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Bruce Yeager had settled his parents into a two-bedroom apartment in Torrance, not far from where they’d lived before going into cold sleep. The furniture, or most of it, was even their own; the government had stored it against the off chance they’d come back. The stove and the refrigerator were new, and much more efficient than the ones they replaced.
Jonathan Yeager didn’t much care about efficiency. What mattered to him was that Karen should like them. She did.
Also new was the computer. The one that had gone into storage was a hopeless antique. This one… This one would do everything but tie Jonathan’s shoes. As a matter of fact, it could do that, too, if he fitted it with a waldo attachment. Such things were common and cheap these days. They made life closer to tolerable for handicapped people, and had countless industrial uses besides.
Before very long, Jonathan realized he was a handicapped person in this Los Angeles. He knew exactly what his handicap was, too: he was missing almost forty years. Knowing didn’t help. He had no idea how to fix it.
When he complained, Karen said, “It’s nothing we have to worry about right away. We may be missing the years, but we’re not missing the money from them. We won’t miss any meals, either-I promise you that.”
“I know,” he said. “But I don’t want to sit back and twiddle my thumbs the rest of my life. I want to do something useful, and it doesn’t look like anything I can do is useful any more.”
“We both still know the Race well,” Karen said.
He shook his head. “Here, we knew the Race well. We know it well on Home. We’re up to date there. We’re most of a lifetime behind here. Who’d want to pay us to catch up?”
Karen started to say something, but she didn’t. Jonathan had a pretty good idea of what she’d swallowed. Yes, their son would doubtless put them on his payroll. That stuck in Jonathan’s craw. He didn’t think he’d mind working for Bruce. But he would mind getting a sinecure, and anything he would do would only be worth a sinecure.
“I think I’d rather try to write my memoirs,” he said. “They’d be up to the minute-well, pretty close, now-and I can tell a story hardly anybody else will ever be able to.”
“Can you do it well enough to get people to pay money for it?” Karen said. “I’ve been asking myself the same question.”
“We’ve both done plenty of writing,” Jonathan answered. “We ought to try, anyhow. I think we can do it.” He managed a wry grin. “It’s our story. What could be more interesting to us than we are?”
“To us, yeah,” Karen said. “How about to anyone else?”
“All we can do is give it our best shot.” Jonathan laughed out loud. “Maybe we should ask Mickey who his literary agent is.”
“Yes, I think we should,” Karen said, and she wasn’t laughing at all. She sounded bleak, in fact, as she went on, “For one thing, that may help us. For another, Mickey doesn’t hate us-or if he does, he’s more polite about it than Donald.”
“He gives us more credit for doing the best we could.” Jonathan wondered how good that best had been. “I think we did better with them than Ttomalss did with Kassquit.”
“Not a fair comparison,” Karen said. “We knew a lot more about the Race when we started than Ttomalss did about us when he started. And Mickey and Donald had each other for company. That had to help, too.” Jonathan might have known his wife wouldn’t cut Kassquit any slack. But then Karen surprised him by adding, “She’ll have her baby before too long.”
“So she will,” Jonathan said. “I think Frank was smart to go back: over there, he’s not behind the times. He helped make the arrangements the new people are dealing with.”
“The new people.” Karen tasted the phrase. “They really do feel like that, don’t they? Like they just started out and everything’s ahead of them, I mean. Even when they’re our age, they’ve got that feel to them. I don’t know whether to be jealous or to want to pound some sense into their stupid heads.”
“They’re like the people who went West in covered wagons,” Jonathan said. “They can taste the wide open spaces in front of them. And do they ever have them! Jesus! Light-year after light-year of wide open spaces. No wonder they’ve got that look in their eye and they don’t want to pay any attention to us. We’re the city slickers who just want to stay back in Philly-and that even though we went traveling.”
“Yeah.” His wife nodded. “What we did hardly counts these days. It was all the Lizards had for all those thousands of years. It’s still all they have. And it’s as obsolete as we are.”
Jonathan nodded, too. “Melanie will have to go back to school if she wants to keep on being a doctor. They know so much more now than they did when she went on ice. Tom and Linda are as out of date as we are. And Dad’s got it even worse. He’s older, and he spent all those extra years in cold sleep.”
“I think he’ll do fine, though, once he gets his feet on the ground,” Karen said. “He’s had to adapt before. Look how much things changed for him when the Lizards came, but he did okay then. Better than okay, in fact.”
“Hope you’re right,” Jonathan answered. Again, he didn’t much feel like arguing with his wife. He didn’t have much from which to argue: only the lost look he thought he saw in his father’s eyes. He suspected his old man would have indignantly denied it if anyone called him on it. He also suspected the denial would mean nothing, or maybe a little less. Instead of arguing, Jonathan said, “Want to go to a movie tonight?”
“Sure,” Karen said, and then, with a wry smile of her own, “This is supposed to help us fit into the here-and-now?”
“Well… It depends on which one we pick,” Jonathan said. When he and Karen were dating, films showed things they hadn’t when his father was a young man. When his sons started taking girls out, films showed things they hadn’t in his day. The trend hadn’t slowed down while he and Karen went to Home and back. A lot of what ordinary people lined up to see now would have been blue movies in the 1960s.
They didn’t have drive-ins any more, either. Jonathan had fond memories of the one on Vermont, but apartment buildings stood where the lot and the big screen had been. Boys and girls these days didn’t seem to feel the lack, so they must have had other ways to find privacy when they wanted it.
Karen flipped through the Los Angeles Times. Just about all the photos and ads in the paper were in color, which they hadn’t been in 1994. “We don’t want the sappy kiddy shows,” she said. “Those are just as bad as they ever were, maybe worse.” Jonathan didn’t argue with that, either. She pointed to one movie ad and started to giggle. “Here. The Curse of Rhodes. A horror flick. How can they mess that up?”
“Isn’t that why we’re going?” Jonathan asked. Karen raised an eyebrow. He explained: “To find out how they can mess it up.”
“Oh.” Karen laughed. “Sure. But we know from the start that this is hokum.” She pointed to the ad again. A bronze statue strode across what was presumably the Aegean with a naked girl in its arms. A few wisps of her long blond hair kept things technically decent.
“Works for me,” Jonathan said solemnly. Karen made the kind of noise that meant she would clobber him if she weren’t such an enlightened, tolerant wife: a noise only a little less effective than a real set of lumps would have been. Jonathan mimed a whipl
ash injury and pointed out, “You were the one who suggested it.”
“Well, let’s go,” she said. “We can always throw popcorn at the screen if it gets too awful.” She paused. “We may pick different times.”
“Here’s hoping,” Jonathan said, and laughed when she made a face at him.
Most of the people buying tickets for the movie were in their teens or twenties. Most of the ones who weren’t had ten- or twelve-year-old boys in tow. Jonathan and Karen looked at each other, as if to ask, What are we getting ourselves into? They both started to laugh. Maybe a really bad horror movie was just what they needed.
Jonathan bought popcorn and candy and Cokes. The smells of the concession stand hadn’t changed a bit since before he went into cold sleep. Prices had, but not too badly. Even back then, theaters had gouged people on snacks.
The slope of the rows of seats was steeper than it had been back in a twentieth-century theater. That let each seat have a proper back without interfering with children’s views of the screen. Some unknown genius had thought of putting a cup holder in each armrest. The rows were father apart than they had been; Jonathan could stretch out his feet. He closed his eyes. “Good night.”
“If you can’t stay awake to leer at the naked girls, don’t expect me to shake you,” Karen said. He sat up very straight. She poked him.
Down went the lights. There were more ads and fewer coming attractions than Jonathan remembered. Maybe that meant he was turning into a curmudgeon. But, by body time, it hadn’t been that long ago, so maybe the folks who ran things were trying harder to squeeze money out of people. The sound was louder than he remembered, too. He had as much trouble enjoying the music as his father had had with what he’d listened to when he was young.
That same pounding, noisy beat suffused The Curse of Rhodes. For a while, he hardly noticed it. The special effects were astonishing. A lot of them would have been impossible, or impossibly expensive, in the twentieth century. Computers could do all sorts of things that had been beyond them in those days.
