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  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 a
sked 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 Presiden
t 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.