Several hundred people had already been collected by the air-cars which served the spaceport. Cudyk, Seu, Exarkos and a few others, by unspoken assent, had taken places at the rear of the crowd, to be the last to go. He glanced at Seu. The little man was standing with his hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, staring dully at the Quarter. He looked up after a moment, smiled unhappily, and shrugged. "It's absurd to feel homesick for it, isn't it?" he said. "It was a ghetto; we had no roots there. It was cramped, and it stank, and we fought among ourselves more viciously than we ever fought on Earth. But twenty years ..." "We could pretend that we had roots, at least," Cudyk answered. "We don't belong anywhere. Perhaps we'll be happier, in the long run, once we face that and accept it." "I doubt it." "So do I." To Cudyk's right, Father Exarkos was sitting on his suitcase, hands relaxed on his thighs. Cudyk said, "If I were a believer, Astereos, I think it would do me a great deal of good to confess to you and be absolved." The priest's dry, friendly voice said, "Why, have you sinned so terribly, Laszlo?" "I killed a man," said Cudyk, "but that's not what I mean. I jumped over a stairway railing and stopped Rack. If it hadn't been for me, he might have got away. There would have been nothing wrong with that. He couldn't have done any more harm, one man by himself. The Guards would have captured him sooner or later, anyhow. And if he had gotten away, we wouldn't have given the Niori the one more straw they needed. In that sense, it is my fault that we were expelled." "No, Laszlo," said Seu. Exarkos said, "You have nothing for which to reproach yourself, on that score. You were only the instrument of history, my friend, and a minor instrument at that. And, speaking for myself, not for the Church, Rack deserved to die." Cudyk thought, at least it was quite suitably ironic. Cudyk, the man of inaction, hurls himself through the air to kill a murderer. And the citizens of the Quarter are deported, not because one of their race murdered a billion billion Galactics, but because that same killer was killed by them. That was one thin mark on the credit side. There was one more: the tension was gone, for some of them at least. Now the worst thing that could happen had happened; the Damocletian thread had snapped. The problems which had caused the tension no longer existed. Earth was two months away. Cudyk expected nothing and hoped for nothing. But the Niori had agreed to set each passenger down wherever on the globe he chose to go; each man, at least, could choose his own hell. The crews of the captured battleships, and the captured staff of the base on New Earth, were also being sent back. The weapon that had been used on them had done no permanent damage; they would simply have to be retrained, to learn all over again, as if they were reborn.