Earthman, Come Home

The city hovered, then settled silently through the early morning darkness toward the broad expanse of heath which the planet’s Proctors had designated as its landing place. At this hour, the edge of the misty acres of diamonds which were the Greater Magellanic Cloud was just beginning to touch the western horizon; the whole cloud covered nearly 35° of the sky. The cloud would set at 5:12 a.m.; at 6:00 the near edge of the home galaxy would rise, but, during the summer the sun rose earlier and would blot it out.
All of which was quite all right with Mayor Amalfi. The fact that no significant amount of the home galaxy would begin to show in the night sky for months was one of the reasons why he had chosen this planet to settle on. The situation confronting the city posed problems enough without its being complicated by an unsatisfiable homesickness.
The city grounded, and the last residual hum of the spindizzies stopped. From below there came a rapidly rising and more erratic hum of human activity, and the clank and roar of heavy equipment getting under way. The geology team was losing no time, as usual.
Amalfi, however, felt no disposition to go down at once. He remained on the balcony of City Hall looking at the thickly-set night sky. The star-density here in the Greater Magellanic was very high, even outside the clusters—at most the distances between stars were matters of light-months rather than light-years. Even should it prove impossible to move the city itself again—which was inevitable, consider that the Sixtieth Street spindizzy had just followed the Twenty-third Street machine into the junkpit—it should be possible to set interstellar commerce going here by cargoship. The city’s remaining drivers, ripped out and remounted on a one-per-hull basis, would provide the nucleus of quite a respectable little fleet.
It would not be much like cruising among the far-scattered, various civilizations of the Milky Way had been, but it would be commerce of a sort, and commerce was the Okies’ oxygen.