It was a fairly long haul from the control tower, which was on Thirty-fourth Street and The Avenue, down to Bowling Green, where City Hall was; and Amalfi lengthened it a bit more by giving the Tin Cabby a route that would have put folding money into the pocket of a live one of another, forgotten age. He settled back, bit the end off a hydroponic cigar, and tried to remember what he had heard about the Hamiltonians. Some sort of a republican sect, they'd been, back in the very earliest days of space travel. There'd been a public furor . . . recruiting . . . government disapproval and then suppression . . .

hm-m-m. It was -all very dim, and Amalfi was not at all sure that he hada't mixed it up with some other event in Terrestrial history.

But there had been an exodus of some sort. Shiploads of Hamiltonians going out to colonize, to set up model planets. Come to think of it, one of the nations then current in the West on Earth had had a sort of Hamiltoni-anism of its own, something called a timocracy. It had all died down after a while, but it had left traces. Nearly every major political wave after space flight had its vestige somewhere in the inhabited part of the galaxy.

Utopia must have been colonized very early. The Hrun-tan Imperials, had they arrived first, would have garrisoned both habitable planets as a matter of course.

It was a little easier to remember the Hruntan Empire, since it was of much more recent vintage than the Hamiltonians; but there was less to remember. The outer margins of exploration had spawned gimcrack empires by the dozen in the days when Earth seemed to be losing her grip. Alois Hrunta had merely been the most successful of the would-be emperors of space. His territory had expanded as far as the limits of communication would allow an absolute autocracy to spread, and then had been destroyed almost before he was assassinated, broken into duchies by his squabbling sons. Eventually the duchies fell in <heir turn to the nominal but irresistible authority of Earth, leaving, as the Hamiltonians had left, a legacy of a few remote colonies^—worlds where a dead dream was served with meaningless pomp.

The cab began to settle, and the facade of City Hall drifted past Amalfi's cab window. The once-golden motto—

MOW YOUR LAWN, LADY?—looked greener than ever in the light of the giant planet.

Amalfi sighed. These political squabbles were dull, and they were guaranteed to make a major project out of the simple matter of earning a square meal.