Homeward Bound (2 page)

Kleinfeldt steepled his fingers. Now he looked steadily back at Sam. The older man realized that, despite his youth, despite the foolishness he affected, the doctor was highly capable. He wouldn’t have been involved with this project if he weren’t. Picking his words with care, he said, “You exaggerate.”

“Do I?” Yeager said. “How much?”

“Some,” Kleinfeldt answered judiciously. “You’re the man who knows as much about the Race as any human living. And you’re the man who can think like a Lizard, which isn’t the same thing at all. Having you along when this mission eventually gets off the ground—and
eventually
is the operative word here—would be an asset.”

“And there are a lot of people in high places who think having me dead would be an asset, too,” Sam said.

“Not to the point of doing anything drastic—or that’s my reading of it, anyhow,” Dr. Kleinfeldt said. “Besides, even if everything works just the way it’s supposed to, you’d be, ah, effectively dead, you might say.”

“On ice, I’d call it,” Yeager said, and Dr. Kleinfeldt nodded. With a wry chuckle, Sam added, “Four or five years ago, at Fleetlord Atvar’s farewell reception, I told him I was jealous that he was going back to Home and I couldn’t. I didn’t realize we’d come as far as we have on cold sleep.”

“If you see him there, maybe you can tell him so.” Kleinfeldt looked down at the papers on his desk again, then back to Sam. “You mean we own a secret or two you haven’t managed to dig up?”

“Fuck you, Doc,” Sam said evenly. Kleinfeldt blinked. How many years had it been since somebody came right out and said that to him? Too many, by all the signs. Yeager went on, “See, this is the kind of stuff I get from just about everybody.”

After another pause for thought, Dr. Kleinfeldt said, “I’m going to level with you, Colonel: a lot of people think you’ve earned it.”

Sam nodded. He knew that. He couldn’t help knowing it. Because of what he’d done, Indianapolis had gone up in radioactive fire and a president of the United States had killed himself. The hardest part was, he couldn’t make himself feel guilty about it. Bad, yes. Guilty? No. There was a difference. He wondered if he could make Kleinfeldt understand. Worth a try, maybe: “What we did to the colonization fleet was as bad as what the Japs did to us at Pearl Harbor. Worse, I’d say, because we blew up innocent civilians, not soldiers and sailors. If I’d found out the Nazis or the Reds did it and told the Lizards that, I’d be a goddamn hero. Instead, I might as well be Typhoid Mary.”

“All things considered, you can’t expect it would have turned out any different,” the doctor said. “As far as most people are concerned, the Lizards aren’t quite—people, I mean. And it’s only natural we think of America first and everybody else afterwards.”

“Truth—it is only natural,” Sam said in the language of the Race. He wasn’t surprised Kleinfeldt understood. Anyone who worked on cold sleep for humans would have to know about what the Lizards did so they could fly between the stars without getting old on the way. He went on, “It is only natural, yes. But is it right?”

“That is an argument for another time,” Kleinfeldt answered, also in the Lizards’ tongue. He returned to English: “Right or wrong, though, it’s the attitude people have. I don’t know what you can do about it.”

“Not much, I’m afraid.” Yeager knew that too well. He also knew the main reason he remained alive after what he’d done was that the Race had bluntly warned the United States nothing had better happen to him—or else. He asked, “What are the odds of something going wrong with this procedure?”

“Well, we think they’re pretty slim, or we wouldn’t be trying it on people,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you something else, though: if you ever want to have even a chance of seeing Home, Colonel, this is your only way to get it.”

“Yeah,” Sam said tightly. “I already figured that out for myself, thanks.” One of these days, people—with luck, people from the USA—would have a spaceship that could fly from the Sun to Tau Ceti, Home’s star. By the time people did, though, one Sam Yeager, ex-minor-league ballplayer and science-fiction reader, current expert on the Race, would be pushing up a lily unless he went in for cold sleep pretty damn quick. “All right, Doc. I’m game—and the powers that be won’t worry about me so much if I’m either on ice or light-years from Earth. Call me Rip van Winkle.”

Dr. Kleinfeldt wrote a note on the chart. “This is what I thought you’d decide. When do you want to undergo the procedure?”

“Let me have a couple of weeks,” Yeager answered; he’d been thinking about the same thing. “I’ve got to finish putting my affairs in order. It’s like dying, after all. It’s just like dying, except with a little luck it isn’t permanent.”

“Yes, with a little luck,” Kleinfeldt said; he might almost have been Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado” intoning,
Yes, for the love of God.
He looked at the calendar. “Then I’ll see you here on . . . the twenty-seventh, at eight in the morning. Nothing by mouth for twelve hours before that. I’ll prescribe a purgative to clean out your intestinal tract, too. It won’t be much fun, but it’s necessary. Any questions?”

“Just one.” Sam tapped his top front teeth. “I’ve got full upper and lower plates—I’ve had ’em since my teeth rotted out after the Spanish flu. What shall I do about those? If this does work, I don’t want to go to Home without my choppers. That wouldn’t do me or the country much good.”

“Take them out before the procedure,” Dr. Kleinfeldt told him. “We’ll put them in your storage receptacle. You won’t go anywhere they don’t.”

“Okay.” Yeager nodded. “Fair enough. I wanted to make sure.” He did his best not to dwell on what Kleinfeldt called a storage receptacle. If that wasn’t a fancy name for a coffin, he’d never heard one. His wife had always insisted on looking for the meaning behind what people said. He muttered to himself as he got up to leave. He and Barbara had had more than thirty good years together. If he hadn’t lost her, he wondered if he would have been willing to face cold sleep. He doubted it. He doubted it like anything, as a matter of fact.

After reclaiming his car from the parking lot, he drove south on the freeway from downtown Los Angeles to his home in Gardena, one of the endless suburbs ringing the city on all sides but the sea. The sky was clearer and the air cleaner than he remembered them being when he first moved to Southern California. Most cars on the road these days, like his, used clean-burning hydrogen, a technology borrowed—well, stolen—from the Lizards. Only a few gasoline-burners still spewed hydrocarbons into the air.

He would have rattled around his house if he’d lived there alone. But Mickey and Donald were plenty to keep him hopping instead of rattling. He’d raised the two Lizards from eggs obtained God only knew how, raised them to be as human as they could. They weren’t humans, of course, but they came closer to it than any other Lizards on this or any other world.

The Race had done the same thing with a human baby, and had had a twenty-year start on the project. He’d met Kassquit, the result of their experiment. She was very bright and very strange. He was sure the Lizards would have said exactly the same thing about Mickey and Donald.

“Hey, Pop!” Donald shouted when Sam came in the door. He’d always been the more boisterous of the pair. He spoke English as well as his mouth could shape it. Why not? It was as much his native tongue as Sam‘s. “What’s up?”

“Well, you know how I told you I might be going away for a while?” Yeager said. Both Lizards nodded. They were physically full grown, which meant their heads came up to past the pit of Sam’s stomach, but they weren’t grownups, or anything close to it. He went on, “Looks like that’s going to happen. You’ll be living with Jonathan and Karen when it does.”

Mickey and Donald got excited enough to skitter around the front room, their tailstumps quivering. They didn’t realize they wouldn’t be seeing him again. He didn’t intend to explain, either. His son and daughter-in-law could do that a little bit at a time. The Lizards had taken Barbara’s death harder than he had; for all practical purposes, she’d been their mother. Among their own kind, Lizards didn’t have families the way people did. That didn’t mean they couldn’t get attached to those near and dear to them, though. These two had proved as much.

One of these days before too long, the Race would find out what the United States and the Yeagers had done with the hatchlings.
Or to them,
Sam thought: they were as unnatural as Kassquit. But, since they’d meddled in her clay, how could they complain if humanity returned the compliment? They couldn’t, or not too loudly. So Sam—so everybody—hoped, anyhow.

He did put his affairs in order. That had a certain grim finality to it.
At least I get to do it, and not Jonathan,
he thought. He took the Lizards over to Jonathan and Karen’s house. He said his good-byes. Everybody kissed him, even if Donald and Mickey didn’t have proper lips.
I may be the only guy ever kissed by a Lizard,
was what went through his mind as he walked out to the car.

Next morning, bright and early—why
didn’t
doctors keep more civilized hours?—he went back to Dr. Kleinfeldt’s. “Nothing by mouth the past twelve hours?” Kleinfeldt asked. Sam shook his head. “You used the purgative?” the doctor inquired.

“Oh, yeah. After I got home yesterday.” Sam grimaced. That hadn’t been any fun.

“All right. Take off your clothes and lie down here.”

Sam obeyed. Kleinfeldt hooked him up to an IV and started giving him shots. He wondered if he would simply blank out, the way he had during a hernia-repair operation. It didn’t work out like that. He felt himself slowing down. Dr. Kleinfeldt seemed to talk faster and faster, though his speech rhythm probably wasn’t changing. Sam’s thoughts stretched out and out and out. The last thing that occurred to him before he stopped thinking altogether was,
Funny, I don’t feel cold.

Kassquit bent herself into the posture of respect before Ttomalss in his office in a starship orbiting Tosev 3. Since she didn’t have a tailstump, it wasn’t quite perfect, but she did it as well as anyone of Tosevite blood could. Why not? She’d learned the ways of the Race, of the Empire, since the days of her hatchlinghood. She knew them much better than she did those of what was biologically her own kind.

“I greet you, superior sir,” she said.

“And I greet you, Researcher,” Ttomalss replied, an odd formality in his voice. He was the male who’d raised her. He was also the male who’d tried, for the most part unintentionally, to keep her dependent on him even after she grew to adulthood. That he’d failed, that she’d carved out her own place for herself, went a long way towards accounting for his constraint.

“By now, superior sir, you will, I am sure, have read my message,” Kassquit said. She couldn’t resist tacking on an interrogative cough at the end of the sentence, even if she claimed to be sure.

Ttomalss noticed that, as she’d intended. The way he waggled his eye turrets said he wasn’t too happy about it, either. But he held his voice steady as he answered, “Yes, I have read it. How did you learn that the Big Uglies are experimenting with the technology of cold sleep?”

“That is not the question, superior sir,” Kassquit said. “The question is, why was I not informed of this as soon as we discovered it? Am I not correct in believing the wild Big Uglies have been developing their techniques for more than ten local years now?”

“Well . . . yes,” the male who’d raised her admitted uncomfortably.

“And is it not also true that the Tosevite male named Sam Yeager availed himself of these techniques five local years ago, and in fact did not die, as was publicly reported, and as I was led to believe?”

Ttomalss sounded even more uncomfortable. “I believe that to be the case, but I am not altogether sure of it,” he replied. “The American Big Uglies are a great deal less forthcoming about their experiments, this for reasons that should be obvious to you. What we think we know is pieced together from intelligence sources and penetrations of their computer networks. They are, unfortunately, a good deal better at detecting, preventing, and confusing such penetrations than they were even a few years ago.”

“And why did you prevent me from gaining access to this important—indeed, vital—information?” Kassquit demanded.

“That should also be obvious to you,” Ttomalss said.

“What is obvious to me, superior sir, is that these techniques offer me something I never had before: a chance of visiting Home, of seeing the world that is the source of my . . . my being,” Kassquit said. That wasn’t biologically true, of course. Biologically, she was and would always be a Big Ugly. After years of shaving her entire body to try to look more like a female of the Race—forlorn hope!—she’d acknowledged that and let her hair grow. If some reactionary scholars here didn’t care for the way she looked, too bad. Culturally, she was as much a part of the Empire as they were. Even Ttomalss sometimes had trouble remembering that. Kassquit continued, “Now that I have this opportunity, I
will
not be deprived of it.”

After a long sigh, Ttomalss said, “I feared this would be your attitude. But do you not see how likely it is that you do not in fact have the opportunity at all, that it is in fact a snare and a delusion?”

“No.” Kassquit used the negative gesture. “I do not see that at all, superior sir. If the technique is effective, why should I not use it?”

“If the technique were proved effective, I would not mind if you did use it,” Ttomalss replied. “But the Big Uglies are not like us. They do not experiment and test for year after year, decade after decade, perfecting their methods before putting them into general use. They rashly forge ahead, trying out ideas still only half hatched. If they are mad enough to risk their lives on such foolishness, that is one thing. For you to risk yours is something else. For us to let you risk yours is a third thing altogether. We kept these data from you as long as we could precisely because we feared you would importune us in this fashion.”

“Superior sir, my research indicates that I have probably already lived more than half my span,” Kassquit said. “Must I live out all my days in exile? If I wait for certain perfection of these methods, I will wait until all my days are done. For a species, waiting and testing may be wisdom. For an individual, how can they be anything but disaster?” Tears stung her eyes. She hated them. They were a Tosevite instinctive response over which she had imperfect control.