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Something else occurred to him. As casually as he could, he asked his father, “Have we heard from Kassquit? Did she make it through cold sleep all right?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact,” Sam Yeager answered with a rather sheepish grin. “Difference is, you know she went into cold sleep. I didn’t, because she went in after me. I got a jolt when I heard what had to be a human speaking the Lizards’ language and asking for Regeya.”
Jonathan laughed. The two American pilots looked blank. “Regeya?” Flynn said plaintively, while Johnson asked, “Just who is this Kassquit person, anyway? A traitor? You never did exactly explain that, Sam.”
“Regeya’s the name I used on the Lizards’ electronic network back home,” Jonathan’s father said. “And no, Kassquit’s not a traitor, not the way you mean. She’s got a right to be loyal to the other side. She was raised by the Lizards ever since she was a tiny baby.”
“You’ve met her?” Glen Johnson asked. Jonathan and his father both nodded.
“Raised by Lizards, was she?” Flynn said. The Yeagers nodded again. The pilot asked, “And how crazy is she?”
Sam Yeager looked to Jonathan, who knew her better. “Some,” Jonathan said. “Maybe more than some. But less than you’d expect. She’s very smart. I think that helped.” We did the same thing to Mickey and Donald, too, he thought. They at least had each other. Kassquit didn’t have anybody.
His father was still looking at him. He knew all the reasons Jonathan had asked about Kassquit. Oh, yes. He knew. And so would Karen.
Consciousness came back to Karen Yeager very slowly. She couldn’t tell when dreams stopped and mundane reality returned. She’d been dreaming about Jonathan and his father. Next thing she knew, she saw them. She would have accepted that as part of the dream, for they were both floating in space in front of her, and dreams were the only place where you could fly. But then she realized they weren’t flying, or not exactly, and that she was weightless, too.
“We made it,” she whispered. Her tongue felt like a bolt of flannel. It didn’t want to shape the words.
“We sure did, honey.” Jonathan had no trouble talking. For a moment, Karen resented that. Then, on hands and knees, a thought crawled through her head. Oh. He’s been awake for a while.
“How are you, Mrs. Yeager?” That brisk female voice hadn’t been part of her dream. The woman in a white smock also floated above her head.
Answer. I have to answer. “Sleepy,” Karen managed.
“Well, I’m not surprised. All your vital signs are good, though,” the woman said. “Once the drugs wear off and you get used to being normal body temperature again, you’ll do fine. I’m Dr. Blanchard, by the way.”
“That’s nice,” Karen said vaguely. She turned toward Sam Yeager. “Hello. It’s been a while.” She laughed. She felt more than a little drunk, and more than a little confused, too. “How long has it been, anyway?”
“Everybody asks that once the fog starts to clear,” Dr. Blanchard said. “It’s 2031.” She gave Karen a moment to digest that. It was going to take more than a moment. I’m almost ninety years old, Karen thought. But she didn’t feel any different from the way she had when she went into cold sleep. She looked at her father-in-law again. How old is Sam? She had trouble with the subtraction.
The woman in the smock gave her chicken soup. Swallowing proved at least as hard as talking, but she managed. She felt better with the warm broth inside. It seemed to help anchor her to the here and now.
“Can I get up?” she asked.
Jonathan and his father both started to laugh. “We both had to figure out how, and now you do, too,” Jonathan said. After some fumbling-her hands still didn’t feel as if they belonged to her-Karen managed to undo the fasteners that held her to the revival bed. Only a towel covered her. Dr. Blanchard chased the male Yeagers out of the revival room and gave her shorts and a shirt like the ones they had on. Then they were suffered to return. She pushed off toward them.
When she came up to Jonathan, he gave her a quick kiss. Then he let her go. He’d known her a long time. Had he tried for anything more than a quick kiss just then, she would have done her feeble best to disembowel him.
She saw her father-in-law watching her in a peculiar way. Sam Yeager had always noticed her as a woman. He’d never once been obnoxious about it, but he had. Now, for no reason at all, she found herself blushing. Then she shook her head, realizing it wasn’t for no reason at all. “I’ve just aged seventeen years right before your eyes, haven’t I?” she said.
“Not a bit,” he said. “You’ve aged maybe five of them.”
Karen laughed. “Did they bring the Blarney Stone along so you could kiss it while I was asleep?” She was a child-a great-grandchild, actually-of the Old Sod, even if her maiden name, Culpepper, was English.
Then Jonathan said, “Dad’s right, hon.”
She tried to poke her husband in the ribs. “You of all people really ought to know better. It’s very sweet and everything, but you ought to.”
“Nope.” He could be stubborn-now, maybe, endearingly stubborn. “Here on the Admiral Peary, he really is right. We’re weightless. Nothing sags the way it would under gravity.” He patted his own stomach by way of illustration.
“Hmm.” Karen thought that over. She didn’t have a mirror-which, right after cold sleep, was bound to be a mercy-but she could look at Jonathan and Sam. “Maybe.” That was as much as she was going to admit.
Jonathan pointed to the passageway where he and his father had gone while she dressed. “Home’s out there waiting, if you want to have a look.”
Sam Yeager added, “It’s out there waiting even if you don’t want to have a look.”
Jonathan grunted. “You’ve been listening to that Mickey Flynn too much, Dad.”
“Who’s Mickey Flynn?” Karen asked.
“One of the pilots,” her husband answered darkly.
“He’s a bad influence,” her father-in-law added. “He’s a professional bad influence, you might say. He’s proud of it. He has a dry wit.”
“Any drier and it‘d make Home look like the Amazon jungle,” Jonathan said.
“Okay,” Karen said. “Now I’m intrigued. Would I rather meet him or the Lizards’ planet?” She pushed off toward the passageway.
But Mickey Flynn wasn’t in the control room. The pilot who was, a sober-looking fellow named Walter Stone, said, “Pleased to meet you, ma‘am,” when Jonathan introduced her to him, then went back to studying his radar screen. Karen saw how many blips were on it. That still left her slightly miffed. Stone seemed to care more for machines than he did for people.
Then Karen stopped worrying about the pilot, because the sight of Home made her forget him and everything else. She knew the map of Tau Ceti 2 as well as she knew the map of Earth. Knowing and seeing were two different things. Someone softly said, “Ohh.” After a moment, she realized that was her own voice.
“That’s what I said, too, hon,” Jonathan said.
Stone looked over his shoulder. “We’ll deal with whatever they throw at us,” he said. “And if they start throwing things at us, we’ll make ’em sorry they tried.”
Karen believed the last part. The Admiral Peary was armed. A ship that went to strange places had to be. If the Lizards attacked it, it could hurt them. Deal with whatever they threw at it? Maybe Brigadier General Stone was an optimist. Maybe he thought he was reassuring her.
She didn’t feel reassured. That was what she got for knowing too much. She stared down at the golds and greens and blues-more golds, fewer greens and blues than Earth-spread out below her. “They’re the only ones who’ve ever flown into or out of this system till now,” she said. “We hadn’t even started farming when they conquered the Rabotevs.”
“And they were in space inside this system for God only knows how many thousand years before that,” Sam Yeager said. “They’ve got reasons to be antsy about strangers.”
“We’ve got reasons for coming here,”
Karen said. “They gave us most of them.”
“Don’t I know it!” her father-in-law said. “I was on a train from Madison down to Decatur when they came to Earth. They shot it up. Only dumb luck they didn’t blow my head off.”
“I’m glad they didn’t,” Jonathan said. “If they had, I wouldn’t be here. And I sure wouldn’t be here. ” He pointed out toward Home.
Would I be here? Karen wondered. The Race had fascinated her ever since she was little. Even if she’d never met Jonathan, she probably would have done something involving them. Would it have been enough to get her aboard the Admiral Peary? How could she know? She couldn’t.
