He spends several months waiting around in the bars spacemen frequent, including the club for the League of Free Traders, hoping to find a captain willing to hire him for a return trip to Terra.
The Fafnir, an aging cargo ship, makes an emergency landing near Canalopolis after its jet man is killed when a machine in his power room explodes.
Despite some misgivings about serving on a ship in such disrepair, Garver accepts and after several weeks of repairing Fafnir, they depart—along with the electronics man, Winchell 'Winch' Astrabadi, an Arab 'Moslem' with a New York accent and his cat, Cosmo.
Garver departs to open a spaceman-oriented bar and grill, Vanderhoff puts the Fafnir up for sale as scrape and Winch takes a job on a shuttle to and from Luna.
They miss the kick of the wheel, the wail of the wind in the rigging, the exotic sights and smells of a harbor half across the world, the roar of engines cutting through the slipstream, and the powerful, body-shaking thunder of the jets.
It is to these restless men with the wanderlust that the human race owes a priceless debt as the wanderers push the horizons out to the stars -- " The world of the story seems to have a largely anarchic or libertarian political system.
The story does not have the feel of a 'wild west,' but it does seem to be a capitalist libertarian utopia, where there are understood codes of conduct and everyone acts in a law-abiding manner—only without any evidence of laws or law-enforcement.