Homeward Bound (58 page)

“Madness,” Jonathan said. “After you had your audience with the Emperor, I thought everything was going to fall into place. We’d have peace, and nobody would have to worry about things for a while.” He chuckled unhappily. “Naive, wasn’t I?”

“Well, if you were, you weren’t the only one, because I felt the same way,” his father said. “And I really don’t know what queered the deal.”

“That experiment back on Earth, whatever it was?”

“I guess so,” his father said. “I’d like things a lot better if I knew what was going on there, though. The Lizards who do aren’t talking.” He paused to make sure the Race’s listening devices were suppressed, then spoke in a low voice: “The Emperor wouldn’t even tell Kassquit.”

Jonathan whistled softly. “Kassquit is as loyal to the Empire as the day is long. Or do the Lizards think she’ll spill everything she knows to Frank in pillow talk?” He threw his hands in the air to show how unlikely he thought that was.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know, dammit,” Sam Yeager said. “That’s possible—if the Lizards know us well enough to know what pillow talk is. But they do know we can bug their phone lines here, remember. That may be why Risson kept quiet. I can’t say for sure. Nobody human on Home can say for sure. That worries me, too.”

“Do they have any ideas on the
Admiral Peary
?” Jonathan asked.

“I asked Lieutenant General Healey.” His father’s mouth twisted, as if to say he considered that above and beyond the call of duty. “He hasn’t found anything yet, but there’s a hell of a lot of Lizard signal traffic between Earth and Home to sift through and sometimes try to decrypt, so who knows what he’ll come up with once he does some real digging?”

“And in the meantime . . .”

“In the meantime, he’s sending a war warning back to the USA,” his father said grimly. “Whatever the Lizards do, they won’t pull a Jap on us.”

“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said. That was a phrase from Sam Yeager’s generation. Jonathan understood it, though he wouldn’t have used it himself. He wondered how many Americans living right now would have any idea what it meant. Not many, he suspected.

“Wish I had better news for you, son,” his father said.

“So do I,” Jonathan said. “If I can do anything, you sing out, you hear?”

“I will,” his father promised. “That’s what you’re along for, after all. Right now, though, I have to tell you I don’t know what it would be. That’s not a knock on you. I don’t know what more I can do myself. I wish to hell I did.” Sam Yeager had always been a vigorous man who looked and acted younger than his years. But now the weight of worry made him seem suddenly old.

Jonathan walked over and set a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Something will turn up.”

“I hope so.” His father sounded bleak. “I’ll be damned if I know what it is, though. Of course, I would have said the same thing back in 1942, when the Lizards were knocking the crap out of us. Nobody had any idea what to do about them, either, not at first.”

“That’s what I hear,” Jonathan agreed. “Of course, I wasn’t around then. You were.”

“If I hadn’t been, you wouldn’t be around now.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan said.

His father looked back across the years. “And if your mother hadn’t been carrying you,” he said, as much to himself as to Jonathan, “I probably wouldn’t be
here
right now.”

Jonathan raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam Yeager blinked. He seemed to realize what he’d just said. A long sigh escaped him. “You know your mother was married to another guy before she met me.”

“Oh, sure,” Jonathan said. “He got killed when the Lizards invaded, right?”

“Well, yeah.” His father was staring into the past again. He looked . . . embarrassed? “It’s—a little more complicated than we ever talked about, though.”

“Whatever it is, I think you’d better spit it out, Dad,” Jonathan said. “Do I have to come ten light-years to get all the old family scandals?”

“Well, it looks like you probably do.” Sam Yeager not only looked embarrassed, he sounded embarrassed, too. “When your mother and I got married in beautiful, romantic Chugwater, Wyoming, we both thought her first husband was dead. That’s the God’s truth. We did.”

“But he wasn’t?” Jonathan said slowly. He didn’t know how to take that. It was news to him.

His father nodded. “He sure wasn’t. He was a physicist on our atomic-bomb project. Barbara—your mom—found out she was pregnant with you, and then she found out she wasn’t a widow—bang! like that.” Sam Yeager snapped his fingers.

“Jesus! You never told me any of this,” Jonathan said.

“It’s not exactly something we were proud of,” his father answered, which was probably the understatement of the year. “I always figured that, if she hadn’t had a bun in the oven, she would have gone back to the other guy—Jens, his name was. I never asked her—you’d better believe I didn’t!—but that’s what I figure. She did, though, and so she ended up choosing me . . . and the rest is history.”

“Christ!” Jonathan exclaimed. “Any
other
skeletons in the closet, as long as you’re in a confessing mood?”

“I don’t
think
so,” his father answered. “I guess I should have told you this a long time ago.”

“I guess you should have,” Jonathan said feelingly. “What the hell happened to this other guy? Do you even know?”

“Yeah. I know.” Sam Yeager’s face went even more somber than it had been. “He kind of went off the deep end after that, and who can blame him? He shot a couple of people before they finally got him. And sometimes I wonder what I would have done. . . .” His voice trailed away.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Dad!” Jonathan said. “You wouldn’t have done anything that nutty. It’s not your style, and you know it.”

His father only shrugged. “How can you tell till something happens? You can’t. Losing your mom screwed up the other guy’s whole life. It sure wouldn’t have done me any good. She was . . . something special.” Now his voice broke.

For him, Barbara Yeager hadn’t been dead long at all. He’d gone into cold sleep not long after she passed away. Jonathan had waited another seventeen years. He had scar tissue over the wound his father didn’t. But the other things his old man had told him . . . “Why did you sit on all this stuff for so long? Didn’t you think I had a right to know?”

Sam Yeager coughed a couple of times. “Well, part of it was that your mother never wanted to talk about it much. She always did her best to act as though it hadn’t happened. I think she felt bad about the way things turned out for the other guy. I know I would have in her shoes. How could you help it? It wasn’t even that she didn’t love him, or hadn’t loved him. That probably made it worse. Just—one of those things. She didn’t have any perfect choices. She made the one she made, and then she had to live with it. We all had to live with it.”

Except the other guy had turned out not to be able to. Jonathan had always thought his mother’s first husband was off the stage before she met his father. Nobody’d ever
said
so. It was just what he’d assumed, what his folks had wanted him to assume. He saw why they’d want him to—it was safe and conventional. The real story seemed anything but.

“Why tell me now?” he asked harshly.

“It’s the truth. I figured you ought to know.” His father’s mouth tightened. “And I have no idea what the odds of our coming through all this are. We may not have a whole lot of time.”

A deathbed confession? Not quite, but maybe not so far removed from one, either. Jonathan picked his words with care: “It must have been a crazy time, back when we were fighting the conquest fleet.”

His father nodded. “You can say that again. We didn’t know if we’d make it, or if we’d all get blown to hell and gone the next week or the next day or sometimes the next minute. A lot of us just . . . grabbed what we could, and didn’t give a damn about tomorrow. Why, I remember—”

“Remember what?” Jonathan asked when his father broke off.

But Sam Yeager only said, “Never mind. That really isn’t any of your business. I’m the only one left alive whose business it is, and I’ll take it to the grave with me.”

“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said, surprised by his father’s vehemence. But that was just one surprise piled on top of a ton of others. He tried to imagine his father and mother falling in love, falling into bed, her thinking she was a widow. . . . He tried, and felt himself failing. The picture refused to form. They were his parents. They were so much older than he was.

His father wasn’t so much older than he was as he had been before cold sleep. And once upon a time, long before cold sleep, his father had been younger still—and so had his mother. He still couldn’t imagine it.

He couldn’t imagine war with the Lizards, either. But that was liable to be every bit as real as his parents’ sex life.

Kassquit asked Frank Coffey, “Do you know what sort of experiments you Tosevites are carrying out on your home planet?”

“No.” The dark-skinned American Big Ugly made the negative gesture. “I know there are some, and I know the Race is worried about them. I was hoping you could tell me more.”

She let her mouth fall open in a silent laugh. “I went up to the Emperor himself, and he would not tell me. And if I knew, I would hurt the Empire by telling you.”

“If I knew, I might be hurting my not-empire by telling you,” Coffey said. “And yet we both keep trying to find out. Either we are both spies, or we have become very good friends.”

“Or both,” Kassquit said.

The American Tosevite laughed, though she hadn’t been joking. They lay on the sleeping mat in her room, both of them naked. They’d made love a while ago, but Frank Coffey hadn’t shown any interest in putting his wrappings on again. When even an air-conditioned room on Home was warmer than Tosevites found comfortable, wrappings made no sense to Kassquit. She knew wild Big Uglies had strong prohibitions against shedding their wrappings in public. She knew, but she did not understand. However irrational they were, the prohibitions seemed too strong to overcome. She’d given up trying.

“Will it be war?” she asked. The question was being asked more and more often in the hotel in Sitneff, by more and more Tosevites and members of the Race.

“I cannot tell you that,” Coffey answered. “I can tell you that the United States will not start a war against the Race. For us to start a war would make no sense. If the Race starts a war . . .” He shrugged. “We will fight back. We will fight back as hard as we can. You may rely on it.”

“Oh, I do,” Kassquit said. “The other part of the promise is what concerns me. The Deutsche tried a surprise attack against the Race.”

“I remember. I was a boy then,” Coffey said. That startled Kassquit for a moment. They seemed about the same age, but she’d come into adulthood when the Deutsche started the second major war between Big Uglies and the Race. Then she remembered she’d gone into cold sleep years before the American Tosevite had, and been kept in cold sleep till the
Admiral Peary
neared Home. Coffey went on, “They had radioactivity alerts every day. Depending on how bad the fallout was, sometimes they would not let us go out and play.”

“That sort of thing could happen here,” Kassquit said.

“Truth,” Coffey agreed. “Worse than that, much worse than that, could also happen here. And it could happen in my not-empire, too.”

Kassquit cared very little about the United States. She remembered only belatedly that Frank Coffey cared very little about the Empire. That struck her as strange. It would have struck an average member of the Race as even stranger. For more than a hundred thousand years, the Race hadn’t needed diplomatic relations with foreign empires. Those of the Rabotevs and Hallessi had fallen before earlier conquest fleets in the flick of a nictitating membrane.

Here as in everything else, the Big Uglies were different.

“If there is a war, Tosev 3 may not survive it,” Kassquit said. “What would you do then?”

“Personally? I am not sure,” Coffey answered. “I would not
know
the worst had happened for many years. That is something of a relief. But the question may be academic. The
Admiral Peary
and whatever other starships the United States is flying by then would do their best to make sure that whatever happened to Tosev 3 also happened to Home and the other worlds of the Empire.”

Was he speaking as someone who was simply concerned, or as an American military officer who wanted to make sure the Race’s military officers heard his words? He had to be sure Kassquit’s room was monitored. Kassquit was sure of it herself. She hated it, but didn’t know what she could do about it.

“How much damage could Tosevite starships do?” she asked, partly as a concerned citizen of the Empire and partly to make sure the Race’s military officers heard his reply.

What he said, though, wasn’t very informative: “How can I know for certain? I have been in cold sleep a long time. The state of the art back on Tosev 3 will have changed. I could not begin to guess the capabilities of the United States right now—or those of the other independent Tosevite empires and not-empires.”

Or maybe that wasn’t so uninformative after all. He’d managed to remind the Race it might not be fighting the United States alone. That was something military officers needed to think about, all right.

“If this war comes, it will be the worst anyone has ever known,” Kassquit said.

“No one could possibly say that is not a truth,” Coffey agreed gravely.

“Then why fight it?” Kassquit exclaimed.

“I speak for myself and for the United States when I say we do not want to fight it.” Frank Coffey used an emphatic cough. “But I also have to say again that, if the Race attacks us, we will fight back, and fight back as hard as we can.” He added another one.

“Where is the sense to it?” Kassquit asked.

“As for myself, I do not see that sense anywhere,” the American Big Ugly said. “But I can tell you where I think the Race sees it.”

“Where?”

“The Race fears that, no matter how bad the war would be if they fought it now, it would be even worse if they waited till later,” Coffey answered. “This is a mistaken attitude. The United States is completely happy to be a good neighbor to the Empire—as long as the Empire stays a good neighbor to us.”