Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE EARTH QUARTER BY DAMON KNIGHT _The Niori permitted refugees from Earth to live in their cramped little ghetto conditionally: that they do so peacefully. But there will always be patriotic fanatics, like Harkway and Rack, who must disturb the peace...._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The sun had set half an hour before. Now, from the window of Laszlo Cudyk's garret, he could see how the alien city shone frost-blue against the black sky; the tall hive-shapes that no man would have built, glowing with their own light. Nearer, the slender drunken shafts of lamp posts marched toward him down the street, each with its prosaic yellow globe. Between them and all around, the darkness had gathered; darkness in angular shapes, the geometry of squalor. Cudyk liked this view, for at night the blackness of the Earth Quarter seemed to merge with the black sky, as if one were a minor extension of the other--a fist of space held down to the surface of the planet. He could feel, then, that he was not alone, not isolated and forgotten; that some connection still existed across all the light-years of the galaxy between him and what he had lost. And, again, the view depressed him; for at night the City seemed to press in upon the Quarter like the walls of a prison. The Quarter: sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions, eighteen nationalities; the only remnant of the human race nearer than Capella. Cudyk felt the night breeze freshening. He glanced upward once at the frosty blaze of stars, then pulled his head back inside the window. He closed the shutters, turning to the lamp-lit table with its hopeless clutter of books, pipes and dusty miscellany. Cudyk was a man of middle height, heavy in the shoulders and chest, blunt-featured, with a shock of greying black hair. He was fifty-five years old; he remembered Earth. A drunk stumbled by in the street below, cursing monotonously to himself, paused to spit explosively into the gutter, and faded into the night. Cudyk heard him without attention. He stood with his back to the window, looking at nothing, his square fingers fumbling automatically for pipe and tobacco. Why do I torture myself with that look out the window every night? he asked himself. It's a juvenile sentimentalism. But he knew he would go on doing it.