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“I do not know what your custom is,” Kassquit answered unhappily.
“Do you know whether you want breakfast?” the technician asked, plainly doubting whether Kassquit could make up her mind about anything.
“Yes, please,” she answered.
“All right. Some of your foods came with you on the starship, and I also have a list of foods from Home you have proved you can safely eat. Which would you prefer?”
“Foods from Home are fine,” Kassquit said. “I am on Home, after all.”
“All right. Wait here. Do not go anywhere.” Yes, the technician was convinced Kassquit had no brains at all. “I will bring you food. Do not go away.” With a last warning hiss, the technician left.
She soon returned, carrying a tray like the ones in the starship refectory. It held the same sorts of food Kassquit had been eating there, too. She used her eating tongs as automatically and as well as a female of the Race would have. When she finished, the technician took away the tray.
“What do I do now?” Kassquit called after the female.
“Wait,” was the only answer she got.
Wait she did. She went to the window and looked out at the landscape spread out before her. She had never seen such a thing in person before, but the vista seemed familiar to her thanks to countless videos. Those were buildings and streets there, streets with cars and buses in them. The irregular projections off in the distance were mountains. And yes, the sky was supposed to be that odd shade of dusty greenish blue, not black.
Kassquit also looked down at herself. Her body paint was in sad disarray-hardly surprising, after so many years of cold sleep. As she’d thought she would, she found a little case of paints in the room and began touching herself up.
She’d almost finished when a male spoke from the doorway: “I greet you, ah, Researcher.”
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?”
