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“How… Christian of you.” That was more mockery, now flaying rather than dancing. But Donald started slightly when he saw Mickey. “Ah, my Siamese twin. The only Lizard on four planets as screwed up as I am-except he won’t admit it.”
“Oh, I admit it,” Mickey said. “How could I do anything else? It’s true, for Christ’s sake. The difference is, I don’t think we can do anything about it now, and I don’t think there’s much point to getting upset about the way it happened.”
“Why not? They’re to blame.” Donald pointed to Karen and Jonathan. “Them and old Sam.”
“We’ll take some of the blame for the way you turned out-some, but not all,” Jonathan said. “You have to blame yourself, too.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Mickey said. Donald let out an angry hiss. Like some of the purely human noises Kassquit made when she was furious or surprised, that one seemed instinctive in the Race.
“Can I fix you a drink to go with everyone else‘s?” Karen asked Donald. She gave him her sweetest smile. “No need to check it for rat poison, I promise.”
“Meow,” he said. “Most of the time, I get paid for being rude-though there are some people for whom I’d do it for nothing. I’d love one, thanks. Whatever he’s having.” He pointed to Mickey’s rum and Coke. “You Yeagers made damn sure our tastes would be the same, didn’t you?”
“In a word, no,” Karen answered over her shoulder as she went back into the kitchen. “It did work out that way a lot of the time, but not always. It often does with two brothers, especially when they’re the same age.”
“Brothers? How do you know we’re brothers?” Donald said. “All we were when you got us was a couple of eggs. They could have come from anywhere-from two different anywheres. For all you know, they did.”
Now Karen and Jonathan looked at each other in consternation. They and Jonathan’s father had always assumed the eggs they’d got from the government came from the same female. Karen realized Donald was right: they had exactly zero proof of that. She wondered if the people who’d got the eggs from the Lizards had any idea whether they belonged together. After seventy years, she couldn’t very well ask. Odds were none of those people was still alive.
“If you want to know bad enough, there’s genetic testing,” Jonathan said.
“I’ve talked about it. The Race thinks I’m some kind of a pervert for caring one way or the other,” Donald answered. “But I do care-and there’s one more thing that’s your fault. I’m a goddamn human being with scales, that’s what I am. I already told you I watch Rita’s tits, didn’t I? Yeah, I thought so. I shouldn’t give a damn. I know I shouldn’t give a damn. But I do. I can’t help it. It’s how I was raised. Thanks a lot, both of you.” He raised his glass in a scornful salute, then gulped the drink.
“I watch women, too,” Mickey confessed. “I keep thinking they’re what I ought to want even though I can’t really want anything unless I smell a female’s pheromones. Even then, half of me thinks I ought to be mating with a pretty girl, not with a Lizard.”
Oh, Lord. They’re even more screwed up than Kassquit is, Karen thought miserably. As far as she knew, Kassquit had never wanted to lie down with a Lizard. But then, the Race didn’t parade sex out in front of everybody and use it to sell everything from soap to station wagons the way people did. Except during mating season, Lizards were indifferent-and after mating season, they tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. With humans, the titillation was always out there. Mickey and Donald had responded to it even if they couldn’t respond to it… and if that wasn’t screwed up, what the devil would be?
Donald thrust his glass out to her. “May I have a refill, please?” Now he didn’t even give her the excuse of rudeness to say no.
“All right.” She wasn’t all that sorry for a chance to retreat.
“We do have a lot to answer for. I know that,” Jonathan said. “We went ahead even after we knew what Kassquit was like. That should have warned us-it did warn us. But we went ahead anyway.”
Mickey slid a sly eye turret in Donald’s direction. “Don’t beat yourselves up about it too much. For all you know, he would have been crazy if the Lizards raised him, too.”
Donald used a negative gesture that didn’t come from the Race but that nobody in the USA was likely to misunderstand. “You just give them excuses,” he snarled.
“Enough!” Karen said suddenly. “Enough with all of this. We did what we did. It wasn’t perfect. It couldn’t have been, by the nature of things. But it was the best we knew how to do. And it’s over. We can’t take it back. If you want to hate us for what we did, Donald, go right ahead. We can’t do anything about that, either.”
“Well, well.” If anything ever fazed Donald, he didn’t let it show. “And I thought I was the one with the sharp teeth.” Letting his lower jaw drop, he showed off a mouthful of them. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll make nasty jokes about you on the show?”
“Go ahead, if that’s what you want to do,” Karen answered. “They’ll make you look worse than they do us, and you’ll just give me more juicy bits for my book. Or would you rather I put you over my knee and paddled you?”
She hadn’t done that since Donald was much smaller. Sometimes, as with human children, it had been the only way to get his attention. He rose now with what might have been anger or dignity. “No, thanks,” he said. “However messed up I am, I don’t take pain for pleasure.”
“Take it, no,” Karen said. “Give it…?”
Donald spun and sped out of the apartment. He didn’t even slam the door behind him. “Congratulations, I think,” Mickey said. “I’ve never seen anybody do that to him before.”
Karen got herself another scotch. As she put ice cubes into the whiskey, she said, “I don’t want congratulations. I want to go back into the bedroom and cry. Rip van Winkle didn’t know what to do when he woke up, either, and we were asleep a lot longer than he was.”
“O brave new world, that has such difficult people in’t!” Jonathan misquoted.
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Karen turned to Mickey. “Nothing personal.”
He shook his head. “It’s all personal. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be so upset.”
He was right, of course, and Karen knew it. She’d thought they could come back to America and fit in better than they’d managed in the few months since they’d come down from the Commodore Perry. Maybe things would improve as time went by. She hoped so. It wasn’t the country she’d left close to forty years earlier. She hadn’t changed, and it had, and she had trouble getting used to it. Who was right? Was she, for thinking things had been fine the way they were? Was the rest of the country, for going on about its business without her? Was it even a question of right and wrong, or just one of differences? She knew she’d be looking for answers the rest of her life.
The refectory was the only chamber in the Admiral Peary big enough to gather most of the crew together. Even Lieutenant General Healey came to hear the presentation by the officer from the Tom Edison. Seeing Healey’s bulky form did nothing to delight Glen Johnson, but he stayed as far away from the commandant as he could.
Lieutenant Colonel Katherine Wiedemann carried a mike the size of a finger that let her voice fill up the hall. They hadn’t had gadgets like that when Johnson went into cold sleep. “I want to thank you for your interest and attention,” she said, and tacked on an emphatic cough. “Ever since the Commodore Perry got here and found you’d arrived safely, we’ve had to work out what would be best for you. This was especially challenging because so many of you are restricted to weightlessness. But now we have the answer for you.”
“Not ‘we think we have the answer.’ Not ‘we have an answer,’ either,” Mickey Flynn murmured. “Oh, no. ‘We have the answer.’ ”
“Hush,” Johnson said. But he took Flynn’s point. These twenty-first-century Americans were a damned overbearing lot. They thought they could lord it over the twentieth-century crew of the Admiral Peary by virt
ue of owning forty more years of history. The evidence-and the power-were on their side, too.
“You will have a choice,” Lieutenant Colonel Wiedemann said. She was blond and stern-looking-if anyone argued with her, she was liable to send him to the woodshed. “You may stay here aboard the Admiral Peary if you like. Or you may return to the Solar System in the Tom Edison. ”
No matter how stern she was, she had to pause there because everybody in the refectory started talking at once. Three people shouted the question that was also uppermost in Johnson’s mind: “How? How do we do that?”
With the help of her strong little wireless mike, Lieutenant Colonel Wiedemann answered, “If you’ll listen to me-if you’ll listen to me — ladies and gentlemen, I’ll tell you.” She waited. The hubbub didn’t stop, but it did diminish. At last, she nodded. “Thank you for your attention.” She would have made a hell of a sixth-grade teacher. “We intend to send the Tom Edison off to the transition point at a lower acceleration than normal-just.05 g. Our medical experts are confident that this will not be dangerous even to those of you who have been weightless the longest. The journey will take longer because of the lower acceleration, but it will be safe.” Again, she left no possible room for doubt.
This time, Johnson was one of the people calling questions: “What do we do when we get there?”
