If he chose, Amalfi could remember those days, since he had been mayor of the city—although only for a short time—when the City Fathers had decided that it was time to go aloft. That had been in 3111, decades after every other major city had already left the Earth; Amalfi had been just 117 years old at the time. His first city manager had been a man named deFord, who for a while had shared Amalfi's amused puzzlement about what to call all the familiar things now that they had turned strange—but deFord had been shot by the City Fathers" around 3300 for engineering an egregious violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch, which had put a black mark on the city's police record which the cops still had not forgotten.

The new city manager was a youngster less than 400 years old named Mark Hazleton, who was already as little loved by the City Fathers as deFord had been and for about the same reasons, but who had been born after the city had gone aloft and hence had no difficulty in finding the appropriate words for things. Amalfi was prepared to believe that he was the last living man on board the flying city who still had occasional bubbles blown into his stream of consciousness by old Earthbound habits of thinking.

In a way, Amalfi's clinging to City Hall as the center of operations for the city betrayed the mayor's ancient ties to Earth. City Hall was the oldest building on board, and so only a few of the other structures could be seen from it. It wasn't tall enough, and there were too many newer buildings around it. Amalfi didn't care. From the belfry—or bridge, if that was what he had to call it now—he never looked in any direction but straight up, his head tilted all the way back on his bull neck. He had no reason to look at the buildings around Battery Park, after all. He had already seen them.

Straight up, however, was a sun, surrounded by starry sable. It was close enough to show a perceptible disc, and becoming slowly larger. While Amalfi watched it, the microphone in his hand began to emit intermittent squawks.

"It looks good enough to me," Amalfi said, lowering his bald head grudgingly a centimeter or two toward the mike. "It's a type G star, or near to it, and Jake in Astronomy says two of the planets are Earthlike. And Records says that both of 'em are inhabited.

Where there's people, there's work."

The phone quacked anxiously, each syllable evenly weighted, but without any over-all sense of conviction. Amalfi listened impatiently. Then he said, "Politics."

The way he said it made it sound fit only to be scrawled on sidewalks. The phone was silenced; Amalfi hung it on

its hook on the railing and thudded back down the archaic stone steps which led from the belfry/bridge.