AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“And in the meantime…”
“In the meantime, he’s sending a war warning back to the USA,” his father said grimly. “Whatever the Lizards do, they won’t pull a Jap on us.”
“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said. That was a phrase from Sam Yeager’s generation. Jonathan understood it, though he wouldn’t have used it himself. He wondered how many Americans living right now would have any idea what it meant. Not many, he suspected.
“Wish I had better news for you, son,” his father said.
“So do I,” Jonathan said. “If I can do anything, you sing out, you hear?”
“I will,” his father promised. “That’s what you’re along for, after all. Right now, though, I have to tell you I don’t know what it would be. That’s not a knock on you. I don’t know what more I can do myself. I wish to hell I did.” Sam Yeager had always been a vigorous man who looked and acted younger than his years. But now the weight of worry made him seem suddenly old.
Jonathan walked over and set a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Something will turn up.”
“I hope so.” His father sounded bleak. “I’ll be damned if I know what it is, though. Of course, I would have said the same thing back in 1942, when the Lizards were knocking the crap out of us. Nobody had any idea what to do about them, either, not at first.”
“That’s what I hear,” Jonathan agreed. “Of course, I wasn’t around then. You were.”
“If I hadn’t been, you wouldn’t be around now.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said.
His father looked back across the years. “And if your mother hadn’t been carrying you,” he said, as much to himself as to Jonathan, “I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”
Jonathan raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sam Yeager blinked. He seemed to realize what he’d just said. A long sigh escaped him. “You know your mother was married to another guy before she met me.”
“Oh, sure,” Jonathan said. “He got killed when the Lizards invaded, right?”
“Well, yeah.” His father was staring into the past again. He looked… embarrassed? “It’s-a little more complicated than we ever talked about, though.”
“Whatever it is, I think you’d better spit it out, Dad,” Jonathan said. “Do I have to come ten light-years to get all the old family scandals?”
“Well, it looks like you probably do.” Sam Yeager not only looked embarrassed, he sounded embarrassed, too. “When your mother and I got married in beautiful, romantic Chugwater, Wyoming, we both thought her first husband was dead. That’s the God’s truth. We did.”
“But he wasn’t?” Jonathan said slowly. He didn’t know how to take that. It was news to him.
His father nodded. “He sure wasn’t. He was a physicist on our atomic-bomb project. Barbara-your mom-found out she was pregnant with you, and then she found out she wasn’t a widow-bang! like that.” Sam Yeager snapped his fingers.
“Jesus! You never told me any of this,” Jonathan said.
“It’s not exactly something we were proud of,” his father answered, which was probably the understatement of the year. “I always figured that, if she hadn’t had a bun in the oven, she would have gone back to the other guy-Jens, his name was. I never asked her-you’d better believe I didn’t! — but that’s what I figure. She did, though, and so she ended up choosing me… and the rest is history.”
“Christ!” Jonathan exclaimed. “Any other skeletons in the closet, as long as you’re in a confessing mood?”
“I don’t think so,” his father answered. “I guess I should have told you this a long time ago.”
“I guess you should have,” Jonathan said feelingly. “What the hell happened to this other guy? Do you even know?”
“Yeah. I know.” Sam Yeager’s face went even more somber than it had been. “He kind of went off the deep end after that, and who can blame him? He shot a couple of people before they finally got him. And sometimes I wonder what I would have done…” His voice trailed away.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Dad!” Jonathan said. “You wouldn’t have done anything that nutty. It’s not your style, and you know it.”
His father only shrugged. “How can you tell till something happens? You can’t. Losing your mom screwed up the other guy’s whole life. It sure wouldn’t have done me any good. She was… something special.” Now his voice broke.
For him, Barbara Yeager hadn’t been dead long at all. He’d gone into cold sleep not long after she passed away. Jonathan had waited another seventeen years. He had scar tissue over the wound his father didn’t. But the other things his old man had told him… “Why did you sit on all this stuff for so long? Didn’t you think I had a right to know?”
Sam Yeager coughed a couple of times. “Well, part of it was that your mother never wanted to talk about it much. She always did her best to act as though it hadn’t happened. I think she felt bad about the way things turned out for the other guy. I know I would have in her shoes. How could you help it? It wasn’t even that she didn’t love him, or hadn’t loved him. That probably made it worse. Just-one of those things. She didn’t have any perfect choices. She made the one she made, and then she had to live with it. We all had to live with it.”
Except the other guy had turned out not to be able to. Jonathan had always thought his mother’s first husband was off the stage before she met his father. Nobody’d ever said so. It was just what he’d assumed, what his folks had wanted him to assume. He saw why they’d want him to-it was safe and conventional. The real story seemed anything but.
“Why tell me now?” he asked harshly.
“It’s the truth. I figured you ought to know.” His father’s mouth tightened. “And I have no idea what the odds of our coming through all this are. We may not have a whole lot of time.”
A deathbed confession? Not quite, but maybe not so far removed from one, either. Jonathan picked his words with care: “It must have been a crazy time, back when we were fighting the conquest fleet.”
His father nodded. “You can say that again. We didn’t know if we’d make it, or if we’d all get blown to hell and gone the next week or the next day or sometimes the next minute. A lot of us just… grabbed what we could, and didn’t give a damn about tomorrow. Why, I remember-”
“Remember what?” Jonathan asked when his father broke off.
But Sam Yeager only said, “Never mind. That really isn’t any of your business. I’m the only one left alive whose business it is, and I’ll take it to the grave with me.”
“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said, surprised by his father’s vehemence. But that was just one surprise piled on top of a ton of others. He tried to imagine his father and mother falling in love, falling into bed, her thinking she was a widow… He tried, and felt himself failing. The picture refused to form. They were his parents. They were so much older than he was.
His father wasn’t so much older than he was as he had been before cold sleep. And once upon a time, long before cold sleep, his father had been younger still-and so had his mother. He still couldn’t imagine it.
He couldn’t imagine war with the Lizards, either. But that was liable to be every bit as real as his parents’ sex life.
Kassquit asked Frank Coffey, “Do you know what sort of experiments you Tosevites are carrying out on your home planet?”
“No.” The dark-skinned American Big Ugly made the negative gesture. “I know there are some, and I know the Race is worried about them. I was hoping you could tell me more.”
She let her mouth fall open in a silent laugh. “I went up to the Emperor himself, and he would not tell me. And if I knew, I would hurt the Empire by telling you.”
“If I knew, I might be hurting my not-empire by telling you,” Coffey said. “And yet we both keep trying to find out. Either we are both spies, or we have become very good friends.”
“Or both,” Kassquit said.
The American Tosevite laughed, though she ha
dn’t been joking. They lay on the sleeping mat in her room, both of them naked. They’d made love a while ago, but Frank Coffey hadn’t shown any interest in putting his wrappings on again. When even an air-conditioned room on Home was warmer than Tosevites found comfortable, wrappings made no sense to Kassquit. She knew wild Big Uglies had strong prohibitions against shedding their wrappings in public. She knew, but she did not understand. However irrational they were, the prohibitions seemed too strong to overcome. She’d given up trying.
“Will it be war?” she asked. The question was being asked more and more often in the hotel in Sitneff, by more and more Tosevites and members of the Race.
“I cannot tell you that,” Coffey answered. “I can tell you that the United States will not start a war against the Race. For us to start a war would make no sense. If the Race starts a war…” He shrugged. “We will fight back. We will fight back as hard as we can. You may rely on it.”
