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  "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."