For Texas and Zed

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.