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“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.”
“Oh.” Sam felt foolish.
“I should have thought of that. I’m sorry. You must feel like Moses looking at the Promised Land.”
“A little bit-but there is one difference.” Johnson paused. Sam waved for him to go on. He did: “All Moses could do was look. Me, I can blow this place to hell and gone. The Admiral Peary came loaded for bear.”
Ttomalss looked up into the night sky of Home. Some of the bright stars there moved. The Race had had orbital vehicles for as long as they’d been a unified species-a hundred thousand years, more or less. But one of these moving stars, the first one ever, didn’t belong to the Race. It was full of wild Big Uglies.
Which one? Ttomalss couldn’t pick it out, not at a glance. For all he knew, it could have been on the other side of the world. That hardly mattered. It was there. No-it was here. The Tosevites were forcefully reminding the Race they weren’t quiet subjects, weren’t quiet colleagues, like the Rabotevs or Hallessi.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t know this day was coming. He wouldn’t have been recalled to Home if it hadn’t been. But he’d been revived for years now, and nobody seemed to have any better idea of what to do about the Big Uglies than males and females had had before he went into cold sleep. That not only worried him, it also annoyed him.
Quite a few things about Home annoyed him these days, from the ridiculous appearance of the young to the way males and females here seemed unable to make up their minds. Nobody decided anything in a hurry. It often looked as if nobody decided anything at all. His time on Tosev 3 had changed him more than he’d imagined while he was there.
The psychologist’s mouth fell open in a laugh, though it really wasn’t funny. If you couldn’t make up your mind on Tosev 3, you’d end up dead-either that or hornswoggled by the Big Uglies, depending. You had to be able to decide. You had to be able to act. Here… This place felt like the back side of a sand dune. The wind blew past overhead, but nothing here really changed.
Ttomalss laughed again. Strange how living among barbarians could be so much more vivid, so much more urgent, than living among his own kind. The Race didn’t hurry. Till he went to Tosev 3, he’d thought of that as a virtue. Now, perversely, it seemed a vice, and a dangerous one.
