They aren't particular about settlers in the Rim Worlds.  They can't afford to be.  The night sky, at those seasons of the year when the sun is in conjunction with the great lens of the Galaxy, is frightening, even to those who were born and reared there, on the planets of the last, the ultimate frontier.  It is the emptiness of the firmament that is so shocking, the emptiness made even worse by the dim, incredibly distant nebulosities that are other galaxies, that are island universes.  Many a man has come to Thule, or Faraway, or Ultimo to carve out a new career and, after a stay of only a few months, has taken ship for some planet in towards the Galactic center, for some world where at night the sky is ablaze with stars, with the beckoning, comradely lights of far-flung colonies and kingdoms.

There is a continual drain of population from the Rim Worlds.  Their imports are, literally, everything, and their exports are young men and women.  Without Federation aid the colonies would have to be abandoned; but they are lookout posts on the frontier of the endless dark, and as such must be maintained.

They are also the worlds from which a man on the run can run no further.

Clavering was on the run, and he ran to Faraway.  Clavering was wanted, originally, on Earth, but during his flight he had contrived to make himself interesting to the police forces of at least a dozen other planets.  His original crime had been robbery with violence - and what made it worse, from the viewpoint of the Terran authorities, was that the victims of the crime had been non-human, and highly important non-humans at that.  It was unthinkable, of course that the Shaara Empire should go to war, with the Federation over the theft of the imperial regalia; even so, the High Queen cut short her visit to Washington and her farewell to Terran dignitaries was rather less than warm.

Clavering was on the run, and he bribed and hid and forged and stowed away, and somehow he stayed free and somehow kept moving.  Plastic surgeons on four planets helped him with changes of identity.  Somewhere along the line he added murder to his crimes - although it was really self defense; Clavering's spirit was restless, driving, self-torturing... but it was not wholly evil.  There were other thefts - mainly of money.  The larger items of the High Queen's regalia, even when broken up, were not easy to dispose of.

He had known for a long time, as do all who live on the wrong side of the Law, that there is no extradition from the Rim Worlds.  It was on Van Diemen's Planet that he made his decision.  A friendly police officer had warned him, for a consideration, that Terran agents would be arriving on the next in-bound liner, and the tramp freighter Jolly Swagman, owned by the Faraway Line and homeward bound, was almost ready to blast off from Port Tasman.  Her captain was ready and willing to supplement his salary by arranging a passage at very short notice.