Homeward Bound (10 page)

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.

An enormous yawn tried to split her face in two. “That happened to me after I’d been awake for a little while,” Jonathan said. “They’ve given us a cabin for two, if you want to sleep for a bit.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Karen said.

“It’s right next to mine,” her father-in-law added. “If you leave the TV on too loud, I’ll bang my shoe against the wall.”

Brigadier General Stone looked pained. “It’s not a wall. It’s a bulkhead.” He and Sam Yeager wrangled about it, not quite seriously, as Jonathan led Karen out of the control room and back to the fluorescent-lit painted metal that was the starship’s interior.

The cabin didn’t seem big enough for one person, let alone two. When Karen saw the sleeping arrangements, she started to giggle. “Bunk beds!”

“Don’t let Stone hear you say that,” Jonathan warned. “He’ll probably tell you they’re supposed to be bulkbunks, or something.”

“I don’t care.” Karen was still giggling. “When I was a little kid, my best friend had a sister who was only a year younger than she was, and they had bunk beds. I was so jealous. You can’t believe how jealous I was.”

“They’ve got the same sort of straps on them that the revival bed did,” Jonathan said. “We won’t go floating all over the cabin.”

“I wish they’d spin the ship and give us some gravity,” Karen said. “But it would kill the guys from the
Lewis and Clark,
wouldn’t it?”

“Like that.” Her husband snapped his fingers. “It would screw up fire control, too. We’re stuck with being weightless till the Lizards let us go down to Home.”

Karen grimaced at the thought of fire control: a euphemism for
this is how we shoot things up.
The grimace turned into yet another yawn. “Dibs on the top bunk,” she said, and got into it. As she fastened herself in, a question bubbled up to the top of her mind: “Have we . . . lost anybody?”

“A couple of people,” Jonathan answered. “It was a little riskier than they said it would be. I suppose that figures. I’m damn glad you’re here, sweetie. And I’m glad Dad is. They really didn’t know what they were doing when they put him under.”

“I’m glad you’re here, too,” Karen said. The chill that ran through her had nothing to do with cold sleep. How sorry would certain people back on Earth have been if Sam Yeager hadn’t revived? Not very, she suspected. She also suspected she was falling asleep no matter what she could do about it. Moments later, that suspicion was confirmed.

When she woke up, she felt better. She realized how groggy she’d been before. The buckles on the bunk were just like the ones on the revival bed. Those had almost baffled her. She opened these without even thinking about it. When she pushed out of the bunk toward a handhold on the far—not very far—wall, she saw Jonathan reading in the bottom bunk. He looked up from the papers and said, “Hi, there.”

“Hi, there yourself,” Karen said. “How long was I out?”

“Just a couple of hours.” He waved papers at her. “This is stuff you’ll need to see—reports on what’s been going on back on Earth since we went under. We’ve got to be as up-to-date as the Lizards are, anyhow.”

“I’ll look at it.” Karen laughed. “It still feels like too much work.”

“Okay. I know what you mean,” Jonathan said. “I’m a day and a little bit ahead of you, and I’m still not a hundred percent, either—not even close. Still, one of these days before we go down to Home, it might be fun to try it weightless. What do you think?”

If Jonathan was chipper enough to contemplate sex, he was further ahead of Karen than he knew. What she said was, “Not tonight, Josephine.” What she thought was,
Maybe not for the next six months, or at least not till all the drugs wear off.

She also almost reminded him that he’d already fooled around in space. At the last minute, she didn’t. It wasn’t so much that he would point out he hadn’t been weightless then; the Lizards’ ship had spun to give it artificial gravity. But she didn’t want him thinking about Kassquit, and about the days when he’d been young and horny all the time, any more than he had to. Yes, keeping quiet seemed a very good idea.

* * *

Sam Yeager spent as much time as he could in the
Admiral Peary
’s control room. Part of that was because he couldn’t get enough of looking at Home. Part of it was because the control room wasn’t far from the revival room. He got the chance to say hello to some people he hadn’t seen for more than fifty years. That was what the calendar insisted, anyway. To him, it seemed like days or weeks. It was a matter of years to them, but not anything like fifty.

And he enjoyed the company of Glen Johnson and Mickey Flynn—and, to a lesser degree, that of Walter Stone. Stone was too much the regulation officer for Sam to feel completely comfortable around him. Such men were often necessary. Yeager knew as much. But he wasn’t one of them himself, and, as far as he was concerned, they were also often annoying. He gave no hint of that opinion any place where Stone could overhear him.

Johnson, now, Johnson was as much of a troublemaker as Sam was himself. The authorities had known as much, too. Yeager asked him, “Did you get the subtle hints that it would be a good idea for you to go into cold sleep if you wanted to have a chance to keep breathing?”

“Subtle hints?” The pilot considered. “Well, that depends on what you mean. Healey didn’t quite say, ‘You have been ordered to volunteer for this procedure.’ He didn’t quite say it, but he sure meant it. You, too, eh?”

“Oh, yes.” Sam nodded. “They looked at me and they thought,
Indianapolis.
I’m not sorry I’m a long way away.”

“I’ve been in Indianapolis,” Flynn said. “They should have given you a medal.”

Sam scowled and shook his head. Johnson said, “Not funny, Mickey.”

“They were people there. Everybody back in the States thought I forgot about that or didn’t care,” Sam said. “What they wouldn’t see was that the Lizards we blew up were people, too.”

“That’s it,” Johnson agreed. “I was up there on patrol when we did that. I figured it was the Reds or the Nazis, but it wasn’t. The Lizards would have got their own back against them. They had to against us, too.”

“We spent so much time and so much blood making the Race believe we were people, and deserved to be treated like people,” Yeager said. “Then we didn’t believe it about them. If that’s not a two-way street, it doesn’t work at all.”

Before either of the pilots could say anything, alarms blared. They both forgot about Sam and swung back to the instrument panels. Equipment failure? Lizard attack? No and no. The urgent voice on the intercom said what it was: “Code blue! Code blue! Dr. Kaplan to the revival room! Dr. Garvey to the revival room! Dr. Kaplan! Dr. Garvey! Code blue! Code blue!”

“Damn,” Glen Johnson said softly.

“Yeah.” Yeager nodded. When the Lizards went into cold sleep, they were all but guaranteed to come out again when revival time rolled around. As often happened when humans adopted and adapted the Race’s techniques, they made them work, but less efficiently. Sam often wondered how very lucky he was to have awakened here in orbit around Tau Ceti 2.

“Who’s getting revived now?” the pilot asked.

“I haven’t looked at the schedule for today,” Sam answered. “Do you have a copy handy?”

“I ought to, somewhere.” Johnson flipped through papers clipped together and held on a console by large rubber bands so they wouldn’t float all over the place. He found the one he wanted and went down it with his finger. Suddenly, he stopped. “Oh, shit,” he muttered.

“Who, for God’s sake?” Sam asked.

“It’s the Doctor,” Johnson said.

“Christ!” Sam exclaimed. People had been calling the diplomat the Doctor for years. He was a lucky Jew: his parents had got him out of Nazi Germany in 1938, when he was fifteen. He’d been at Harvard when the Lizards came, and spent a hitch in the Army afterwards. When the fighting ended, he’d gone back to school and earned his doctorate in nineteenth-century international relations.

He’d moved back and forth between universities and the government from that time on. Ever since Henry Cabot Lodge retired in the early 1970s, he’d been the U.S. ambassador to the Race. With his formidably intelligent face and his slow, ponderous, Germanic way of speaking, he was one of the most recognizable men on Earth. He would have been a natural to head up the first American mission to Home.

Sam wondered when the Doctor had gone into cold sleep. Probably not till just before the
Admiral Peary
took off. The two of them had met several times before Sam went under, and the Doctor had consulted him about the Race by telephone fairly regularly. Sam had looked forward to working with the diplomat here ever since spotting his name on the list.

He had, yes. Now . . . Hoping against hope, he asked, “Have they ever managed to revive anybody they’ve called a code blue on?”

Glen Johnson shook his head. “Not that I remember.”

“I didn’t think so. I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

He wondered if he ought to pull himself down the hatchway and see what was going on in the revival room. Regretfully, he decided that wasn’t a good idea. Everybody in there would be desperately trying to resuscitate the Doctor. As soon as anyone noticed him rubbernecking, they’d all scream at him to get the hell out of there.

“If the Doctor doesn’t make it,” Johnson said slowly, “who the hell dickers with the Lizards?”

“I haven’t studied the whole passenger list,” Sam said. “Besides, who knows how many people got important between the time when I went under and when the
Admiral Peary
took off?”