Homeward Bound (79 page)

“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 virtue 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?”

Maybe he was very loud. Or maybe she was going to answer that question next anyhow. “When you arrive in Earth orbit, you will have another choice,” she declared. “You may stay in orbit, in weightlessness, on one of the U.S. space stations, for the rest of your lives. The stronger of you may also choose to settle at Moon Base Alpha or Moon Base Beta. The gravity on the Moon is .16 g. Permission to settle there will be granted only with the approval of physicians at the space stations.”

Johnson tried to imagine himself with weight again. The trip back on the
Tom Edison
didn’t worry him so much; his effective weight there would be about eight pounds. He exercised regularly, and was sure he could deal with that. But if he tried to go live on the Moon, he’d weigh about twenty-five pounds. That was enough to notice. Some people—Flynn, Stone, and Lieutenant General Healey, too—had been weightless even longer than he had, because they’d gone into cold sleep later. But it had still been close to twenty years by his body clock since he’d felt gravity.

“What do we do if we stay?” someone asked.

“In that case, you will remain aboard the
Admiral Peary,
” Lieutenant Colonel Wiedemann replied. “We will send replacements across from the
Tom Edison
to handle the jobs of those who elect to return to the Solar System. We want to continue to have an armed presence in the Tau Ceti system—and a monitoring presence, too. This ship is the only choice available for that until we have more FTL craft in service. That day is coming, but it is not yet here.”

More questions followed, but those were the ones that mattered most. “What do you think?” Johnson asked Flynn as the gathering broke up.

“Interesting choice,” the other pilot answered. “We can be obsolescent here or obsolete there.”

That was about the size of it. Johnson said, “New faces back there.”

Flynn twisted his not-so-new face into a not-so-happy expression. “By what I’ve seen from the
Commodore Perry
and the
Tom Edison,
new faces are overrated. They’re an improvement on yours, sure, but that’s not saying much.”

“Gee, thanks a bunch,” Johnson said. Mickey Flynn regally inclined his head.

Lieutenant General Healey zoomed past, as usual a bull in a china shop. “No, I’m not going anywhere,” he said to anyone who would listen. “My assignment is commandant of the
Admiral Peary,
and I aim to carry it out. When I leave this ship, I’ll leave feet first.”

Johnson hadn’t been in much doubt about what he would do. Hearing that removed the last traces of it. Going back to Earth would be strange. Seeing it and not being able to land on it would be frustrating. Spending the rest of his life with Lieutenant General Healey would be like going to hell before he died.

He didn’t know how much that particular worry bothered other people, but a majority of the crew on the
Admiral Peary,
Mickey Flynn among them, applied to go back to the Solar System. Johnson wondered if Healey would try to hold him back, but the commandant didn’t. Healey probably wanted to be rid of him as much as he wanted to be rid of Healey.

When a shuttlecraft took Johnson to the
Tom Edison,
his first thought was that the new starship felt much more finished than the
Admiral Peary
did. The
Admiral Peary
was a military ship first, last, and always, and had no frills or fanciness of any sort. The
Tom Edison
’s accommodations, though cramped, were far more comfortable. And computers had come a long way since the
Admiral Peary
left the Solar System. Johnson discovered he had access to an enormous library of films and television programs, including a whole great swarm that were new to him because they’d been made since he went on ice. He hoped that meant he wouldn’t be bored on the way back to Earth.

No matter what Lieutenant Colonel Wiedemann said, he had worried about what owning any sort of weight again would do to him. But the tough-looking officer turned out to have known what she was talking about. The only time he really noticed he had weight was when he missed a handhold as he brachiated through the starship. Then he’d slowly glide to the floor instead of just floating along to the next one. His legs proved plenty strong to push him on to the next gripping point.

Mickey Flynn weighed more than eight pounds, but he also seemed to be coping well enough. “Nice to eat new meals,” he remarked in the galley one day, then raised his hand in self-correction. “I should say, new styles of meal. We didn’t eat the same supper over and over on the
Admiral Peary,
after all.”

“No, it only seemed that way,” Johnson agreed. “Of course, these ships don’t have to recycle as much as we did. They can get resupplied whenever they come back to the Solar System. We were out there for the long haul.”

“It certainly seemed like a long haul,” Flynn said, and Johnson couldn’t very well argue with that.