by Zach Hughes
"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 un
able 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.
