Homeward Bound (8 page)

Reading his body paint at a glance, she assumed the posture of respect. “And I greet you, Senior Researcher. What can I do for you, superior sir?”

“I am called Stinoff,” the male said. “You must understand, you are the first Tosevite I have met in person, though I have been studying your species through data relayed from Tosev 3. Fascinating! Astonishing!” His eye turrets traveled her from head to feet.

“What do you wish of me, superior sir?” Kassquit asked again.

“You must also understand, it is later than you think,” Senior Researcher Stinoff said. “When you came to Home, you were kept in cold sleep until it became evident the starship full of wild Tosevites would soon arrive. We did not wish to expend undue amounts of your lifespan without good reason. That starship is now nearly here, which accounts for your revival at this time.”

“I . . . see,” Kassquit said slowly. “I thought that, as a citizen of the Empire, I might have had some say in the timing of my awakening. I made it clear I wished to become familiar with Home as soon as possible.”

“Under normal circumstances, you would have,” Stinoff said. “In your case, however, how can circumstances be normal? And I thought that, as a citizen of the Empire, you would recognize that the needs of society take precedence over those of any one individual.”

He had a point, and a good one. Aggressive individualism was a trait more common and more esteemed among the barbarous Big Uglies than in the Race. Kassquit used the affirmative gesture. “That is a truth, superior sir. I cannot deny it. How may I be of the greatest use to the Empire?”

“You have direct experience with Tosevites.” Stinoff was kind enough or clever enough to keep from reminding her again that she
was
a Tosevite. He went on, “Negotiations with these foreigners”—an archaic word in the language of the Race—“will not be easy or simple. You will work on our side along with Fleetlord Atvar and Senior Researcher Ttomalss.”

“Oh?” Kassquit said. “Ttomalss is here, then?”

“Yes,” Stinoff said. “He was recalled while you were on the journey between Tosev 3 and Home. He has spent the time since his revival preparing for the coming of the Tosevite starship.”

Ttomalss had more time to spend than Kassquit. That hadn’t seemed to matter when she was younger. Her own time had stretched out before her in what seemed an endless orbit. But it was not endless; it was spiraling down toward decay, burnout, and extinguishment—and it spiraled more quickly than that of a male or female of the Race. Nothing to be done about it.

“I was told this would be a starship from the not-empire of the United States,” Kassquit said. Stinoff made the affirmative gesture. Kassquit asked, “Do we know the identities of the Tosevites on the ship?”

“No, not yet,” the male from Home replied. “They will still be in cold sleep. The ship is not yet in our solar system, though it is close.”

“I see,” Kassquit said. “Well, it may be interesting to find out.”

* * *

When Sam Yeager returned to consciousness, his first clear thought was that he was dreaming. He knew just what kind of dream it was, too: a dream out of some science-fiction story or other. He’d read them and enjoyed them since the first science-fiction pulps came out when he was a young man. The elasticity that reading science fiction gave his mind was no small part of how he’d got involved in dealing with the Lizards to begin with.

This dream certainly had a science-fictional quality to it: he didn’t weigh anything at all. He was, he discovered, strapped down on a table. If he hadn’t been, he could have floated away. That was interesting. Less enjoyably, his stomach was doing its best to crawl up his throat hand over hand. He gulped, trying to hold it down.

I’m on my way to the Moon,
he thought. He’d been to the Moon once before, and he’d been weightless all the way. So maybe this wasn’t a dream after all.

He opened his eyes. It wasn’t easy; he felt as if each one had a millstone on it. When he succeeded, he wondered why he’d bothered. The room in which he found himself told him very little. It was bare, matte-finished metal, with fluorescent tubes on the ceiling giving off light. Someone—a woman—in a white smock hung over him. Yes, he was weightless, and so was she.

“Do you hear me, Colonel Yeager?” she asked. “Do you understand me?” By the way she said it, she was repeating herself.

Sam nodded. That was even harder than opening his eyes had been. He paused, gathered strength, and tried to talk. “Where am I?” The traditional question. He wondered if the woman heard him. His throat felt full of glue and cotton balls.

But her nod told him she’d got it. “You’re in orbit around Home, in the Tau Ceti system,” she answered. “Do you understand?”

He nodded again, and croaked, “I’ll be a son of a bitch.” He wouldn’t usually have said that in front of a woman, especially one he didn’t know. He still had drugs scrambling his brains; he could tell how slow and dopey he was. Had he offended her? No—she was laughing. Bit by bit, things got clearer. “So the cold sleep worked.”

“It sure did,” she said, and handed him a plastic drinking bulb. “Here. Have some of this.”

Clumsily, Sam reached out and took it. It was warm, which made him realize how cold his hands were, how cold all of him was. He drank. It tasted like chicken broth—and tasting it made him realize the inside of his mouth had tasted like a slit trench before. He couldn’t empty the bulb, but he drank more than half. When he tried to speak again, it came easier: “What year is this?”

“It’s 2031, Colonel Yeager,” the woman answered.

“Christ!” Sam said violently. His shiver had nothing to do with the chill the broth had started to dispel. He was 124 years old.
Older than Moses, by God,
he thought. True, he remembered only seventy of those years. But he had, without a doubt, been born in 1907. “The starship took off in . . . ?”

“In 1995, Colonel. It’s called the
Admiral Peary.
”

“Christ,” Sam said once more, this time in a calmer tone. He’d been two years old when Admiral Peary made it to the North Pole—or, as some people claimed later, didn’t make it but said he did. He wondered what the old geezer would have thought of this trip.
He’d have been jealous as hell,
was what occurred to him.

More slowly than it should have, another thought crossed his mind. He’d gone into cold sleep in 1977. They’d kept him on ice for eighteen years before they took him aboard the starship. It wasn’t just because he was an expert on the Race, either. He knew better than that. They’d wanted to make sure he stayed out of the way, too.

And they’d got what they wanted. He was more than ten light-years out of the way. If he ever saw Earth again, it would be at least two-thirds of the way through the twenty-first century.
To heck with Moses. Look out, Methuselah.

“I’m Dr. Melanie Blanchard, by the way,” the woman said.

“Uh—pleased to meet you.” Sam held out a hand.

She gave it a brisk pump, and then said, “You won’t know this, of course, but your son and daughter-in-law are aboard this ship. They haven’t been revived yet, but everything on the instrument panels looks good.”

“That’s good. That’s wonderful, in fact.” Sam still wasn’t thinking as fast as he should. He needed close to half a minute to find the next question he needed to ask: “When did they go under?”

“Not long before the ship left. Biologically, your son is fifty.” Dr. Blanchard talked about Jonathan’s age. With a woman’s discretion, she didn’t mention Karen‘s.

“Fifty? Lord!” Sam said. His son had been a young man when he went into cold sleep himself. Jonathan wasn’t young any more—and neither was Karen, dammit. Sam realized he had to catch up with a third of their lives. He also realized something else: how mushily he was talking. Dr. Blanchard had been too discreet to mention that, too. He asked, “Could I have my choppers, please?”

“You sure can.” She gave them to him.

He popped them into his mouth. He hadn’t worn them in more than fifty years . . . or since yesterday, depending on how you looked at things. “That’s better,” he said, and so it was. “I can hardly talk like a human being without ’em, let alone like a Lizard.”

“I understood you before,” she said. “And there were other things to worry about.”

Like what?
he wondered. Answers weren’t hard to find. Like making sure he was alive. Like making sure he still had two working brain cells to rub against each other. If they’d hauled him more than ten light-years and ended up with nothing but a rutabaga . . .
Some of them wouldn’t have been too disappointed.

Before he could get too bitter about that, a man’s voice called from a hatchway leading out of the room: “Anybody home?” Without waiting for an answer, the man came gliding down into the chamber. He was about sixty, very lean, with a long face and graying sandy hair cropped close to his head. He wore a T-shirt and shorts; the shirt had a colonel’s eagles pinned to the shoulders. “You’re Yeager, eh?”

“Last time I looked—but that was a while ago,” Sam replied. The other man grinned. Sam added, “You’re one up on me.”

“Sorry about that. I’m Glen Johnson.”

“Are you? I’m damned glad to meet you in person, Colonel!” As he had for Dr. Blanchard, Yeager stuck out his hand.

The other man took it. He didn’t have much of a grip. Even at seventy, even coming out of cold sleep, Sam could have squashed his hand without half trying. Maybe his surprise showed on his face, for Johnson said, “I spent more than twenty years weightless out in the asteroid belt before they decided to refrigerate me.”

“Oh. You were on the
Lewis and Clark
?” Yeager asked, and Johnson nodded. Sam went on, “I wondered why I never heard from you again after we talked when you were flying orbital patrol. Now I understand better.” He paused for more thought. “So they put you away in . . . 1984?” His wits were clearer, but still slow.

“That’s right.” Johnson nodded again. “How about you?”

“Me? It was 1977.”

They looked at each other. Neither said anything. Neither needed to say anything. They’d both gone into cold sleep—been urged, almost forced, to go into cold sleep—years before the
Admiral Peary
was ready to fly. The reasons behind that seemed altogether too obvious.

“Isn’t it great to be politically reliable?” Sam murmured.

“Who, me?” Glen Johnson said, deadpan. They both laughed. Johnson went on, “Actually, depending on how you look at things, it’s not that bad. They were so eager to send us far, far away, they gave us the chance to see Home.” He said the name in English and then in the Lizards’ language.

“Well, that’s true,” Sam said. “They can get some use out of us here, and we’re too far away to get into a whole lot of trouble.”

“That’s how I figure it, too,” Johnson agreed. “And speaking of seeing Home, how would you like to
see
Home?”

“Can I?” Sam forgot about the straps and tried to zoom off the table. That didn’t work. He looked at Dr. Blanchard. “May I?”

“If you’ve got enough coordination to undo those straps, you’ve got enough to go up to the control room,” she told him.

He fumbled at them. Glen Johnson laughed—not mockingly, but sympathetically. He said, “I’ve done that twice now.”

“Twice?” Sam tried to make his fingers obey him. There! A buckle loosened.

“Yeah, twice,” Johnson said. “They woke me halfway through so I could help in the turn-ship maneuver. Everybody here will get a good look at Home pretty soon. I saw the sky with no sun anywhere.” A certain somber pride—and more than a little awe—filled his voice.

Yeager tried to imagine how empty that sky would seem—tried and felt himself failing. But his hands seemed smarter when he wasn’t telling them what to do. Two more latches came loose. He flipped back the belts that held him to the table.

That was when he realized he was naked. Melanie Blanchard took it in stride. So did Johnson. Sam decided he would, too. She tossed him underpants and shorts and a T-shirt like the pilot’s. “Here,” she said. “Put these on, if you want to.” He did. He thought the underpants were the ones he’d been wearing when he went downtown to go into cold sleep. The shirt, like Johnson‘s, had eagles pinned to the shoulders.

“Come on,” Johnson said, and went up the hatchway.

Slowly, creakily, Sam followed. Johnson was smooth in weightlessness. He would be, of course. Yeager was anything but. A splash of sunlight brightened the top of the corridor. He paused there to rest for a moment before going up into the control room. “Oh,” he said softly. Here he was, resting like a cat in the sunlight of another star.

Tau Ceti was a little cooler, a little redder, than the Sun. Sam stared at the light. Was there a difference? Maybe a little. The Lizards, who’d evolved here, saw a bit further into the infrared than people could, but violet was ultraviolet to them.

“Come on,” Glen Johnson said again.

“I’m coming.” Sam thrust himself up into the control room. Then he said, “Oh,” once more, for there was Home filling the sky below him. With it there,
below
suddenly had a meaning again. He had to remind himself he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, fall.

He’d seen Earth from orbit, naturally. The cloud-banded blue, mingled here and there with green and brown and gold, would stay in his memory forever. His first thought of Home was,
There’s a lot less blue.
On Earth, land was islands in a great, all-touching sea. Here, seas dotted what was primarily a landscape. The first Lizards who’d gone around their world had done it on foot.

And the greens he saw were subtly different from those of Earth. He couldn’t have said how, but they were. Something down in his bones knew. What looked like desert stretched for untold miles between the seas. He knew it wasn’t so barren as it seemed. Life had spent as long adapting to the conditions here as it had back on Earth.

“I’m jealous of you,” Johnson said.

“Of me? How come?”

“You’ll be able to go down there and take a good close look at things,” the pilot answered. “I’m stuck here in the ship. After so long aboard the
Lewis and Clark,
gravity would kill me pretty damn quick.”