* * * * *
Within half an hour close to sixty men had collected outside Manning's
door. They were dirty and unshaven; some of them were working in the
town, a few were miners, but most of them were drifters who had followed
the advance of the star frontier, who drank and brawled in the streets
of the town, sleeping by day and raising hell at night. They stole when
they could, killed when they wanted.
The drifters were men who had been all over the worlds of the Edge, who
had spent years watching the new planets opened for colonization and
exploitation, but had never got their own piece. They knew the feel of
these planetfall towns on the Edge, and could talk for hours about the
worlds they had seen. But they were city men, all of them; they had seen
the untamed worlds, but only from the streets. They hadn't taken part in
the exploring or the building, only in the initial touchdowns. When the
building was done, they signed on to the spacers again and drifted to
the next world, farther out.
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