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Gromyko said, “Have you yet decided what we ought to do, given the changed conditions inside the Reich?”
Stalin would have decided on the spur of the moment. He would have followed through on whatever he decided, too: followed through to the hilt. He might not have been right all the time-Molotov knew only too well he hadn’t been right all the time-but he’d always been sure. Sometimes being sure counted for as much as being right. Sometimes it counted for more than being right. If you were sure, if you could make other people sure, you might easily end up right even when you’d been wrong before.
Molotov also knew he lacked that kind of decisiveness. He said, “We can try prodding at Romania and Finland and see how they react-and how the Reich reacts. If the fascists’ puppet states show weakness, that will be a sign the Reich itself is on the way to the ash-heap of history to which the dialectic consigns it.”
Gromyko considered, then nodded. “Good enough, I think, Comrade General Secretary. And if the Germans show they are still alert in spite of this collective leadership, we can pull back at little risk to ourselves.”
“Yes.” Molotov permitted himself a small, cold smile of anticipation. “Just so. And it will be pleasant to pay them back in their own coin for the troubles they continue to cause us in the Ukraine. That will make Nikita Sergeyevich happy, too.” He dismissed Gromyko, then spent the next twenty minutes wondering whether he wanted to make Khrushchev happy or not.
As the airliner droned on toward Kitty Hawk, Jonathan Yeager turned to his father and asked, “Do you think Mom is up to… taking care of what needs taking care of till we get back?”
He didn’t want to mention Mickey and Donald. His father nodded approval that he hadn’t, then answered, “She’ll do fine-because she has to.” He grinned. “She put up with you when you were a baby, so she ought to be able to manage the other.”
Hearing about himself as a baby never failed to embarrass Jonathan. He changed the subject: “Four more years for President Warren, eh?”
“Sure enough,” his father said. “I thought he’d win. I didn’t think he’d take thirty-nine states.” He didn’t look so happy that Warren had taken thirty-nine states, either.
“Neither did I,” said Jonathan, who knew his father had soured on the president but didn’t know why. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I wish the election had come a couple of months later. Then I could have voted, too.” Having to wait till he was almost twenty-five to help pick a president struck him as dreadfully unfair. He tried to make the best of it: “One vote wouldn’t have mattered much this time around, anyhow.”
“No, but you never can tell when it will,” his father said. “As for that, you’re lucky. When I was your age, I was living somewhere different every year. I never put down enough roots to be able to register and vote, so I never did, not till after the fighting stopped and I settled down with your mother.”
Jonathan hadn’t thought about that. Lord, his father had been an old man by the time he finally got the chance to vote. Before Jonathan could say anything about it, the pilot announced they’d be landing soon. This was Jonathan’s first flight. His father took airplanes for granted, so he did his best to do the same. It wasn’t easy. Watching the ground rush up, feeling the jounce as the plane hit the runway…
And you’ll be going into space in a couple of days, he thought. If you’re getting excited about airplanes, what will you do when you blast off?
A trim captain halfway between his age and his father’s took charge of them when they got off the plane. The captain gave Jonathan’s shaved a head a couple of glances, but didn’t say anything.
The officer drove through drizzle to a barracks. The quarters the two Yeagers got struck Jonathan as spartan. His father accepted them with the air of a man who’d known worse. Sometimes Jonathan wondered what all his old man had been through in the days before he’d reached the scene himself. His father didn’t talk about that much.
When they went to the mess hall, some of the soldiers there also gave Jonathan’s shiny skull and casual civilian clothes odd looks. He ignored them. He wished he could have ignored the food. You could eat as much as you wanted, but he couldn’t see why anybody would want to eat any of it.
Along with his father, he spent the time till he went into space getting lectured about everything that could go wrong and what to do if anything did. The short answer seemed to be, If anything fails, you probably die. The long answers were more complicated, but they added up to the same thing.
People did die going into space. He thought about that as he boarded the upper stage with REDTAIL painted on its nose. He didn’t think about it for long, though. At not quite twenty-one, he didn’t really believe he could die.
“Going to pay a call on the Lizards, eh?” said the pilot, a Navy lieutenant commander named Jacobson. “I’ll get you there and I’ll bring you home again-as long as we don’t blow up.”
“If we do, it’ll be over in a hurry,” Jonathan’s father said. “Plenty of worse ways to go, believe you me.”
“Oh, yeah.” The Navy man glanced over at Jonathan. “First time l ever took up a guy dressed like a Lizard, I’ll tell you that.”
Jonathan knew his dad would defend him if he didn’t speak up for himself. But he figured he was old enough to do that, even if he hadn’t hit twenty-one yet: “One of the reasons I’m going up is that I dress this way. It’s supposed to set their minds at ease, I guess you’d say.” He still kept quiet about Kassquit; the lieutenant commander didn’t need to know about her.
“Okay, kid,” Jacobson said. “You’re on the manifest, so you’re going. Strap in good there. I know your old man’s done this before, but you haven’t, have you?”
“No, sir.” Jonathan tried not to be nervous as he settled himself on the foam-padded seat. He didn’t know how much good the safety harness would do, but he fastened it.
“Been a while for me,” his father said. “But I know I’d rather go up there in just body paint and shorts than in my uniform here. The Race likes it hot.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” Jacobson said. “Well, get as comfy as you can, because we’ve got an hour to kill now, waiting for launch time.”
That hour seemed to Jonathan to stretch endlessly. At last, though, the countdown, hallowed by endless books and films, reached zero. The rocket motor roared to life beneath him; all at once, it felt as if three or four guys had piled onto his chest. He’d had that happen in football games. But here, the guys didn’t get up. They couldn’t-they were him, his own body weight multiplied by acceleration. Though it was only a matter of minutes, the time felt as long as the hour’s wait before blastoff.
Beside him, his father forced out a sentence a word at a time: “Watch that first step-it’s a lulu.”
“You all right, Dad?” Jonathan asked: wheezed, actually. He wasn’t having too much trouble with the acceleration, but his father-heck, his father was practically an old man.
“I’ll manage,” Sam Yeager answered. “I reckon I was born to hang.”
Before Jonathan could answer that, he stopped weighing several hundred pounds. In fact, as the rockets cut off he stopped weighing anything at all. He discovered another reason for his safety harness: to keep him from floating all over the Redtail ’s cramped little cabin. He also discovered his stomach was trying to climb up his gullet hand over hand. Gulping, he did his best to get it back where it belonged.
Lieutenant Commander Jacobson recognized that gulp. “Airsick bag to your right,” he said. “Grab it if you need it. Grab it before you need it, if you please.”
“I’ll try,” Jonathan said weakly. He found the bag, but discovered he didn’t have to clap it over his mouth, at least not right away. The pilot, meanwhile, was talking in the language of the Race and getting answers from the Lizards. Every so often, he’d use the Redtail ’s motors to change course a little. Jonathan was too sunk in misery to pay much attention. His father was also quiet and thoughtful.
/> “We dock at the central hub of the Lizard ship,” Jacobson said after a while. “They spin most of their vessels for artificial gravity, but the axis stays weightless, of course.”
Again, Jonathan didn’t much care. The ship the Redtail approached looked big enough to have respectable gravity just from its own mass. Clanks and bangs announced contact. “Very neat,” his father said. “Very smooth.” It hadn’t felt smooth to him, but he had no standards of comparison.
“I’ll be waiting for you when the Lizards bring you back,” Jacobson said. “Have fun.” By his snort, he found that unlikely.
When the hatch opened, it revealed a couple of Lizards floating in a corridor. “The two Tosevites for the interview will come with us,” one of them said.
Jonathan undid his harness and pushed himself toward the Lizards. He flew as easily as if in a dream, but in a dream he wouldn’t have been fighting nausea. His father followed him. Sure enough, it was hot and dry in the spaceship, as hot and dry as it got in L.A. with the devil winds blowing.
Little by little, as Jonathan and his father followed the Lizards outward from the hub, weight, or a semblance of it, returned. By the time they got to the second deck out, they were walking, not floating. Jonathan approved. His stomach approved even more. The curved horizon of each deck seemed as surreal as something out of an Escher painting, but bodily well-being made him willing to forgive a lot.
