Jakkes moved and his movement violated Newton's third law of motion to the point of sending the Sub-Chief spinning off the hull to jerk to a stop at the end of his fifteen-foot lifeline. The unconnected contact of the magnetic clamp was jerked from his hand, jiggled, hung from the connector free. The seam, stressed hard from below, tried to rip through the bulkhead fastenings and Lex moved as fast as he could, ignoring the struggling Sub-Chief as Jakkes pulled himself down hand over hand trying to make contact with the hull, not watching his lifeline as it coiled and floated to let two loops fall into the opened seam.
Lex placed the second contact and, looking over his shoulder with some effort, saw that there were seconds to spare before the bulkhead fastenings went and activated the coil of the clamp. As the clamp contracted, there was resistance and the movement of the opened seam was jerky and slow and then, with a sudden snap, the seam closed, cutting Jakkes' lifeline in two places to leave him holding a line with no anchor, floating five full feet away from the hull. Although they were dead in space, there was some residual forward movement of the ship, Jakkes keeping pace, trying desperately to remember from long-forgotten training which movement to make to cause a reaction which would drift him toward the hull. He made exactly the opposite motion, a sudden jerk, and began to swim slowly outward. The situation was serious, because the ship was dead, damage having been done in the power compartment by explosive decompression. Jakkes knew that he was a dead man, because his L.S.A. communicator was of limited range and before the ship could be brought under power for a search he'd be the tiniest mote on a big black emptiness and he had enough air for, say, three hours.
"Texas," he yelled, his voice not concealing his fear, but far short of panic.
Lex looked up, sized up the situation immediately. A man who can fly an airors inches off the deck can judge distances. He saw that Jakkes was already too far out to be reached from his own lifeline and that there was only one chance. Extending out from the rear hull was a thin weapons pod, tipped by spidery direction-finding equipment. The tip of the framework was just under fifteen feet from the hull. Lex loosed his anchor, crawled swiftly aft, loosed the anchor again and, without thinking of what would happen if he missed, he tossed the anchor carefully, accurately, toward the very tip of the spider and it hit, held. His range of activity extended fifteen feet beyond the hull, he launched himself, swam slowly in weightlessness, caught the drifting Sub-Chief in a bear hug. After that it was just a matter of pulling themselves in, like toothfish from the western sea caught on a line from theCrucis .
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.