tection myself. Many thanks, Kras. What’s my new assign-
ment?”
“To begin with,” Krasna said, grinning, “as simple a job
as I’ve ever given you, right here on Randolph. Skin out of
here and find me that cab driverthe one who mentioned
time-travel to you. He’s uncomfortably close to the truth;
closer than you were in one category.
“Find him, and bring him to me. The Service is about
to take in a new raw recruiti”
Bindlestiff
By James Bush
It was inevitable that, occasionally, one of the
cruising cities of space would turn criminal.
And they made vicious, deadly enemies!
I.
E yEN to the men of the flying city, the Rift was awesome beyond all human experience. Loneliness was natural between the stars, and starmen were used to it—the stardensity of the average cluster was more than enough to give a veteran Okie claustrophobia; but the enormous empty loneliness of the Rift was unique.
To the best of Mayor Amalfi’s knowledge, no Okie city had ever crossed the Rift before. The City Fathers, who knew everything, agreed. Amalfi was none too sure that it was wise, for once, to be a pioneer.
Ahead and behind, the walls of the Rift shimmered, a haze of stars too far away to resolve into individual points of light. The walls curved gently toward a starry floor, so many parsecs
“beneath” the keel of the city that it 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 intergalactic gap.
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 a migratory city.