retribution.
“Amalfi?”
“Yeah.”
“About ten parsecs, give or take four-tenths. That’s from the proxies, not from us. I’d say you’ve found a floater, my boy.”
“Thanks.” Amalfi put the phone back and drew a deep breath. “Just a few years’ travel. What a relief.”
“You won’t find any colonists on a star that isolated,” Hazleton reminded him.
“I don’t care. It’s a landing point, possibly a fuel or even a food source. Most stars have planets; a freak like this might not, or it might have dozens. Just cross your fingers.”
He stared at the tiny sun, his eyes aching from sympathetic strain. A star in the middle of the Rift—almost certainly a wild star, moving at four hundred or five hundred kilometers per second, but not, as such stars usually were, a white dwarf; by eye alone, Amalfi estimated it to be an F star like Canopus. It occurred to him that a people living on a planet of that star might remember the moment when it burst through the near wall of the Rift and embarked upon its journey into the emptiness.
“There might be people there,” he said. “The Rift was swept clean of stars once, somehow. Jake claims that this is an overdramatic way of putting it, that the mean motions of the stars probably opened the gap naturally. But either way, that sun must be a recent arrival, going at quite a clip, since it’s moving counter to the general tendency. It could have been colonized while it was still passing through a populated area. Runaway stars tend to collect hunted criminals as they go by, Mark.”
“Possibly,” Hazleton admitted. “Though I’ll bet that if that star ever was among the others, it was way back before space flight. By the way, that image is coming in from your lead proxy, out across the valley. Don’t you have any outriggers? I ordered them sent.”
“Sure. But I don’t use them except for routine. Cruising the Rift lengthwise would
“I know. But where there’s one isolated star, there may be another. Maybe a nearer one.”
Amalfi shrugged. “We’ll take a look if you like.”
He touched the board. On the screen, the far wall of the Rift was wiped away. Nothing was left but what looked like a thin haze; down at that end, the Rift turned and eventually faded out into a rill of emptiness, soaking into the sands of the stars.
“Nothing on that side. Lots of nothing.”
Amalfi moved the switch again.
On the screen, apparently almost within hallooing distance, a city was burning.
It was all over in a few minutes. The city bucked and toppled in a maelstrom of lightning. Feeble flickers of
