strapped on a gunbelt and loaded one of the stunners. He snapped it into
the holster carefully, wondering just what Manning had meant by his last
remark. Was it a threat in any real sense, or was Manning just letting
off steam? Well, they'd see about that too ... and Rynason would be
watching.

* * * * *

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.

Rynason looked at their faces from where he stood in the doorway,
listening to Manning talking to them. They were hard men, mean and
sometimes vicious. Nameless faces, all of them, having no place in the
more developed areas of the Terran civilization. And maybe that was
their own fault. But Rynason knew that they were running, not to