For Texas and Zed Read online

  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.