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.