As a reward he is sent to the city-planet Helior to receive a medal from the emperor. Bill's city plan is stolen from him on a sightseeing tour. Losing his plan is a crime, and without his plan it takes him days to get back to the Trooper Transit Center. When he arrives he finds he is AWOL for missing his transport, and is threatened with arrest and torture. He escapes and flees into the depths of the city, where he first falls in with a gang of similarly "deplanned" outlaws, then finds employment with Helior's garbage disposal service, cannily using the galactic postal service to send garbage to other planets, since Helior has run out of room for it. His unwilling recruitment as a spy to infiltrate an ineptly-run anarchist plot leads to his arrest. He has been AWOL for so long that now he is considered a deserter. He avoids being shot by a firing squad thanks to a wily lawyer, who points out that technically the entire city, and therefore the entire planet, is under military rule and is a military base, so he never actually went AWOL. However, he is convicted of sleeping on duty.