He got off the trolley in Santa Monica, where the night fog was already fingering in from the ocean.
He crossed the wide street, angled toward the Mira Mar hotel.
In his room he stood looking out across the street over the stretch of park that broke suddenly as a dull cliff, dropping jaggedly to the road beneath. Beyond were buildings unusually small and squalid in sea perspective. The beach, curving north to Malibu; and the sea itself was overshadowed toward the Ocean Park Pier by the brazen glitter of red neon.
But the fog was quieting the scene, and isolating it. After a bit there was no world beyond the window but the grey damp world of fog.
Still the excitement beat at him. He projected his thoughts beyond the immediate future to the bright burning of the Oholo System, the atomic prairie fire skipping from sun to sun at the core, leaving the planets ashes—while isolated, the periphery worlds would one by one capitulate to Knoug power, to Knoug will, and become infected with Destiny.
Beyond that?
The doubt came, and he cringed mentally.
He was guilty of something.
His hands whitened on the sill, and staring into the fog he tried to bring all of the weight of Empire to his support.
But there was the memory of revolt by Knougs themselves on a tiny, distant moon.