Homeward Bound (75 page)

“Family group,” Jonathan agreed. He suspected his voice sounded ragged. So what, though? By God, hadn’t he earned the right to sound a little ragged just now?

“Three generations for the price of one,” she said. “You could all be brothers.”

By body time, they could have been. Not many sets of brothers were spread as far apart as the three of them, but some were. And yet . . . “You’d have to go some to find three brothers as different as we are,” Jonathan said.

“Can’t be helped,” Richard said. “We are what we are, that’s all, and we have to make the best of it.”

“‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves,’ ” Sam quoted. “Except that’s not true, not this time. If it weren’t for Tau Ceti, everything would be normal.” He sipped from his drink. “Of course, I wouldn’t be here, so I’m not about to complain.”

Strictly by the calendar, Jonathan would turn ninety in December, so he wasn’t about to complain, either. “Can you imagine how strange it would be if there were thousands and thousands of families trying to sort this out?” He pointed to his father. “How much fun are you going to have trying to renew your driver’s license when you tell a clerk—or more likely a computer—you were born in 1907?”

Sam winced. “Hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, it ought to make some electronics start chasing their own tail.”

“How do the Lizards handle it?” Diane asked, and started to laugh. “I’ve got three of the world’s best experts here to answer my question.”

Richard Yeager looked to his father and grandfather. “I defer to the people who’ve been on the spot, which I haven’t.”

“You know more about it than we do, son,” Jonathan said. “We were either stuck in a hotel trying to be diplomats or we were out being tourists, which isn’t exactly a scientist’s dream, either.”

“That’s about the size of it,” his father agreed. “Besides, since your wife asked, only fair you should show off in front of her. I’m sure she’s never heard you do it before.”

Diane Yeager snickered. Richard turned red. He said, “The two big things the Race has going for it are its longer lifespan and its different social structure. It doesn’t have families to be disrupted the way we do. We were talking about this in the car on the way down, in fact.”

“Truth,” Jonathan said in the Race’s language. He went on, “Even so, there’s a clique of star travelers who stick together because they aren’t so connected to the present. I suppose that would have happened with us, too.”

“Probably,” Richard said. “Better this way, though. Now we don’t have to spend some large part of our loved ones’ lifetime traveling from star to star.”

Before Jonathan or his father could add anything to that, Donald came up to them. He aimed one eye turret at Jonathan, the other at Sam. “Did the two of you have any idea—any idea at all—what you were doing to Mickey and me when you decided to raise us as people?” he demanded.

“No,” Jonathan and his father said at the same time. Sam went on, “Do you know of Kassquit, the girl the Race raised?”

“We’ve heard of her,” Donald answered. “We’d like to meet her one of these days. If anybody would understand some of the things we’ve been through growing up, she’s the one.”

“She’s said the same thing about the two of you,” Jonathan said.

“The Race tried to raise a human as much like one of their kind as they could,” his father said. “We did the same thing with you. When we met Kassquit, we realized how unfair that was to you, but we were committed to doing it.”

“National security,” Donald said scornfully. He stuck out his tongue. “This for national security. You ruined our lives for the sake of national security.”

“Things could be worse,” Jonathan pointed out. “You’ve made a lot of money. People admire you. Millions of them watch you every night. And Mickey’s prosperous, too, even if he’s less public about it.”

“Yes, we have money. You know that old saying about money and happiness? It’s true,” Donald said. “All the money in the world can’t make up for the simple truth: we’re sorry excuses for males of the Race and we’re even sorrier excuses for humans. You want to know how sorry? I really do leer at Rita, because that’s what a man would do. I can’t do anything with her. Even if I smelled pheromones from a female of the Race and got excited, I couldn’t do anything with her. But I leer anyway. There they are, hanging out, and I stare at them.”

What could you say to something like that? Jonathan looked to his father, who didn’t seem to have any idea, either. “I’m sorry,” Jonathan said at last. “We did the best we could.”

“I know that. I never said you didn’t,” Donald answered. “But there’s a goddamn big difference between that and good enough.” He used an emphatic cough. It didn’t sound like the one an ordinary Lizard would have made. He had most of the same accent a human English-speaker would have. All by itself, that went a long way toward proving his point.

Jonathan wondered again if coming home had been such a good idea after all.

Of all the things Glen Johnson had looked for while orbiting Home, boredom was the last. He didn’t know why that was so. He’d spent a lot of time on the
Lewis and Clark
bored. Maybe he’d thought seeing the Lizards’ home planet would make sure he stayed interested. No such luck.

This wasn’t entirely bad. He realized as much. He and everybody else on the
Admiral Peary
could have had a very interesting time trying to fight off missiles from however many spaceships the Lizards threw at them. They wouldn’t have lasted long, but they wouldn’t have had a dull moment.

Still . . . He had to fight not to go to sleep on watch. Back in the Civil War, they would have shot him for that. When he was a kid, he’d known an old man who as a boy had shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln. He wondered if anyone else still breathing a third of the way through the twenty-first century could say that.

When he mentioned it to Mickey Flynn, the other pilot said, “Well, I can’t. I had ancestors who fought in it. People were willing to have Irishmen shot to keep the country in one piece, but not to give ’em a job once they’d managed to miss the bullets. American generosity knows no bounds.”

“I don’t know. Sounds fair to me,” Johnson said.

“And what could I expect from a Sassenach?” Flynn didn’t put on a brogue, but his speech pattern changed.

“Don’t let it worry you,” Johnson told him. “As far as the Lizards are concerned, we’re all riffraff.”

“They are a perceptive species, aren’t they?” Flynn said.

“That’s one word,” Johnson said. “The
Commodore Perry
should be back on Earth by now. I wonder when it’ll come here again.”

“Sooner than anything else is likely to,” Flynn said.

Johnson clapped his hands. “Give the man a cigar!”

“Not necessary,” the other pilot said modestly. “A small act of adoration will suffice.”

“Adoration, my—” Johnson broke off with a snort. He started a new hare: “I do wonder when the Russians and the Germans and the Japanese will start flying faster than light. The Lizards are probably wondering the same thing.”

“I would be, if I were in the shoes they don’t wear,” Flynn agreed.

Johnson started to reply to that. Then he started trying to work through it. After a few seconds, he gave it up as a bad job. “Right,” was all he did say. Mickey Flynn’s nod announced anything else was unthinkable.

Home spun past the reflectionless windows. The
Admiral Peary
was coming up on Sitneff. Clouds covered the city, though. The Americans from the
Commodore Perry
were saying it might rain. That didn’t happen every day. Johnson hoped the Johnny-come-latelies got wet. It would serve them right. He had little use for the great-grandchildren of his old-time friends and neighbors. They struck him as intolerably arrogant and sure of themselves. Maybe they’d earned the right, but even so. . . .

“No matter how much you influence people, having friends is better,” Johnson said.

“And what inspired this burst of profundity?” Flynn’s voice was gravely curious.

“The punks downstairs.” Johnson pointed to the clouded city where the Americans lived.

“Oh. Them.” Mickey Flynn also spoke with noticeable distaste. “They aren’t the most charming people God ever made, are they?” He answered his own question: “Of course they aren’t. All the people like that are aboard the
Admiral Peary.
”

The intercom crackled to life: “Colonel Johnson! Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the commandant’s office immediately! Colonel Johnson! Colonel Glen Johnson! . . .”

Over the noise, Johnson made a wry face. “And some who aren’t the most charming, too. Oh, well. See you later, alligator.” Out of the control room he went.

As usual, Lieutenant General Healey looked as if he wanted to bite something when Johnson glided into his sanctum. “Took you long enough,” the commandant growled.

“Reporting as ordered, sir,” Johnson replied blandly. “I would have been here sooner except for the traffic accident on Route 66. I had to wait till they towed away a station wagon and cleaned up the spilled gasoline.”

Healey looked more baleful than ever. He probably wasn’t thrilled at being stuck in command of the most obsolete starship the United States owned. “Bullshit,” he said, and waited for Johnson to deny it. When Johnson just hung silently in midair, Healey scowled and went on, “I need you to fly a scooter to the
Horned Akiss.
”

“Sir, the Lizards will search it eight ways from Sunday,” Johnson said. “I want your word of honor in writing, in English and the Race’s language, that I’m not trying to smuggle ginger.”

“There is no ginger on the scooter.” Healey spoke in a hard, flat voice that defied Johnson to contradict him. Johnson didn’t. He also made no move to leave the commandant’s office. He kept waiting. After some dark mutters, Healey grabbed an indelible pencil—much more convenient in weightlessness than pens, which needed pressurized ink to work—and wrote rapidly. He scaled the sheet of paper to Johnson. It flew through the air with the greatest of ease. “There. Are you satisfied?”

To fit his personality, Healey should have had handwriting more illegible than a dentist’s. He didn’t; instead, it would have done credit to a third-grade teacher. The commandant’s script in the language of the Race was just as neat. Johnson carefully read both versions. They said what he wanted them to say. Try as he would, he found no weasel words. “Yes, sir. This should do it. I’ll take it with me to the scooter lock.”

“When they retire this ship, Colonel, I’ll no longer have to deal with the likes of you,” Healey said. “Even growing obsolete has its benefits.”

“I love you, too, General.” Johnson saluted, then brachiated out of the commandant’s office.

As usual, he stripped down to T-shirt and shorts so he could put on his spacesuit. When he stuck the folded piece of paper in the waistband of the shorts, the technician on duty at the lock raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?” he asked. “Love letter to a Lizard?”

“Oh, yeah,” Johnson agreed. “Their eye turrets drive me nuts.” He sighed, as if in longing. The tech snickered.

After boarding the scooter, he ran through the checklist. The technician had already cleared everything. Johnson did it anyhow. The technician wasn’t going to take the scooter out into hard vacuum, and he was. Everything checked green. He passed the word to the tech, who opened the outer door to the air lock.

Johnson used the scooter’s attitude jets to ease the little rocketship away from the
Admiral Peary.
Before firing up the main engine, he called the
Horned Akiss
to make sure he was expected. Healey hadn’t said word one about that.

But the answer came back in the language of the Race: “Yes, scooter from the Tosevite starship. We await your arrival. Stop well away from the ship, so that we may inspect you before you enter the air lock.”

“It shall be done,” Johnson said. That inspection wouldn’t be for ginger. The Lizards would be making sure he wasn’t bringing them a bomb. The
Admiral Peary
did the same thing when Lizard scooters approached. Nobody really expected trouble now, but nobody took any chances, either.

He aimed the scooter at the
Horned Akiss,
then fired the rear motor. Away the little rocket went. He liked nothing better than flying by the seat of his pants, even if he did have radar to help. A burn from the front motor killed the scooter’s velocity and left it hanging in space a couple of miles from the Lizards’ ship. One of their scooters came out to inspect it. “All appears to be in order,” a spacesuited member of the Race radioed to him when they were done. “You may proceed to the
Horned Akiss.
”

“I thank you,” Johnson answered. “Can you tell me what this is all about?”

“Not I,” the Lizard replied. “The commandant will attend to it when you have gone aboard.”

“Have it your way,” Johnson said. They would anyhow.

Once in the
Horned Akiss’
air lock, he had to get out of his spacesuit. With the heat the Lizards preferred, T-shirt and shorts had a good deal going for them as a uniform. Males and females of the Race went over the spacesuit and the scooter. He showed them Healey’s pledge. One of them said, “Very nice. We will continue the examination even so.”
Not worth the paper it’s written on,
he thought. If Healey had lied, though, (maybe) they wouldn’t blame the mere pilot so much.

“Everything appears to be as it should,” a different Lizard said after more than an hour. “We will escort you to Medium Spaceship Commander Henrep’s office.”

“I thank you,” Johnson said once more. For someone his size, the corridors were narrow, the handholds small and set at awkward intervals. He managed even so.

When he got to the skipper’s office, he found another Lizard in there with Henrep. The captain said, “Inspector, this is the Tosevite called Glen Johnson. Colonel Johnson, here we have Police Inspector Second Grade Garanpo.”

“I greet you,” Johnson said, thinking unkind thoughts about Lieutenant General Healey. Healey hadn’t lied to him—oh, no. But even if the scooter didn’t have any ginger aboard it this time, he was still in trouble.