For Texas and Zed

toward the button which activated the immediate double-blink, sending theQueen at right angles out of the midst of the waiting fleet, he felt her fists pounding on his back and then, theQueen resting safely at a known point in space awaiting the charge to send her peacefully homeward, minus an escort, having performed a feat which was unknown to that date in space technology, he turned, a smile forming, and the Lady Gwyn's fist took him directly on the nose. He bled.

'What the holy hell?' Murichon Burns exploded.

'Ole Lex brung him a souvenir,' said a crewman, to the delight of his mates, who laughed as Lex feebly tried to wipe blood from his upper lip while defending himself against the surprisingly strong onslaught of the scantily clad Lady from Earth. 'A chocolate all-day sucker,' the same wag said, to applause in the form of chuckles.

'Now you stop it, Gwyn,' Lex said, his voice shaking as she tried to scratch his eyeballs from their sockets. 'After all, I'm going to marry you.'

That stopped her. Her talons were stilled in midair, her shrill verbal assault silenced. 'Marry me?' she asked in amazement, her voice going deep contralto. 'Marry me?'

'Sure,' Lex said, blushing as the men looked on. 'You don't think I'm the kind of man who'd steal a woman away from her folks without doing the right thing by her?'

'Marry me?' She asked it quietly, her face blank with shock, her mouth hanging open. Then the storm grew again and her eyes blazed. 'You hopeless moron. You brainless—'

'Shouldn't talk like that,' Lex said, having had time to think it over. He wasn't used to being shamed, by a woman of all people, in front of his mates. He picked her up under one strong arm and suffered her scratching as he carried her from the bridge to a chorus of hoots and chuckles.

'I'll be the son of an albino ground dog,' Murichon Bums said. 'He's stolen a representative of old mother Earth herself.'

But there was work to be done. Contact, via blink-stat, to be made with His Honor, the First Leader of Ursa Major Sector. Texas had meat to sell.

'Your Honor,' he dictated to the signalman, 'this is Murichon Burns sending. If it ain't too much trouble I'd like to know, by return blinkstat beamed—' He let the signalman fill in the coordinates. '—if you've decided to swap a little metal for good Texas, meacr.'

Chapter Two

There's nothing like spirited competition to make a fool forget his humiliation. And an airors is probably the most gloriously overpowered vehicle in creation, a thing made for a man who has just been spat upon, kicked, scratched, cursed at and threatened with burial in a teacup after being administered a thorough enema. Windscreen up, Lex powered the gleaming red airors straight up to ten thousand feet, leveled her, gave her a kick in the side to send her hurtling west at a speed which narrowly allowed retention of his hair, streaming in the blast.

Below him, Texas sunned itself in the beaming rays of good old Zed, the Lone Star. Up there at ten thousand the wooded, rolling hills around Dallas City were leveled to a mat of green and as his airors, Zelda , streaked silently away from the sun the big emptiness of the plains came rushing toward him until all below there was a sea of brownish green with the grazing meacr visible only when they flocked together.

He spotted, far below, the dot of a herding airors and beeped a greeting on the air-to-air and got a beep in return and then the herder was far behind and the Pecos was a thin line of green through the brownish grass and then gone and over New Paris, one hour and five hundred miles out of Dallas City, he slowed to go on voice to tell his aunt Mary that he and his dad were back from the Empire and that they were feeling fine, and, yes, they had watched their diet and hadn't drunk Empire water.

He began to feel a little better when he saw the white glitter of the big sands up ahead and he dove, screaming with the rushing wind, to make dust trails, and the airors skimmed the dunes at a flat-out sub-sonic max, leaving swirls of sand and terrified sanrabs in his wake. Feeling his oats, forgetting Empire and a girl with red- tattooed nipples, he nippedZelda upside down and slowed to a mere three and hung his head down toward the sand to watch its ripples flow by underneath, yelling and feeling the wind fill his mouth and ripple the flesh of his cheeks. He flipped upright and took his legs off the rests to stretch them short of the rise of the far-side foothills and then rose in a swoop to cross the low mountains into moist, warm air of the savannah. There was the sea. It was big, just as everything on Texas was big. Behind him stretched seven thousand miles of plains, desert and mountains. Ahead of him, gleaming and sparkling in the sun, ten thousand miles of open ocean with not enough islands to give resting places to the seabirds.

He went up until he felt the air get thin and looked at it as he closed on New Galveston-by-the-Sea. It was a sight which never failed to thrill him, the blue of the sea, the clean, white buildings of the town, the mountains behind him. His mother had been born in New Galveston and he'd attended secondary school there to learn his reading and writing. He'd been given his first airors upon graduation and his first solo flight had been just like this, high, fast, the view magnificent, the air warm but cooling at altitude, the sun bright, the ocean stretching endlessly outward unmarred by floating things save a few pleasure sailers near shore and the surfers on the very fringe next to the white, bright strand.

When he spotted the brightly colored umbrellas on the strand he dug his heels in, dropped power and fell like a space-fresh meteorite aimed at the parking area near the refreshment tent. He thought negative power at the last possible instant and crushed to a stop with the skids of the airors contacting the sand without stirring a particle and was greeted with whoops and a can of icy brew.

In that crowd he was not a giant, as he'd been back in the Empire. Some of them went well over seven feet, but he knew from past trials that he could hold his own with them at any of the manly arts from leg wrestling to hand fighting because he kept in shape and went light on the brew and didn't touch the hard stuff except for a glass of Rio now and then at dinner.

Class of '72 reunited. Twenty high-spirited young Texicans in tight-fitting jeans and some swimsuits and brown shoulders and big arms and whoops of greeting and backslapping and more brew until Lex finally got loose from the mob and singled out old Billy Bob Blink and said, 'Got something to show you.'

They walked behind a dune and Lex showed him Gwyn's little costume. He held up the misty thing in front of him and said, 'How about that?' Billy Bob's eyes went wide and he tried to touch it but Lex pulled it away.

'You're kidding,' Billy Bob said.

'Right on the streets they wear 'em,' Lex lied. 'All of 'em sticking out all over the place.'

'You're kidding,' Billy Bob said.

'She gave this to me,' Lex said.

'The one you brought back?'

'Her.'

'Holy Hopping Hornies.' Billy Bob was openly impressed. 'When you gonna marry her?'

'Well,' Lex said, looking up to see a lone beagle soaring up there looking for dinner. 'I guess I'll have to think it over a little.'

'They say she's pretty.'

'She's all right,' Lex admitted, wondering how the hell the word had spread all the way to New

Galveston in just a day and a night, but knowing how, because big as it was Texas was a close-knit community and if you put the hood and the air on an airors you could make it from Dallas City to New Galveston in ten minutes with one blink up and one blink down and the communicators were free to all and everyone was everyone else's cousin, so when you stopped to think it wasn't strange at all to know that New Galveston knew that Lex Burns had brought home an Empire gal.

'What are you gonna do today?' Billy Bob asked, after he'd watched Lex put the little misty thing away in his pocket.

'Oh, racing and herding, I guess,' Lex said.

'Try to get into different heats at first so we won't knock one another out early,' Billy Bob said. 'That way you'll at least make the finals.'

'You mean that way you'll make the finals,' Lex said, grinning.

They walked back and joined the group and they were drawing lots for the first racing heats. Lex held back and Billy Bob went first and then when the heat which Billy Bob had drawn was full, Lex took his number. He was up against some good boys, but he'd seen Billy Bob Blink in action before and he knew that when it came down to the final run it'd be hisZelda against Billy Bob'sClean Machine and