Homeward Bound (4 page)

How much of the Lizards’ blood is on our hands?
Johnson wondered to himself.
We pulled a Jap on them, attacked without warning—and we attacked colonists in cold sleep, not a naval base.
He started to point that out to Healey, then saved his breath. What point? The commandant wouldn’t listen to him. Healey never listened to anybody.

After a deep, angry breath, the three-star general went on, “And I’ll tell you something else, Johnson. Your precious Yeager is on ice these days, too.”

“On ice? As in cold sleep?” Glen Johnson knew the question was foolish as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

“Yes, as in cold sleep.” Healey nodded. “If he hadn’t decided to do that, he might have ended up on ice some other way.” His eyes were cold as ice themselves—or maybe a little colder.

He didn’t say anything more than that. He just waited.
What’s he waiting for?
Johnson wondered. He didn’t have to wonder long.
He’s waiting to make sure I know exactly what he’s talking about.
Figuring that out didn’t take long, either. Slowly, Johnson asked, “Sir, are you saying
I’m
liable to end up on ice some other way if I don’t go into cold sleep?”

“I didn’t say that,” Healey answered. “I wouldn’t say that. You said that. But now that you have said it, you’d better think about it. You’d better not think about it very long, either.”

Lots of ways to have an unfortunate accident back on Earth. Even more ways to have one out here in space.
Would people on the crew be willing to help me have an unfortunate accident?
Johnson didn’t even need to wonder about that. Lieutenant General Healey had plenty of people aboard who would obey orders just because they
were
orders. Johnson was damn good at what he did and he had some friends, but he couldn’t stay awake twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He couldn’t keep an eye on all the equipment he might have to use all the time. If Healey wanted him dead, dead he would be, and in short order.

Which meant . . . “You talked me into it,” he said. “You’re persuasive as hell, sir, you know that?”

“So glad you’re pleased,” Healey said with a nasty grin. “And just think of all the interesting things you’ll see eleven light-years from here.”

“I’m thinking of all the things I’ll never see again,” Johnson answered. Healey smirked, an expression particularly revolting on his hard, suspicious face. Johnson went on, “The one I’ll be gladdest never to see again, I think, is you. Sir.” He pushed off and glided out of the commandant’s office. If they were going to hang him tomorrow anyway, what difference did what he said today make?

It turned out not to be tomorrow. A doctor came out from Earth to do the dirty work. Calculating the cost of that, Johnson realized just how badly they wanted him on ice and on his way to Tau Ceti. All that sprang to mind was,
If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.

“Are you ready?” asked the doctor, an attractive woman named Blanchard.

“If I say no, will you turn around and go back?” Johnson asked.

She shook her head. “Not me. I’ll just hold you down and give you the treatment anyhow.” She could do it, too. All the work in the ship’s gymnasium and on the exercise bike couldn’t make up for Johnson’s being out of a gravity field the past twenty years. Dr. Blanchard was undoubtedly stronger than he was.

He rolled up a sleeve and bared his arm. “Do your worst.”

She did. He felt hot first, then nauseated, then dizzy. His heart slowed in his chest; his thoughts slowed in his head.
This must be what dying is like,
he realized. Had something gone wrong—or right? He stopped thinking altogether before he could finish shaping the question.

Jonathan Yeager had started shaving his head when he was a teenager. It made him look more like a Lizard, and he’d wanted nothing so much as to be as much like a male of the Race as he could. He still shaved his head here in 1994, though he wasn’t a teenager any more; he’d had his fiftieth birthday the December before. The Race still fascinated him, too. He’d built a good career out of that fascination.

His father had gone into cold sleep seventeen years earlier. Most people thought Sam Yeager was dead. Even now, cold sleep wasn’t much talked about. Back in 1977, it had been one notch higher than top secret. Of the few aware of it nowadays, fewer still knew it had existed that long.

As Jonathan checked the incoming electronic messages on his computer, he muttered under his breath. The mutter wasn’t particularly happy. To this day, people seldom thought of him as Jonathan Yeager, expert on the Race. They thought of him as Sam Yeager’s kid. Even to males and females of the Race, for whom family was much more tenuous than it was for humans, he was Sam Yeager’s hatchling as often as not.

“Not fair,” he said quietly. He was as good with Lizards as anybody breathing. No one had ever complained about his ability. The trouble was, his father had had something more than ability. His father had had precisely the right instincts to think like a male of the Race, instincts that amounted to genius of a highly specialized sort. Even the Lizards admitted as much.

For whatever reasons of background and character and temperament, Jonathan didn’t quite have those same instincts. He
was
an expert. He was damned good at what he did. It wasn’t the same. It left him stuck being Sam Yeager’s kid. He’d be Sam Yeager’s kid till the day he died.

“What’s not fair?” Karen said from behind him.

He spun in his chair. “Oh, hi, hon,” he said to his wife. “Nothing, really. Just woolgathering. I didn’t know you were around.”

Karen Yeager shook her head. Her coppery hair flipped back and forth. She was almost his own age; these days, she had help keeping her hair red. “Don’t talk nonsense,” she said briskly. “We’ve known each other since high school. We’ve been married almost thirty years. Do you think I can’t tell when something’s eating you?” She ended the sentence with an interrogative cough, tacked on almost automatically; she was as much an expert on the Lizards as he was.

Jonathan sighed. “Well, you’re not wrong.” He didn’t say anything more.

He didn’t have to. Karen pounced. “You’re letting your dad get you down again, aren’t you?”

More than a little shamefaced, he nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Dumb.” She didn’t hesitate about giving her verdict. “Dumb, dumb, dumb, with a capital D.” This time, she added an emphatic cough. “You’re here. He’s not. He was good. So are you.” Another emphatic cough followed that.

“He was better than good, and you know it.” Jonathan waited to see if she’d have the nerve to tell him he was wrong.

She didn’t. He wished she would have. She said, “You’re as good as anyone in the business nowadays. I’m not lying to you, Jonathan. If anybody ought to know, it’s me.”

She was probably right about that. It made Jonathan feel very little better. “I’m not a spring chicken any more,” he said. “I’m not a spring chicken, and I’m still in my father’s shadow. I don’t know that I’ll ever get out of it, either.”

“I’m in his shadow, too,” Karen said. “Anybody who has anything to do with the Race nowadays is in his shadow. I don’t see what we can do about that.”

Jonathan hadn’t looked at it that way. He’d always imagined Sam Yeager’s shadow over himself alone. What son of an illustrious father—especially a son in the same line of work—doesn’t? Grudgingly, he said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe, nothing. It’s truth.” Karen put the last word in the Lizards’ language, and added another emphatic cough. She went on, “And Mickey and Donald think you’re pretty hot stuff.”

He couldn’t deny that, because it was obviously true. The two Lizards raised as human beings took him as seriously as they’d ever taken his father. That they were adults now astonished Jonathan as much as having one son in graduate school at Stanford and the other a junior at UCLA. The boys were both studying the Race; that passion had passed on to the third generation.
Will they ever think of me the way I think of my old man?
Jonathan wondered.

He didn’t try to answer the question. Just posing it was hard enough. To keep from having to think about it, he said, “Mickey and Donald didn’t turn out
too
bad. Of course, we couldn’t isolate them from other Lizards as much as the Race isolated the human they raised Lizard-style.”

“Right,” Karen said tightly. Jonathan knew he’d goofed by referring to Kassquit, even if he hadn’t named her. Thirty years earlier, he’d been her introduction to humanity, and to a lot of the things humans did. That had almost cost him Karen, though he still didn’t think it was all his fault. He hadn’t planned to go up and visit Kassquit just at the time when war broke out between the Race and the
Reich.
That had kept him up there with her a lot longer than he’d expected, and had let things between Kassquit and him get more complicated and more intimate than he’d thought they would.

Karen looked as if she was about to say something more, too. She hadn’t let him completely off the hook for Kassquit, not after all this time. That Kassquit herself had been in cold sleep for years and was probably on her way back to Home by now had nothing to do with anything, not as far as Karen was concerned.

Before the squabble could really flare up, the telephone on Jonathan’s desk rang.
Saved by the bell,
he thought, and almost said it aloud. Instead, though, he just picked up the phone. “Jonathan Yeager speaking.”

“Hello, Yeager.” The voice on the other end of the line didn’t identify itself. It carried so much authority, it didn’t really need to. “Are you by any chance familiar with the
Admiral Peary
?”

Ice and fire chased themselves through Jonathan. Not a whole lot of people knew about the
Admiral Peary.
Officially, he wasn’t one of them. Unofficially . . . Unofficially, everybody in the first rank of American experts on the Race had been salivating ever since that name leaked out. “Yes, sir,” Jonathan said. “I have heard of it.” He didn’t say how or when or where, or what the
Admiral Peary
might be; no telling how secure the telephone line was.

The authoritative voice on the other end of the line said what he’d most wanted to hear ever since that name began being bandied about: “How would you like to be aboard, then?”

And Jonathan said what he’d long since made up his mind he would say: “You are inviting Karen and me both, right?”

For close to half a minute, he got no answer. Then the voice, suddenly sounding not quite so authoritative, said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”
Click.
The line went dead.

“What was that all about?” Karen asked. “Inviting us where?”

“Aboard the
Admiral Peary,
” Jonathan answered, and her eyes got big. Then he said something he wished he didn’t have to: “So far, the call is just for me.”

“Oh.” He watched her deflate, hating what he saw. She said, “That’s why you asked whether it was for both of us.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, then took a deep breath. They’d never talked about this, probably because it cut too close to the bone. It had been in Jonathan’s mind a lot the past few years. It had to have been in Karen‘s, too. He said, “If they say it’s just me, I’m not going. I don’t need to see Home bad enough to get a divorce to do it, and you deserve the trip as much as I do.”

“
They
don’t think so,” Karen said bitterly. She gave him a kiss, then asked, “Are you sure about this? If you say no now, you’ll never get another chance.”

“I’m sure,” he said, and so he was—almost. “Some things aren’t worth the price, you know what I mean?”

“I know you’re sweet, is what I know,” Karen said. “What did the man say when you told him that?”

“He said, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ and then he hung up on me.”

“That doesn’t tell us much, does it?”

“Doesn’t tell us a damn thing,” Jonathan answered. “If he calls back with good news, he does. And if he calls back with bad news or he doesn’t call back—well, close but no cigar. This is the way I want it to be, hon. I like being married to you.”

“You must,” Karen said, and then looked out the window and across the street so she wouldn’t have to say anything more. For a moment, Jonathan didn’t understand that at all. Then he did, and didn’t know whether to laugh or get mad. Yes, Kassquit probably was Homeward bound right now. Karen meant he was throwing over a chance to see her along with a chance to see the Race’s world.

He wanted to remind her it had been thirty years since anything beyond electronic messages lay between Kassquit and him, ten years since Kassquit herself had gone into cold sleep. He wanted to, but after no more than a moment he decided he’d be better off if he didn’t. Even now, the less he said about Kassquit, the better.

“Did this man say how long it would be before he got back to you?” Karen asked.

“Nope.” Jonathan shook his head. “Nothing to do but wait.”

“Any which way, there’ll be—” Karen broke off, just in time to rouse Jonathan’s curiosity.

“Be what?” he asked. She didn’t answer. When she still didn’t answer, he used an interrogative cough all by himself. The Lizards thought that was a barbarism, but people did it all the time these days, whether using the Race’s language, English, or—so Jonathan had heard—Russian. But Karen just kept standing there. Jonathan clucked reproachfully, a human noise. “Come on. Out with it.”

Reluctantly, she said, “Any which way, there’ll be a Yeager on the
Admiral Peary.
”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.” That had occurred to Jonathan before, but not for a long time. His laugh wasn’t altogether comfortable. “Dad’s been on ice for a while now. Wer’e a lot closer in age than we used to be. I wonder how that will play out. I don’t know whether it’s a reason to want to go or a reason to stay right where I am.”

“You won’t say no if they give you what you want,” Karen said. “You’d better not, because I want to go, too.”

“We have to wait and see, that’s all,” Jonathan said again.

Mr. Authoritative didn’t call back for the next three days. Jonathan jumped every time the phone rang. Whenever it turned out to be a salesman or a friend or even one of his sons, he felt cheated. Each time he answered it, he felt tempted to say,
Jonathan Yeager. Will you for God’s sake drop the other shoe?