"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.