For Texas and Zed

duties as administrators of planets, groups of planets, vast star fields. An isolated dictatorship, embracing six planets, resisted. The main military planet was broken, burned, using captured Empire planetkillers, and there was peace.

The Texas-builtLone Star , flagship of the victorious Texican fleet, neared old Earth, paused as scanners played over the planetary surface to show, in full color close-ups, a park planet, manicured and clean, population confined to towering cities, the main administrative city covering the central belt of the North American continent in what had once been the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. The spaceports which had once served the capital were deserted. In the streets there was little movement.

Lex scorned the spaceports, lowering theLone Star into the vast reaches of the park surrounding the Emperor's palace. The building, when he stepped out onto the earth of his mother planet, towered over him, gleaming, dazzling in the bright summer sun. The planet was weather-controlled. The temperature, after he confines of a warship, seemed chill at seventy-two degrees. Around him growing things followed orderly patterns as he walked, at the head of his crew of officers, toward the group which was forming to greet him on the palace entry.

The Lady Gwyn was there, dressed officially. In addition, there were somber-faced old men, documents in hand. 'In the name of the Emperor,' said one official, 'we welcome you to Earth.'

Lex waved them aside, taking the steps two at a time, his officers following, hands on their side arms. The Lady Gwyn, as they passed, said bitterly, 'Gentlemen, this is your new Emperor.'

Lex heard. He kept his face forward, striding purposefully up the stairs to the grand entry door. Inside, a huge hall stretched away from him. Uniformed attendants stood fearfully at attention. 'The Emperor,' Lex said to one of them.

'This way, sir,' the attendant said, bowing, leading Lex across the huge hall into a series of corridors until, with another bow, the man indicated a door flanked by two men, tall by Empire standards.

'To see the Emperor,' the attendant said. 'President Lexington Burns.'

Lex brushed past the two guards.

The Emperor was a very old man, small, seemingly enfolded in official robes of purple. Contrary to Lex's expectations, the room was only of moderate size and there was no throne, only a large desk flanked by a bank of communication equipment. The walls were simple white, decorated with sun paintings, the floor not as luxuriously thick in pile as the corridors outside.

'Ah,' the Emperor said, standing, making a short, stiff bow. 'President Burns. Or should I say Emperor Burns.'

'I don't want your title, old man,' Lex said.

The Emperor remained standing. Lex examined the simply furnished room.

'If I may have your permission to sit,' the Emperor said. 'Age is a terrible adversary, even more irresistible than your Texicans.'

'Sit, sit,' Lex said impatiently.

'Thank you. May I send for something? A brandy, perhaps?'

'Nothing,' Lex said. He stalked toward the desk. One chair faced it. He sat, letting his feet stick straight out in front, oversized for the chair. He looked at the old man, wondering.

'So now it's over,' the Emperor said. 'Strangely, I'm not even sorry.'

'Old man, you launched population reducers on Texas,' Lex said.

'I plead guilty,' the Emperor said, with an open-handed gesture. 'For I must confess that even then I felt,

shall we say, a prescient foreboding.' He sighed. 'Ah, well, there is an end to everything, man, his works, even the universe ultimately.'

Lex had looked forward to the moment. All the way, all that long, terrible way, with death his constant companion, feeling the pain of his victims, drinking blood with his soul, a bitter draught. Now, as he looked at the withered, old, feeble man he felt as if he'd been cheated.

'Empires,' said the old man, 'are among the most fragile of man's creations, coming and going as history marches inevitably onward. Now my time has come, just as yours will come.'

'You won't live to see it.'

'Ah.' Lex noticed that the old hands were shaking even more. 'I ask only, if I am allowed that favor, that I be allowed to choose my own way, a peaceful slumber, as it were, in my own bed.'

Lex rose, walked to a white wall, examined a particularly effective painting. When he turned, the old man's eyes were on him.

'No,' Lex said. 'We won't ask that. You can go, if you want to. Pick a place. Just go.'

'Ah. There is a planet. It's in the Sirius sector, a family place. Thinly populated, treed, a green place of quietness and peace. I used to go there when—'

'Yeah, sure,' Lex said. 'Just go, huh? Take any with you who want to go. But do it.'

For he had seen, in those few troubled moments, that the death of one old man, already near a natural decease, would change nothing. He turned on his heel and left the Emperor's office, finding his officers in conference with the Emperor's people, discussing an orderly turnover of the mechanics of government. Bored by the discussion he wandered the halls and rooms of the huge building. He discovered the war room in a sub-basement, a huge, gray place of the most sophisticated instrumentation, and that occupied his attention for an hour. Beyond the main room, with its vast arrays of communications, computers and gear, was a wonder which halted his step upon entering, a vast, complicated, scaled model of the galaxy. The loom stretched far and away, two hundred, three hundred feet, and it was filled with it—the galaxy, the stars and the fields and the glowing areas of space debris.

At first he thought he was alone in the room, but he gradually felt the presence of another and he turned to face a uniformed woman.

'Sir,' she said.

'Who are you?'

'I am the operator.'

'Of this?'

'Yes, sir.'

'It's remarkable,' he said.

'Shall I show you?' the woman asked.

'Yes.'

He seated himself. The woman disappeared. In a moment the model of the galaxy glowed to wondrous

life. It was as if he were looking from the viewport of a ship to see the universe spread before him.

A voice came to him, pleasant, speaking in Empire accents.

'We have traced your progress,' the voice said. 'From the time you left your home planet and entered

the galaxy here.'

A red glow showed the point of entry.

'And I, personally, could not help but admire you,' the female voice said, as the red glow began to move

into the galaxy, coloring star after star in its inevitable spread.

'The red color of your movements,' the voice said, 'the path of conquest as it passed Centaurus and then into Cassiopeian space.'

Seeing it graphically reproduced, he felt, for the first time, the sweep of it. In his mind he relived the

march down the starways, in his eyes the glow of red, the color of his achievements.

'At the Battle of Wolfs Star,' the woman was saying, but he blanked it from his mind, the voice, and let his eyes watch the march of red toward Earth and then it was all red, the galaxy, all red, all his. And as he watched motion began in the vast wheel as it simulated the 'whirl of the galaxy in space, the movement greatly accelerated. He watched it wheel before his eyes and wished, dreamed, that she was by his side to see. Riddent.

Or Arden Wal. Or Jakkes. Form and Billy Bob. His father. But he was alone with the slowly wheeling galaxy, his galaxy, his red, beautiful galaxy.

And they were dead. Riddent. His father. Form. Billy Bob was back on Texas, probably competing for the hand of a Texas girl. Jakkes and Arden were doing his work out in his galaxy and he was alone.

Emily.

He had offered her a chance to be by his side and she had refused.