Lone Star Planet | Page 4

captain, inside the airlock, when I
boarded the big, spherical space-liner. A tubby little man, with
shoulders and arms he had never developed doing secretarial work, and
a good-natured, not particularly intelligent face.
See the happy moron, he doesn't give a damn, I thought.
Then I took a second look at him. He might be happy, but he wasn't a
moron. He just looked like one. Natalenko's people often did, as one of
their professional assets.
I also noticed that he had a bulge under his left armpit the size of an
eleven-mm army automatic.
He was, I'd been told, a native of New Texas. I gathered, after talking
with him for a while, that he had been away from his home planet for

over five years, was glad to be going back, and especially glad that he
was going back under the protection of Solar League diplomatic
immunity.
In fact, I rather got the impression that, without such protection, he
wouldn't have been going back at all.
I made another discovery. My personal secretary, it seemed, couldn't
read stenotype. I found that out when I gave him the tape I'd dictated
aboard the cutter, to transcribe for me.
"Gosh, boss. I can't make anything out of this stuff," he confessed,
looking at the combination shorthand-Braille that my voice had put
onto the tape.
"Well, then, put it in a player and transcribe it by ear," I told him.
He didn't seem to realize that that could be done.
"How did you come to be sent as my secretary, if you can't do
secretarial work?" I wanted to know.
He got out a bag of tobacco and a book of papers and began rolling a
cigarette, with one hand.
"Why, shucks, boss, nobody seemed to think I'd have to do this kinda
work," he said. "I was just sent along to show you the way around New
Texas, and see you don't get inta no trouble."
He got his handmade cigarette drawing, and hitched the strap that went
across his back and looped under his right arm. "A guy that don't know
the way around can get inta a lotta trouble on New Texas. If you call
gettin' killed trouble."
So he was a bodyguard ... and I wondered what else he was. One thing,
it would take him forty-two years to send a radio message back to Luna,
and I could keep track of any other messages he sent, in letters or on
tape, by ships. In the end, I transcribed my own tape, and settled down

to laying out my three weeks' study-course on my new post.
I found, however, that the whole thing could be learned in a few hours.
The rest of what I had was duplication, some of it contradictory, and it
all boiled down to this:
Capella IV had been settled during the first wave of extrasolar
colonization, after the Fourth World--or First Interplanetary--War.
Some time around 2100. The settlers had come from a place in North
America called Texas, one of the old United States. They had a lengthy
history--independent republic, admission to the United States,
secession from the United States, reconquest by the United States, and
general intransigence under the United States, the United Nations and
the Solar League. When the laws of non-Einsteinian physics were
discovered and the hyperspace-drive was developed, practically the
entire population of Texas had taken to space to find a new home and
independence from everybody.
They had found Capella IV, a Terra-type planet, with a slightly higher
mean temperature, a lower mass and lower gravitational field, about
one-quarter water and three-quarters land-surface, at a stage of
evolutionary development approximately that of Terra during the late
Pliocene. They also found supercow, a big mammal looking like the
unsuccessful attempt of a hippopotamus to impersonate a dachshund
and about the size of a nuclear-steam locomotive. On New Texas'
plains, there were billions of them; their meat was fit for the gods of
Olympus. So New Texas had become the meat-supplier to the galaxy.
There was very little in any of the microfilm-books about the politics of
New Texas and such as it was, it was very scornful. There were such
expressions as 'anarchy tempered by assassination,' and 'grotesque
parody of democracy.'
There would, I assumed, be more exact information in the material
which had been shoved into my hand just before boarding the cutter
from Luna, in a package labeled TOP SECRET: TO BE OPENED
ONLY IN SPACE, AFTER THE FIRST HYPERJUMP. There was also a
big trunk that had been placed in my suite, sealed and bearing the same

instructions.
I got Hoddy out of the suite as soon as the ship had passed out of the
normal space-time continuum, locked the door of my cabin and opened
the parcel.