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“You made it, Jonathan,” his father said. “We made it. We’re in orbit around Home. When you wake up a little more, you can look out and see the Lizards’ planet.”
With an effort, Jonathan opened his eyes. There was his father, floating at an improbable angle. A woman in a white smock floated nearby, at an even more improbable one. “Made it,” Jonathan echoed. Then, as his wits slowly and creakily began to work, he smiled again. “Haven’t seen you in a hell of a long time, Dad.”
“Only seems like a little while to me,” his father answered. “You drove me downtown, and I woke up here.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said, his voice still dreamy. “But I had to drive the goddamn car back, too.” He looked around. His neck worked, anyhow. “Where’s Karen?”
The woman spoke up: “She’s next on the revival schedule, Mr. Yeager. All the signs on the diagnostic monitors look optimal.”
“Good.” Jonathan discovered he could nod as well as crane his neck. “That’s good.” Tears stung his eyes. He nodded again.
“Here, have some of this.” The woman held a drinking bulb to his mouth. He sucked like a baby. It wasn’t milk, though. It was… Before he could find what that taste was, she told him: “Chicken broth goes down easy.”
It didn’t go down that easily. Swallowing took effort. Everything took effort. Of course, he’d been on ice for… how long? He didn’t need to ask, Where am I? — they’d told him that. But, “What year is this?” seemed a perfectly reasonable question, and so he asked it.
“It’s 2031,” his father answered. “If you look at it one way, you’re going to be eighty-eight toward the end of the year. Of course, if you look at it that way, I’m older than the hills, so I’d rather not.”
His father had seemed pretty old to Jonathan when he went into cold sleep. From thirty-three, which Jonathan had been then, seventy would do that. From fifty, where Jonathan was now, seventy still seemed a good age, but it wasn’t as one with the Pyramids of Egypt. I’ve done a lot of catching up with him, he realized. That’s pretty strange.
“Can I get up and have that look around?” he asked.
“If you can, you may,” the woman in the white smock answered, as precise with her grammar as Jonathan’s mother had always been.
“It’s a test,” his father added. “If you’re coordinated enough to get off the table, you’re coordinated enough to move around.”
It proved harder than Jonathan thought it would. What was that line from the Bible? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning — that was it. Both his right hand and his left seemed to have forgotten their cunning. Hell, they seemed to have forgotten what they were for.
Finally, he did manage to escape. “Whew!” he said. He hadn’t imagined a few buckles and straps could be so tough. The woman in white gave him shorts and a T-shirt to match what his father had on. He hadn’t noticed he was naked till then.
“Come on,” Sam Yeager said. “Control room is up through that hatchway.” He pushed off toward the hatchway with the accuracy of someone who’d been in space before. Come to that, Jonathan had, too. His own push wasn’t so good, but he could blame that on muscles that still didn’t want to do what they were supposed to. He not only could, he did.
Jonathan pulled himself up the handholds and into the control room. Along with his father, two officers were already in there. The leaner one eyed Jonathan, turned to the rounder one, and said, “Looks like his old man, doesn’t he?”
“Poor devil,” the rounder man… agreed?
“These refugees from a bad comedy show are Glen Johnson and Mickey Flynn,” Sam Yeager said, pointing to show who was who. “They’re the glorified bus drivers who got us here.”
“Two of the glorified bus drivers,” Flynn corrected. “Our most glorified driver is presently asleep. He does that every once in a while, whether he needs to or not.”
“Stone’d be happier if he didn’t,” Johnson said. “He’d be happier if nobody did.”
He and Flynn did sound like a team. Jonathan Yeager would have been more inclined to sass them about it if he hadn’t started staring at Home. He’d seen it in videos from the Race, of course, but the difference between a video on a screen and a real world out there seeming close enough to touch was about the same as the difference between a picture of a kiss and the kiss itself.
“Wow,” Jonathan said softly.
“You took the words out of my mouth, son,” his father said.
“We’re really here,” Jonathan whispered. Hearing about it in the room where he’d revived was one thing. Seeing a living planet that wasn’t Earth, seeing it in person and up close… “Wow,” he said again.
“Yes, we’re really here,” Flynn said. “And so the Lizards have laid out the red carpet for us, because they’re so thrilled to see us at their front door.”
“Excuse me,” Johnson said, and looked down at his wrist, as if at a watch. “I think my irony detector just went off.”
“Can’t imagine why.” Flynn cocked a hand behind one ear. “Don’t you hear the brass band? I’m just glad the Race never thought of cheerleaders.”
How long had the two of them been sniping at each other? They might almost have been married. A light went on in Jonathan’s head. “You two are off the Lewis and Clark, aren’t you?”
“Who, us?” Flynn said. “I resemble that remark.”
Johnson said, “It’s the stench of Healey, that’s what it is. It clings to us wherever we go.”
“Healey?” Jonathan wondered how hard his leg was being pulled.
“Our commandant,” Mickey Flynn replied. “Renowned throughout the Solar System-and now here, too-for the sweetness of his song and the beauty of his plumage.”
“Plumage, my ass,” Johnson muttered. “We thought we’d gone light-years to get away from him-worth it, too. But turns out he came along in cold sleep, so now he’s running this ship, dammit.”
“Healey’s a martinet-one of those people who give military discipline a bad name. There are more of them than there ought to be, I’m afraid,” Sam Yeager said.
Johnson looked as if he wanted to say even more than he had, but held back. That struck Jonathan as sensible. If this Healey was as nasty as all that, he made little lists and checked them a lot more than twice. “I wonder who’s president these days,” he remarked.
“As of last radio signal, it was a woman named Joyce Peterman,” Johnson replied, with a shrug that meant the news surprised him, too. “Of course, last radio signal left more than two terms ago, so it’s somebody else by now-or if it’s not, things have really gone to hell back there.”
“As long as the radio signals keep coming, I’m happy,” Jonathan’s father said. “They could elect Mortimer Snerd, and I wouldn’t care.”
Jonathan, who’d grown up as television ousted radio, bar
ely knew who Mortimer Snerd was. He understood what his father was talking about just the same. Radio signals from Earth to Tau Ceti meant the Lizards and the Americans-or the Russians, or the Japanese, or (since the last Nazi-Lizard war was almost seventy years past by now) even the Germans-hadn’t thrown enough missiles at one another to blast the home planet back to the Stone Age.
My kids are as old as I am now, Jonathan thought, and then he shook his head. That was wrong. If it was 2031, his kids were older than he was. In any sane universe, that should have been impossible. But then, nobody had ever shown this was a sane universe.
He looked up-or was it down? — at Home. The universe might not be sane, but it was beautiful.
“Radio signals are useful things,” Flynn said. “We let the Lizards know we were coming, so they could bake us a cake. And we let them know that if the signals from the Admiral Peary stopped coming while she was in the Tau Ceti system, we’d bake them a planet.” He paused for a precisely timed beat, and then finished, “I love subtle hints.”
“Subtle. Right.” But Jonathan knew the Lizards would be pitching a fit down there. This had been their imperial center for tens of thousands of years, the place from which they’d set out on their conquests. Now they had uninvited guests. No wonder they were jumpy.
“We’ve got one ship here,” Glen Johnson said. “One ship, against everything the Race has in space. They came at us with their goddamn conquest fleet when we were flying prop jobs. I don’t waste a lot of grief on them.”
“They didn’t even expect us to have those,” Jonathan’s father said. “They were looking for knights in shining armor. Hell, if you’ve ever seen that photo their probe took, they were looking for knights in rusty armor. If they’d found them, they might not have lost a male.”
The Race always took a long time to get ready before doing anything. That had saved mankind once. Jonathan dared hope it would work for the Admiral Peary, too. But the Lizards back home had seen they couldn’t sit around and dawdle when dealing with Big Uglies. Did the ones here also realize that? We’ll find out, he thought.
