"All the world's not a stage," my father had been fond of saying. "Only the best part of it. Between shows, you'll need good luggage."

It's good advice, and I've always taken it to heart. In my career I've lived in nine-room hotel penthouse suites and plush-carpeted modular winnies trucked to location sites. I've owned luxury condos and homes in the most exclusive Disneylands. At times I've owned enough things to lease storage modules simply to accommodate the excess.

More often, everything I own could be packed into one trunk. It's a big trunk, granted, but if you think it's easy, look around your own surroundings and ask yourself if you could do it.

Remember I talked about a return ticket, when going on the road? My attachment to that ticket would rate as a pale thing indeed compared to the tenacity with which I would hold on to that trunk. Imagine how you'd feel if murdering rapists were holding your children hostage, and you'll get some idea how upset I was to learn I couldn't take my trunk with me on arrival.

Pawnbrokers weep with joy when they see me coming, begin planning that long-delayed rumpus room in the basement or a nice vacation on Oberon. But while the trunk may contain many items I'll cheerfully hock, the trunk itself is sacred. It contains everything of any importance to me.

Don't shop for one like it at your local outfitter. It was custom-made for me thirty years ago by the firm of Signe Powell, christened the Pantechnicon Mark III. (I also owned the original, and the Mark II, replacing each not so much because it had worn out or become obsolete, but because I had the money, and a few new ideas.) It is waterproof, vacuumproof, fireproof, and proof against most forms of radiation. It's... well, it has so many features that any useful description would quickly start sounding like an operator's manual, so perhaps it's best just to mention them as needed. But if in the course of my story the Pantechnicon blacks up, gets down on one knee, and starts to belt out "Swanee River," don't be too surprised.

The nine-room penthouse suites were but a passing memory these days. Lately, Toby and I had been sleeping rough in mall service corridors.

You can spend a long life beneath the surface of one of the Eight Worlds without ever visiting a service corridor, unless you are a delivery person or work in the stockroom of one of the stores it adjoins. These are not exactly public spaces, but they're not precisely private, either. You don't need a permit or a security badge to enter most of them, but finding the entrance is usually beyond the powers of the uninitiated, at least the sort of entrance I was looking for. Getting to them should have been easy. Simply walk into any store, any retail outlet at all, follow the signs to the emergency fire exit. This will take you through the stockroom... where you will be seen, bothered, and usually turned back by some meddlesome employee, especially if you're wheeling a trunk the size of a small asteroid. No, it was seldom that easy in practice. The public and service corridors are like the human circulatory system. Arteries carry goods from the factories to the point of sale, veins carry them back to consumers' homes. The great engine of commerce flows freely at all points, but the two flows never mix.

But if you know how to get back there, unchallenged—and I'd learned it at my father's knee—you will find a Spartan realm free of the madding crowds. It is a place of dim lighting, high ceilings, gray walls, completely utilitarian as few places in the public world are.

It's a dangerous place until you know the ropes. Robot and manned vehicles zip along paths whose system is not intuitively obvious, following signals and signs you may not even see unless you know what to look for. It's a good place to get squashed like a bug beneath a fifty-wheel flatbed goods train equipped with only token lights and brakes; the operator usually will never know he hit you. So don't go back there unless you're with somebody like Uncle Sparky, who knows the ropes, okay, boys and girls?

The great advantage to this huge, unknown city is that people will usually leave you alone once you've gained entrance. This is where the down-and-outers hide from the rousting nightstick and the contemptuous stare. Winos, tramps, vagabonds, swagmen, and other ladies and gentlemen of leisure drift away from their daytime endeavors to find a private corner here where one can spread his kip and not be bothered. Did you ever wonder where city pigeons go to build their nests and raise their pidglings? This is the place.

This is also the site of that peculiar abode known as the jungle. By following a few seemingly random chalk marks on walls, marks that you probably would not even have seen, and certainly couldn't have read even if you knew there was information in them, I made my way to a warehouse door. There was a court seal on it, promising me that if I broke it I would be subject to a fine and jail time. But the date was twenty years previous and the printing was almost illegible. Places like these, full of useless merchandise attached in connection with a bankruptcy dating to when dinosaurs walked the Earth, were among the least frequented and policed areas on any civilized planet. Which was just fine with the hoboes who came here to gather around the fire and swap stories just as they had in the heyday of the railroads on Earth. Toby and I picked our way through towering stacks of dusty crates in the darkness, guided only by a light from the Pantechnicon. We came to a huge open space, at the far end of which was a flickering orange light with human shapes sitting around it. Toby took off, barking. You don't sneak up on a group of 'bos, but I never had to worry about announcing myself when Toby was up and around.

I got there to find Boots Lumpkin putting down a plate for the dog. Toby himself was working his way around the circle, greeting his friends, some of whom he'd known for thirty years, others he'd met the night before.

"Easy on the mulligan, Boots," I said, setting the trunk down on its end. "That rascal put away a sausage big as his own hind leg an hour ago."

"Gotcha," said Boots, and ladled a bit of stew into the bowl while Toby threw me a reproachful look. The crazy hound would have eaten whatever was put in front of him, though his belly was round as a beach ball, because it's rude to turn down stew in a hobo jungle, and because that's just what dogs do.

I was greeted around the circle by those who knew me, introduced to those few I hadn't met.

"Looks like you finally got your bindle back," Sarge Pollito called out, which was always good for a laugh. While nobody there actually had his goods tied in a handkerchief and hung from a stick, comparing the Pantechnicon Mark III with the canvas backpacks, haversacks, kitbags, portmanteaux, and valises that contained the belongings of these happy mudlarks was comical indeed.

"Will the butler be arriving soon?" someone called out.

"Had to let the blighter go, Skids," I said, ruefully. "He just wouldn't keep the silver polished." I accepted a plate of stew, shook my head to the offer of coffee. It keeps me awake.

"Hard to get good help these days," said Rivkah the Jewess.

"You said it, Riv. I'm looking for a new upstairs maid. Interested?"

She punched my shoulder, and I sat on the trunk and spooned up the stew.

One night in 1867, in a railyard in Ohio—so the story goes—a 'bo knocked over a rabbit with a good toss of a stone. He skinned it, chopped in a potato and a few wild onions and carrots he found growing trackside, added some flour and salt and pepper, then tossed the whole mess in his billy and boiled it up. It tasted so good he saved some for the next night, when another hobo offered some venison jerky to add to the mix. The third night he met a man who had some beans and a chili pepper. The night after that it was raccoon. And since that unfortunate coney met his maker, every bird of the air and beast of the earth, every fish that swims in the sea, every creep-crawlie that wriggles on its belly or burrows in the mud has had its turn in the stewpot. The mulligan had been ladled over chow mein noodles, spooned over eggs, slapped into sloppy joe sandwiches, sizzled with dumplings, rolled up in crepes, and slipped under mashed potatoes. The Eternal Mulligan is boiled anew every night; you donate what you can to the pot, take out what you need—it is always shared with all present.