The city was beautiful. Its official name was Galactic Center, but it was called The Hub because that is what it was, the hub and focus of a galaxy. It was the biggest city in the Milky Way. It covered almost the entire land area of the third planet of a Type G star that someone with a sense of humor had christened Pax. The planet was chosen originally because it was centrally located and had no inhabitants, and because it was within the limits of tolerance for the humanoid races. The others mostly needed special accommodations anyway.
And so from a sweet green airy world with nothing on it but trees and grass and a few mild-natured animals, The Hub had grown to have a population of something like ten billion people, spread horizontally and stacked up vertically and dug in underneath, and every one of them was engaged in some governmental function, or in espionage, or in both. Intrigue was as much a part of life in The Hub as corpuscles are a part of blood. The Hub boasted that it was the only inhabited world in space where no single grain of wheat or saddle of mutton was grown, where nothing was manufactured and nobody worked at a manual job.
Durham loved it passionately.
Both moons were in the sky now. One was small and low, like a white pearl hung just out of reach. The other was enormous. It had an atmosphere, and it served as storehouse and supply base for the planet city, handling the billions of tons of shipping that kept it going. The two of them made a glorious spectacle overhead, but Durham did not bother to see them. The vast glow of the city paled them, made them unimportant. He was remembering how he had seen it when he was fresh from Earth, for the first time—the supreme capital, beside which the world capitals were only toy cities, the heart and center of the galaxy where the decisions were made and the great men came and went. He was remembering how he had felt, how he had been so sure of the future that he never gave it a second thought.
But something happened.
What?
Liquor, they said.
No, not liquor, the hell with them. I could always carry my drinks.
Liquor, they said, and the accident.
The accident. Well, what of it? Didn't other people have accidents? And anyway, nobody really got hurt out of it. He didn't, and the girl didn't—what if she wasn't his fiancee?—and the confidential file he had in the 'copter hadn't fallen into anybody's hands. So there wasn't anything to that.