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.
Amalfi shut off the City Fathers in mid-reminiscence and removed the phone from his aching ear. The control boards of the city stretched before him, still largely useful, but dead forever in one crucial bloc— the bank that had once flown the city from star to new star. The city was grounded; it had no choice now but to accept, and then win, this one poor planet for its own.
If the cops would let it. The Magellanic Clouds were moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy; the gap was already so large that the city had had to cross it by using a dirigible planet as a booster-stage. It would take the cops time to decide that they should make that enormously long flight in pursuit of one miserable Okie. But in the end they would make that decision. The cleaner the home galaxy became of Okies—and there was no doubt but that the cops had by now broken up the majority of the space-faring cities—the greater the urge would become to track down the last few stragglers.
Amalfi had no faith in the ability of a satellite starcloud to outrun human technology. By the time the cops were ready to cross from the home lens to the Greater Magellanic, they would have the techniques with which to do it, and techniques far less clumsy than those Amalfi’s city had used. If the cops wanted to chase the Greater Magellanic, they would find ways to catch it. If—
Amalfi took up the earphone again. “Question,” he said. “Will the need to catch us be urgent enough to produce the necessary techniques in time?”
The City Fathers hummed, drawn momentarily from their eternal mulling over the past. At last they said:
“YES, MAYOR AMALFI. BEAR IN MIND THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS CLOUD. REMEMBER THOR V.”
There it was: the ancient slogan that had made Okies hated even on planets that had never seen an Okie city, and could never expect to. There was only the smallest chance that the city which had wrought the Thor V atrocity had made good its escape to this Cloud; it had all happened a long time ago. But even the narrow chance, if the City Fathers were right, would bring the cops here sooner or later, to destroy Amalfi’s own city in expiation of that still-burning crime.