For Texas and Zed

ForTexasand Zed by Zach Hughes

Chapter One

"Well, sirs, you swing down the Orion Arm with the fires of a sun in your belly, point out in the plane of the disc toward Carina and turn right to Puppis. Beacon blink on the RR Lyrae stars near Orion past the black hole in Taurus. When you see the Beta Canis Majoris on the left you blink on the giant Cepheid on an angle of thirty-five to the galactic ecliptic to Auriga and after that it's a matter of blinking by the seat of your pants."

"And, as I follow your rather poetic instructions," said Jum Anguls, First Leader, Ursa Major Sector, "you end up in nowhere."

"In the big lonesome," Murichon Burns said. "The boonies. The outback."

"Are we wasting the gentleman's time?" asked the lady, with an imperious stare aimed in Murichon's direction. She wore stylish starcloth, spangled, transparent, her tipped mammaries soft peaks pushing against the frail material.

Anguls chuckled, crossing his tightly clad, fleshy thighs. "When dealing with provincials—" He winked at Murichon. "Gwyn has so little patience, you see. They move swiftly on the old Earth."

"To talk in specifics when dealing with honest traders is expected," Gwyn said, forcing her full lips into a semblance of a smile. Her eyes, in her dark face, were glowing jewels, slanted upward. Her skin had the richness of satin-deep space, but lighter, tending to creamy brown, the complexion of the mother planet. In contrast to her, to the white softness of the skin of Jum Anguls, Murichon was reddened, roughed, weathered. His rough spacecloth, dull blue, against the richness of the others' clothing, seemed rude. Yet he was at ease while Anguls chewed a fingernail and looked at him askance and the female blinked at him through force-grown lashes of half an inch length.

"The Republic is not asking for inclusion on the Empire's star maps," Murichon said. "I am here to sell meat. If you're buying, fine. If not—"

Murichon looked out the huge expanse of window and saw the city below, alive, blinking, moving. Trails of fire where arcs lit the lanes, flashes of color as ad-signs lured and promised, the movement of traffic at ten levels, all below, crawling up in whites and reds in the foothills and then abating in density as the galaxy itself thinned toward home. And as he looked b could imagine, hear in his mind, the din, the roar, the sigh and moan of millions crowded into small spaces and his heart flew the countless parsecs and yearned for the Bojacks of Texas, the trackless plains with the grazing herds, the wide sky, the soft caress of the winds of home.

"We are, of course, buying," Anguls said, "but I think the Lady Gwyn has a point. We do not intend to take delivery on meacr steaks dehydrated to the point of cured leather or softened to carrion."

"You ate," Murichon said. The table testified to that. He'd grilled the steaks himself, after picking them at random from the selection he'd brought in on theTexas Queen . "Quick-frozen. In transport for thirty-two standard days—"

"Via Orion and Taurus and the third Cepheid on the left," Lady Gwyn said.

"I know a shortcut," Murichon grinned. He turned, bellowed. The loud call startled the Lady Gwyn, causing her to spill a drop of goodRio Grandewine on the tiny skirt of her costume. She frowned, reached for a napkin. She paused in mid-motion, the spilled wine forgotten, as a tall, young man appeared in the doorway, tray in hand. He, too, was dressed in space blue. However, it was not his attire which froze the Lady Gwyn into admiring immobility for a second, and then sent her long lashes fluttering.

"My son," Murichon said. "He's called Lex."

"Lex," the Lady Gwyn breathed.

Lex himself had not recovered as quickly as Gwyn. His face, already showing the character lines, the weathering, was flushed, his eyes locked on the area of brown skin showing above the low neckline of Gwyn's costume.

"Won't you join us?" Jum Anguls said.

Lex looked down from his six foot seven inch height and raised his eyebrows in question toward Murichon, waiting. When Murichon nodded he moved, saying, "Sure," to place the tray and its steaming contents at table center and then to swing one long blue-clad leg over a chair and ease his weight down with a soft thump.

"Your manners, boy," Murichon said.

" 'Scuse me, ma'am," Lex said, not sure what he'd done wrong.

"Now this," Murichon said, "is meacr steak which was frozen sixty days before lift-off. That ages it to over ninety days."

"My dear fellow," Anguls said, rubbing his distended belly, "I don't know about the appetite of you, what do you call yourselves?Texasmen?"

"Texicans," Lex said, speaking as he speared a steak on a fork and flopped it onto his plate.

"But the ample size of our previous repast," Anguls said.

"Just a taste," Murichon said.

"Ah, well." Anguls sighed, cut a dainty portion with delicate, long-nailed hands. He lifted the bite to his lips, after sniffing it, chewed thoughtfully. "The preservation process seems to be quite effective."

Allowing for transshipment to other systems, using your warehouses as a distribution point, you'd have six months to receive, sell and distribute before there would be any noticeable deterioration in quality," Murichon said.

"Sometimes out on the plains we keep it without cooling for a month," Lex said, talking around a cheekful of meat. "Gets a little ripe—"

"Please," Gwyn said, frowning.

"Course, you can dry it in the sun," Lex said. "Makes it chewy. Keep it all winter that way."

"As to terms," Anguls said. "As you may or may not know, a minimum of sixty percent of total shipments would have to be carried in Empire hulls. This is a basic requirement, you know, over which I have no control. Price? On that I am more flexible."

"Negative," Lex said, putting his fork down with a clatter. "I'll handle this, boy," Murichon said. "No Empire ships onTexas," Lex said, his voice cold. "Will you shut up?" Murichon roared. "Sorry, Dad, but—" "But me no buts, just shut up, enjoy the view and eat." He had not missed the fact that his son's eyes

seemed glued to the red-painted nipples of the Lady Gwyn's mammaries. "No Empire hulls," he said, looking deep into Jum Anguls' watery eyes.

That's what I just said, Dad," Lex said. "Impossible," Gwyn said, letting her eyes leave Lex's bulging arm biceps for a moment. "Our Space Guilds would not hear of it."

"Way I hear it," Murichon said, "your Space Guilds are hungry, too. But that's it. You've got the price. You've got the terms. Delivery on Leader Anguls' site inTexashulls. Payment in acceptable metals. No paper. No credits."

"Mr. Burns, what you propose is not only impossible, it's absolutely inane," Anguls said, his face serious.

"Are you implying that the coinage of the Empire is not stable?" "I ain't implying anything," Murichon said. "But we damned sure can't spend Empire paper onTexas." He rose. "Well, it's been a long day."

The two Empire people, accustomed to long, leisurely meals followed by stimulants, looked up, shocked by such discourtesy. Gwyn, glancing at the First Leader, saw danger in his face. Quickly she put her hand on his arm. "We are not dealing with civilized men," she whispered, as they rose together. Anguls coughed back his anger and nodded.

"I will deliver your terms to our Economic Board," Anguls said. "I do not offer, however, any hope of

their being accepted." Murichon shrugged. "Cassiopeian metals aren't as good as yours, to be frank, but they aren't slaves to their Guilds." He yawned massively, not bothering to cover it. "Lex, you wanta show the good folks out?"

"Yeah, in a minute," Lex said, stuffing his mouth, wiping it on the back of his hand, rising while chewing and swallowing. "You turning in, Dad?" "It's been a long day, as I said."

"Mind if I go down the hill?" Lex asked, hitching at his low-hanging jeans.

"Don't want you out raising hell among the civilized folks," Murichon growled. "Like turning a Bojack farl loose in a flock of meacrs." Anguls bristled anew. "He'd be quite safe in our city, sir." "Ain't him I'm worried about," Murichon said. "Perhaps," the Lady Gwyn said, "your father would feel more at ease if you had a qualified guide."

"You offering?" Murichon asked, his brows lifting to show his steel-blue eyes. "I'm, uh, offering," she said, smiling toward Lex, who was standing with his hands thrust into his back pockets.

Murichon roared. "Well!" Anguls sputtered. "Hell, you got diplomatic immunity, I guess," Murichon said. "Just don't drink anything you wouldn't feed

to a beagle and remember that civilized folks can be breakable." He turned, walked three paces, paused. "And put on some decent clothes. You want civilized folks to think you're working a meacr dip?" Left alone, the two Empire citizens felt awkward. They were unaccustomed to being kept waiting.

"Arrogant barbarians," Jum Anguls growled. "I find them charming," Gwyn said. "You'd find anything over two inches charming," Anguls said. "Quality, darling," she said, blinking her long lashes. "Not quantity." "At least you're thinking," Anguls said. "If anyone can get information out of that big oaf you can." "Thank you." "I want the coordinates," Anguls said. "Exact and complete. If they have as many of those animals as

they say—"

"Remember our research team's report, my dear First Leader. By historical fact, all Texicans are pathological liars when it comes to facts about their country, their possessions, their natural resources." "Divide it by half and it's worth sending a fleet," Anguls said. Lex came out buttoning multiple pearl-like studs on a dark wine jacket-shirt which hung past his waist,

loose. His jeans were of shiny silken material, tight at the thighs, flared at the ankles. The Lady Gwyn, measuring the heroic scale of his body, put her soft hand on his arm, guided him out the doorway onto a marble balcony with a magnificent overlook. Lex wasn't interested in scenery. His eyes were traveling the graceful curve of her neck, down to the soft, dark valley between two red-tipped peaks.

Guards sprang to stiff attention, presented arms. An atmospace convertible clanged entry ramp down, lights glowed from within. Anguls, with a look at the Lady Gwyn, trod regally upward the slight slope and disappeared within. Guards followed. Escort fighters orbited the larger vessel as it lifted.

"First," Gwyn said, still hanging onto Lex's arm, "I must go to my villa."

"We gonna do the town, we oughta get started," Lex said.

"Dressed like this?"

"I like it."

"That's sweet." She stood on tiptoe and planted a warm kiss on his cheek. "But you'll like my town costume, too."

"You don't mind driving, I hope," Lex said as they entered the vehicle provided by the Empire for VIP guests of the diplomatic villa atop the mountain. "I'm not used to so many people."

Lady Gwyn's villa was also in diplomatic country, a five-minute flight from the guesthouse which housed theTexasdelegation headed by Murichon Burns. Once there, she surreptitiously punched a signal button which warned her domestics to stay in their quarters until further notice, escorted Lex into a luxurious room overlooking the city, filled his big hand with a deceptively mild-tasting concoction.

"Do you really like my costume?" she asked, posing before him, much of Lady Gwyn on display.

"I love it," he said. "Wish I could get one to take home to my girl."

"Is she as heroically formed as you?" Gwyn said.

"If you mean is she bigger than you she is." Hell, all Texas women were bigger. That was a part of her fascination. She stood no taller, he estimated, than five and a half feet. Her waist was startlingly small.

"If she isn't much larger she could wear this," Gwyn said, pushing the costume down off her shoulders, doing it slowly, tantalizingly. Lex's eyes got larger as the red-tipped mounds were revealed; then ever larger as she let the filmy garment drift downward, freeing it from her flaring hips with a seductive wiggle. She was clean-shaven. From hairline to toe she was of a uniform creamy brown.

She bent her knees, retrieved the garment, put it into his hand. It held her warmth. "Would you give her this as a gift from me?"

"Sure," Lex said, swallowing. Actually he didn't have a girl, wasn't old enough to claim one of the cozen or so nubile women in his county. He'd been thinking of buying one of the revealing garments just to prove to the boys that Empire women wore such things.

The costume had the light, fragile feel of a Texas girl's undergarment. Once, in Dallas City, he'd held such a garment In his hands with great and breathless anticipation. Once and only once he'd seen a woman in the gloriously nude state in which the Lady Gwyn stood so casually before him. He felt his chest constricting. All of the mucous membranes of his body were constricting, all erectile tissue engorging itself with his hot blood.

The Lady was not oblivious to his interest. With a pulse-pounding grace she moved toward him. "Darling, do you really want to go into the city?"

Lex swallowed.

"It's just a city, you know."

He tried to give orders to his hands.Be Still. Down . His hands had minds of their own and then were full of softness, heat, smoothness.

"Ah," she said, "you don't want to leave our nice villa, do you?"

"Nope," Lex said.

And that was the last of conversation.

Even when, in a twisting, relaxing heap of moist limbs and sweetness she breathed into his ear and asked him about his home. Even when, after a few more of those fine-tasting but deceptive drinks, he felt the world tilt and knew great and revived strength and she played coy. Even when his superior strength forced her and brought a sigh of inevitable resignation to her soft lips.

"It must be a wonderful place, your planet," she said, as dawn came through the open windows and showed the dark circles of lovely dissipation under her eyes.

"Yeah," he said, just before he put pressure on her carotid arteries. She struggled, fear in her eyes, and then went quietly to sleep as her brain was deprived of oxygen.

When he carried the large, limp bundle past the guards at the spaceport he could feel her breathing as she lay inertly across his shoulder. The crudeness of his first method of immobilization had been followed by the administration of a harmless tablet used by spacemen to enforce sleep quickly during the endless shifts of blink travel. The diplomatic badge he wore warded off any search, even in such a sensitive area as a deep spaceport. At the ship, his fellow Texicans, if they had curiosity, showed none. As acting First Officer, he enjoyed the relative luxury of a six-by-eight private cabin. There, he looked at his prize, nude, lithe, breathing deeply and evenly. He smoothed her jet-black hair on the polydown pillow. It would be close quarters on the trip home, but it would be worth it. His supply of dozers would hold out until the Queen was well past the Cassiopeian lines, and then it would be too late to turn back to the Empire. He would present his father with an accomplished deed.

He felt the efforts of the night all at once, and he yawned mightily. Locking the cabin door behind him, he went to crew's quarters and showered, heedless of the waste of water since the ship was in port. Then, with a glad feeling for his companion, he bent his body around the frailness, the creamy brown richness, the heat, the softness and slept the sleep of the tired conqueror.

He woke to the sound of the ship's power, an all-pervading hum, an awareness, a prickling of the skin. Next to him, the Lady Gwyn slept peacefully, her lips parted sweetly. He kissed them, then held her in his arms as he gave her water and a dozer. Dressed in ship's wear, he went to the bridge.

"Big night?" Murichon Burns asked absently, as his eyes followed an intricate pattern of meters and instruments. The ship was almost to lift power.

"Big enough," Lex said. "We leaving?"

"How did you ever figure that out?"

"You heard from the great leader, then?"

"We'll hear from him via blinkstat from a few parsecs out," Murichon said. "I'll feet better about it that way."

A soft bell sounded the readiness of the ship's power. As Murichon's hands played over the console the hum of the plant changed, became a bee's song.

"Texas Queen," a voice said on the sound system, "you do not have clearance to charge."

"I'm taking clearance," Murichon said, without activating the broadcast unit. "Read me clearance one-one-hundredth unit vertical vector," he told Lex.

"Traffic as thick as parasites on a molting meacr," Lex said. "Depth and layers."

"Find me a hole, boy. We're going into it."

It was risky business. It was a busy planet and an active spaceport. Inbound and outbound, the starships, the interplanetary craft, the privates and atmoflyers cluttered the screens.

"The button's yours," Murichon said, giving way to the superior reflexes of the young. "When you find a hole, hit it."

"Texas Queen, Texas Queen," the control voice said, "you will decharge immediately."

"Now," Lex said, the screen giving him a small vertical hole which, the computers estimated, would be open for a millisecond, and the button was punched as he spoke and there was a feel of intimate and disturbing events in his gut as he looked out on the blackness of space with Polaris off the starboard quarter and depressed at an angle of seventy.

"I'll take her, boy," Murichon said. "We'll likely have company for a while."

Company they had. She signaled her blinking from outside the planet's atmosphere and emerged into space a telescope's shot away, a sleek and deadly Empire Vandy, painted the black of space but visible as theQueen's autos homed in on her. Aboard was Fleet Captain Arden Wal, veteran of the Battle of Wolfs Star, graying, slim, impeccable in his gold and black. As theTexas Queen moved at sub-light speed, charging for a big blink, Wal had time to report. He was near enough to use voice transmission, scrambled, of course. "As you suspected, sir, the bird flew prematurely."

"You're with her?" The voice was the smooth, cultured one of First Leader Jum Anguls.

"We have her, sir. We'll stay with her."

"Not too close."

"Of course, sir."

Wal relaxed. His superior power was ready, capable of outleaping that rusting antique by a hundredfold, equipped with instruments which could, in that micro-microinstant of blinking, measure and follow and emerge within a few thousand miles of any blinking ship. His Vandy had just been reconditioned at the Empire yards on Polaris Two. She was a smoothly functioning unit with a crew seasoned by two tours along the Cassiopeian frontier. To think for one moment that she was incapable of following the primitive Texas vehicle through space was to approach heresy.

Ahead, theTexas Queen blinked along a line down the Orion Arm and she was there, recharging, when Captain Arden Wal'sWolf emerged. The mission, Wal was thinking, was duck soup, a welcome rest for a crew which had earned a rest. He began to have his first doubts when a series of straight vector blinks showed the line of travel to be directly toward the Cassiopeian defense lines beyond Antares. If the Texicans continued in that direction, it would prove one thing, or one of two things. Either Jum Anguls was right in suspecting that the Texicans were Cassiopeian spies or the outworlders were just plain crazy, flying into the teeth of five full Line Fleets, each ship of which was more than capable of making scattered atoms out of theTexas Queen . Already the Cassiopeians would be alerted by the signals which a bunking ship sends ahead of itself through the continuum. Already a thousand weapons would be moving ponderously toward a possible emergence point.

TheTexas Queen leaped parsecs through the emptiness, not deviating from the line of travel. Zigzagging to avoid large stars which could disrupt a blink generator and send a ship and its contents into limbo for eternity, the ship blinked and rested, bunked and rested, traveling the Orion Arm in seven-league boots, covering distances which strained the imagination in an instant, held back only by the need to rest, to recharge, to build for the next jump. And always behind her the sleek, dark form of the Empire Vandy.

Wal rang battle stations when, with gentlemanly courtesy, the warning came. "You are nearing Cassiopeian space, guard yourself and identify."

Wal listened for the telltale identification from the vessel ahead of bun. None came. Instead, as instruments whined td measure, she blinked and theWolf followed on automatic with the crew tense and all weapons ready and hell broke loose as theWolf emerged into space dead center of a whole Cassiopeian Line Fleet and screens sizzled as an incredible assault was made by a thousand weapons centered.

"The Texan, the Texan," Wal said, his voice calm.

"Gone, sir." The tech was not so calm. Bedlam was breaking loose as the ship's screen began to fail and force hammered the hull.

It was true. The tuned screens which had been following the Texas ship were blank. She'd blinked into the middle of a fleet and disappeared and now that fleet was pounding the Empire Vandy and gunners were opening up and, as he gave the emergency one order which gutted his power and left him a derelict in dead space—but out of Cassiopeian range—he saw first one and then another Cassiopeian cruiser puff as screens went under the concentrated fire of theWolf . At least, he thought, in the silence of a dead ship, we took two of the bastards with us.

It is not a pleasant feeling to kill a fine ship. One instant with smooth sounds she's alive around you and the next she's silent as a tomb and floating free in uncharted space and you know that the power is melted into a useless blob of metals and all that's left is life support emergency to hold you, maybe, until you can find out where the hell the undirected emergency blink sent you and call in a wrecker. The hull can be salvaged, if it isn't too long a tow back to an Empire base, but she's no longer the same ship. Once before he'd been forced to do it, in the last stages of the Battle of Wolfs Star when he'd been Captain of an old Middle-guard cruiser. Now he'd been forced, to save his crew, to save himself, to kill one of the newest, finest ships of the Empire fleet and it caused him indigestion as his navigators searched unfamiliar stars for a clue to their location and the signalman sat patiently waiting to send out a tow request. And as he felt his stomach growl in protest he knew a mixture of hate and puzzlement. It was a strange feeling. He had little experience with hate. He didn't like the Cassiopeians, of course, but they were gentlemen.

They knew the rules of warfare and followed them. Their warning had been in the finest traditions of the hundred years' war. It was the Texicans who were barbarians, leading theWolf into a trap, without a doubt by some prearranged plan wherein theTexas Queen went unharmed while the Empire ship came under the concentrated fire of a fleet. Only the superiority of the Empire screens had saved her. Yes, it was clearly the men from Texas, wherever the hell it was, who were responsible for his being, for the second time in his career, aboard a killed ship, a ship gutted by his own orders. They would pay.

It took eighteen hours to locate theWolf in the sea of uncharted stars. The distress signal going into the nearest blinkstat relay point was weak, incomplete. TheWolf wallowed in her own misery for two long, sweating, stale-aired weeks before a rescue tug blinked alongside to begin the tedious journey to the Empire.

"They will pay," Captain Arden Wal promised the universe as he felt the grapples join his disabled ship to the tug, knew the first discomfort of overstressed blinking.

He did not know that one of the Texicans had already begun to pay for his sins, although leading the Empire Vandy into a Cassiopeian fleet was not, in his mind, one of them. Going into the Cassiopeian line, Lex's presence was required in the bridge. While there, his youthful reflexes in command of the intricate controls of the double-blink system installed shortly before leaving the home planet, he was unable to guard and tend his unconscious guest in the First Officer's stateroom. He had discovered that the Lady Gwyn's system was unusually resistant to drugs and his supply of dozers was low even before reaching the Cassiopeian sector. While he was on duty, at a rather touchy time, the Lady from old Earth awoke, made the classic quote,

"Where the hell am I?" and immediately put two and two together.

Seeing her storm out of the stateroom into the crowded bridge was an experience which the crewmen of theQueen would long remember. The only garment Lex had brought aboard when he kidnapped his newfound love was the scanty, revealing thing of transparent mist and the Lady's mammary points were not painted, but tattooed a permanent red and although her hair was a bit worse for having lacked attention through her long sleep, she was a spectacular sight as she raged into the bridge, lips forming words which most Texicans would have used only in dire pain or anger and then not in the presence of a lady.

Lex heard, but there was no time to turn. The ship was building for the blink and as he heard her apply some rather harsh epithets against his manhood and general character the ship was blinking and as he started his finger toward the button which activated the immediate double-blink, sending theQueen at right angles out of the midst of the waiting fleet, he felt her fists pounding on his back and then, theQueen resting safely at a known point in space awaiting the charge to send her peacefully homeward, minus an escort, having performed a feat which was unknown to that date in space technology, he turned, a smile forming, and the Lady Gwyn's fist took him directly on the nose. He bled.

"What the holy hell?" Murichon Burns exploded.

"Ole Lex brung him a souvenir," said a crewman, to the delight of his mates, who laughed as Lex feebly tried to wipe blood from his upper lip while defending himself against the surprisingly strong onslaught of the scantily clad Lady from Earth. "A chocolate all-day sucker," the same wag said, to applause in the form of chuckles.

"Now you stop it, Gwyn," Lex said, his voice shaking as she tried to scratch his eyeballs from their sockets. "After all, I'm going to marry you."

That stopped her. Her talons were stilled in midair, her shrill verbal assault silenced. "Marry me?" she asked in amazement, her voice going deep contralto. "Marry me?"

"Sure," Lex said, blushing as the men looked on. "You don't think I'm the kind of man who'd steal a woman away from her folks without doing the right thing by her?"

"Marry me?" She asked it quietly, her face blank with shock, her mouth hanging open. Then the storm grew again and her eyes blazed. "You hopeless moron. You brainless—"

"Shouldn't talk like that," Lex said, having had time to think it over. He wasn't used to being shamed, by a woman of all people, in front of his mates. He picked her up under one strong arm and suffered her scratching as he carried her from the bridge to a chorus of hoots and chuckles.

"I'll be the son of an albino ground dog," Murichon Bums said. "He's stolen a representative of old mother Earth herself."

But there was work to be done. Contact, via blink-stat, to be made with His Honor, the First Leader of Ursa Major Sector. Texas had meat to sell.

"Your Honor," he dictated to the signalman, "this is Murichon Burns sending. If it ain't too much trouble I'd like to know, by return blinkstat beamed—" He let the signalman fill in the coordinates. "—if you've decided to swap a little metal for good Texas, meacr."

Chapter Two

There's nothing like spirited competition to make a fool forget his humiliation. And an airors is probably the most gloriously overpowered vehicle in creation, a thing made for a man who has just been spat upon, kicked, scratched, cursed at and threatened with burial in a teacup after being administered a thorough enema. Windscreen up, Lex powered the gleaming red airors straight up to ten thousand feet, leveled her, gave her a kick in the side to send her hurtling west at a speed which narrowly allowed retention of his hair, streaming in the blast.

Below him, Texas sunned itself in the beaming rays of good old Zed, the Lone Star. Up there at ten thousand the wooded, rolling hills around Dallas City were leveled to a mat of green and as his airors, Zelda , streaked silently away from the sun the big emptiness of the plains came rushing toward him until all below there was a sea of brownish green with the grazing meacr visible only when they flocked together.

He spotted, far below, the dot of a herding airors and beeped a greeting on the air-to-air and got a beep in return and then the herder was far behind and the Pecos was a thin line of green through the brownish grass and then gone and over New Paris, one hour and five hundred miles out of Dallas City, he slowed to go on voice to tell his aunt Mary that he and his dad were back from the Empire and that they were feeling fine, and, yes, they had watched their diet and hadn't drunk Empire water.

He began to feel a little better when he saw the white glitter of the big sands up ahead and he dove, screaming with the rushing wind, to make dust trails, and the airors skimmed the dunes at a flat-out sub-sonic max, leaving swirls of sand and terrified sanrabs in his wake. Feeling his oats, forgetting Empire and a girl with red-tattooed nipples, he nippedZelda upside down and slowed to a mere three and hung his head down toward the sand to watch its ripples flow by underneath, yelling and feeling the wind fill his mouth and ripple the flesh of his cheeks. He flipped upright and took his legs off the rests to stretch them short of the rise of the far-side foothills and then rose in a swoop to cross the low mountains into moist, warm air of the savannah. There was the sea. It was big, just as everything on Texas was big. Behind him stretched seven thousand miles of plains, desert and mountains. Ahead of him, gleaming and sparkling in the sun, ten thousand miles of open ocean with not enough islands to give resting places to the seabirds.

He went up until he felt the air get thin and looked at it as he closed on New Galveston-by-the-Sea. It was a sight which never failed to thrill him, the blue of the sea, the clean, white buildings of the town, the mountains behind him. His mother had been born in New Galveston and he'd attended secondary school there to learn his reading and writing. He'd been given his first airors upon graduation and his first solo flight had been just like this, high, fast, the view magnificent, the air warm but cooling at altitude, the sun bright, the ocean stretching endlessly outward unmarred by floating things save a few pleasure sailers near shore and the surfers on the very fringe next to the white, bright strand.

When he spotted the brightly colored umbrellas on the strand he dug his heels in, dropped power and fell like a space-fresh meteorite aimed at the parking area near the refreshment tent. He thought negative power at the last possible instant and crushed to a stop with the skids of the airors contacting the sand without stirring a particle and was greeted with whoops and a can of icy brew.

In that crowd he was not a giant, as he'd been back in the Empire. Some of them went well over seven feet, but he knew from past trials that he could hold his own with them at any of the manly arts from leg wrestling to hand fighting because he kept in shape and went light on the brew and didn't touch the hard stuff except for a glass of Rio now and then at dinner.

Class of '72 reunited. Twenty high-spirited young Texicans in tight-fitting jeans and some swimsuits and brown shoulders and big arms and whoops of greeting and backslapping and more brew until Lex finally got loose from the mob and singled out old Billy Bob Blink and said, "Got something to show you."

They walked behind a dune and Lex showed him Gwyn's little costume. He held up the misty thing in front of him and said, "How about that?" Billy Bob's eyes went wide and he tried to touch it but Lex pulled it away.

"You're kidding," Billy Bob said.

"Right on the streets they wear 'em," Lex lied. "All of 'em sticking out all over the place."

"You're kidding," Billy Bob said.

"She gave this to me," Lex said.

"The one you brought back?"

"Her."

"Holy Hopping Hornies." Billy Bob was openly impressed. "When you gonna marry her?"

"Well," Lex said, looking up to see a lone beagle soaring up there looking for dinner. "I guess I'll have to think it over a little."

"They say she's pretty."

"She's all right," Lex admitted, wondering how the hell the word had spread all the way to New

Galveston in just a day and a night, but knowing how, because big as it was Texas was a close-knit community and if you put the hood and the air on an airors you could make it from Dallas City to New Galveston in ten minutes with one blink up and one blink down and the communicators were free to all and everyone was everyone else's cousin, so when you stopped to think it wasn't strange at all to know that New Galveston knew that Lex Burns had brought home an Empire gal.

"What are you gonna do today?" Billy Bob asked, after he'd watched Lex put the little misty thing away in his pocket.

"Oh, racing and herding, I guess," Lex said.

"Try to get into different heats at first so we won't knock one another out early," Billy Bob said. "That way you'll at least make the finals."

"You mean that way you'll make the finals," Lex said, grinning.

They walked back and joined the group and they were drawing lots for the first racing heats. Lex held back and Billy Bob went first and then when the heat which Billy Bob had drawn was full, Lex took his number. He was up against some good boys, but he'd seen Billy Bob Blink in action before and he knew that when it came down to the final run it'd be hisZelda against Billy Bob'sClean Machine and then there'd be hell to pay, because Billy Bob, taking after his distant grandfather a few times removed, was always coming up with something new. Billy Bob thought he owned all airorses because his distant forebear had developed the blink drive back on the old Earth when they said that all inventions were possible only through the work of a well-financed research team. Old man Blink had built the first blink drive in his garage workshop on the out-skirts of Houston in a prime example of individual initiative which was still being taught to Texas schoolchildren six hundred years later. Lex knew the story well. Having built a machine which could reduce space, any known length of it, to nothing, he offered it to the government, but all of the Congress and everyone else was too interested in trying to impeach a President named Wixon or something; no one would listen to a gray-haired thirty-year-old TV repairman from Texas. So old Zed Blink installed his drive in a 1954 Lincoln Continental and emerged it into the restricted air space over the White House, which was the place of the President of the United States then, andthat got some attention. Then the armed forces wanted an exclusive on the drive and there was one hell of a hassle about it until Blink gave the drive, outright gave it, to six domestic airlines and in doing so gave up a sure fortune. Well, it was an old story and Lex just happened to think about it while be was watching Billy Bob win his heat and while he was tinkering withZelda getting her ready. Because Billy Bob had seemed to inherit the scientific abilities of the Blink boys and was always coming up with something new for his airors. All Lex had going for him was his natural skill and a nerve which allowed him to hug the pylons closer and fly faster and withstand the g forces of the right-angle turns better than most. After all, the rules made it so that the final limiting factor was physical ability, not tinkering knowledge to soup up an airors.

Billy Bob won his heat handily. He didn't use anything new and startling, just solid racing ability and the finely tunedClean Machine's basic functions. There was only one accident. The racecourse was two parallel rows of pylons set a hundred feet apart stretching down the strand, and one boy from up in the Bojacks lost his airors and put her nose into the surf and tumbled six times before sinking slowly into the shallow water. He came up spitting salt and waving a hand to show that he was OK.

Speed wasn't everything. Some of the old-timers said that the race was patterned after an event back on the old Earth which had riders on animals guiding them around barrels and it was turning ability as much as anything which made the race, for the pylons were close together and you had to cut each one of them. Miss one and you got a penalty.

It was a fine Texas day with Old Zed—the star named after Zed Blink, who led the people out of red-tape democracy to find a solitary star way out in the big lonesome—hot and fierce and the sweat felt good as it cooled not too rapidly on the forehead and then Lex was getting ready and the first two boys to make the run both missed a pylon and then he took the course going slow and sure, because his competition wasn't too keen, and he won it by a few seconds.

Billy Bob won his second heat as if he'd beenthe Blink. Actually, it was his great-great-grandfather who had developed the mnemonic brains of an airors. Billy Bob was good. He rode in the prescribed style, hands free, giving orders to his airors with knees and body movements and the almost uncanny empathy which can develop between a good airors and a good rider. It was almost as if theClean Machine were a living thing reading Billy Bob's mind. Well, sometimes you felt almost as if an airors were a living thing. Out on the boonies, the Bojacks, you spent a lot of time with it, and you got to the point of talking to it and it responded, that funny, complicated brain learning new things; and while herding a wingling meacr you sometimes wondered if that damned machine didn't know more about it than you did. A wingling is swift and shifty and sometimes the airors seemed to anticipate a darting turn before you did and that was the kind of thing you had to have to be able to do the job and to be able to win a race and Billy Bob had it. He'd won more races than any other young stud on Texas and the next one to him was one Lex Burns, who won his prelim heats and then, sweating, drinking a cool brew, eager, a little nervous, watched Billy Bob really turn it on to best the best time of the day by a full five seconds, eliminating everyone but Lex from the finals.

Lex took his run, his first, all out, leaning, twisting, feeling the hard pull of the g's as he cut a pylon, a force which, had he not been strapped in, would have thrown him ass over teakettle into the sand or the surf. He was counting off the ticks of the clock as he went down course and he knew he was behind Billy Bob's time by at least half a second and one odd run back up the course to make it up. He powered the Zelda beyond human ability to ride her and leaned horizontal on the turns and stirred up sand as his boot tip dragged he was flying so low. He could hear the rush of the wind and his own grunts of effort as he fought the g's, sometimes feeling the blood pushed out of his brain and going a little soft in the head but recovering in time to push theZelda hard down the last straightaway to tie Billy Bob's time to the tenth of a second.

That called for a runoff and the crowd had grown and it seemed that all of New Galveston was out to see them break the tie. Lex had to go first and he went down all out and blacked out for what seemed to be an eternity as he rounded the last pylon, losing a precious tick as he went wide and then recovering to burn up the course, blowing sand silently in the wake of the flashingZelda , but he knew he'd blown it down there on the far turn, and sure enough, when Billy Bob came in he was a tenth of a second faster and, once again, Lex had to settle for a second.

"I been running hind tit to you all my life," he told Billy Bob. "One of these days I'm gonna get tired of it and beat on you a little."

"Bring your lunch," Billy Bob said. "It'll be a long day's work."

Herding, now, was a separate breed of cat. In herding, it usually went the other way, with Lex's slightly lighter weight adding to his maneuverability and his rapport with his machine giving him another slight edge. The contest was a simple one drawn directly from the work life of a male Texican. It all started way back when the settlers found out that the meacr made better, juicier, more tender steaks than the various breeds of Earth cattle which had been brought out in the original settlement fleet. The meacr was smaller than, say, a whiteface or a Charolais, and he bred like an old Earth rabbit, having twins twice a year, cute little critters with wings which, after a few days, hardened up like a bat's wing and grew to massive length to carry the chunky little body of the wingling up into the auto sport and play and look for insects and small rodents, things which made up his diet until the change, when the wings shrank into two swollen appendages used for flicking bisects and which made the finest, tastiest soup this side of galactic core. In his flying form the meacr was unpredictable. He was as likely to soar a thousand miles as he was to stay put on the range where he belonged, with an owner's brand on his hide, until his wings set and he started to grow and eat a few tons of grass to make him fat, placid and highly edible. While he was in flying form, the meacr needed herding to keep him on his proper range and that was where the airors came into its own. The meacr wingling wasn't fast, but he was tricky. It took some dude to stay with him, herd him back where he belonged. Fortunately, the wingling was gregarious, soaring in groups of six to twenty, and he played follow the leader. Herd the leader and the rest followed.

There weren't that many Texicans that a man could go through life without doing a hitch on the Bojacks and both Billy Bob and Lex had done their year. There were, of course, professional herdsmen who made a lifetimes work of it, but they were, for the most part, loners who loved the big, empty nighttime skies of Texas, lit only by the two small moons, the galaxy itself mist in the southern sky on summer evenings. Some of them were men who had lost out in the competition for the scarce women of Texas. Some of them were just ne'er-do-wells who couldn't hack it in the towns and some just liked it.

Lex had liked it well enough. It was a pleasure to have it all to yourself, all the Bojack country stretching away flat and green to make an inverted bowl of horizon all around you, the meacrs gentle and quiet, making only those soft, sweet humming sounds after they fed enough for the day, the winglings being restless and pesky, the occasional old, grizzled farl sneaking up to cut down a stray for his dinner. But Lex, being the son of Murichon Burns, had been off planet twice, once when he was just thirteen, on a scouting trip into Cassiopeian territory to determine the feasibility of trade routes into the galaxy. And once you've seen space, well, herding winglings becomes just a sport for a Sunday afternoon and the year of enforced service drags and then you begin to know what girls represent and you're given the loot and a new suit and sent into Miss Toni's in Dallas City and after that the Bojacks have lost their charms.

But doing it for sport, herding, is fine; and Lex was ready and eager as he took his turn in the chute and a wingling with a ring on its tail to put life into it was released a few yards in front of him to take to the air like a salt-shot beagle. He was off with a whoop and hadZelda on the wingling's nose in a wink and had the critter going the right way when he made a slip and the wingling zapped a left and then it was full g's getting him again and not much time lost and the circle down there coming up. He forced the frustrated wingling to land and the time was good enough to win his heat.

He leaned on the fence next to Billy Bob. "You, an, been to bed with her?"

"A gentleman don't answer questions like that," Lex said, looking skyward.

"I been into Miss Toni's," Billy Bob said.

"You ain't a man until you have," Lex said.

"Who'd you get when you went?"

"Girl named Pitty."

"Tall, blond?"

"The same."

"Hot damn. I got her, too." "They say she specializes in first-timers," Lex said. "God, what a set," Billy Bob breathed, the memory making him squirm. "Billy Bob Blink next in the chute," the announcer said. Billy Bob was so shook thinking of Miss Pitty

and her set that he let his wangling take a lead and lost three full seconds and then it was over and Lex had his ribbon and a few brews and then he buttoned up the hood and blinked home and in the gathering darkness the skies began to take on their blackness and the lone star of the globular cluster out there in the big lonesome was low and the galaxy hadn't risen yet. Then he began to think and what he thought he didn't like. He thought about the scene at the spaceport when theTexas Queen came down, all the big wigs there to meet her, although the news of the successful trip had been blinkstatted ahead of them. They weren't there to greet the heroes returned from the Empire, but to see the girl Murichon Burns's boy had stolen, right under the noses of the Empire on Polaris Two.

He remembered how she looked, dressed like a decent Texas woman in real cloth, her legs extending out from the short skirt, her hair flowing down over her shoulders, her head held high. And he remembered what she'd said.

"I demand," she said imperiously, "that these ruffians be arrested at once." "Well," said President Andy Gar, "we'll talk about that." "Under the laws of the Empire," she said. "This ain't Empire," the President had said, quickly. "But there must be civilized men here." "Well," said Murichon Burns, "I reckon we're civilized enough to suit us. Civilized enough, at any rate, to

send you back on the meat fleet, but that'll be a wait, ma'am, since it takes time to slaughter and freeze." "Meanwhile, ma'am," Lex said, "why don't you stay at our town house? We got plenty of room." "I would not be caught dead under the same roof with you," she said. "We're sorta short on guest facilities," President Gar said. "And Murichon's house is comfortable. But if

you don't want to be around the boy I reckon we can find something. Might put you up at Miss Toni's place." This brought a general chuckle and roused Gwyn's suspicions. "And who is Miss Toni?" "Well, it's sorta hard to explain," Lex said. "But it's where we, I mean we young ones, go—"

"A whorehouse," Gwyn said. "Not exactly," President Gar said. "We prefer to call it a place of professional entertainment." Miss Toni, who was over sixty, was Gar's cousin.

"We'll put the boy out in the garage," Murichon said.

And that's the way it had been. He saw her, that night, at table. She was displaying some curiosity about the planet and Murichon was answering questions carefully. He'd had her in isolation during the last part of the trip and what she could see in the skies wouldn't tell her much. It would tell her more than he wanted her to know, that Texas was an outplanet, distant from the disc of the galaxy, and relatively near a globular cluster, near enough for the cluster to make one huge star in the nighttime skies. However, after discussing it with the others, they'd decided that those were not enough clues to give away the exact location of the planet. At any rate, the only alternative to risking giving a clue was to keep the Lady on Texas and Murichon wasn't sure the planet could stand such a test. He'd seen her in action against his son. She was, he thought admiringly, quite a woman.

Lex tried to get into the conversation at table but every time he spoke she cut him dead and ignored his comments. She even turned down an offer to be taught airors riding and that was his hole card.

While he sat outside atmosphere, buttoned up in the hood of theZelda , cold space empty around him, he called and used voice to say, "I'm home, Dad," hit the button and blinked into the garage. There was warmed-over soup and wingling stew and he ate alone, in the kitchen. He was feeling so lonely he had the cook robot go over menus just to hear a voice. Then he went to his room over the garage and turned on the circular music station from Dallas central and let the twangy sound of strings soak into his hide, killing a brew before going in for a shower.

Hell, he was going to marry the girl. What more did she expect?

"I am an appointed representative of the Emperor himself," she'd told President Gar. "I shall report my ill treatment to the Emperor personally."

"Well," President Gar said, "give the old boy my regards."

He was dressed and ready for—what? Dressed up and no place to go. Early evening. Just across the courtyard was—heaven in scents and feels and softness and long hair and supple legs and clinging arms. How could she change so quickly? She'd loved him there on Polaris Two. How could she have done the things she did with him without love? She wasn't like Miss Toni's girls, who had chosen to even the inbalance of the sexes on Texas by being all things to all men. Hell, she wasn't like that. So she had to have loved him and then, when he did what any man would do, steal away the girl he loved, she'd turned into a spitting, scratching female farl, half-tiger and half-shrew.

He was feeling quite sorry for himself when the communicator came to life and his father's voice requested his body in the house. A request from Murichon was not merely an order, it was the law, and, besides, it was something to do. He walked across and noted that there were a couple of strange airorses outside and an official arc with the great seal on the side. He went into the living room looking around forher . She wasn't there, but old Andy Gar was, along with the head man of the Meat Growers Association, a couple of Ranger officers of high rank and his father.

"Sit down, boy," Murichon said. He was dead serious, grim as being stranded in the middle of the great desert without water. Lex sat. He glanced out of the corner of his eye toward the Ranger General with his tan and gold braid and wondered how he'd look in uniform.

"I'm gonna give it to you straight and slow, son," Murichon said. "First off, it appears that you've snatched a red-hot coal right out of the Emperor's own fire and it might burn your fingers. Your little gal with the spitfire temper is the Emperor's own cousin, and, in all probability, one of his favorite bedmates, judging from the fuss they're making about the Lady Gwyn."

"The Empire demands," began the Ranger General, but Murichon held up his hand and the General lapsed into silence.

"He's just a boy and he's got a decision to make," Andy Gar said. "Let's make sure he understands the situation."

"You know we've been in blinkstat communication with the First Leader on Polaris," Murichon said. Lex nodded. He knew the setup. At random times a Texican ship, blinking random patterns within range of an Empire blink relay, would contact and wait just long enough to receive a message in return. The details of the meat shipment were being worked out that way, after the Empire had swallowed its pride in order to be able to swallow good, juicy Texas steak. "Well, the first message about your gal was just a polite inquiry about her, wondering if we had any idea where she was. That was a couple of days ago. The next one wasn't so polite. They told us flatly that you'd been seen carrying a suspicious-looking sack onto the Texas Queen . Now I suppose we should have just flat out lied about it at that point, but you know I don't cotton to lying without reason, and I was looking on this Lady Gwyn as just another Empire gal, a little more advanced in position than most, but just another gal in a system which has billions of girls. I was wrong. I admitted that one of the crewmen had taken a fancy to her and had lifted her to be his wife. I was lying just a little, because I guess that was your intention."

"It was," Lex said.

"Well," Murichon said, "I should have lied more." He tilted his glass and drained it. He looked at his son and there was a deep wrinkle between his eyes he was looking so hard. "Son, they say either we turn over the kidnapper and the Lady in good condition or the meat deal is off."

Lex's face did not change, but he felt cold winds blow inside. He had an instant flashback to the day, the wild ride over the desert, the wide plains, the sun over Texas. "Well then, I reckon I'll have to go," he said.

Andy Gar cleared his throat. "Son, do you remember when that prospector, got picked up in Cassiopeian space back in '65?" Lex nodded. He remembered it well from hearing the stories, but he'd been born too late to volunteer for the rescue force. "And how the whole nation turns out when a man is missing in the desert or somewhere?"

"Yes, but this is different," Lex said.

"Only in degree," Andy Gar said, while the Ranger General fidgeted. "You're still a Texican and we Texicans stick together. There ain't no one here gonna try to force you to go into the Empire and turn yourself in to a pack of faggots. Under ordinary circumstances, our answer to the Empire ultimatum would have been something like what old Jack Bridges told his wife when he was determined on going out into the outback prospecting for iron." Lex chuckled. Jack Bridges, an almost legendary figure, had reputedly told his wife, who protested his leaving her and her two children, to perform an anatomical impossibility involving basic breeding functions. "But," Gar went on, "we got us a problem, son. We're all alone out here and there ain't too many of us and we'd like to have enough people on this world to fix it up right, not too many, but just enough. Because we're short on a lot of things we have to limit the population so that there's just about one Texican for every thousand square miles of land. We need metals. You know from your schooling that Texas is a light planet. That's good in a way, because if she had a metal core like some she'd have a gravity which would be so strong it would be all we could do to crawl. Now we've got a couple of ways to get metals. We can sneak into the worlds on the periphery and poach them from Empire or Cassiopeian territory. We've done it in the past and so far we've not lost a man. But sooner or later we're going to get caught. Some prospector is going to be careless and he'll come home with an Empire or a Cassiopeian Vandy on his tail and then we'll be in it when we don't want to be. All the Republic of Texas wants is to be left alone to do things the way our fathers did them, maybe just a bit better. We want no part of the war inside the galaxy. But we've got some things that each of the warring sides would risk ten battle fleets for. Meat, for example. They're eating manufactured protein on the ships of the line and the home front doesn't even get that most of the time. Let an Empireite or a Cassiopeian see Texas and we'll be calling out the Guard and I don't have to tell you that even a Texican can be outgunned and outmanned when the odds are a million to one and the other side has unlimited metals and arms. The other way we can get metals is to trade, and we're right on the verge of making a successful deal for enough metals to keep Texas going for fifty years. We've spent ten years working out the details, breeding a surplus of meacrs, so you can see why some folks are a little upset about the turn of events."

"I'll go," Lex said.

"Hold your horses," Murichon said. "Hear it all."

"We've had our lawyers working over Empire law-books," the President said. "It seems that they've got more laws than they know what to do with. The penalty for kidnapping is a severe one, but it hasn't been enforced for a hundred or so years, because in spite of the war they've got so many people that when they lose one or two they don't even notice, unless the victim is someone of importance. There's not been a kidnapping prosecution on Earth for 2 hundred years and there are no penalties for rape—at least they're not enforced. So we're not sure just what they'd do to you. There's an old law on the books calling for life under supervision, working the mining planets, for kidnapping, so that seems to be the worst that could happen. On the other hand, we've told them and we're waiting for an answer, that you're the son of a rather important man who'd take a dim view of his son being sentenced to labor for life. We told them flat out that one Texican is worth all the metals they could dig in a thousand years, and we're hoping that they'll make an offer. Here's what we're thinking. If they'll offer a light punishment, and if you're willing to go out there for Texas, then we'll think it over. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," Lex said. "I was the one done it. I ought to pay for it. Texas is more important than one man."

"Texas is one man," Andy Gar said. "One man repeated. Each individual as important as the whole." He drank. "So we're not going to pressure you, boy. The choice is yours."

Chapter Three

When Billy Bob heard about it, he came over from New Galveston on theClean Machine , suspended her on nul-grav just over where Lex was lying on the sun deck in his skivvies, and poured a cold brew down Lex's bare chest, causing him to leap almost as high as theMachine and come down, waked from a nightmare about being holed up in a mining shaft for eternity, with his hand chopping the air with a force which would have decapitated a man had it struck home. Billy Bob almost fell off his airors laughing and Lex had to chuckle along, after the anger faded.

They were waiting for the word from the communications ship out in the galaxy. It was taking a helluva long time and the wait was getting on Lex's nerves. It was a nice day, just before a rain with the coolness moving in from the big weathermaking ice country to the north. Lex flewZelda out of the garage, after making feeble excuses against showing the Lady Gwyn to Billy Bob. Actually, the Lady stayed close to her room and Lex wasn't about to disturb that sleeping farl. He told Billy Bob that Gwyn was so shook about being shipped back to the Empire, losing the chance to be the wife of Lex Burns, that she was moody and her eyes were red from crying. So they went out into the desert and shot sonic booms at mountainsides and then went sanrab hunting.

Sanrab hunting was trickier than herding winglings, for the little rodent-like things were capable of turning three-sixty on a dime and it was hot, sweaty and not undangerous work to zoom low enough to lean down and make a grab with the bare hand for a sanrab's long tail while guiding the airors inches off the uneven surface with thought and knees and intuition. They caught two each and released the females and took the bucks home to the cook robot and then ate one each while in the front of the Burns house the official vehicles came and went and the air of something imminent, something bad, got thicker and thicker.

When Lex was called to the conference room he left Billy Bob behind and joined his father, the President and the same Ranger General, plus a few odd and assorted government officials and the Admiral of Texas' fleet. As a past President, it was not unusual for Murichon to have such notables in his house, and Andy Gar was a frequent caller, not only for business. Old Andy drove his own arc, saying that the Republic needed all able-bodied men in good jobs, not driving a President's car. He sat there among the others, a little older, a bit more weathered, dressed as they were dressed, in range clothes, and chewed some good Bojack tobacco,

"I reckon it's time, huh?" Lex asked, when he saw his father's grim face.

"We heard from His Majesty, or whatever he calls himself," Murichon said. He looked helplessly toward Andy Gar.

"Son," Gar said, "that gal must be something in bed."

Lex flushed and shifted his feet.

"His Bigness sets great store in her. He's rejected the deal we made with the First Leader on Polaris."

"Damn," Lex said, feeling lower than a belly-crawling reptile.

"He's put up some new terms," Gar said. "He said that we were unreasonable to refuse to agree to the Empire law which says Empire hulls have to be used in interplanetary trade with any outsiders."

"You're not going to let them come to Texas," Lex said. It wasn't a question.

"No, he suggested a compromise. Meet us halfway, he said. Out in the rim somewhere the cargoes would be lifted from Texas hulls to Empire hulls. We pick the place. We told him we didn't trust the Empire as far as we could sling a farl by the tail and the transfer would be on our terms and he said he'd agree to all that as long as we let Empire hulls carry the meat into Empire center to save him from the displeasure of the Guilds. We said, OK, fine. We'll do it, but we don't turn over the man you want under those conditions. He said, well, the deal is off."

The Ranger General cleared his throat and started to speak. Gar motioned him into silence. "Then we talked about your potential punishment and the best we could do is this. They'll try you in a regular court, but instead of going to the work planets, you'll serve a hitch, whatever the sentence is, in the Empire battle fleet. That's the best we could do."

"I guess it'll have to do," Lex said. "When do I leave?"

"The meat fleet won't be ready for a couple of weeks," Murichon said. "But the choice is still yours.

Make up your mind and keep it solid, because once we start slaughtering and freezing meacrs it'll be too late to change your mind."

"I won't change it," Lex said.

"Boy," Andy Gar said, "we don't know all about it, because we've discouraged any contact with the Empire, but what we know isn't good. The Empire's fighting fleets impress their men and since no one really wants to fight, except the leaders, maybe, the discipline is rough. There's not much real danger, apparently, because this war between the Empire and the Cassiopeians has been going on so long that it's become a sort of ritual. The last time a real clash came was about twenty years ago, at a place called Wolfs Star. That's good and it's bad. That means that service is mainly patrol along the frontiers, day after day, week after week, making little bows now and then in the direction of the enemy just to remind him that you're there. You might wish, before it's over, that they'd put you on a work planet."

"There's just one thing," Lex said, standing tall, his face set grimly. "On the way out I wanta be on the ship withher ."

"I reckon we can arrange that," Gar said, grinning broadly.

So there were two weeks left. He spent the first night in Dallas City with Billy Bob doing something he rarely did, drinking the hard stuff, the straight cactus juice which had the kick of a Darlene space rifle. He started hard and continued hard and then he and Billy Bob woke up, with two Rangers looking at them through the bars, after wrecking a joint and wasting a few out-of-town herders who had made some remark about kids being up too late. Murichon bailed them out and shook his head, but he didn't bad-mouth them, just told them to take it easy, that he wanted part of Texas left whole when Lex went off into the Empire, so the second time out they used Lex's savings, money he'd been putting aside for when he went courting in future years, and bought reservations at Miss Toni's from a couple of drunk herders and discovered that Miss Pitty, who had looked so good to them a couple of years before, had aged somewhat and now was a plush, over-fifty woman with big, sympathetic eyes and a voice which sounded sorta tired. But she'd heard. Everyone on Texas had heard, and she said she thought Lex was a very brave boy for doing what he was doing and that a brave boy deserved a good send-off.

"Honey," Miss Pitty said, "I've devoted my life to serving the needs of lonely Texicans, and only a few times have I really turned myself loose, you know what I mean? I mean, well, you have to conserve yourself, like, in this work, and if I let myself go all the time I'd burn myself out in a year, you know what I mean?"

"No ma'am," Lex said.

But in the dawn's early light he knew as he staggered weakly out of Miss Toni's and supported Billy Bob on his arm and went down the cool, crisp, early-fall-aired street humming to himself and wondering if it would be too rotten to have a snort before breakfast.

It wasn't too rotten, but breakfast sort of cleared his head and then they went and gotZelda and the Clean Machine and blinked up and down to land on a deserted strand way down south where the desert came up to the sea and there was no one within five hundred miles, save maybe a prospector out in the big lonesome. They ate sandwiches and swam and washed away the liquor of the night and then lay in the blazing sun, brown, tall, young.

"I'm going with you," Billy Bob said, after a light nap.

"Wish you could, boy."

"I can."

"Not a chance." Lex turned and squinted out over the light-dancing waters. "First time some Empire non-com told you to wash out the John you'd lay one on him."

"I can do anything you can," Billy Bob said. "You can take it I can. Hell, a man—" He paused, swallowed, on the brink of saying something sentimental. "Well, you're ugly and you ain't much, but we been friends, I mean—"

"I know what you mean," Lex said, "and I appreciate it. I really do."

"We could, like, maybe take over a ship once we were on the line. Then we could fly her home."

"No," Lex said. "Look, you're all set up to go into the business after you finish tech school, right? Hell, Texas needs you here more than it needs you out there keeping me company. You got a knack for things, mechanical things. You might come up with something important, something—" He paused.

A batgull flew low, eyeing them. Seeing that they were too big to eat, he went off on a wing toward the water.

"In a few years, when you're of age, you'll go out and court that little blond up north of New Galveston—"

"Won't be fun without you for competition," Billy Bob said.

"Least, this way, you'll have a chance," Lex said.

"Ho, ho."

Billy Bob threw a handful of hot, dry sand stingingly against Lex's bare lower parts and then there was a tumble of bodies, straining, matched well, neither able to get the advantage. They struggled to their feet, arms locked, fell heavily with mighty grunts, rolled in the sand. Lex got Billy Bob by the short hair, yanked and produced a roar of pain and then he broke away and ran, laughing, with Billy Bob after him, into the surf, rolling and slipping now as they wrestled, wet, naked.

A big comber with a reach of thousands of miles came in from nowhere and they tumbled, came up caught in the suds, coughing, laughing, to crawl to the sand and lie panting with the sun hot on their wet backs. They raced home at ground speeds, just off the deck, daring each other to swoop the hills closer, closer.

Then it was over and he was off to San Ann. There, in a dinky white hospital gown, he suffered the indignities of complete physical tests which proved him to be in the pink and then into the psych section with a bearded head man and his fat, female cohort and they mucked around in his brain and then he was in isolation, a part of his memory altered. Going home, he felt as if a part of him were missing, because, although he could remember everything about his growing up, his childhood, his dead mother, his dad, all the fellows, try as he might he couldn't think where he was from. Oh, he knew he was a Texican, but he had this lost feeling, even then, still on the planet, because where Texas once was, fixed on the mental map of the galaxy in his brain, was one great, deep mystery. They said it had to be that way. There were these two great powers out there gobbling up the galaxy world by world, fighting over each life-zone planet, letting everything go to hell while they spent all their energy on breeding and building new fleets and new weapons and intellectualizing mightily over which system was best, the tight, central control of the Empire or the allied dictatorships of the Cassiopeian sectors. Either one of them would love to get claws into Texas, because it takes manpower and dirt to grow food with a good, natural taste, and not all planets are suited. You can take a rock and make it livable by making an atmosphere, but you can't create good dirt, and aside from Texas' good dirt, her billions of meacrs, her bountiful harvest of grains and other foodstuffs, just the fact that she existed, independent of either of the great systems, would be justification enough for either to send a space fleet to "liberate" the planet into themselves.

It was just the kind of thing that had been going on when man first began to expand out from Earth. Organization. Red tape. The individual pushed down into the masses. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That wasn't the Texas way. Texicans thought a man found his own niche in the scheme of things and hung onto it with tooth and claw and gave a friendly hand to a less able fellow, but not to the point of being ridiculous about it, not to the point of killing Mother Nature's way of making man better and better.

He had a smattering of all that from his schooling, and in the last week, he was force-fed more of it as people came to the ranch and gave him the benefit of all the knowledge available about the Empire and its ways.

History: In the old days, back on Earth, men built fabulous machines and atom bombs and began to find out what made the universe tick, but were, seemingly, unable to develop a pleasant, easy, sure method of birth control. Overpopulation bred poverty, starvation, wars, the rape of a planet. And most of them didn't learn, but went out into space and began all over again, the "East" and the "West" fighting it out out there in the near stars, vying for the most fertile planets, breeding like sand flies to provide more settlers and more fighters. And, meantime, with misguided kindness, they tried to make all men equal in fact, when, in fact, man is born equal not at all, not in ability, not in physique, not in mind. Somewhere back there they lost sight of the fact that nature operates with a sort of natural artfulness to make life in the first place—intelligent, humanoid life had existed only on the old Earth—lifting some chemical compound to a state of near life and then working it, kneading it, torturing it with all manner of hardships and tests to make it develop into a form which can fight the inhospitable conditions of an unfeeling universe.

It wasn't that Texicans believed strictly in the survival of the fittest. Life was, perhaps, more sacred to Texicans than to any bleeding heart who moaned, back in the distant past, about the sanctity of the life of an unborn fetus. In all of Texas history there had never been an execution. But each Texican, while he was just a mixture of chemicals and a few cells in his mother's womb, was scanned and probed and if he didn't measure up, he didn't exist, for all you had to do was look at the pictures the spy ships brought back from the galaxy to see the sorry state of the race when breeding was indiscriminate and uncontrolled and people were allowed to be born with twisted limbs and damaged minds to be loved and pampered and revered as sacred life.

"They'll call you a fascist," said Professor Emily Lancing, a specialist in galactic civilization. "That is an antique name going back about six hundred plus years. They might even compare you to a man called Hitler, who believed that his nation was peopled by a super-race, that they were superior to all other peoples of Earth. This Hitler, among other things, tried to exterminate an entire religious sect by starvation and murder. Your answer to this, should you care to make an answer, is that you have not, nor has any Texican or group of Texicans, tried to exterminate anyone. But you don't want to appear too peaceful. We've deliberately left in your mind the facts concerning a certain incident in Cassiopeian space when we sent in a small fleet to pull out that prospector who was taken by the Cassiopeians. We want them to know that only a dozen Texican ships were involved, that the ships of the Cassiopeians were wasted not by the Empire but by Texas and that the incident precipitated the battle of Wolfs Star. How much do you know about the Darlene space rifle?"

"Not much," Lex admitted, having a hard time concentrating on what she was saying because she was just in her late thirties, had glorious black hair and a Texas girl's body which seemed intent on bursting the seams of her costume. "I know that once it's trained on something there's no doubt about the outcome. Are you saying that we used the Darlene against the Cassiopeians twenty years ago?"

"We had to knock out five Cassiopeians swiftly to rescue the prospector. Five rounds from a Darlene. They thought it was an entire Empire battle fleet. Briefly, the Darlene sounds somewhat like an anachronism, because it fires a projectile. Empire and Cassiopeian weapons are based on rays or beams, but the projectile fired by the Darlene space rifle is something more than just a bullet. It's about a yard long and a third as thick and it contains not only a blink generator but other goodies which, once it's locked onto the target, guide it through any maneuvers the target can make, including blinking. There's no defense against it. Our people have worked on a defense, just so we'd have it, but the mechanics are just too much for us. We want them to know about it, so if they question you, you can tell what I've told you."

"If we've got something like that why do we take any guff off them?"

She smiled and crossed a shapely leg. Lex felt his mouth go dry. "Because it takes metals and it takes a long time and a lot of expensive hardware to fit a ship with a Darlene. We couldn't take on the whole Empire fleet, for example." As if she knew he was enjoying the view, she let her skirt slip upward to reveal a length of beautifully suntanned thigh. "But let's get back to philosophy. They'll question you, that's for sure. And I'd like—that is, we'd like, for you to admit that you're not unusual among Texicans. Oh, I know you can out-wrestle most, probably, but let modesty guide you. You tell them you're just a little below average in height and size—"

"I'm tall enough."

"Sure, honey," she said, smiling, "I know that. But they don't. Look, it all goes back to Darwinism. You know Darwin?"

"Evolution and all that?"

"That's right. Survival of the fittest, to put it simply. In its raw form, in nature, that meant eat or be eaten. The strongest, the smartest survived. The weak ones were selected out. Whole species of life on the old Earth were wiped out because they couldn't adapt to new conditions. Now our theory is, from our limited knowledge of the Empire, that they've very well eliminated natural selection from the human race. You saw them. What was your impression?"

"Well, they were sort of scrungy," he said. He wrinkled his brow, thinking. "I mean, they were sorta runty—"

"The natural trend of the race is toward greater height," she said. "It began centuries ago on Earth. Better foods, better health care, all contributed to making the race larger. If you've seen pictures of the armor worn back in the middle ages of the Christian Era on Earth you've noticed, I imagine, that the armor would be too small for a Texican twelve-year-old."

"Yeah."

"The closely packed civilizations of the galaxy have reversed that trend in recent centuries. Studies seem

to prove that the race there is shrinking, while here on Texas, people get taller and taller and healthier and healthier. Back on Earth, before the blink drive, there was a halfhearted effort to limit breeding, but that effort ended when an endless supply of worlds was opened up by the drive. Settlement was rapid and indiscriminate. Planetary conditions were sometimes unfavorable. Microorganisms on the new worlds opened up a whole new pack of ills in the form of disease and parasitic debilities. Food was sometimes inadequate. Although Empire medical science is probably more developed than ours, they waste a lot of time and materials treating people who were born defective. Indiscriminate breeding, unlimited, fills worlds with people who were slightly disadvantaged at birth. You're going to find that you're a man among children as far as physical strength is concerned. Oh, they're not all midgets, but you'll stand out in a crowd. They'll notice you and they'll ask questions. When you say you're the result of selective breeding, they'll call you a murderer and other things, but you can say that no living thing was killed because of you, that you were scanned when you were a mere union of egg and sperm and found to be normal, that's all. You can say that there's no abortion, except therapeutic, lifesaving emergency abortion, on this planet, and you'll be telling the truth. Defective cell-sperm unions simply are not allowed to become attached to the wall of the uterus."

"They mess with me," Lex said, "I'll tell them where they can go."

"Don't go in with that attitude, boy," she said. Lex bristled at being called boy with half of her thigh staring at him. "You don't have to take any shit off them, but don't look for trouble. We're doing our best to prepare you to answer their questions in a way which won't unduly antagonize them, which will make things easier for you. You try to fight all of them and you'll never come back."

"Well," Lex said, cooling off. He thought about it. It made sense. Not even a Texican could take on the whole Empire single-handed. He listened with respect as she continued to talk about a number of things. He tried to remember all of it, but his mind was elsewhere. They were alone in the house. She was a beautiful woman.

At midday they ordered from the cook robot and ate, still talking, on the balcony overlooking the wide expanse of the ranch. The conversation was informal, in a light vein. He was telling her about his impressions of the Empire, as he'd seen it on Polaris Two. When she began to ask questions about Empire women, he blushed and became tongue-tied. But he got out a little bit about their manner of dressing and, surprisingly, about how they seemed to think and feel that sex was just a plaything. Talking about sex with a pretty girl did things to him and he fell silent.

"You've had no opportunity to go courting, have you?" she asked, looking at him with dark brown eyes full of sympathy.

"Too young," Lex said.

"I'm so sorry you'll miss that. It's one of the most exciting times in life."

"Yeah," he said. "I guess you're married, huh?"

"Yes." She looked off into the distance. The sky was full of white clouds with thunderheads forming to the north. It would rain. "At least I was."

He waited, quiet, not even chewing the bite he had in his mouth. After a long time she said, "He was killed, you know."

"No, I didn't know," Lex said. "Gee, I'm sorry."

"They were looking for metallic deposits in the shallows off the east coast. He was in a diver at three thousand feet when the undersea quake came. They say he probably lived for hours there under the tons of mud and rock which fell on the machine."

Lex couldn't swallow. His throat was dry. He coughed and tried to think of words. She tossed her hair and smiled. "Well, let's not talk about that. I imagine you'll find a girl, out there in the Empire."

Lex thought of Gwyn and felt visceral twinges.

"And she'll make you forget all about Texas girls."

He shook his head. "I'll remember you," he said, surprised at his boldness. "I'll think of you and remember how Texas girls are big enough to be an armful, how they laugh, how they have that twinkle—' felt a huge lividness of face, a lump closed his throat. He turned away.

"You're very sweet," she said, and her smile would have melted a mile cube of polar ice.

In looking back, he would never remember how it was that he knew. But he knew. Inside, seated side by side on a wide, comfortable couch, he knew that if he had the nerve to kiss her she would not object. He did and she didn't.

"Damn, I'm sorry," he said, when their lips parted.

"Don't be."

He wasn't, really. The second kiss was longer.

"It isn't bad," she said, "because I want it too, you see? I want you to remember. I want you to think of me as Texas, all Texas girls, and the sky and the winds and all of it."

In a way it was bad, not evil bad, but bad for him, because, in her arms, feeling the natural slickness, the strength of her, the pushing and yearning and answering and a gale of pure emotion, he knew what he was going to miss. It was no disrespect when he thought of the girl in his school, the one with the short, curly hair of desert tan who smiled athim and let him kiss her,once , behind the trees in the park. He thought of how he'd determined then that he'd go looking for her when the time came, pit himself against the others who would be vying for her, win her. In his arms the teacher became that girl, all Texas girls, the girl he'd never court, the girl he'd never win, and it was a bittersweet victory when, together, they rode the tail of a comet down, down, down and then up to heights which, even with Gwyn, he'd never reached.

And because it was so beautiful, he lingered, close, joined, dampened by exertion and nature, and put his head down into the hollow of her shoulder and wept like a baby because, even if he didn't have to go out into the Empire, even if he could stay, it would never again be the same for him, because she was older and would choose again, a man of her own age, her own sort, not a seventeen-year-old boy not yet ready to go courting. She understood and didn't laugh at him because he cried and when he said, "Don't tell. Not ever. Not anyone," she kissed him atop his tousled head and soothed him.

"No, no, never."

He watched her as she dressed and felt a sense of the most devastating loss as she was, gradually,

systematically, covered, hidden from his eyes. He kissed her once more.

"Emily?"

"Yes, darling?"

"Thanks."

"You don't have to say that."

"Not for, well, not for—" He swallowed, suddenly shy, now that she was fully clothed. "I mean for letting me cry on your shoulder."

"You cried because it was beautiful," she said.

Well, that wasn't all of it, but he was grateful to her for saying it.

"I hope you never lose the ability to cry over beauty," she told him. "Remember it, even when things are rough. Remember how it was so beautiful and how it made you feel so full you had to cry. It wasn't unmanly. Didn't you ever feel your eyes mist over at a particularly brilliant sunset, or when the bloodflowers are blooming on the plains?"

"I know what you mean," he said.

"And Lex?"

"Ummmm?"

"Don't ever come to think you did something wrong here today. Don't ever blame yourself. We did it together. We did it because we needed each other. I needed you as much as you needed me. For a moment, we were one. That makes it something special. Don't ever let it become dirty. Promise?"

"You don't even have to ask."

And then it was more information being force-fed into his reeling brain and a string of other professional people talking, drawing out ideas, telling him what they wanted to know about the Empire when he came back. He didn't see Emily Lancing again, but he had a mind picture of her to carry with him as he went to the huge, noisy, crowded spaceport outside of Dallas City to watch the ships being collected and laden with frozen meacr meat. He'd never seen so many Texican ships in one place at one time. He guessed that the entire fleet was gathered there and his questions proved him to be not far from right. Outside of a thin line of patrol ships guarding the approaches to the planet, lest a stray galaxy ship come wandering in, the meat fleet represented all the spaceworthy hulls on Texas.

Day and night the sounds of alteration came to him as workers pressed into service from all over the planet installed freezers, ripped out bulkheads, carefully preserving any salvageable metals, prepared the fleet for the trip into the periphery.

Once he went to the slaughterhouse and saw the countless meacrs being herded into chutes and this, too, was another first, because he'd never seen death in such wholesale lots before. He was saddened. He had, of course, killed a meacr himself now and then and he was no stranger to hunting for meat, but to see thousands of the pleasant, mild little animals being pushed to slaughter made him a bit mad at the Empire for being so hungry and set him to wishing that Texas didn't need Empire metals. But necessity was necessity and he left the slaughterhouse with a sick feeling to load his few belongings aboard the flagship and settle into his cabin to get the feel of it.

Billy Bob and a half dozen studs from his school came out, the night before lift-off, to wish him well. He sot frightfully drunk and he was carried bodily into his cabin and woke up the next morning in space with a lead as big as old Zed himself.

The last thing he remembered about Texas, and that only dimly, was his father standing over his bunk looking as if he'd been in a dust storm, his eyes red.

"You're not a boy anymore, Lex," Murichon had said. "Remember that. And remember that you're doing this for Texas and Zed."

Chapter Four

In relation to the total cube of the space occupied by the galaxy, matter makes up a small part of the total. Far out in the rim there are multiples of cubic parsecs of space which contain less than nothing, it seems, for empty space can be more than nothing, and the vast spaces between the hard, bright stars become an enormous black hole. Evenly distributed, the entire mass of the galaxy would place matter equaling one tenth of the mass of old Sol, the sun of Earth, in each cubic parsec, and that's one hell of a big emptiness.

Texicans were on a first-name basis with bigness. It was a part of their heritage. In their folklore were stories about the original Texicans back on Earth: These two Texicans were out walking and came to a bridge over a river. Needing to relieve themselves, they halted, unzipped their flies and proceeded. "Damn," said the first Texican, "that water is cold."

"Sure is," said the second Texican, "and deep, too, with rocks on the bottom."

Big planet, big space. Seen edge on, the galaxy is not as idealized as in the ancient photographic imitations which showed a neat disc with a bulging center made out of millions of suns, but is more ragged, messier. There is a definite disc and a definite core and spewing out from the shape, spread into parsecs of intergalactic space and allied to the galaxy only by gravitational attraction, are clusters and isolated, lost suns and out there, in the darkness, in empty space, safe from the casual explorer, Texas and its sun, old Zed, swims the darkness, orbiting the galaxy in something like 8 X 1046years, a period of time which can have no meaning to anyone, not even a Texican with his sense of bigness.

A mote in nothing. A brightness which, to be seen from the inhabited worlds of the Empire, needs to be discovered accidentally with the most powerful of telescopes. Yet, big as it was, the world was insignificant in relation to the occupied worlds of the Empire segment of the galaxy.

It was necessary to enter the periphery by a circumspect route, for Empire ships with sophisticated instruments were waiting, stationed on the outskirts, all systems alert, searching for the first blinking signal sent ahead by the Texican meat fleet.

Thus, Admiral Crockett Reds sent the fleet into Cassiopeian space, after a long, boring detour, in single file, spaced seconds apart. To emerge into Empire pace from the Cassiopeian line was the purpose, for the multitude of Cassiopeian ships would furnish a confusing background for Texican movement and add tothe mystery of Texas by showing the Empireites that a fleet could be moved through the territory of the Empire's enemy with impunity.

Using the immediate double-blink technique, made possible by the use of a double-charge generator developed by the Blink Space Works, New Austin, the Texican fleet, blinking in one at a time, spent milliseconds in real space, just long enough, as the instruments of the Cassiopeians registered the momentary presence of ship after ship, to send the Cassiopeian fleets into Red Emergency Status and cause a flurry of movement along the Empire-Cassiopeian line.

Forming in columns abreast in Empire space, the fleet moved, Darlenes activated and ready, to a rendezvous with a single Empire Vandy, where contact was made and instructions given.

The transfer was made in emptiness, between the scattered stars, a long, tedious process of lock and empty, one Texas ship at a time becoming vulnerable by locking with an Empire freighter, the others ringed, at varying distances, on battle alert. As each Texas ship was emptied of frozen meat, it locked with a second Empire freighter to take on ingots of pure metals, then blinked, alone, into the emptiness. At no time was the number of Empire ships present allowed to approach the total number of Texican ships lying in wait to be unloaded.

Not every Texas ship was followed, but an unlucky few had to take evasive action, blinking in and out of Cassiopeian space to lose the Empire scouts and Vandys and, once, a freighter disguised as a Texican.

Then it was over. The flagship, laden, as were the others, with frozen meat, locked with a pitted Empire freighter and Lex watched, suited and ready, as the cargo disappeared through the lock tunnel into the Empire hull. Only one transfer was remaining. A sleek Middleguard cruiser approached, locks clanked. Lex stood aside and let the Lady Gwyn, bulky in her L.S.A., cross the flexible floor of the tunnel first. He shook hands with the unloading crew, thanked the Admiral, who was suited and present to say his goodbyes, held his shoulders back and left Texas behind with a sadness which was almost physical.

Into an Empire which stretched out in a long oval from the old Earth, extending eight thousand parsecs toward the core, skirting it, pushing into opposite side stars for another four thousand parsecs until it ended, bounded there by the opposite extent of the Cassiopeian dictatorships, the oval sweeping out the periphery to extend into extra-galactic space and isolated clusters of semi-autonomous nations and groupings of worlds, man having spread far, far in six hundred years, flyingthe wings of the blink generator through the cold void between stars, charting, building complicated patterns of starways along which blinked the commerce of Empire, millions of starships, billions of people all paying homage to a man who sat his throne in the heights of Galaxy City atop the old Earth's highest mountain.

It was to be discovered by Lexington Burns, Gunner Basic, Emperor's Battle Fleet, that Empire was an accomplishment not to be despised, but admiration, however grudging, was last in line behind more immediate concerns.

"Lexington Burns, of the Planet Texas, you stand accused—"

The judge, wizened, stern-faced, his voice strident in Lex's ears, speaking fast, words lost in the swiftness, around him the packed room with the vivid colors, the scant coverings, the foppish, foolish, modish clothing of Empire in contrast to his space blues. The judge robed in purple. Beside Lex, coming to his chest, a young attorney.

"Answer direct questions as briefly as possible. Don't volunteer anything. Say sir to the judge."

The training planet, marginal life zone, cold, cold as space itself, metal huts atop the ice and struggling through deep drifts thinking ofher . Emily. Home. All that was Texas was embodied in a mental picture of

dark hair and flashing eyes and soft, soft arms and—

He was, of course, singled out. At first they tried to break him with physical strain. However, although he was unused to the cold, the snow, the eternal ice, he was a Texican and when he carried home an instructor on his broad shoulders, after a march which was supposed to drop him, panting and whining, into the snow to be picked up by the ski-mounted meat wagon, they gave up on that.

"Shit-eater, give me the table of organization." Face close to Lex's, the instructor almost as tall, breath issuing in freezing clouds from behind the cold mask.

"Sir. The Emperor, the Emperor's Prime Minister, the Joint Admirals of the Emperor's fleet, the—" Endless rote, crammed into his head at late night sessions, punishment tours in the library and that slow growth of the grudging realization that the organization of the Empire was a wonder on the order of a variable star.

"Shit-eater, give me the prime purpose of the Emperor's Battle Fleet."

"Sir, to preserve the status quo, to protect the citizens of the Empire and the citizens' property, to extend the glory of the Emperor into the galaxy."

It was a stern, rigorous life with food which, at first, made his stomach protest the lack of juicy meacr steaks and fruit and green vegetables fresh from the rich, black dirt of Texas. Bulk pills to fill the void in his stomach, synthetic protein, tasteless, glutinous, eaten in haste with back straight and shoulders back, one hand held daintily on his lap. Endless harassment.

"Texas, you're latrine orderly. Hit it."

"Texas, you're disposal detail. Hit it." The wastes of the training camp open to freeze solid and be transported to dumps with the ski-car bumping and the waste sloshing until it solidified.

Instants of deep satisfaction. In hand-to-hand combat, a burly instructor, Lex's height, a big man for an Empireite. "I don't want to hurt you, shit-eater, so when you feel force, give."

Standing, resisting, driven to it. Straining muscles and a sudden move which sent the instructor cold mask first into a crusted drift to come up with hate in his eyes and hands dealing blows which, if landed, would have maimed, and Lex dancing, always just out of reach, until, in self-defense, he had to level the man to stand over him, chest heaving, as a silence hung over the parade ground and trainees stood fearfully at attention waiting for a lightning bolt to strike down the man who had dared best an instructor.,

"Scrub, shit-eater. Every inch of it. Anything I hate it's a smart-assed recruit. They tell me all Texicans eat meat, shit-eater. Is it true?"

"Yessir."

"Here's about seven inches, shit-eater, eat it."

"Sir, show me that in regulations."

"You're learning, shit-eater. Scrub." The floor extending for endless yards, an indoor parade of time-worn plastic, impossible to clean, his hands, his knees, his arms and legs protesting as he scrubbed and remembered soft lips and the winds of the plains and looked ahead with a despair which was a physical pain in his gut.

"I sentence you to a labor planet for a period not to exceed twenty years and not less than ten years." His voice harsh and alien in Lex's ears, the room a-rustle with approving sounds.

"For to seize one of the Emperor's subjects, to carry her against her will far from the benevolent rule of the Emperor and all it stands for, is a crime of serious degree."

That wasn't all I did to her, Lex was thinking, standing straight and tall.

"Let not the leniency of this sentence influence future wrongdoers," the Judge continued, "for it is to be noted that the Emperor's agent herself," a glance toward a box seat where the Lady Gwyn sat in regal splendor, "has appealed for temperance. Thus, I am pleased to say that the Emperor is willing, subject to consent by the convicted, to commute the sentence to an equal term of service in the Emperor's battle fleet."

On an icy flatness, protected from drifting snow by heat shields, a grounded fleet: the hull of a Vanguard destroyer salvaged after the Battle of Wolfs Star, an aged middleguard cruiser and a Rearguard battle cruiser, huge, as long as three blocks in Dallas City, a city known for its spaciousness, weapons in place, engines deactivated but there, endless hours, in battle gear, at station behind the controls of the weapons, mucking in lubricants to test mechanical aptitude, assembling and disassembling, doing it by the book even when it took, obviously, longer. Empire life support armor was heavy and awkward, and finding a suit to fit Lex was not, seemingly, within the capacity of the Emperor's battle fleet. Tight joints chafed his skin, limited his movements, but the tedium of basic was over and he was oblivious to the harassment as he devoted himself to learning as much as he could possibly learn about weapons, ships, hardware, techniques, even the thinking of the Emperor's defenders.

Texican lads began tinkering with their airorses before they knew enough math and physics to understand the theory behind the hardware involved, and, indeed, tinkering seemed to be a natural ability with most Texicans. Lex knew the workings of a blink generator without knowing fully the theory and the whys of its working, but he could take one apart and clean it and test the various components and replace faulty ones, and the small blink generator on hisZelda , back on Texas, made the Empire machines look like primitive imitations of the real thing. He was shocked by the total lack of refinement.

Of course, the Empire generators did the job, but they were bulky and cranky compared to the souped-up models used onTexas, and not one advance had been made, seemingly, since the blink was perfected for the great expansion outward from Earth. It was thus with most Empire hardware. It was basic, stripped-down stuff of a simplicity which made it duck soup for Lex. However, very early he decided, having learned the operations of a ship of the line from his training manuals, that he did not want to be stuck below decks in the generator room mucking around in the Empire's primitive power plants. He had little to gain from ten or more years of service in the battle fleet, but one thing he could do, and that was observe. To observe, he had to be where the action was, and so he purposely made himself look to his instructors as if he were a six-thumbed novice with mechanics and showed his best on the controls of various beam and ray weapons.

On weapons, he allowed his reflexes, which could guide an airors inches off the uneven terrain of the deserts ofTexas, full play. He was fractions of a second faster than any other trainee at programming the automatics which guided the weapons, and when assignment time came, he was sent to gunnery school on a planet some light-years away from the cold training planet where he excelled at knocking drone targets out of space.

It all took time, but not enough time. Days seemed both to crawl and to fly past. Hours in classrooms were devastatingly slow, but weeks went by without conscious observance. It was the months, building up to years, which seemed longest. Gunnery trainee Lex Burns had been offTexasfor six months when he was assigned to the training ship T.E.S.Crucis . Behind him were endless long, lonely nights, countless humiliations, small victories, moments of looking upward to the crowded skies of the galaxy and thinking of home. He was more alone than he'd ever been while roaming the Bojacks of home in solitude. He formed no close associations. The Empire trainees seemed cold, distant, forming their little groups for games and talk and gambling without inviting the big outworlder to join. Not that Lex wanted to join in with the Empireites. They were a scurvy lot in general, runted, harsh-voiced, arrogant without reason. No, he was content to be the loner, obeying orders, doing each assigned task to the best of his ability, remembering, at times, Billy Bob's suggestion that he come with him and steal an Empire ship.

Perhaps, in the endless years ahead, he would think about it. In training, of course, escape was impossible. He didn't know where to run even if be could escape.

"Where is your home planet?"

"What course did you fly into the galaxy with the Texas fleet?"

"If you don't know where the planet called Texas is, tell us about the skies of Texas. What are the star formations?"

Under deep hypnosis, drug-induced, leaving small shards of memory, the voice of a man speaking quietly: "They are not primitive in their techniques, for if they were, there would be a residuum of the knowledge we seek. However, if the knowledge has been truly erased, there is no way of putting it back, at least not by someone who does not have the knowledge."

In his mind were dozens of interrogation sessions and he remembered with satisfaction their deep interest in the Darlene space rifle, their consternation upon discovering that the last active battle between the opposing forces came about not because of a Cassiopeian miscalculation, as they had long believed, but simply because one Texican had strayed, was captured and was rescued by a small Texas fleet.

The concept of a world moving, using all its resources, to save the life and liberty of one man was alien to them.

"Do you expect us to believe that your planet sent a fleet to rescue one unimportant prospector for metals?"

"No Texican is unimportant to Texas."

"He was the son of a great man then? Or he had important friends?"

"I think he was just a loner, an old prospector with a junk ship trying to make a dollar."

"When you kidnapped me," she said, standing before him in formal Empire uniform, small, beautiful, coldly distant, "were you acting on orders from higher up?"

"No, ma'am, I just liked you. I thought you liked me."

"Just answer the questions," said the Lady Gwyn.

"You acted like you liked me," he said, grinning. "That night on—" "Shut up. Was this a plot to hold me for ransom?" "No, I just wanted to marry you." "Lady," asked the uniformed guard with her, "shall I still his insolent tongue?" "Let him talk," the Lady Gwyn said. Lex was seated, chained to his bunk in the prison. "What did you

hope to gain by kidnapping an agent of the Emperor himself? Surely my momentary attraction to you did not make you think that a cousin of the Emperor would choose to live out her days on an outplanet herding some dirty animals?"

"You liked me on the way back to the Empire, too," Lex said. "Enough," said the Lady Gwyn. "He is hopelessly stupid." On the way back to the Empire he hadn't had much to lose and she was there, taking over the cabin of

the First Officer, having her meals served there, not choosing to associate with the lowly Texas crew. One day out, when the routine of blink, rest, blink and rest was established and the ship was running smoothly, Lex took her tray from the steward and delivered it in person.

In order to carry more cargo, the flagship had been stripped of luxuries. It was warm in the cabin and she was dressed in nothing more than the undergarments worn by a Texas girl, low-cut panties and a nearly miraculous bra which supported where no support was needed by some invisible means which had always puzzled Lex, not being too familiar with the article of clothing.

"Your food, ma'am," he said, knocking on the door.

He heard the inner lock pushed back. "You may put it on the table," she said, before opening the door. Then she tried to close it in his face, but he pushed in, almost spilling the contents of the tray. "Get out," she said coldly. "I don't believe I will," he said. "I will inform the Captain," she said, taking a step toward the ship's communicator link in the cabin. He

stood quickly between her and the unit. "You are in enough trouble," she said, as he put the tray aside and looked down into her face. "M'am, since I'm in Empire trouble, I been reading all about your laws. Seems there's no law against

what I'm going to do to you." She backed slowly away. "Don't touch me." "Well, I don't think I'll justtouch you," he said, advancing. "Way I look at it you were the one who

issued the invitation back there on Polaris Two. What we did there seemed to be fun, but didn't seem to matter much to you, so if it doesn't matter to you I don't see why we should spend a couple of weeks or more without having fun, do you?"

"I will have you publicly whipped," she said, as he caught her, pulled her to him, held her arms as she tried to scratch his face.

"I figure worse things than that are already lined up," he said. He picked her up bodily and threw her, somewhat roughly, onto the bunk. He discovered that the fragile-looking bra was stronger than it seemed, for when he ripped it away the straps left red marks on her delicate brown skin.

She was surprisingly strong, but he was stronger and his body weight, atop her, soon exhausted her struggles.

"Animal," she said. She spit into his face. He wiped it off by rubbing his cheek on her breasts and leaned to kiss her. She bit him and he bit her back, leaving a big purple bruise on her lower lip.

"We just promised to deliver you back to his bigness," he said. "We didn't say unbruised. You wanta play rough I'm here."

The strange thing was, as he remembered the incident, that she came to enjoy the roughness, seemingly urging him on even after her cone-shaped breasts began to heave with her rapid breathing, forcing him to force her until, with a melting, gasping, moaning lunge, she came to him.

And it was never mentioned. Not at the trial, not ever, not by Gwyn. He made the reference to it when she took her turn at trying to pry the location of his home planet out of him, but that was it. He didn't see her again after that, but he spent a lot of cold hours in the training camp thinking about those times aboard the flagship when he'd knock on her cabin door and she'd open up, sometimes dressed in the Texas undergarments, sometimes in only her brown skin, her arms opening to him, that wondrous world of sensuality opening up to him at the sight of her.

Women.

He thought a lot about women. Not that he suffered unduly. It seemed to be much harder, those long weeks of male society on the training planet and on the ships and in schools, for the Empire trainees, because, as he'd heard in their conversations, things were much different on Empire worlds, with sex taken free and easy from an early age. He didn't suffer, because on Texas you didn't expect the total joy of sex until you were old enough to make your first trip into Miss Toni's place in Dallas City and after that until you courted and won. He was weeks short of his eighteenth birthday and he'd known three women. Miss Pitty once in fear and trembling and fumbling quickness, a second time when she, taking time from her work to give him a rousing send-off from Texas, taught him some interesting variations. Gwyn. He'd lost count. He tried, when things were rough and he had trouble getting to sleep, to remember the times. Some stood out. Others faded into the sweet, sensual memory of the totality of those long weeks of it there on the flagship. And Emily. Of all the three, she was the best. She was a Texas girl, all of Texas, all of life and sweetness and love and tenderness and beauty, the girl he would marry, someday, the girl he would have married sooner had he not lost his head and kidnapped an Empire farlcat.

Emily alone was more than most Texicans his age could hope for and when you added in Gwyn there was no reason for him to suffer, because he'd had more than his share of women. So he counted his blessings and wondered about women and used his memories to ease his desperate homesickness.

T.E.S.Crucis was an antiquated Middleguard with some of her communications and battle gear removed to house dozens of trainees and the extra weapons on which they practiced. She was a leaking old hull and the Texican was often rousted from his bunk, hustled to the locks, suited in L.S.A. and shoved out and away to crawl awkwardly over the rusting hull to patch weaknesses. He got all thegood details like that, mostly because he was the outworlder and possibly because he did them uncomplainingly. He was good with a space welder and did the job neatly so that theCrucis leaked less and less because the job was done right.

They were out in Vegan space, shooting at drones, when the main seam gave over the power compartment, stressed by the weight and mass of the generator, let space in and did in three power men before the compartment could be evacuated and sealed off.

Dead in space, theCrucis reflected the glitter of Vega as Lex, pressed into service as usual, crawled the curves, clanking soundlessly, except in the atmosphere of the L.S.A., to see a serious breach.

"Sir," he sent to the officer on the other end of his communicator, "it's a big one this time. I'll need help."

"Damn, Texas, can't you handle it?"

"Take a look, sir." He put his scanner on it and let the officer take a look. He heard a gasp. As the scanner moved, the seam opened wider, moving along the vertical axis of the hull. If it opened much wider it would rip into the crew area, venting a good deal of the ship's air into space and closing off a full quarter of the ship.

"A plate of extra patching metal and a magnetic clamp, too," Lex said, beginning to move already, taking his welder to the hairline crack which moved even as he began to throw a temporary weld onto it. "And, sir, I'd hurry if I were you."

They sent out an Empire Sub-Chief, not trusting the job, which had suddenly become critical, to a trainee. Sub-Chief Blant Jakkes stood five foot ten and, as did most Empireites, rather hated the big Texican, not because he knew Lex well enough for hatred, but mainly because Lex was an outsider and different and bigger and faster and decidedly more handsome. The Sub-Chief was a career man who had done ten toward his retirement at the end of thirty and he was a member of the training cadre of the Crucis because he'd shown, in a couple of duels with the Cassiopeians, that he was one hell of a weapons man. He was also a good teacher and, even if he did resent Lex, he had to admit that the Texican was also one hell of a good weapons man. That didn't make it right to have an alien on one of the Emperor's fleet ships, but the Texican did know his way around a beam control panel.

Blant Jakkes came crawling out, attaching and releasing his lifeline, carrying a plate of patching metal and a clamp to look down on the breach, which was still creeping forward in spite of Lex's efforts, with some concern.

"Right," Lex said, opening the communicator with his tongue. "We need the clamp here and there." He pointed with the welder, making marks on the hull. There was no time for Sub-Chief Jakkes to remind the trainee that he'd give the orders. He set his lifeline and put one contact of the clamp at the indicated near spot and crawled abeam to set the other. He felt the hull jerk under him and looked back, startled, to see that the seam had opened all the way to the joint of the inner-support bulkhead and he cursed the old single-hull construction, wishing that he were back with the battle fleet, where all ships had double hulls.

"Move," Lex yelled. "Set that contact."

Jakkes moved and his movement violated Newton's third law of motion to the point of sending the Sub-Chief spinning off the hull to jerk to a stop at the end of his fifteen-foot lifeline. The unconnected contact of the magnetic clamp was jerked from his hand, jiggled, hung from the connector free. The seam, stressed hard from below, tried to rip through the bulkhead fastenings and Lex moved as fast as he could, ignoring the struggling Sub-Chief as Jakkes pulled himself down hand over hand trying to make contact with the hull, not watching his lifeline as it coiled and floated to let two loops fall into the opened seam.

Lex placed the second contact and, looking over his shoulder with some effort, saw that there were seconds to spare before the bulkhead fastenings went and activated the coil of the clamp. As the clamp contracted, there was resistance and the movement of the opened seam was jerky and slow and then, with a sudden snap, the seam closed, cutting Jakkes' lifeline in two places to leave him holding a line with no anchor, floating five full feet away from the hull. Although they were dead in space, there was some residual forward movement of the ship, Jakkes keeping pace, trying desperately to remember from long-forgotten training which movement to make to cause a reaction which would drift him toward the hull. He made exactly the opposite motion, a sudden jerk, and began to swim slowly outward. The situation was serious, because the ship was dead, damage having been done in the power compartment by explosive decompression. Jakkes knew that he was a dead man, because his L.S.A. communicator was of limited range and before the ship could be brought under power for a search he'd be the tiniest mote on a big black emptiness and he had enough air for, say, three hours.

"Texas," he yelled, his voice not concealing his fear, but far short of panic.

Lex looked up, sized up the situation immediately. A man who can fly an airors inches off the deck can judge distances. He saw that Jakkes was already too far out to be reached from his own lifeline and that there was only one chance. Extending out from the rear hull was a thin weapons pod, tipped by spidery direction-finding equipment. The tip of the framework was just under fifteen feet from the hull. Lex loosed his anchor, crawled swiftly aft, loosed the anchor again and, without thinking of what would happen if he missed, he tossed the anchor carefully, accurately, toward the very tip of the spider and it hit, held. His range of activity extended fifteen feet beyond the hull, he launched himself, swam slowly in weightlessness, caught the drifting Sub-Chief in a bear hug. After that it was just a matter of pulling themselves in, like toothfish from the western sea caught on a line from theCrucis .

Jakkes was shaken. Lex, calm, went back to his work; and the clamp holding, the matter was a simple patch and weld job and when he finished, with Jakkes recovering enough to help in the last stages, the hull was secure, stronger, in that area, than it had been.

In the lock Jakkes was still shaking, but he managed to hide his trembling hands. Lex was cool.

"Do you know what would have happened if you'd missed?" Jakkes asked.

"I didn't miss."

"You'd have been out there with me."

"Well, we would have both had company."

Jakkes was looking at the outlander as he'd never looked at him before. There were no lines on the face, although the skin was tanned and weathered. Hell, he was just a boy.

During target practice, he watched Lex in action and was impressed anew. He yelled as much as ever and showed no sign of having changed his Empire hatred of an alien, but toward the end of the week, after Lex bad shown exceptional skill with the newest beam weapons control board, he sought out the Texican in trainee quarters and sat down next to him. "How old are you, Texas?"

Lex didn't figure it was any of the Sub-Chiefs business, and if it were, he could find it out on Lex's records, but he was feeling a little blue. He'd been thinking of what a party would be coming off if he were home.

"Today is my birthday, sir. I'm eighteen."

Jakkes saw a faraway look in the Texican's eyes and he was moved in spite of himself. "Hell, that means you're old enough to drink, doesn't it?" Lex grinned. "I've been that old for a long time." Down in the crew's lounge they looked hard at Jakkes and the trainee, but no one said anything as Jakkes took a bottle from the stock and two glasses and motioned Lex to sit.

Chapter Five

The roots of the war extended so deeply into history that only scholars could trace them backward to the time on old Earth when the race was divided into two philosophically opposed camps seeking the same goals, food, freedom of action, comfort, progress for a mere few billion people of various languages, skin coloring and temperament. Lex, who had been bookish only to the required extent, became interested in the war when he asked, idly, "Why do we fight the Cassiopeians?"

"Because," Blant Jakkes said. Lex's first assignment after training was aboard a huge Rearguard, not the newest in the fleet, for new ships were being added all the time to increase the fleet strength and to replace obsolete vessels. Out of a crew of over a thousand men he knew personally of two ex-cassiopeians, captured and rehabilitated, who held potions of responsibility. One was a Section Chief in the power room.

"It isn't because they're different," he said. "Not in looks," Jakkes said. "They're different, though."

"They speak the same languages."

"It's up here," Jakkes said, pointing a blunt finger at his temple.

"Their beliefs?"

"Yeah, I guess that's it."

Lex pressed on. "Their form of government is different, I know that, but not all that different. Instead of having one central head of government they have many, allied to form a grouping of worlds as widespread and as numerous as the Empire."

"They starve people," Jakkes said. "They haven't got the know-how we have. They almost match us in weapons, because they use their entire industrial capacity to build them, but on the worlds the people are poor and hungry."

"This Empire stuff leaves me a bit hungry, too," Lex said.

"They don't give their people freedom," Jakkes said, his brow wrinkled as he thought more deeply than he liked. "Here in the Empire we can do as we will, as long as we remember that personal freedom stops at the tip of the other fellow's nose."

"That's not what Rambler, down in the power room, says," Lex said. "He says that Empire red tape

would sink the Cassiopeian fleet forever if we could find a way of thrusting it on them in one lump mass."

"Rambler's a good guy. You can almost forget that he's Cassiopeian, but he's still Cassiopeian. He was a First Officer over there, you know."

"There's a lot of things I don't understand," Lex said. "Like we're fighting them. But we've been out here for three months with the enemy a short blink away, and we've not fired a shot. We've got enough firepower on this old wagon to destroy a hundred Cassiopeian worlds and yet we carefully avoid contact, hold our own positions. Hell, we even notify the Cassies when we're going to make a move so they won't get nervous."

"That's the way it is. No one wants war."

"But we are at war."

"Yeah."

Lex scratched his head. "Way I see it, the Empire is in the same fix as the Cassies. It spends most of its time making weapons and ships and there are a lot of people on Empire worlds, I hear, who don't even have the basic luxuries, like climate control and all. Every time the Cassies build a new ship the Empire builds one and a half."

"Listen, boy, thereare a lot of things you don't understand. That's called the balance of power. Let them bustards get ahead of us and they'd run all over us. Give them the advantage and they'd sweep through the Empire shooting up worlds until there wasn't anything left but planet-sized cinders."

"No one wants a real war, then?"

"No sane man, but some of their dictators aren't exactly sane. They're power-hungry, irrational. Any one of them could start a biggie at any time. We have to be ready. We have enough firepower to kill them a couple of times over and they know it. As long as they know they'll all die, all their worlds, they won't start anything."

"How long," Lex asked, "has it been like this?"

"Hell, forever."

For six hundred years plus, Lex found out, hitting the obscure and seldom consulted electrobooks in the library of the ship. All the way back to the Earth when East and West held each other at bay with primitive newks. Throughout the expansion into space, with the other side seeing the handwriting on the wall first a id grabbing up all the good planets within a few light-years of Earth, only to be displaced with a huge pre-Empire push, shoved into the depths of the galaxy to lick their wounds and rape worlds to build a fleet which almost ended the budding Empire in its first hundred years. He thought of the waste. The expansion was a historic phenomenon, truly, happening with fantastic swiftness, but it would have been faster had not the main energies of the two sides been devoted to war and weapons of war.

"Jak," he said, one day after his reading session, "I give you this as a thought. If the resources and credit expended on warships and weapons by both sides were diverted to development of the galaxy, we'd have the whole thing catalogued and settled and everyone would be living like the Emperor."

"You gotta remember one thing," the Sub-Chief said, slightly miffed, "you're an outworlder. You didn't

grow up under the threat of the Cassies. What I'm saying is you don't know shit about the situation, boy, and sometimes you come close to talking treason."

So he stopped talking, even to Jakkes, who, after training, had requested an action station and had pulled strings to take Lex with him.

The thing about it was that there were facts and figures. The military budget of the Empire was a matter of record and, after his brain stopped swimming with the astronomical numbers involved, Lex began to think, more and more, that the waste was not only foolish, it was criminal.

Down near Centaurus there was a ship's graveyard. It consisted of outmoded warships and it extended for thousands of miles with the dead, stripped, pitted hulls packed as closely as possible. There was, in that ships' graveyard, enough metals to represent the ores of a hundred Texas-sized planets with normal density, enough to supply the needs of Texas for a thousand years, and it was a total waste, since reclamation was more expensive than mining new ore on the out-planets of the Empire. When Lex punched up the visual tapes showing the "reserve fleet," he was astounded. He put the facts into his brain and told them to stay there for future reference. He spent nights thinking about how a Texas fleet could blink in, latch onto a hull and blink out with enough salvageable metal to add to the meager reserves of Texas a stockpile which would make piracy worthwhile. "Alternately, he envisioned trade deals, meacr for old ships. The Empire, as imagined, would trade low, because they had fresh ores and their labor guilds would not stand still for Declamation, because it would throw miners out of work.

He had a lot of time to think as the Rearguard cruised up and down the line, covering an assigned volume of space at sub-light speeds, traveling from nowhere to nowhere and back again, instruments tracking the Cassie opposite who traveled the same empty trek time and again until the routine became automatic and the only escape, during his off-duty hours, was the library.

At the end of his first six months' tour he was somewhat of an authority on the war, could recite its high points and its isolated hot battles, knew and laughed at the dueling concept, and he had not been close to an enemy ship. Toward the end of the tour, he was almost wishing for a fight, anything to relieve the endless routine.

Luyten Three was a fleet port, a planet devoted to the clang and din of repair, modernization and outfitting of battle vessels. Land area was scant, isolated volcanic tips thrust above the endlessly rolling seas, but the location of the planet saved long and tedious blinks from that sector of space back into Empire central.

Luyten City was a brawling, tough town, always packed with spacers on holiday, its streets lined with gaudy fronts and flashing signs designed to lure the bored, spacesick servicemen into parting with their accumulated pay. Luyten City offered everything, whores for whoremongers, gambling for gamblers, Feelies for those who wanted their kicks vicariously, nude shows for voyeurs, safe drugs for those who wanted to drop out for a while, illegal and even deadly drugs for more reckless souls, drinks for drinkers, culture in the form of live drama and museums for the aesthetic, vulgarity for vulgarians and, for Lex, a meacr steak, costing a week's pay, served by a sweet-faced little girl in the scantiest of costumes who told Lex that she was off duty at local midnight and that her cost was reasonable.

"Don't mess with any of the townies," Blant Jakkes had warned, just before he disappeared for three days into a government-controlled brothel. "Some of them you put it in and it has teeth, boy. You wanta get laid, you go to a government place, right?"

"Right," Lex said, holding his town guide map and marking the restaurant which, according to the information, offered the foods of a thousand worlds. And he struck pay dirt in the form of a fairly decent steak, the first real meat he'd had since leaving Texas, and thanked the little girl while declining her invitation and then went out to look things over, feeling good solid land under his feet and missing the wide expanse of home, for the Luyten landscape was hilly and the sea was never far away.

He'd asked, there in the restaurant, where the steak had come from, hoping to hear someone say "Texas."

"You got me," the little girl had said.

"You read anything recently about a planet called Texas?" he asked a runty little fellow in a stand selling printed materials and stat papers.

"Who reads 'em?" the runt asked. "You wanta read, you buy."

He bought a couple of stat papers and scanned them. Most of the news he'd heard on the daily report put onto the ship's communications system, all Empire stuff. Nowhere was there a mention of Texas, not even a mention of a trade deal for meat. But he knew that the trading had to be still going on, because he'd had a Texas meacr steak which could not have been preserved from the first shipment.

He hit a couple of bars and listened to the talk there, strange-sounding places and the typical language of the fleet, walked, feeling lonely, toward the brothel where Jakkes had disappeared, made a fantastic discovery.

Aboard ship Gunner Basics didn't have access to blinkstat machines. But there, on the corner, was a sign saying "Public Blinkstat." He had to go into a bar to get the proper coinage for the machine and then he sent a blink addressed to his father via First Leader Jum Anguls, Ursa Major Sector. He waited for acknowledgment and got it, acknowledgment meaning only that the stat had been started across the parsecs toward the addressee. He had no assurance that there was even contact between the First Leader and the Texicans, but he was hungry for some word from home. He wanted to know how his father was feeling and how Billy Bob was holding out and, although he had not dared ask in the stat, he wanted to know about Emily. He left the column of the enlisted men's mess and his name and rank with blinkstat central in case there was a return message before his ship lifted off Luyten Three and then wandered the streets, hitting a few more bars but limiting his drinking, talking with fleeters, comparing tours of duty, getting around to asking, always, if anyone had heard any news about a planet called Texas.

Texas didn't exist.

"Texas? What sector?"

"I don't know," he had to say. "Had a buddy from there. Trying to locate him."

"Never heard of it."

Liberty was, in many ways, worse than duty, and the Luyten liberty was the first of many on isolated outplanets where the fleet touched down. And they were much the same, all the planets, chosen for their lack of livable land area, suited only for the fleet workshops, peopled by parasites who reached into the pockets of the fleeters, whores, gamblers, opportunists, perverts, retired fleeters making a credit on their ex-buddies. Liberty was loneliness and frustration, because each of his attempts, for a period of eighteen Months, to reach or make contact with his father brought nothing in return. Each time he'd send his blinkstat, at the cost of a week's pay, and each time he'd wait in vain for an answer. It was as if Texas had ceased to exist.

Gradually, however, he ceased to be a loner. His acceptance by Blant Jakkes threw him into association with others and he came to find that not all Empireites were scrungy. Some of them were fairly decent fellows. Talking with his fellow crewmen, listening to their descriptions of their home worlds, gave Lex an embryonic feeling of being a part of something and helped to nurture his growing, if grudging, admiration for Empire. For the Empire was, truly, huge. Rambler, the converted Cassiopeian, talked of his home and the far-flung alliance of star groups on the other side of the line and Lex felt a glow of pride to be a member of a race which could, in so short a time, conquer so much of the galaxy.

He was sorry to leave the old Rearguard when transfer orders came, sending both him and his best friend, newly promoted Weapons Chief Blant Jakkes, to a fleet port on the far edge of the core sector to be assigned to a wheezing Vandy with a lonely sector of space to patrol. There at the core the worlds were few. The dense star fields glowed brightly, with no space debris in the relatively small areas between old suns, and the only reason for patrolling it at all was to forestall a Cassiopeian scouting sweep into Empire from the rear.

After the spaciousness of the Rearguard ship, the small Vandy was cramped. Worse, her age and condition seemed to dictate at least one cooling failure per day, so that the crew was constantly grumbling, out of uniform, sweating, panting, cursing the day they were ever assigned to T.E.S.Grus .

However, no one cursed the oldGrus more than her skipper, Fleet Captain Arden Wal, hero of the Battle of Wolf's Star, goat of the Texas incident. Having lost two first-line ships, Captain Arden Wal was fortunate, he realized, to have any ship at all. But he had been passed over for promotion and had narrowly escaped being shipped back to the central Empire to fly a desk. He'd been saved from that fate by discovering theGrus on the way to the ships' graveyard, claiming her, seeing to her outfitting personally and calling on a long-overdue favor from an Admiral on the Emperor's staff.

There were days when he regretted his good fortune of getting another ship. Like the day when the blink computer misfired and sent them out into space so close to a huge core monster of a sun that the paint began to melt on the hull and the coolers whined with overwork and threatened to fail and bake them all and the generator seemed to take forever to charge for a quick, cooling blink to anywhere except almost in the Hades of that bastard sun.

When it was over and the coolers stopped complaining, Wal went storming down the corridors and ladders to chew on his navigator a little and, on the way, passed crew's quarters where he saw one helluva big man out of uniform, sweating, his chest bare and drops of perspiration forming on his well-developed muscles.

"Fleeter, you're out of uniform," Captain Wal barked. "When I come back, don't be."

Lex put on his T-top and swore a little, but snapped to attention when the Captain came back to stand in the hatch and look in with grim approval on his face. "Sure it's hot, fleeter," Wal said, "but we're all hot, carry on."

It was later, after the duel, that each of them was to discover that they had something in common, a chase into Cassiopeian space which had cost Wal a ship, a promotion and his career.

Since the blink computer proved to be accurate only to plus or minus one tenth of a unit, the patrol was, at times, a nervous one and the word got around and the crew began to sweat each time there was a charge building up in the generator, because one tenth of a unit is a not inconsiderable distance. There, near the core, one tenth of a unit could put them back into range of a star or send them close enough on a straight-line blink to a mass to warp the generator. Between blinks, the tech crew labored with the computer, but it was past its prime and it was all they could do to keep it operating within that plus or minus one tenth unit range.

Off duty, Lex wandered into navigation and listened to the techs swear and peered over shoulders to see that the computer was a relatively primitive, fairly simple model out of the past, the kind kids practiced on back on Texas. Lex didn't follow the technical jargon being bantered about, but he knew a little about computers, especially the kind he and Billy Bob used in school, on the sly, to predict the possibility of Lex's sweet little girl friend's capitulation to more than a sneaked kiss. He soon realized that the computer was a shotgun model, designed to do far more complicated jobs than run a blink vector, and that some of its brain was superfluous to its present function. Moreover, the malfunction seemed to be in one of the superfluous sections.

"You might try bypassing this sector," Lex suggested to the Chief Tech, a man who occasionally drank with him and Jakkes.

Empire techs did things by the book. The Chief looked at him blankly, asking silently what Gunner knew about 'chinery, and turned back. The next blink showed an error of just under one quarter light-year and left them a week's run at mini-blink speed to the appointed station, making the opposition Cassie a little nervous. Lex was on the bridge at his gunnery station when the communication came through.

"You're consistently giving us false information," the Cassie sent.

"Computer failure," theGrus sent,

"Let us hope that your errant computer does not send you into our space," the Cassie sent.

So another element of tension was added, for the patrol route was along the line, close in, and the Cassie opposite was a new Vandy type with all the latest gear. There hadn't been a duel in the core sector in decades, but as theGrus limped and missed, limped and missed, the communications from the Cassie became more and more curt.

"He thinks we're up to something," Jakkes said. "We're going to have to fight him sure as hell."

"We haven't even got the latest screen on this old tub," said the Tech Chief, who was drinking with them. "And he's got us outgunned."

"You think he'd take us in a fight, then?" Lex asked.

"No doubt about it," Jakkes said.

"Why don't you bypass that defective lobe and give us at least that much?" Lex asked.

"Look, Texas," the Tech Chief said, "you just don't go frigging around with a computer. That lobe was put there for a reason. I have no idea what would happen if we blinked with that lobe bypassed and I don't intend to find out."

"It was put there to handle information not needed on a blink," Lex said.

"In view of your erratic and deceptive behavior," the Cassiopeian Vandy sent, "we must reluctantly challenge you."

The honor of the Emperor was at stake. Captain Wal knew that he had a slim chance in a head-to-head duel with the new Cassie Vandy and he answered with his head high, but with inner anger. So it was to end like this, out here in the core, on a ship which was years overdue for the junk heap.

"In the name of the Emperor, I accept your challenge," Wal sent. He followed, since he was the challenged party, with a time in universal and with coordinates in a clear area of space which would give his errant computer room for wide misses.

"Do we have to fight him?" Lex asked Jakkes.

"It's the code."

"Let me be sure I understand," Lex said. "We blink out at a place we've given him in advance and he'll be there and then we just sit there blasting at each other until something gives."

"That's the way it is."

"Why?"

Jakkes shook his head. "Hell, that's just the way it is."

"It's based on trust," the Tech Chief said. "By making the duel conform to tradition we assure the Cassie and he assures us that the duel is an isolated engagement and that neither of us is up to any tricks. That keeps it one ship on one ship and doesn't expand the fight."

"But we're apt to miss the coordinate by a few million miles and make him think we're trying to sneak by him into Cassie space," Jakkes said.

"If we do, we'll have a battle fleet down on our ass in hours," the Tech Chief said.

Jakkes was getting drunk rapidly. He looked at Lex with watery eyes. "If you want to write any last letters home, better get with it."

Lex didn't even know where home was. And he wasn't ready to write last letters. He'd done two of his years with the fleet and he'd even begun to believe, after the slow passage of what seemed like aeons of time, that he'd live to see Texas again as a free man.

The Captain called a crew meeting. "Fleeters," he said, standing tall in his finest dress uniform, "for those of you who have not dueled, I will explain. At the given moment, theGrus will go into normal space at a prearranged point. The enemy will blink in at the same instant. Should there be a slight discrepancy in blink times, there is a short period of adjustment allowable. When both ships are on station, armed, screened properly, a signal will be exchanged. That is when the reactions of the gun crew become of utmost importance. The gun crew which reacts quickest to the signal will be victorious. I have the utmost confidence that it will be you." He looked directly at Lex, who was on the main battery control on the bridge because of his superior reaction time.

There was more about honor and duty to Empire and Lex was sitting there thinking that something was wrong with the entire setup. Here they were, about to go willingly into a situation where they would be at a disadvantage. Even if they had been evenly matched it seemed foolish to him to fight on prearranged terms. He'd never been in a fight to the death, but he'd faced a couple of tough old Bojack farls and when you're up against something or someone who is trying to kill you you don't give advantage. You take advantage if you can.

He thought about it through the waiting period and then, just before he knew that the ship was going to be called to battle stations, he went down into the navigator's room where his friend, the Tech Chief, was working feverishly on the computer.

"How is it?" Lex asked.

"I won't guarantee it," the Chief said. "There's a galloping decay in that damned lobe."

"What happens if we miss the appointed coordinate?"

"They start blasting, if they can. If they can't, they call in a fleet. There's one standing by a blink away. Either way if we miss it we've had it."

"And we're going to miss it, just as we've missed each blink point for the last few weeks," Lex said.

"Bet your ass on it," the Chief said.

"It's the only ass I've got," Lex said, putting his hand on a heavy wrench, lifting it, carefully demolishing the sick lobe.

"Now bypass that bastard," he said, as the crew stood there, shocked.

They had no other choice.

There was no time to test the jury-rigged computer. It was time to defend the honor of the Emperor. Captain Arden Wal sounded stations. TheGrus came alive, quivered. At the appointed second she blinked and came out on the nose with the Cassie Vandy sitting within point-blank range getting ready to put up her screens for the duel.

There was a ritual for it. Wal sent his greeting. His greeting was returned gravely in the voice of a Cassiopeian. The next order was to be, "Screens up." After that there would be the mutual signal and the duel would begin.

Only it didn't go that way.

When he got into position, on the instant of blinking out, Lex was already arming his battery. He punched it in, programmed it. He could see the Cassie with his naked eye. At that range, with her screens not yet in place, she was a sitting duck. The Cassie didn't know what hit her. She vaporized and was no more.

There was a stunned silence on the bridge. Arden Wal's face went white. For three hundred years the honorable duel had been the accepted method of keeping a war relatively cool, of testing new weapons, of providing a victory for either side to propagandize. Now, at the hands of one crewman, the entire concept was shot down. He was shocked into momentary immobility, then he turned his attention to the scanners. By all rights there should be a Cassiopeian battle fleet blinking in at that very moment. However, space was empty. After five minutes of tense waiting, Wal concluded that the Cassie had not sent a signal to the waiting fleet, that the suddenness of its destruction had prevented a report of the unbelievable action of the Empire Vandy.

He had time, then, to walk slowly to Lex's station. Lex was retiring his weapons, clearing charge on them,

Returning them to their pods. "Congratulations, son," Wal said in an even, tired voice. "You've killed us." Lex looked up. "If I may speak, sir?"

"Yes," Wal said wearily.

"I think I saved our lives, sir."

"For the moment," Wal said. "However, we have violated the Military Code of Honor as it has never been violated before. Every action, every signal is recorded in the ship's Automatic Record. That record will be inspected when we return to port. There is no way of erasing it. Tampering with an Automatic Record is a death offense, just as violating the Code is a death offense."

The First Officer stood at Lex's back, hand weapon pointed at Lex's head. "Shall I put him in the brig, sir?"

"Why bother?" Wal said.

"Damned Texican," the First Officer said, his hand white on his weapon.

"Texican?" Wal asked.

"This is the one, sir, the outworlder."

"Yes, yes," Wal said. "I've been meaning to have a chat with you." Actually he'd been putting it off. He had been afraid, having been harmed twice through contact with Texicans, that he would, face to face with one, lose his control. He knew, now, that Texicans had precipitated the Battle of Wolf's Star, where he'd lost his fine middleguard cruiser. He knew that the Texicans had led him into the Cassiopeian ambush, asa result of which he'd lost a splendid Vandy. It was because of Texas and Texicans that he was in command of a junk ship. And now, because of a Texican, he, as Captain and therefore responsible, would share this boy's guilt for blasting an enemy in violation of the Code.

And now that he was face to face with the Texican, he felt only an overwhelming sadness, and a hint of curiosity.

"Please bring him to my cabin," he said, turning his back. "And resume patrol." Halfway out the door leading from the bridge, he turned. "And you may say, in your report home, that we have emerged victorious in a duel with a Class-A Cassiopeian Vanguard destroyer."

He would at least have the rest of his patrol time to live. There was no reason to go rushing back to face sure conviction.

Chapter Six

"I did it, sir," Lex said, standing at attention in the Captain's cramped quarters, "because someday I'm going to be free to go home, back to Texas."

"Is Texas so heavenly that a man will violate his honor for her?" Wal sat, slumped tiredly over his small writing desk.

"Sir, with all respect, it was not my honor which I violated, it was yours. Or the Empire's. Or something. I mean, sir, that I wasn't the one who made the rules."

"The rules, fleeter, are the result of centuries of tradition. Till now, they've worked fairly well to keep us all alive."

"They wouldn't have kept us alive, sir," Lex said. "In fact, they seemed sure to get us dead."

"Rules are designed for the good of all," Wal said. Why, he asked himself, was he so calmly debating with this outworlder? "Is it every man for himself on Texas?"

"No," Lex said. "On Texas it's all for one and one for all, sir. And they, meaning that nebulous 'they' which we use when we talk about people we don't really know, people who have life-and-death power over us, don't make rules which would devalue the life of a single Texican as our lives were devalued by the situation wherein we faced a superior force and were forced to fight on terms not of our choosing."

"An interesting thought," Wal said, "in keeping, I think, with the rather incredible story which has been told about the Battle of Wolfs Star. I have heard that a Texican fleet moved to save one individual."

"It's true, sir."

"But they sent you out into the Empire to take your punishment," Wal said.

"I was given a choice, sir."

The Captain looked at Lex with knitted brows. He was trying to imagine a like situation in the Empire. He knew that the individual involved would not even be consulted, not given a voice, much less a choice. "Sit down, Gunner. Tell me about this Texas of yours."

Lex made himself as comfortable as possible in the undersized chair in front of the Captain's desk. Big, lanky, he spilled over the edges, leaned one elbow on the back. His ease in the presence of a superior impressed Wal and, as the Captain listened, he began to make unconscious comparisons.

Arden Wal was a loyal man. He was a Vegan. He'd spent his formative years at the heart of the Empire, had been educated in the best schools and at the Academy on Polaris Two. He was a man of some intelligence. His mind was never satisfied with the knowledge it held, always seeking more data. At fifty, he was in the prime of his middle manhood. He had never formed a permanent relationship with a woman. His love had always been the fleet and, for a long time, until the last Texican incident, he'd entertained hopes of rising in rank to, someday, command an entire sector. His cabin was neatly arranged, everything in its place, but packed to capacity with electrobooks, star charts and an impressive collection of antique printed books which included, as his prime source of pride, ancient star catalogues from the old Earth, theBanner Durchmusterung , first edition, listing 324,000 stars north of -2 degrees declination from the Earth; Schonfeld's extended catalogue and theCordoba Durchmusterung , the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung , theCarte du Ciel . In addition to the priceless ancient catalogues, of value for their age, their quaintness, there were hundreds of carefully cross-filed electro-charts, a collection of star knowledge which covered the charted galaxy. Wal had traveled many of the blink lines charted in theComplete Empire Spaceways and, as First Officer of an exploration scout, he'd personally helped to add to the continually growing charts. He was a cosmopolitan man in the true sense, having seen the Empire from old Earth to the far reaches of the periphery, its cities, its mining planets, its museums and prisons and fisheries, its agriculture and its people. But he'd never seen Texas and he'd never heard of a society wherein the individual mattered more than the whole.

As Lex rambled on, taking the opportunity to talk of home, Wal was fascinated.

TheGrus blinked accurately, contacted a new opposite, sent out to replace the lost Cassie Vandy, and an hour passed. Wal offered Eridani brandy, warmed his glass in his hand as Lex talked about the big planet somewhere far out past the extent of Empire and Wal asked questions about its people, its industry, its war potential. Lex told him about the Darlene, about the maneuverability of an airors, about Texas' need for metals. But it was government which caught Wal's attention for long minutes.

"A board of citizens appoints a President?" he asked, unbelievingly.

"No one really wants the job," Lex said. "But if he's chosen he serves."

"No one wants it?"

"Heck, no. Who'd want to spend his time pushing papers and talking with everyone who has an idea or a complaint when he could be on his own land, growing his own meacrs, or out hunting in the desert?"

"No Texican, then, seeks power for the sake of power?" Wal asked sarcastically.

"I can't speak for all of them," Lex said, "but when my father was appointed President he tried like hell to get out of it, and we almost had to hog-tie old Andy Gar to get him to serve."

Three brandies later Lex was talking wistfully about how he and ole Billy Bob went riding over the desert and how they shot low vectors at the hills and caught sanrabs with their bare hands and Wal found himself laughing. By this time he was convinced that Lex had no idea where Texas was located, except that it was well beyond Empire control areas and lonely in its big skies. And he was convinced, also, that Texicans were very atypical people. He had to admit that their ideas about keeping a planet livable were sensible. Overcrowding was a problem throughout the Empire and the drain of energies and goods and wealth to people unable to fend for themselves was a growing cancer. Instead of being angry with the young man, he was coming to like him. Lex's casual dismissal of his actions toward the ailing computer impressed him. The lad had not only thrown out every regulation in the book regarding destruction of fleet equipment, but he'd been right. And according to him every Texican who had attended a school would have recognized the necessity to disconnect the sick lobe. Wal envisioned a planet filled with men like Lex, intuitive tinkerers at home with machinery and electronics, able to mend and make do without the basic theory behind their actions.

As a military man, he was impressed by the Texicans' ability to destroy major Cassiopeian battle ships not only without fear of retaliation, but without detection. And he was inordinately interested in the double-blink technique which allowed a Texican ship to blink in and out of danger while others, like this new and impressive Vandy, had to sit and wait for recharging, taking the accumulated fire of a fleet while doing it, or use the last charging reserve and kill a ship to escape.

It was new data for his greedy mind. He fed the young Gunner brandy until he was satisfied that he'd picked all the available information and then he listened as Lex talked of his family with a loneliness which was touching. Sobered, Wal was reminded that both he and the Texican were dead men.

"I'm very sorry that you will never see them again," he said.

"But I will," Lex said. "Somehow I will." "When we get back to base we'll both be brought up on charges the second the Automatic Record is

monitored," Wal said. "Sir, I've been thinking about that. Why do we have to go back to base?" "Shall we sneak up and destroy the entire Empire as you destroyed the Cassie?" "We don't have to, sir. We can go to Texas." When it was said, Wal realized that he'd been waiting for the boy to say it. He mused silently for a

moment.

"With all respect, sir, you don't look like a man who would just lie down and let someone kill him for using common sense." "You used common sense," Wal said, realizing that the brandy was getting to him. "If I had known that it would get you in trouble too I might not have." "And you're not using it now," Wal said. "Even if we entertained the idea of defecting to your Texas—" "I know," Lex said. "I don't know where it is. But we're still trading with the Empire, aren't we? I had a

steak from Texas in a restaurant on Luyten not long ago. And if we're still trading, we can find the

rendezvous point and contact a Texican ship." "And if your escape from your punishment angers the Emperor to the point of stopping the trading, then-what? You'd be right back where you started."

"Well," Lex said, "it's different now. They weren't going to shoot me then. They were just going to hold me for a few years." "They'd take you back at the risk of losing all the metals they need?" "If I asked it, they would."

"Perhaps we could," Wal said, talking almost to himself, his voice soft. "But there's the crew." "I've thought about that, too," Lex said. "I think a few of them would go with us. Jak would. The others. Well, we could fake disablement, put them in lifeboats near an inhabited planet, or on a main blink line."

"Son, it takes three men to prepare for a blink." "We'd have at least three. Me, you and Jak." "What do you know about an Empire generator?" "Well, they're more or less the same all over, except yours, pardon me for saying so, sir, are a little more

primitive."

"I'll think on it," Wal said.

"Thank you, sir," Lex said. Sensing his dismissal, he rose, somewhat unsteady on his feet. "Good stuff," he said, grinning as he pointed at the half-emptied bottle.

"Take it with you," Wal said.

He shared the balance of the bottle with Jak and, when he felt the time was right, he talked about Texas.

Jak had always shown some curiosity about the planet and was especially intrigued by the idea of hunting sanrabs from a flashing airors with his bare hands.

"They taste good, huh?" Jak had asked back when Lex first told him about sanrabs.

"As good as meacr steak," Lex said.

"I've never eaten meacr steak. I had a steak from an Earth bovine once. Let's see, I think it was when I graduated from finishing school. I was, oh, sixteen years old, I guess. And it took my old man a week to find the steak. It was about half a pound and we split it five ways, my dad and my mother, me and my sister and brother."

"Meacr steak is better than cow steak," Lex told the Sub-Chief.

That night, over a bottle of the Captain's best brandy, Lex brought the subject up again, adding some tales about eating shellfish off the shell, roasted on a bed of coals beside the big seas of Texas.

"The Emperor's balls," Jak said, after listening to Lex talk food for fifteen minutes. He got up and

swallowed a bulk pill. "You're making me hungry."

"Jak," Lex said, "you've never told me about your family."

"Not much to tell," Jak shrugged. "They're all dead."

"I didn't know."

"Freighter brought in a new strain of bug from an outworld. Before they could find the cure half the city

was dead or dying. My folks were among the first. The old man worked at the port."

"And you never formed a permanent relationship with a woman?" Lex asked.

"Came close," Jak said. "Don't like to talk aboutthat ."

Lex held his tongue, although he wanted to know. "Well, Jak, it looks like you've got no real tie to

anything except the fleet."

"Mate, mother and bedfellow," Jak said, grinning. "But sometimes I wish this old tub had hot and cold running females aboard."

"Jak, what if I gave you a chance to eat a meacr teak so big you'd have to chew for two hours to get it down?"

"Who do I have to kill?"

"Let me ask one more question. You're a career man, right? What are you going to do when you've done your thirty?"

"I'll be fifty," Jak said. "I'll have forty or fifty more good years, barring some hairy-assed bug or accident. I'm going to take my savings and my pension and go out on the Deneb frontier and buy a place. They say there are planets there where a man can own as much as ten acres. I figure if prices don't go up too much I'll be able to buy at least five."

"Jak," Lex said, "my dad gave me a hundred thousand acres of good graze land when I was sixteen." "Shit," Jak said. "A man can run enough meacrs on five thousand acres to live good on Texas." "First you have to be on Texas," Jak said, a little miffed to have his dream of owning five acres of land to

call his own diminished by the Texican's bragging.

"How'd you like to be on Texas, with five thousand acres of grazing land to call your own?"

"Shit."

Lex held his breath and took the plunge. "I'm going. You wanta go?"

"Sure," Jak said, laughing.

"Think about it, Jak. It would mean never seeing any of the Empire again."

"You're not shitting me," Jak said, his face going serious. "You've talked with Wal?"

"Yeah," Lex said. "And I'm hanging my neck out a mile to tell you about it."

"The Emperor's balls," Jak said, standing up, a grin on his face. "Five thousand acres?"

"With a stream through the middle with big trees on the banks and a starting stock of meacrs."

"I'll pay for it, Lex. I'll take my savings—"

"You'll pay for it by helping me get there. You won't be able to stop by an Empire bank to draw out

your savings."

"How? I mean—"

"Later, Jak. Tell me this. Any others you'd trust? Any good men who might like to leave Empire?"

"I don't know. Tech-Chief Form. He's got no love for the Emperor. He was pressed. When he finished his first tour he went home to find his wife dead. She'd gone off with a spacer on leave and he'd crashed an atmoflyer, drunk. He's talked about the Deneb frontier with me."

"Feel him out, will you? It takes at least three. We've got me and you and the Captain, but we could sure use Form. Anyone else?"

"I don't know," Jak said. "I'm not sure. Most of them have families."

"We've got to play it right," Lex said. "We're going fake a dead ship and put the crew in lifeboats near a planet. We have to make the Empire think theGrus died in space, because I don't want to mess up my planet's trade deals with the Empire, and if they knew got away it just might. We can't take any risk, like Asking someone to go and have him say no and then tell what happened when he got back to Empire."

"I wouldn't swear to anyone but Form," Jak said.

"Then it'll have to be the four of us."

"Shit, four good men can blink this old tub."

"Let's take her to Texas, then."

"Buddy, I'm with you," Jak said, faking Lex's slow talk, grinning "Five thousand acres? How much is that?"

"Further than you can see," Lex said.

They could see the planet. They were that close. It was a small star among the hoard of stars and the Captain, in L.S.A., the ship's air becoming foul, made sure that the lifeboat chiefs had the coordinates down. The boats left the lock one by one. The last boat was moved into line, the one which was scheduled to hold Wal, Lex, Blant Jakkes and the Tech-Chief. But it didn't leave the hold.

TheGrus had been disabled by some skillful workon the part of Lex, working with Tech-Chief Form. First the generator went, then the life support system. Anyone left on board, according to the endless tests run by crew techs before the order to abandon, would live only as long as the air lasted, and it was getting stale.

The boats left, traveling at sub-blink speeds, a long and tedious journey ahead of them before planetfall, and the life support system came miraculously to life, beginning to rebuild the stale air. The generator worked beautifully after Lex and Form did a bit of tinkering. When the boats were past a given point on the trip to the planet, a drone went out, laden with a rigged weapon which, upon a signal, detonated, making a star of some size for the boats to see. Their reports would state that they had seen theGrus die in a blaze of fire.

Lex stood on the bridge beside Captain Wal and felt free for the first time in over two years. In the improving air of the ship, he felt he could almost catch a sniff of the sweetness of Texas. Below, Form was charging for a blink. The Captain was checking theComplete Empire Spaceways for the hundredth time, making sure that he'd chosen the least frequented blinkways to reach that sector of the rim where the original meat for metal trade had taken place. Lex reasoned that if trade were continuing between Texas and the Empire, it would be conducted in that sector, for it was big, the stars were widely spaced and there was room for maneuver.

Between theGrus and a possible meeting with a Texican ship were thousands, millions of stars and hundreds, thousands of planets occupied by Empire and a billion chances of being detected by an Empire ship. To enhance their chances, Lex and Jakkes crawled the hull, after the first blink, to paint out Empire fleet markings and paint on merchant fleet numbers. TheGrus was old enough to pass for a surplus military ship turned to civilian use.

From near the core to the open spaces along the periphery is quite a jump, but they had unlimited power, drawn from the stuff of the stars, their life support system was regenerative over an indefinite period and with only four of them aboard there was only a slight drain on expendable supplies. The old Grus leaped from point to point along well-charted but infrequently used starways, taking the long way around thickly populated sectors, always alert, the four men working four on and four off in pairs, so that two men were always awake. The strain, after the first week, began to show on all of them. Wal issued wakers to all when he himself dozed off just before a blink.

Around them, the Empire's commercial and military traffic hummed. Blink signals alerted them, the ship's automatics would, at tunes, have as many as five blinking or charging ships on its computers. Once there was visual contact with a Rearguard cruiser, waiting a charge, coming out into space within instrument range and closing to ask identification.

"T.E.M.S.Earthlight ," Wal sent, "en route core mining planets to Antares," and stood by, his tensions hidden behind a five-day growth of beard.

"Glory to the Emperor," the cruiser sent, edging away to let her big generators build. Then she was gone and Wal breathed a sigh of relief. He got to hell out of there before building a full charge, blowing a few fuses on the generator, but nothing serious. Lex and Form had it going again in two hours, missing half their sleep period.

But it was worth it. Lex would have gone without sleep until he fell on his face, because each blink brought him closer to home, to Texas, that big, light, airy planet which was somewhere, somewhere he couldn't even remember.

You could see the stars thin out and the blinks became longer and the worst was over. Ahead was the blackness of intergalactic space and behind the glow of the core, a sky full of brightness. In the relative safety of the rim, Wal called a rest and they slept for twenty hours, woke to toast their success in the Captain's best. Lex, Form and Jakkes were in full uniform and theGrus was undergoing one of her cooling crises. Wal grinned at them. "Gentlemen, since we are no longer in the Emperor's service, if you'd like to let a bit of air to your hides—"

Lex sighed and, with a feeling of freedom and luxury, shed his T-top and wiped sweat from his chest with it.

Wal's charts showed the positions of Empire blink beacons. Lex scoured his memory. He couldn't be sure, because space was big and he hadn't been all that attentive, but he knew that the route of the first trading mission went within range of one of about a dozen blink stations. He wrote a blinkstat and put it on the machine and then Wal began positioning theGrus on a line with the blinkstat beacons and started sending the message into empty space, beamed as if it had originated from the stations.

"For Texas and Zed." That was the content of the message. The beep on the end meant reply along receiving beam within a half hour. The theory was that if Texas were still trading with the Empire there would be Texican ships out there, blinking random patterns. And if there were Texican ships monitoring the Empire blink beacons sooner or later one of them would pick up the message from theGrus. It happened on the fifth try. From somewhere out there near the darkness the blinkstat came back just before the end of theGnu's half-hour waiting period —a longer stay in one position would expose them to Empire discovery, since, Lex reasoned, the Empire would still be interested in taking and questioning a Texican crew—and Lex felt a soaring elation.

"Zed who?" the return message read.

"A beagle flies from San Ann to Dallas City in thirty-two minutes," Lex sent, using a recognition code at least two years old.

The monitor took a message beginning with coordinates. Lex nodded. Wal, the ship fully charged, fed the numbers into the computer and the oldGrus blinked out between two far stars and waited.

"I don't see a Texican," the message read. "I see a Class-F Empire Vandy."

"Carrying Lexington Burns of Dallas City, son of Murichon Burns, with three Empire subjects seeking freedom under the skies of Texas," Lex sent.

"Kill your power, Lexington Burns. Be a dead ship when we come out or you'll be dead with two Darlene projectiles up your ass."

"Kill the ship," Lex said. Wal moved to send the appropriate orders. They waited. They donned L.S.A. and vented the air out the locks. There was just over two hours' worth of air in the suits. The Texas ship waited a full two hours and then came in slow, sending feelers to detect a flow of power, finding none, moving faster then to lock to the open port.

Lex met the Texican at the lock, holding his hands out to show he had no weapon. "Boy," he said, as a tall Texican came warily into the tube, hand weapon ready, "you're as pretty as a batgull."

The Texican ship which had made the contact worked out of New Austin, on the far East Coast of the eastern Texas land mass. The skipper was a grizzled old war-horse who took nothing on faith. Until he reached open space, outside the disc, where he could blinkstat for confirmation of Lex's identity, he kept the four men from theGrus on a tight string, always in the company of a tall, grim-faced Texican. A half-dozen blinkstats convinced the skipper that Lex was, indeed, a Texican and would be welcomed at home on his western continent by the government and his family and '.hen there was cactus juice around and some wild backslapping as Lex told his story and roars of laughter and congratulations.

Lex asked to be brought up to date on developments at home and was pleased to learn that metals were becoming more plentiful with the continuing trade agreement with the Empire. The Blink Space Works had expanded its operations threefold and was producing a new type of ship which, with its double-blink generators, would fly circles around anything else in the galaxy. With the new ships, expeditions had been sent into the distant globular cluster, there to prospect and try to establish metals sources which would make Texas independent of the two warring powers in the galaxy. Already, the child quota had been raised, allowing for a small population growth over the next fifty years. In addition to the meat trades, Texas was now doing business with the Empire in grains and other foodstuffs and any spacer who wanted to make a credit was in demand in the growing merchant fleet.

Andy Gar's term as President of Texas was running out and there was talk of drafting Billy Bob Blink's father, old Billy, for the job, although old Billy was raising hell, saying that he had ships to build. A compromise choice was a middle-aged woman on the eastern land mass who had pioneered the present methods of pre-natal inspection. Some of the spacers didn't like the idea, thinking that the woman would spend too much time trying to improve the race instead of looking after the beans and meat affairs of everyday government.

It was all good news and Lex was so fascinated, so thrilled to be hearing word of Texas again that he forgot his companions. When he surfaced from a sea of gossip about Texas in general and the upcoming Worldwide Airors Rodeo in specific he went in search of the Empireites and found them in the crew's mess. Blant Jakkes was eating a meacr steak two inches thick and Arden Wal and Form were sampling a half-dozen bottles of good Rio Grande wine.

Jakkes talked through a mouthful. "They said if my stomach wasn't used to good, solid food I'd get sick, but it'll be worth it."

When his excitement wore off Lex did his best to catch up on a few weeks of lost sleep and he seemed to be in his bunk constantly until landfall at Dallas City, where the reception was wild and woolly, with Billy Bob and all his friends on hand in addition to the family. He was tossed, pushed, pounded. His hand was squeezed until it hurt. And then he was looking into his father's face and there was a happy, little-boy grin on his face and Murichon, who seemed to have become more gray, cleared his throat and seemed unable to speak. Lex solved the problem of what to say by letting out a whoop and lifting his father off his feet in a bear hug.

"You've filled out, boy," Murichon said.

Lex was looking around for her, for Emily Lancing. There were Texas girls there, but no familiar face, not the face which had helped him through some dark hours out there in the Empire.

Then he was introducing the others and explaining to his father that without them he wouldn't be back on Texas and that the best was none too good for any of them.

"Chief Jakkes is going to be a rancher," Lex said. "And the Captain—" He paused. There still existed a gulf between him and his former commanding officer. He realized that he had not even fully discussed what Wal would do on Texas.

"There's time for that," Murichon said. "First you men rest up, then we'll talk."

On the way to the ranch Murichon talked mostly with Wal, interested in the quiet, proud-faced man. "We'll have to ask you to submit to a little bit of questioning, Captain," Murichon said, after a general discussion of things allied to the Empire fleet. "Then we'll find you something to do."

"You run a fleet," Wal said. "Actually, that's what I'm best trained for, for following orders, for taking a starship into places where others might not want to go."

"There's always room for a good man," Murichon said.

Lex rested by screaming hisZelda low over the hills in chase of Billy Bob'sClean Machine , which had been altered into something unbelievable.Zelda was left panting. Then they taught Jakkes and Form how to ride airorses and the four of them went down south and rode the beach with sudsy white surf splashing on speeding feet and after a night on the sands with plenty of brew they went back home to walk into trouble.

The scene was much like those which preceded Lex's departure for the Empire. The house was filled with stern-faced officials from old Andy Gar on down.

"What's wrong?" Lex asked when he led his crew of dusty, tired playboys into the house.

There weren't a helluva lot of explanations as the four were hustled into arcs and delivered to the hospital in San Ann. There an ovate instrument was removed from within Lex's skull. He awoke with a headache to see his father, President Gar and Admiral Crockett Reds by his bedside.

"It's a thought monitor," Murichon said. "During one of those interrogation sessions you told us about they inserted it and blanked the memory of healing from your mind. Captain Wal had one, too. They've been broadcasting constantly."

"Oh, no," Lex said.

"We've got Wal's hooked back up," Andy Gar said. "When they come we don't want them to know we're expecting them."

"I shouldn't have come home," Lex said. The Empire fleet numbered into the millions. Each unit was more than capable of taking out a planet.

"Well, you did, boy," Gar said. "And you'd every right to. But now I'm afraid you're going to have to fight for that home."

Chapter Seven

The hole in Lex's head kept him in bed for a few days, but caused little pain. What bothered him most was the constant tests he was forced to undergo. The ovate object which had been removed from under his skull was, depending on how you looked at it, both large and small. It was frighteningly large to think of it inside your skull, displacing some brain tissue, replacing some, for actual gray matter had been removed to provide space for the object. The tests were being run to determine what, if any, permanent damage had been done to Lex's mental capacity. However, the human brain being what it is, a study in redundancy, it was finally conceded that the removal of the small—or large—depending on how you looked at it—amount of brain matter was not Hanging in any way. There are large areas of the brain which perform no useful functions. It was in one of those areas that the transmitter-monitor had been mounted.

Both small and large. Small to a frightening degree when the extent of its function was fully understood by Texican technicians. Large to a sickening degree when it had been inside a human skull.

And that one object forced a complete reassessment of Empire technology. Until slight abnormalities had been noted in the encephalogram of Arden Wal the Texican picture of Empire technology had not been a flattering one. It was a fact that Empire blink generators were much the same as the original design, the design which lifted man into interstellar space from the old Earth. Hasty examination of theGrus , bunked to Texas on the locks of the Texican ship which contacted Lex out there in the rim, confirmed the Texican impression that the Empire's techs had stagnated, become bogged down in endless repetition of old themes, spending the time and resources of a million worlds in building quantities, rather than in improving quality. It was true, and had been proven in the field, that a Texican ship, equipped with advanced generators, could fly rings around any Empire ship. Moreover, the technology which had produced the Darlene space rifle was, clearly, far ahead of the Empire, which depended solely on beam and ray weapons. However, the highly compact instrumentation of those objects found under the skulls of both Lex and Wal caused some brow-wrinkling among Texican scientists.

The transmitter mechanism in the brain monitors was a simple one, sending nothing more complicated than a one-tone signal at regular intervals. This, in itself, was not remarkable. What was astounding was the range over which the signal could be picked up. Over a range of something under a quarter of a light-year the monitor could be read by hastily fabricated receivers to obtain an indication of the emotional load of the one being monitored. In a range of a few thousand miles, those who had made a study of the human mind could tell enough from the signals sent out by the monitor almost to read the subject's thoughts. The ovate object in Arden Wal's head made him a unit in the whole. Had he been commanding a ship in a fleet someone, perhaps, it was theorized, aboard the flagship, could read Wal's emotions and stresses just as a good tech read the condition of the various components in a ship's mechanical system.

Wal was deeply shocked. He had no recollection of having been implanted with the instrument, but he did recall various times during his training when he would have to undergo tests and treatments. He requested that the instrument be removed from his skull immediately and was told that it was important that the Empire remain ignorant of the fact that Texas had discovered the implantations.

Lex was not shocked, he was outraged. He felt as if his most secret sanctuary had been invaded. To think of some Empire doctor messing around with his brain was enough to send him into a fury.

One primary implication was drawn from the discovery of the monitoring device in Lex's gray matter. That was the thing which was of most immediate concern to all of Texas, for the most fantastic part of the device was its ability to induce power from the tiny electric currents running through Lex's brain to send a simple tone over distances so vast that it was a certainty that theGrus could have been followed to Texas, followed at such an immense distance that a ship's sensors would not detect the stalker. Such a transmitter would have been installed in Lex for one reason and one reason only, to allow the Empire to follow bun home.

There was one hope. Perhaps the Empire had not maintained constant surveillance on Lex, knowing him to be safely aboard a ship of the line. Perhaps, just perhaps, the instrument had been intended for use when Lex was released from the Empire's service at some future date, after a long enough wait to make it seem as if it were Empire benevolence, rather than an Empire plot to find the location of Texas, to reduce his punishment. However, the signal from Lex's personal bug had reached parsecs into space. There was too much at stake to risk anything less than complete preparedness.

And so a world mobilized.

Messages went out. The most far-flung prospectors were blinking back to Texas to add their hulls to the fleet. For years Texas had been riding a tiger in the contacts with the Empire and now the tiger was threatening to buck.

Ironically, it was good Empire metals which went into the forges at the Blink Space Works to turn out armaments at a pace which had every available worker on overtime. Within a year, every spaceworthy hull under the Texas flag would be armed with a minimum of one Darlene space rifle, but no one was sure that Texas would be allowed a year.

The growing makeshift fleet trained in near space. Scouts ranged into the galaxy, watching for movement of a large Empire fleet toward the rim.

Lex's hole in the head was healing. He was on his feet, still in hospital, given the freedom of the place. He visited Arden Wal, still under observation, and upon walking into the room stopped in mid-stride.

She was dressed in professional whites and she looked even more beautiful than he remembered.

"Hello, Lex."

"Emily."

"I've been meaning to drop in," she said, "but we've been so busy."

The surge of pure joy in him drove out all else. He forgot, for the moment, that it was because of him that Texas was preparing to fight for its life. He forgot the years of loneliness out there in the Empire. She had changed so little, except that she was wearing her hair differently.

He walked toward her, oblivious of the curious look from Wal. His arms went out. She, with complete poise, met him, embraced him in a sisterly way, pushed him back. "My, you're a man now."

It was then, with her hands on his arms, holding him f at arm's length, that he saw the ring. She noted the change of expression. "Yes, I've chosen. He's a doctor. I want you to meet him."

The sun which had begun to glow in his heart died. "Yeah, sure." He swallowed. "Well, sure is nice to see you again, Emily. Hope I didn't break in on anything."

"Oh, no. In fact, I'm glad you stopped by. Captain Wal is very much disturbed. He seems to think that it's his fault Texas is threatened. I've been telling him that the transmitter in your instrument was much more powerful than the one in his, that his seems to be intended for purely local use."

Lex wasn't listening. He stayed a decent interval, said comforting things to Wal, then left to go out of the hospital without permission and get drunk for the first time in his life. Really drunk. Forgetting, falling-down drunk.

When he awoke, back in his room, he had no idea how he had arrived there, but he knew a dead dream when he met one face to face and kicked himself mentally for letting it get to him, because he'd always known that it was nothing more than a dream, that she was older, that the way things were she'd surely choose a man of her own age, probably a man in her own field of interest. But a dream dies hard, especially a dream which had sustained him through the years of Empire service, when he was so much alone.

A visit from Billy Bob, in the uniform of a lower officer of the fleet, helped in a small way, but his release from hospital helped more and then a silent, solitary run into the desert onZelda cleared away the last of the hospital smells from his nostrils. He came home onZelda , flying low and fast, knowing that it was time to stop mooning over girls and start helping Texas. He joined the continuing conference in the big house and was questioned by the Admiral and the Rangers about fleet tactics in the Empire.

He had already dictated all he knew. "I think you'd do better to talk with Captain Wal," he said. "He's spent his life learning fleet tactics."

"I realize that he's your friend," Murichon said, "but he's still Empire."

"Ex-Empire," Lex said. "He came here to escape a sure death sentence and now he's learned that he was never a trusted officer of the Empire, as he'd believed all his life. This thing about the thought monitor has hithim hard. He feels that he was betrayed when it was implanted. He thinks that every officer in the fleet must have such a unit, which makes someone very, very powerful. He was a Fleet Captain, which is a pretty high rank. There are only six active grades above that. I think he's fed up with a system which feels that it has to extend some form of secret control down through the higher ranks to include a man who is capable of direction of the operation of a full fleet He'll fight with us, Dad. I know he will."

"He couldn't go into space with that thing still in his head," Admiral Reds said. "He'd be spotted from a distance, assuming there are monitoring devices on the flagship, or whatever. He'd become a prime target, in addition to endangering others."

"But he can tell you more about Empire tactics than any man on Texas," Lex said. "And I'd also suggest you give both Jakkes and Form an opportunity to serve. Jakkes knows as much about the beam and ray weapons as anyone I know and Form can talk specifics about Empire power plants."

"We have, of course, questioned your friends," Reds said.

"But have you treated them as friends? Have you allowed them to act on good faith rather than as suspected aliens?" Lex asked.

"They are aliens," Andy Gar said. "And, I might add, the first to be on Texas soil since you brought home that Empire girl who started all of this."

"That's a little unfair, Andy," Murichon said calmly. "We've always faced the possibility of the Empire tracking us home. We all knew it would happen sooner or later."

"Sorry, boy," Gar said. "I don't like the idea of losing good men in an unnecessary fight, that's all."

"I'm going to be fighting, too," Lex said, but he wasn't quite sure that would be enough. No matter what his father said he blamed himself for the crisis and he was just one man. He could not, alone, face the danger which his actions had brought down on Texas.

He attended a briefing session. The fleet captains were there and the speaker was Arden Wal. Wal was not in uniform. His small stature had called for clothing in sizes not available except in children's stores and he was dressed in teenage blue jeans.

"You can be sure, gentlemen," Wal told the group, "that it will be done by the book. The fleet discourages initiative. One of three planetary approach plans will be used, and my guess is, depending on the fleet commander assigned to the expedition, that it will be one of two, for you yourselves left in Lex's brain the information regarding population and industrial capacity of your planet. The fleet will approach with confidence, emerging into. space about here—" He pointed with a baton. "—to form in lines for maximum deployment of firepower. They will not, at first, think of attacking the planet directly, since the planet is the prize. They want it intact with its agricultural capacity. Their detectors are quite good enough to spot any and all ships lying in wait for them, but they are not equipped with that rather marvelous double-blink generator which your people have developed. I would suggest that the strike be made during or slightly before the final blink brings the fleet into formation. It will not be necessary to destroy the entire fleet—"

"Question," said Admiral Reds. "Why do you say that? That we shouldn't destroy the entire fleet?"

Wal was not rattled. "One, for humanitarian reasons, Admiral. Two, should you show such overwhelming strike power, the ability to destroy an entire fleet without losses, the Empire will, to put it plainly, be scared shitless. The brass back at Empire central might declare Texas to be a galactic threat: In which case, the next strike would be made from deep space with planet-killing missiles. I need not remind you that one missile, getting through the first line of defense, is enough."

"So your thinking is to show just enough power to drive the fleet away," Reds asked. "But wouldn't that

assure another attempt in greater force?"

"The Empire won't give up easily," Wal said. "But you will buy time, and you will confine the war to space, rather than escalate it into planetary stages."

"We can kill a few planets, too," said a young line Captain.

"But you have only one to be killed," Wal said. "Therefore you have more to lose."

"At the Battle of Wolfs Star," Admiral Reds said, "your fleet executed a flanking maneuver of some interest. Would you explain the tactics?"

Wal smiled wryly. "I understand that you know something of that battle, sir."

"I was there," Reds said, smiling back.

"Yes," Wal said. "Well, when the Cassies deployed—"

Lex had lost interest. He began to look around at the serious, dedicated faces. He wondered, with a sick feelingIn his stomach, how many would attend the debriefing session after the battle.

As it turned out, all did, except one ship's captain who fell down a gangway while doing a little dance of comic victory. He broke his leg in two places and was still chuckling happily as they wheeled him away.

The Empire fleet blinked out into space at almost the exact point predicted by Arden Wal. One thousand ships deployed, materializing instantly, in ranks of awesome power, weapons ready to annihilate a fleet of Texican ships which disappeared from their instruments even as the pre-programmed guns were activated to blast briefly into empty space before the first of two waves of Darlene projectiles ripped the ranks of the Empire into flaming disarray.

Men died there in the cold space of Texas, died instantly, vaporized, burned, torn, thrown into hard vacuum. The Texas fleet blinked and, at the instant of Empire blinking, double-blinked and sent the Darlenes into the Empire ships from the left flank. Shields up, the Empire forces closed ranks, counting losses with a shock which reverberated throughout the fleet and was expressed in emergency blinkstats beamed along the route to Empire central.

For a brief period, the Texican fleet was exposed to long-range beams, but the distance limited damage to a few singed external pods and extensions. The Darlene projectiles ripped through space, blinking out. An explosion against a shield was as deadly as an explosion against a bare hull.

The Empire launched a thousand ships against Texas. When the generators were charged, allowing for orderly retreat, under seven hundred vessels sought the safety of far space in a planned withdrawal which no officer of the fleet could accept. It was inconceivable to the Empire mind to think that a ragtag fleet of converted freighters could rout an entire Empire battle fleet. Combat commanders wanted to mount an all-out assault on Texas immediately, withdrawing huge units of the fleet from the Cassiopeian lines. Cooler heads prevailed. It was recognized, at fleet headquarters, that the Empire was up against a new weapon and a new technique of battle. Gray-haired Admirals gulped wakers and pored over reports of the brief but tragic battle. Plans were made and discarded. The Emperor himself interested himself in the affair and shipworks all over the Empire were put on overtime to replace the lost vessels.

On Texas, it was party time. The victory over the Empire fleet had been so swift, so decisive, so

bloodless that young hotheads called for an immediate strike into Empire territory on the theory that the best defense is a good offense.

"If I were in charge of the Empire fleet," Arden Wal told a group of high-ranking officials at the debriefing, "I would deploy my forces to envelop all of Texican space with a ring of fire. Such a plan would require massive forces, but I need not tell you that the Empire has such forces. Ranks of ships blinking in at intervals, in tremendous numbers, would, sooner or later, catch your fleet between blinks. True, you can double-blink, but then you must charge. True, you are superior ship to ship because of your armaments, but the Empire's weapons are superior to your ship shields. Some of your ships are not even shielded. Caught in a direct fire, you'd sustain losses. And the loss of one Texican ship is the equivalent of the loss of some several thousands of Empire ships."

But the first battle of Texas did what it was planned to do. It bought time, time for the Blink Space Works to finish and outfit hulls, time for Darlene space rifles to be installed on everything large enough to handle the weight. And it bought Lex enough time to reenter the hospital to find the reason for his severe headaches.

In spite of the surgeons' skills, a small hematoma had formed and once again be was lying in bed with a hole in his bead cursing the Empire sadists who had mucked around in his brain. It was not until he was moved into convalescent quarters atop the large building, with a view of the plains to the west, that he began to believe that fate works in strange ways and that his hematoma was a blessing in disguise, for there he met Riddent.

Most of the female personnel of the hospital were career people, aged thirty and up, stern-faced, motherly, businesslike. They brooked no nonsense from patients, not even a young, virile Texican of good looks and restlessness. Lex complained bitterly against a technology which could build an airors brain and a Darlene projectile, but which could not devise a better means of getting medicines into his blood than with a needle the size of the fangs of a beagle. There were two broad, meaty areas on his lower backside which were the favorite targets of the females and their needles and it became almost automatic with Lex, upon the approach of a nurse, to lower his hospital pajamas and roll onto his stomach.

But when they snuck up on you in your sleep—

He'd been lying on his stomach thinking of that little girl back in school and wondering what she was doing. He dozed and awoke to a feel a draft on his backside and then the bite of a needle and he yelped, twisting away to break the needle off in his flesh.

"Now see what you've done," said a female voice.

"Ouch, dammit," Lex said, as fingers pushed flesh down around the stuck needle and then plucked. "Great Zed's balls, do you have to—" He halted in mid-sentence, for a big, forceful hand had zapped him, hard, right on the spot where the needle had penetrated. "Ahhhhhh," he groaned, rolling over to escape and then he was frozen because she stood there, tall, new whites crisp and bulging with Texas girl, big, a man's woman, an armful.

"I will not," she said, her lips pulled back, her eyes fierce, "tolerate such language."

"Duh," Lex said, his mouth open.

"Not on my first day," she said, her eyes going moist.

"Well, look, I'm sorry," Lex managed, but the tears were there and she turned. He tried to scramble off the bed, but his pajamas were down and he fell heavily and she, hearing the thump, turned, tears streaming.

"Oh, did you hurt yourself?" She was kneeling by his side and he was thinking more of his exposure than of his bruises, and was pawing at his pajamas and trying to look at her eyes, which were as blue as Texas skies, and her hair, which was the yellow flame of a sun, and her—well, he was trying to look at all of her and his eyes weren't made to take in that much at one time and they crossed as he let them fall to the bulging front of her whites.

She, seeing his crossed eyes and thinking terrible things about concussions and possible reinjury, went white through her lovely tan and said, "Don't move, I'll get help."

"Help," Lex repeated, in a stunned voice, as he fell a thousand parsecs deep into her eyes.

"Yes," she said, pushing him back as he tried to sit up. "I'll get help."

"You help."

"Yes, yes, I will," she said, her voice agitated.

"I'm all right."

"Yes, I'll get help."

He grabbed the sleeve of her dress. "No, don't leave me."

"I have to. I have to get help."

"I'm afraid," he said. He was truly afraid, afraid she would walk out and he'd never see her again.

"Yes, yes, I'll help." She began tugging on him. He was a big lad. Her hands were so warm, so soft on his arms. He let her pull him to his feet, and then he leaned, putting an arm around her shoulder. He had the universe in his arms, the stuff of creation was bursting inside him. He let her guide him to the bed.

"Where do you hurt?" she asked, leaning over him anxiously.

"Hurt?" he asked stupidly.

At last she recognized his dazed look. "Oh, you," she said, popping him on the chest, hard, with her fist.

And then she was gone, turning, skirt flaring to show lovely thighs.

"Miss, miss," Lex wailed, seeing her back retreating from him. She paused, turned. "Don't go, please don't go."

"There's nothing wrong with you," she said.

"I'm hurting. The fall."

She approached his bed warily. She looked at him with her big eyes squinted. "I can give you a shot." "I don't hurt anymore," he said. "Don't go," he said, as she turned.

"Look," she said. "I have work to do." "Give me the shot," he said. "You don't need a shot." "I need to—look at you." "You can do that every day when I make the rounds." She smiled, the skies opening up after a dark,

northern storm. "No extra charge for looking." Her name, he discovered, was Riddent. In Old English that meant "laughing." It was, he felt, a beautiful name, a descriptive name, for just seeing her made him want to laugh, to sing, to do things like leaping on

an airors and gunning it to all-out and making low passes at the hills. And there were no rings on her fingers. Not even a promise ring. "Riddent?" "Yes?" Patient. Eyes so large, so deep. "Don't go." His hip tingling from another shot. With perverse female joy, she seemed to like punching him with

needles. "I have work to do." Another day. "Riddent, have lunch with me." "Sorry, I have a date." He sneaked into the dining hall, ambulatory to a limited extent, to see her lunching with a doctor, a