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The career of Hem VI from its native Acolyte cluster across the center of the galaxy made history—particularly in the field of instrumentation. Hern VI was a tiny world, considerably smaller than Mercury, but nevertheless it was the most monstrous mass ever kicked past the speed of light within the limits of the inhabited galaxy. Except for the planet of He, which had left the galaxy from its periphery and was now well on its way toward Messier 31 in Andromeda, no such body had ever before been flown under spindizzy or any other drive. Its passage left permanent scars in the recording banks of every detecting instrument within range, and the memories of it graven into the brains of sentient observers were no less drastic.

Theoretically, Hern VI was following the long arc laid out for it by Amalfi’s City Fathers, an arc leading from the fringe of the Acolyte cluster all the way across the face of the galaxy to the center of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (Its mass center, of course; both clouds had emerged too recently from the galaxy as a whole to have developed the definite orbital dead centers characteristic of “spiral” nebulae.) The mean motion of the flying planet followed that arc scrupulously.

But at the speed at which Hern VI was traveling—a velocity which could not be expressed comfortably even in multiples of C, the old arbitrary velocity of light—the slightest variation from that orbit became a careening side jaunt of horrifying proportions before even the micro-second reactions of the City Fathers could effect the proper corrections.

Like other starmen, Amalfi was accustomed enough to traveling at transphotic speeds—in space, a medium ordinarily without enough landmarks to make real velocity very apparent. And, like all Okies, he had traveled on planets in creeping ground vehicles which seemed to be making dangerous speed simply because there were so many nearby reference points to make that speed seem great. Now he was finding out what it was like to move among the stars at a comparable velocity.

For at the velocity of Hern VI, the stars became almost as closely spaced as the girders beside a subway track—with the added hazard that the track frequently swerved enough to place two or three girders in a row between the rails. More than once Amalfi stood frozen on the balcony in the belfry of City Hall, watching a star that had been invisible half a second before cannoning directly at his head, swelling to fill the whole sky with glare—

Blackness.

Amalfi felt irrationally that there should have been an audible whoosh as Hern VI passed that star. His face still tingled with the single blast of its radiation which had bathed him, despite the planet’s hard-driven and nearly cross-polarized spindizzy screen, at that momentary perihelion.

There was nothing the matter, of course, with the orbit corrections of the City Fathers. The difficulty was simply that Hern VI was not a responsive enough space craft to benefit by really quick orbital corrections. It took long seconds for the City Fathers’ orders to be translated into enough vector thrust to affect the flight of the dead planet over parsecs of its shambling, paretic stride. And there was another, major reason: when all of Hern VI’s axial rotation had been converted to orbital motion, all of a considerable axial liberation had also been converted, and there was nothing that could be done about the kinks this put in the planet’s course.

Possibly, had Amalfi spotted his own city’s spindizzies over the surface of the planet, as he had those of the all-purpose city and the plague city, Hern VI might have been more sensitive to the space stick; at the very least, the liberation could have been left as real liberation, for it wouldn’t have mattered had the planet heeled a little this way and that as long as it kept a straight course. But Amalfi had left the city’s drivers undisturbed for the most cogent of all reasons: for the survival of the city. Only one of the machines was participating at all in the flight of Hern VI, that being the big pivot spindizzy at Sixtieth Street. The others, including the decrepit but now almost cool Twenty-third Street machine, rested.

“… calling the free planet, calling the free planet … is there anybody alive on that thing? … EPSILON CRUCIS, HAVE YOU SUCCEEDED IN RAISING THE BODY THAT JUST PASSED YOU?

CALLING THE FREE PLANET! YOU’RE ON COLLISION COURSE WITH US-HELL AND DAMNATION! … CALLING ETA PALINURI, THE FREE PLANET JUST GAVE US A HAIRCUT AND IT’S HEADING for you. It’s either dead or out of control … Calling the free planet, calling the free pla ——”

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