Homeward Bound

20

Bruce Yeager had settled his parents into a two-bedroom apartment in Torrance, not far from where they’d lived before going into cold sleep. The furniture, or most of it, was even their own; the government had stored it against the off chance they’d come back. The stove and the refrigerator were new, and much more efficient than the ones they replaced.

Jonathan Yeager didn’t much care about efficiency. What mattered to him was that Karen should like them. She did.

Also new was the computer. The one that had gone into storage was a hopeless antique. This one… This one would do everything but tie Jonathan’s shoes. As a matter of fact, it could do that, too, if he fitted it with a waldo attachment. Such things were common and cheap these days. They made life closer to tolerable for handicapped people, and had countless industrial uses besides.

Before very long, Jonathan realized he was a handicapped person in this Los Angeles. He knew exactly what his handicap was, too: he was missing almost forty years. Knowing didn’t help. He had no idea how to fix it.

When he complained, Karen said, “It’s nothing we have to worry about right away. We may be missing the years, but we’re not missing the money from them. We won’t miss any meals, either-I promise you that.”

“I know,” he said. “But I don’t want to sit back and twiddle my thumbs the rest of my life. I want to do something useful, and it doesn’t look like anything I can do is useful any more.”

“We both still know the Race well,” Karen said.

He shook his head. “Here, we knew the Race well. We know it well on Home. We’re up to date there. We’re most of a lifetime behind here. Who’d want to pay us to catch up?”

Karen started to say something, but she didn’t. Jonathan had a pretty good idea of what she’d swallowed. Yes, their son would doubtless put them on his payroll. That stuck in Jonathan’s craw. He didn’t think he’d mind working for Bruce. But he would mind getting a sinecure, and anything he would do would only be worth a sinecure.

“I think I’d rather try to write my memoirs,” he said. “They’d be up to the minute-well, pretty close, now-and I can tell a story hardly anybody else will ever be able to.”

“Can you do it well enough to get people to pay money for it?” Karen said. “I’ve been asking myself the same question.”

“We’ve both done plenty of writing,” Jonathan answered. “We ought to try, anyhow. I think we can do it.” He managed a wry grin. “It’s our story. What could be more interesting to us than we are?”

“To us, yeah,” Karen said. “How about to anyone else?”

“All we can do is give it our best shot.” Jonathan laughed out loud. “Maybe we should ask Mickey who his literary agent is.”

“Yes, I think we should,” Karen said, and she wasn’t laughing at all. She sounded bleak, in fact, as she went on, “For one thing, that may help us. For another, Mickey doesn’t hate us-or if he does, he’s more polite about it than Donald.”

“He gives us more credit for doing the best we could.” Jonathan wondered how good that best had been. “I think we did better with them than Ttomalss did with Kassquit.”

“Not a fair comparison,” Karen said. “We knew a lot more about the Race when we started than Ttomalss did about us when he started. And Mickey and Donald had each other for company. That had to help, too.” Jonathan might have known his wife wouldn’t cut Kassquit any slack. But then Karen surprised him by adding, “She’ll have her baby before too long.”

“So she will,” Jonathan said. “I think Frank was smart to go back: over there, he’s not behind the times. He helped make the arrangements the new people are dealing with.”

“The new people.” Karen tasted the phrase. “They really do feel like that, don’t they? Like they just started out and everything’s ahead of them, I mean. Even when they’re our age, they’ve got that feel to them. I don’t know whether to be jealous or to want to pound some sense into their stupid heads.”

“They’re like the people who went West in covered wagons,” Jonathan said. “They can taste the wide open spaces in front of them. And do they ever have them! Jesus! Light-year after light-year of wide open spaces. No wonder they’ve got that look in their eye and they don’t want to pay any attention to us. We’re the city slickers who just want to stay back in Philly-and that even though we went traveling.”

“Yeah.” His wife nodded. “What we did hardly counts these days. It was all the Lizards had for all those thousands of years. It’s still all they have. And it’s as obsolete as we are.”

Jonathan nodded, too. “Melanie will have to go back to school if she wants to keep on being a doctor. They know so much more now than they did when she went on ice. Tom and Linda are as out of date as we are. And Dad’s got it even worse. He’s older, and he spent all those extra years in cold sleep.”

“I think he’ll do fine, though, once he gets his feet on the ground,” Karen said. “He’s had to adapt before. Look how much things changed for him when the Lizards came, but he did okay then. Better than okay, in fact.”

“Hope you’re right,” Jonathan answered. Again, he didn’t much feel like arguing with his wife. He didn’t have much from which to argue: only the lost look he thought he saw in his father’s eyes. He suspected his old man would have indignantly denied it if anyone called him on it. He also suspected the denial would mean nothing, or maybe a little less. Instead of arguing, Jonathan said, “Want to go to a movie tonight?”

“Sure,” Karen said, and then, with a wry smile of her own, “This is supposed to help us fit into the here-and-now?”

“Well… It depends on which one we pick,” Jonathan said. When he and Karen were dating, films showed things they hadn’t when his father was a young man. When his sons started taking girls out, films showed things they hadn’t in his day. The trend hadn’t slowed down while he and Karen went to Home and back. A lot of what ordinary people lined up to see now would have been blue movies in the 1960s.

They didn’t have drive-ins any more, either. Jonathan had fond memories of the one on Vermont, but apartment buildings stood where the lot and the big screen had been. Boys and girls these days didn’t seem to feel the lack, so they must have had other ways to find privacy when they wanted it.

Karen flipped through the Los Angeles Times. Just about all the photos and ads in the paper were in color, which they hadn’t been in 1994. “We don’t want the sappy kiddy shows,” she said. “Those are just as bad as they ever were, maybe worse.” Jonathan didn’t argue with that, either. She pointed to one movie ad and started to giggle. “Here. The Curse of Rhodes. A horror flick. How can they mess that up?”

“Isn’t that why we’re going?” Jonathan asked. Karen raised an eyebrow. He explained: “To find out how they can mess it up.”

“Oh.” Karen laughed. “Sure. But we know from the start that this is hokum.” She pointed to the ad again. A bronze statue strode across what was presumably the Aegean with a naked girl in its arms. A few wisps of her long blond hair kept things technically decent.

“Works for me,” Jonathan said solemnly. Karen made the kind of noise that meant she would clobber him if she weren’t such an enlightened, tolerant wife: a noise only a little less effective than a real set of lumps would have been. Jonathan mimed a whiplash injury and pointed out, “You were the one who suggested it.”

“Well, let’s go,” she said. “We can always throw popcorn at the screen if it gets too awful.” She paused. “We may pick different times.”

“Here’s hoping,” Jonathan said, and laughed when she made a face at him.

Most of the people buying tickets for the movie were in their teens or twenties. Most of the ones who weren’t had ten- or twelve-year-old boys in tow. Jonathan and Karen looked at each other, as if to ask, What are we getting ourselves into? They both started to laugh. Maybe a really bad horror movie was just what they needed.

Jonathan bought popcorn and candy and Cokes. The smells of the concession stand hadn’t changed a bit since before he went into cold sleep. Prices had, but not too badly. Even back then, theaters had gouged people on snacks.

The slope of the rows of seats was steeper than it had been back in a twentieth-century theater. That let each seat have a proper back without interfering with children’s views of the screen. Some unknown genius had thought of putting a cup holder in each armrest. The rows were father apart than they had been; Jonathan could stretch out his feet. He closed his eyes. “Good night.”

“If you can’t stay awake to leer at the naked girls, don’t expect me to shake you,” Karen said. He sat up very straight. She poked him.

Down went the lights. There were more ads and fewer coming attractions than Jonathan remembered. Maybe that meant he was turning into a curmudgeon. But, by body time, it hadn’t been that long ago, so maybe the folks who ran things were trying harder to squeeze money out of people. The sound was louder than he remembered, too. He had as much trouble enjoying the music as his father had had with what he’d listened to when he was young.

That same pounding, noisy beat suffused The Curse of Rhodes. For a while, he hardly noticed it. The special effects were astonishing. A lot of them would have been impossible, or impossibly expensive, in the twentieth century. Computers could do all sorts of things that had been beyond them in those days.

And then Jonathan noticed something that wasn’t a special effect. He stared at the elderly archaeologist who was trying to calm the frightened young hero and heroine-and who was bound to come to a Bad End before long. “Look at that guy,” he whispered to Karen. “I’ll be damned if that’s not Matt Damon.”

She eyed the actor. “My God! You’re right. He used to be just a little older than our kids-and he still is.” She squeezed his hand. “We’ve been away a long time.”

The Curse of Rhodes showed that in other ways, too. The violence was one thing. Gore and horror movies went together like pepperoni and pizza. But some of the doings between the hero, the heroine, and the resurrected, bad-tempered Colossus of Rhodes… Jonathan wouldn’t have taken a ten-year-old to see them in 1994. He wasn’t so sure he would have gone himself. The heroine was either a natural blonde or very thorough. She was also limber enough for an Olympic gymnast, though he didn’t think they gave gold medals in that.

As the Colossus sank beneath the waves-gone for good or ready to return in a sequel, depending on how The Curse of Rhodes did-and the credits rolled, the house lights came up. “What did you think?” Karen asked.

“I know what the curse of Rhodes is now,” Jonathan said. “The screenwriter, or maybe the director.” Karen stuck out her tongue at him. He went on, “It was really dumb and really gory and really dirty.”

She nodded. “That’s what we came for.”

Was it? Jonathan wasn’t so sure. He thought they’d come not least to try to forge some link between the time in which they’d lived and the one in which they found themselves. The movie hadn’t done it-not for him, anyhow. Instead, it reminded him over and over what a stranger he was here and now. With a shrug, he started for the parking lot. Maybe time would help. Maybe nothing would. He’d have to find out day by day, that was all.

Some things didn’t change. The building in downtown Los Angeles where Sam Yeager faced a colonel who’d been born about the time he left for Tau Ceti was the one where he’d worked a generation before that, before he got saddled with the responsibility for Mickey and Donald. The office furniture hadn’t changed much, either. He wondered whether that battered metal desk could possibly date from the 1960s.

Colonel Goldschmidt said, “No, you are not permitted to see any Lizards. You might pass intelligence from Fleetlord Atvar to them.”

You bureaucratic idiot. Sam didn’t say it. He was ever so tempted, but he didn’t. What a good boy am I, he thought, even if he didn’t have a plum on his thumb. Clinging to shreds of patience, he said, “Colonel, you or somebody gave me permission to see Atvar. I’m sure you or somebody listened to what we said. If I’d wanted to do that, I could have gone to a pay phone the minute I got out of his hotel room.”

“But you didn’t do that. You didn’t telephone any Lizards from your place of residence, either.” Goldschmidt had a narrow face with cold blue eyes set too close together. He wore a wedding ring, which proved somebody loved him. Sam wondered why.

“So you’ve been monitoring me,” he said. Goldschmidt nodded. Sam asked, “If you people thought I was that big a menace, why did you let me see him in the first place?”

“There were discussions about that,” Goldschmidt replied. He gave no details. Even though the discussions had been about Yeager, the hatchet-faced colonel’s view was that they were none of his business. “It was decided that the risk was acceptable.”

It was decided. Maybe that meant God had sent down a choir of angels with the answer. More likely, it meant no one wanted to admit he’d done the deciding. No, some things didn’t change. Sam said, “Seems to me you people didn’t think this through as well as you might have. Now that I have seen Atvar, how are you going to keep me away from Lizards for the rest of my life? When I take an elevator down to the lobby and walk out on the street, it’s better than even money that I bump into one, or two, or three. We’re only a few blocks from the Race’s consulate, you know.”

Colonel Goldschmidt looked as if his stomach pained him. “I have my orders, Mr. Yeager. You are not permitted to travel to any territory occupied by the Race or to contact any members of the Race.”

“Then you can lock me up and throw away the key”-Sam was careful to use the human idiom, not the Lizards’-“because I’ve already done it.”

“What? Where? How?” Now Goldschmidt looked horrified. Had something slipped past him and his stooges?

“My adopted sons-Mickey and Donald,” Sam said.

“Oh. Them.” Relief made the colonel’s voice sound amazingly human for a moment. “They don’t count. They’re U.S. citizens, and are considered reliable.”

“What about other Lizards who are U.S. citizens? There are lots of them.” Sam took a certain malicious glee in being difficult.

“As we have not made determinations as to their reliability, they are off-limits for you at this point in time,” Colonel Goldschmidt said.

Yeager got to his feet. He gave Goldschmidt his sweetest smile. “No.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a technical term meaning, well, no,” Sam answered. “I suppose you can keep me from leaving the country if you don’t issue me a passport-Lord knows my old one’s expired. But if I want to see old friends, I will. Or if I bump into a Lizard on the street, I’ll talk to him. You may decide you made a mistake letting me see Atvar, but you went and did it. You can’t very well unpoach the egg.”

“There will be repercussions from this,” Goldschmidt warned.

“That’s what I just told you,” Sam said. “You people forgot there would be repercussions when you let me see Atvar, and now you’re trying to get around them. If you really thought I was a traitor, you shouldn’t have let me do it. If you don’t think I am, why can’t I see other Lizards? You can’t have it both ways, you know.”

By Goldschmidt’s expression, he wanted to. He said, “I am going to have to refer this to my superiors.”

“That’s nice,” Sam said. “Meanwhile, I’m going to do what I think is right.” He’d been doing that for a long time. Yeah, and look at the thanks I’ve got, he thought.

He got some more now. “The last time you did what you thought was right”-Goldschmidt all but spat the words at him-“it cost us Indianapolis.”

“Fuck you, Colonel,” Sam said evenly. “The horse you rode in on, too.” He walked out of Goldschmidt’s office. As he headed for the elevators, he wondered if the Army man would shout for MPs to head him off. He’d already been held incommunicado once in his life, and hadn’t enjoyed it much. The real irony was that he’d told Goldschmidt the exact and literal truth. Atvar hadn’t given him any message to pass on to the Lizards here on Earth, and he wouldn’t have done it if the fleetlord had. He was and always had been loyal to his country, in spite of what seemed to be his country’s best efforts to make him change his mind.

No shouts came from behind him. He stabbed at the elevator’s DOWN button with unnecessary violence even so, and clenched his fists while waiting for a car to arrive. Part of him, the part that kept forgetting he wasn’t a kid any more, wanted a fight. The rest of him knew that was idiotic; one soldier in the prime of youth could clean his clock without breaking a sweat, let alone two or three or four. All the same, the sigh that escaped him when the elevator door opened held disappointment as well as relief.

Sure as hell, Lizards were on the streets when Sam headed for the parking structure a couple of blocks away. They seemed as natural to him as the Hispanic men selling plastic bags of oranges and the British tourists festooned with cameras who exclaimed about how hot it was. That made him want to laugh; after Home, Los Angeles seemed exceedingly temperate to him.

One of the Lizards almost bumped into him. “Excuse me,” the Lizard said in hissing English.

“It is all right. You missed me,” Yeager answered in the Race’s language. He grinned fiercely; he’d taken less than a minute to violate Colonel Goldschmidt’s order, and he loved doing it.

The Lizard’s mouth fell open in a startled laugh. “You speak well,” he said in his own language. “Please excuse me. I am very late.” Off he skittered, for all the world like a scaly White Rabbit.

“I thank you,” Sam called after him, but he didn’t think the Lizard heard. He was tempted to yell something like, Rosebud! at the male just in case sitting in Goldschmidt’s chair had been enough to plant a listening device on him. That would give the Army conniptions, by God! In the end, though, he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want, or didn’t suppose he wanted, to make these moderns any more paranoid than they were already.

His car was a three-year-old Ford. It wasn’t enormously different from the ones he’d owned before he went on ice. The styling was plainer-real streamlining had taken a lot of individuality out of design. One year’s models nowadays looked like another‘s, and one company’s like another‘s, too. The engine was smoother. The radio sounded better. But making cars had been a mature technology even in 1977. The changes were refinements, not fundamentals. He had no trouble driving it.

Traffic was worse than he remembered. The Los Angeles area had more than twice as many people as when he’d gone into cold sleep, and it didn’t have more than twice as many freeways. Too many cars were trying to use the roads at the same time. But things did thin out as he rode down to the South Bay.

His apartment wasn’t far from the one where Karen and Jonathan were living. That was convenient for them in case he got sick. It was also convenient for him: they were two of the very few people he could talk to in any meaningful way. Where cold sleep separated him from the vast majority of mankind, it had brought him closer to his son and daughter-in-law because he’d been in it longer than they had.

“I meant it, Colonel Goldschmidt-you and the horse both,” he said when he walked in the door. He assumed the apartment was bugged. What could he do about it? Nothing he could see.

He sat at the computer for a while. Like Jonathan and Karen, he was working on his memoirs. He wondered if anyone would want to read his once he finished. Very few people these days remembered how things had been back in the 1960s. Instead, they knew what they’d learned in school about that time. What they’d learned in school wasn’t kind to one Sam Yeager.

He shrugged and typed some more. If he couldn’t persuade an American publisher to print the work, he could still sell translation rights to the Race. The Lizards would want to hear what he had to say even if his own people didn’t. And faster-than-light travel might mean he could sell the rights not only on Earth but also on Home, Rabotev 2, and Halless 1-and see the money now instead of in the great by and by. That would be nice. He had no guarantee he’d be around for the great by and by. Odds were against it, in fact.

He jumped when the telephone rang. He’d got used to phones on Home that hissed. And he was going well at the keyboard. He said something unkind as he walked over and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Hello, Sam. This is Lacey Nagel.” Mickey’s literary agent had taken him on, and Jonathan and Karen as well. He hadn’t met her in person, but gathered she was about the apparent age of his son and daughter-in-law. She’d been, or at least seemed, more optimistic about the project than he was. Some of that, no doubt, was professional necessity; an agent who wasn’t optimistic wouldn’t stay in business. But Sam hoped some was real.

“Hi, Lacey,” he answered now. “What’s up?”

“We have a deal with Random House,” she said crisply. Sam’s jaw dropped. Then she told him how much it was for. His jaw dropped farther, all the way down onto his chest. “I hope that’s satisfactory,” she finished.

“My God,” he said, and she laughed out loud. He tried to come up with something more coherent. The best he could do was, “How did you manage that?”

“Well, I didn’t do anything to the acquiring editor that left a mark,” she said, which made him laugh in turn. She went on, “They’re excited about it, in fact. They must be, or they wouldn’t have made that offer. They said it was high time you told your own story.”

He couldn’t very well have told it before this unless he’d done it before he went into cold sleep. That hadn’t even occurred to him back then. Now the book would feel like history to everybody who read it. “My God,” he repeated.

“I hope that means you’re pleased,” Lacey Nagel said.

“I’m more than pleased-I’m flabbergasted,” Sam told her.

“Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a while,” she said.

“I’m not surprised,” Sam said without rancor. “I know the way I talk is old-fashioned as all get-out these days.” Saying all get-out was old-fashioned these days, too.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lacey said. “No matter how you say it, what you have to say will be right up to the minute.”

“I hope so.” He still felt a little-more than a little-dizzy. “I was working on it when you called.”

“Oh-oh!” she said. “That means you want to wring my neck for interrupting you.”

He shook his head. Lacey Nagel couldn’t see that; his phone didn’t have a video attachment, which only proved how old-fashioned he was. “Oh, no,” he said. “If you’ve got news like that, you can call me any old time. Thank you. I don’t think I said that before. Thank you!” He added an emphatic cough. When he walked back to the computer, his feet didn’t touch the carpet once.

Karen Yeager walked softly around Jonathan. The two of them and Sam Yeager all had book deals now, but Jonathan’s dad had got his more than a month before either one of them. That didn’t bother her much. But she could see how it got under her husband’s skin. She laughed at herself. She’d almost thought of it as getting under Jonathan’s scales-proof, as if she needed proof, she’d spent too much time around the Race.

Jonathan hadn’t said much about the way he felt, but he didn’t need to. Spells of alternating gloom and bad temper said it for him. He’d come in second to his old man again, and he didn’t like it one damn bit.

Hearing the doorbell came as a relief. “Who’s that? What does he want?” Jonathan said, grumpy still.

“One easy way to find out.” Karen opened the door. “Oh, hello, Mickey! Come in.”

“Thanks,” Mickey said. Karen waved him to a chair. They’d bought a couple adapted to a Lizard’s shape. But Mickey sat down in an ordinary armchair. “I’m more used to these damn things.” He swung one eye turret toward Karen, the other toward Jonathan. “And whose fault is that?”

“Well, we could blame the federal government,” Karen said. “It’s a handy target-and it is where Jonathan’s dad got your eggs.”

Mickey shook his head. He did that as naturally as most Lizards shaped the negative gesture. “Too big a target. I need to blame people, not a thing.”

“We’ve already apologized,” Jonathan said. “There’s not much else we can do about it now. And you’ll have the last laugh-even with our cold sleep, odds are you’ll outlive us by plenty.”

“Your father already told me the same thing,” Mickey said. Most of the time, that would have been fine. Now… Now, Jonathan made a noise down deep in his throat. He didn’t want to hear that his father had got there ahead of him one more time. Mickey went on, “Yeah, I’ll live a long time. But what will I live as? A curiosity? Hell, I’m a curiosity even to myself.”

“Would you like to be a curiosity with a drink?” Karen asked.

“Sure. Rum and Coke,” Mickey said. As she went to the kitchen, he added, “You Yeagers, all of you, you’re my family-all the family I’ve got, except for Donald. The only problem with that is, I shouldn’t have any family, and if I did have a family, it shouldn’t be full of humans.”

Karen brought him the drink, and scotch for her and Jonathan. “Well, we’ll try not to hold it against you,” she said.

Both his eye turrets turned sharply toward her. Then he realized she was joking, and chuckled-a rusty imitation of the noise a human would make. “Donald would have bitten you for that,” he said, sipping.

“Donald may resent people, but he’s piled up a hell of a lot of money making them laugh,” Jonathan said.

Mickey shrugged. “I’ve piled up a hell of a lot of money, too. I’ve got nothing against money-don’t get me wrong. Life’s better with it than without it. But Donald was right about what he told you the day you came down from the Commodore Perry — the fellow who said it can’t buy happiness knew what he was talking about. That makes Donald angrier than it does me. Instead of biting them, he makes them laugh-and then he laughs at them for laughing at him.”

Jonathan caught Karen’s eye. He nodded slightly. So did she. That made more sense than she wished it did. It also went a long way towards explaining the urgency of Donald’s performance on You’d Better Believe It. Something not far from desperation surely fueled it.

“Do you laugh at us, too?” Karen asked.

“Sometimes. Not quite so often. I still want to be one of you more than Donald does,” Mickey answered. “Yeah, I know that’s silly, but it’s how I was raised. I speak English as well as I can with this mouth, but I have an accent when I use the Race’s language. Ain’t that a kick in the head?”

“Kassquit speaks the Race’s language as well as she can with her mouth,” Jonathan said. “It’s the only one she knows. She never learned any of ours.”

“That’s a damn shame.” Mickey added an emphatic cough, but a lot of human English-speakers these days would have done the same thing. “You could have done worse. I’ve never said anything different. Donald may have-but Donald doesn’t always even take himself seriously, so why should you?”

Before either Karen or Jonathan could answer, the doorbell rang again. “Grand Central Station around here,” Karen said. When she opened the door, she found Donald out there on the walkway. “Well! What can I do for you?”

“May I come in?” he asked. “Please?” Mockery danced in his voice.

“Of course.” Karen stepped aside. “You’re always welcome here. We’re not angry at you. We never have been, no matter what you’ve decided to think about us.”

“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 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.

He dutifully lay down on his bunk when the ship neared the transition point. The warning announcement said that some people felt what it described as “unusually intense vertigo.” That didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun. What he felt when the Tom Edison leaped the light-years was… exactly nothing. He shrugged. Anyone who suffered from vertigo wasn’t going to make it as a pilot.

That evening in the refectory, he asked Flynn whether he’d felt anything. “Not me,” the other pilot replied. “I’m normal.”

“God help us all, in that case,” Johnson said. Flynn looked aggrieved. He did it very well. Johnson wondered if he practiced in front of a mirror.

Seeing Earth again, even if only on a video screen, brought a lump to Johnson’s throat. He’d got occasional glimpses of the home planet when he was out in the asteroid belt on the Lewis and Clark. But a blue star near a shrunken sun wasn’t the same as seeing oceans and clouds and continents-and there, by God, there was the United States. Clouds covered most of the eastern half of the country, but he didn’t care. He knew it was there.

When the Tom Edison ’s shuttlecraft took him to a space station, he found a tall mound of paperwork to remind him in another way that he’d come home. He formally retired from the Marine Corps and discovered just how much money he had to draw on. “This doesn’t include the living allowance you’ll have here,” said the functionary handling his case. “This is accumulated pay and interest.”

“It’s mighty interesting,” Johnson allowed. He really could be a sugar daddy down below-if it weren’t for gravity. Up here? He wasn’t so sure about that. Finding out could also be mighty interesting, though.

The functionary looked pained. “Do all you Rip van Winkles make bad puns?”

“Ah, you’ve been dealing with Mickey Flynn,” Johnson said, and surprised the man all over again.

“Will you want to stay here in weightlessness, or would you rather settle in one of the bases on the Moon?” the modern asked.

“I don’t know yet. Do I have to decide right away?” Johnson replied.

Reluctantly, the other man shook his head. “No, not yet. But the longer you stay weightless, the harder it will be for your body to get used to the Moon’s gravity-if it can at all.”

“I’ve been weightless for years and years,” Johnson answered. “I don’t think a few days to make up my mind will kill me or my chances.”

The longer he stayed at the space station, the less inclined he was to leave. It was a much busier operation than any he’d known in space before leaving Earth orbit. Of course, that was almost seventy years ago now. In those days, space travel had been almost exclusively military. Nowadays, this place was a tourist trap.

He shopped. He spent money in stores and bars. That felt strange, after doing without cash and credit cards for so long. In one of those bars, he met a woman from Cincinnati who hadn’t been born when he went into cold sleep. Donna thought he talked a little funny (he thought everybody these days talked a little funny), but she thought he was interesting, too. One thing most enjoyably led to another.

“I’ve never done it weightless before,” she said in his chamber. “It’s different.”

“Yeah.” It had been a hell of a long time since Johnson had done it any other way. It had, in his opinion, been too damn long since he’d done it at all.

“What do you think about being back after all the things you did and all the places you went to?” she asked.

“Well, right this minute I like it fine,” he answered. That made her laugh, though he was kidding on the square. In an odd way, the encounter-which lasted only a day-made up his mind. This wasn’t Earth, but it was the next best thing. He’d stay here.

Kassquit stared down at the little female hatchling in her arms. She’d already known that Tosevite hatchlings were much less able to fend for themselves than those of the Race. In the twenty days since hers came forth, she’d seen that again and again for herself.

But the hatchling did know how to feed itself, and sucked greedily now. Kassquit’s breasts were still tender, but she was getting used to nursing. It wasn’t anything the Race would do-it wasn’t anything the Race could do-but it had a satisfaction of its own. And she was convinced it helped forge the emotional attachment between mother and hatchling that formed such an important part of Tosevite society.

Along with things like that, she was finally learning some English. Having a word to describe nursing instead of the long circumlocution she would have needed in the Race’s language came in handy. And, since the hatchling hadn’t exactly hatched, baby seemed more precise. Because it was female, it was a daughter. Had it been male, it would have been a son. That puzzled her, because she thought son was also the word for a star. Sooner or later, she hoped it would make sense. As with a lot of things that had to do with wild Big Uglies, though, she recognized that it might not.

Someone knocked on the door. That had to be a Tosevite; a member of the Race would have used the hisser. “Come in,” Kassquit called. “It is not locked.”

She’d hoped it would be Frank Coffey, and it was. “I greet you,” he said, and then, to the baby, “and I greet you, too, Julia.”

“And I greet you,” Kassquit answered, “and so does Yendys, even if she cannot tell you so because her mouth is full.” That wasn’t the only reason the baby couldn’t talk, of course. Coffey’s chuckle showed he knew she’d made a joke. They both agreed the baby should have two names, since it had two heritages.

“How are you feeling?” asked Julia Yendys’ father — another English word Kassquit had come to know.

“Day by day, I get stronger,” Kassquit answered. She would much rather have laid an egg than gone through what Tosevite females did to produce an offspring. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had the choice. The Tosevite physician had seemed capable enough, but he couldn’t make the process any too delightful. And afterwards, as soon as it was finally over, she’d felt as if a herd of zisuili had trampled her. Little by little, that crushing exhaustion faded, but only little by little.

The baby swallowed wrong, choked, and started to cry. Having one word for the horrible noises a baby made was useful, too-not pleasant, but useful. Kassquit put a cloth on her shoulder and raised Julia Yendys to it. She patted the baby’s back till it expelled the air it had swallowed-and some sour milk. That was what the cloth was for. Bare skin didn’t do the job.

She’d got the cloth from the American Big Uglies. They used such materials much more than the Race did and were better at manufacturing them, just as the Race knew things about paint that the Tosevites hadn’t imagined. She patted Julia Yendys’ face with the cloth. “Are you done now?” she asked. As usual, the baby gave not a clue.

“Let me hold her,” Coffey said. Kassquit passed him the baby. He was bigger than she was, and could comfortably hold his daughter in the crook of his arm. He had had no offspring till this one, but he still seemed more practiced with her than Kassquit did. He crooned vaguely musical nonsense to the baby.

“What is that song?” Kassquit asked.

“We call it a lullaby, ” he answered. “Sometimes, it helps make a baby go to sleep. Since she has just had some food and she is still dry-I stuck a finger in there to check-maybe this will be one of those times.”

And Julia Yendys’ eyes did sag shut. Coffey also had an easier time than Kassquit at getting her to go to sleep. Kassquit sometimes resented that. Right now, it came as a relief. The baby stirred when Coffey eased her down into the crib-which had made the trip from Tosev 3 on the Tom Edison — but did not wake.

Kassquit stared down at her. “She is halfway between the two of us in color,” she said.

“Not surprising,” Coffey said. “We both have something to do with her, you know.”

Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “Truth. But I am used to the Race. All the subspecies that used to exist here have mixed together till it is practically uniform. I know that is not true for Tosevites, but here I see a beginning of such blending.”

Frank Coffey shrugged. “Our subspecies were mostly isolated till much more recently than those of the Race. And we are also more particular about whom we mate with than the Race is. Males and females of one Tosevite subspecies often prefer a partner from that same group.”

“Not always.” Kassquit set a hand on his arm.

He covered it with his own hand. “I did not say ‘always.’ I said ‘often.’ I know the difference between the two. But that also helps make mixing slower with us.”

“I understand,” Kassquit said. “Do you suppose Tosevites will ever become as blended as the Race is now?”

“Before the Commodore Perry came to Home, I would have said yes,” Coffey replied. “Now I am not so sure. Some of the groups that form colonies will all come from one kind of Tosevite or another. On their new worlds, they will breed only with themselves. Colonies are much easier to start now, which also means that isolation of subspecies is easier to preserve.”

“That is not good, especially when members of some of your subspecies think they are better than others,” Kassquit observed.

The wild Big Ugly laughed, though he did not seem amused. “Members of all our subspecies think they are better than others,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “I think that is too bad, but I have no idea what to do about it.”

“How will it affect the Empire?” Kassquit asked.

“I have no idea about that, either,” he told her. “Anyone who says he knows now is lying. We can only wait and see. It depends on many things.”

“How soon the Race learns to travel that way,” Kassquit said. “How soon the Deutsche do, too. Whether you Americans decide on a preventive war against us.”

“And whether the Race decides to try to destroy Tosev 3,” Coffey added. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture; that did also enter in. The American went on, “Too many variables, not enough data. We have to find out. I already said that.”

Kassquit wanted certainty. She’d learned that from the Race. She couldn’t have it. Every time Tosevites touched her life, certainty exploded. Every time the wild Big Uglies touched the Race, its certainties from millennia past exploded.

She looked down at Julia Yendys, who’d exploded the certainty that she would never breed. She still didn’t know what to think about that. Raising a Tosevite hatchling was an astonishing amount of work. She began to understand why family groupings loomed so large among the wild Big Uglies. Without them, hatchlings-babies — would die. It was as simple as that.

“Wait until the baby begins to smile, ” Frank Coffey said. “It will not be too much longer. That is a day to remember.”

“Maybe. But I cannot return the smile. I never learned how.” Kassquit imagined herself as a hatchling, trying again and again to bond with Ttomalss through facial expressions. But Ttomalss wasn’t biologically programmed to respond, and so her own ability to form those expressions had atrophied. She didn’t want that to happen to Julia Yendys. Her own baby should be a citizen of the Empire, yes, but should also be a complete and perfect Tosevite.

“Do not worry too much,” Coffey said. “I promise I will smile lots and lots for my daughter.” After an emphatic cough, he pulled back his lips and showed his teeth in a big grin. “And there will be plenty of other wild Big Uglies to show her how to make funny faces.” He made a very funny one, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue.

It startled Kassquit into a laugh. “That is good,” she said. “I was just thinking the baby should have more of its Tosevite heritage than I do.”

That made the American Big Ugly serious again. “Well, you were raised to be as much like a member of the Race as possible. I would not want that for Julia Yendys, and I am glad you do not, either.”

“What I want for her is the chance to grow up and live out her life in peace and happiness. How likely do you think that is?”

Frank Coffey sighed and shrugged. “Kassquit, I already told you-I have no better way to judge that than you do. I just do not know. All we can do is go on and hope and do all we can to make that happen, even if we know it may not. If we do not try-if the United States and the Race do not try-then we are much too likely to fail.”

“What would you do if there were a war?” Kassquit asked.

“Probably die,” he answered. She gave back an exasperated hiss, one that might have sprung from the throat of either a Tosevite or a member of the Race. He shrugged again. “I do not know what else to say. It would depend on what happened, on where I was, on a thousand other things. I cannot know ahead of time.”

That was reasonable. Kassquit had hoped for a ringing declaration that he would never fight no matter what, but a little thought told her that was too much to expect. He served the United States with as much dedication as she served the Empire, and he was a military male. If his not-empire required him to fight, fight he would.

He said, “You should have the baby immunized against as many of our diseases as you can. She will meet many more wild Tosevites at an earlier age than you did.”

“I have already talked about this with the new doctor,” Kassquit said. “He agrees with you that this would be good. I will follow his advice. He also urges me to get more immunizations, for the reason you mentioned. Faster-than-light travel will mean more Tosevites coming to Home, which will mean more chances for disease to spread.”

“Good. Not good that disease may spread-good that you and the doctor have thought about it,” Coffey said. “He does seem to know what he is doing. Call me old-fashioned-I cannot help it, considering when I was hatched-but a lot of the moderns get under my scales and make me itch.” He had no scales to get under, but used the Race’s phrase all the same.

Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “This doctor knows much more than Melanie Blanchard did. I am sure of that. But I liked her, while when I see him it is all business.”

“He is a better technician, but a poorer person,” Coffey said.

“Truth! That is what I was trying to say.”

“You do what you can with what you have. I do not know what else there is to do,” Coffey said. “The other choice is not doing what you can with what you have, and that is worse. If you do not make the most of what you have, why live?”

“Truth,” Kassquit said once more.

Have I made the most of what I have? she wondered. Looking back, she didn’t see how she could have done much more. Some things she did not have, and never would. She could rail at Ttomalss for that, but what was the point? Her upbringing was what it was. She couldn’t change it now. She remained bright. Even by Tosevite standards, she remained within hissing distance of sanity. And she’d had-she’d really had-an audience with the Emperor!

She looked down at Julia Yendys once more. Now she also had a chance to make her baby’s life better than hers had been. That was a chance members of the Race didn’t get, not in the same way. She intended to make the most of it.

When the telephone rang, Sam Yeager jumped like a startled cat. He’d been deep in work-deeper than he’d thought, obviously. Well, it wasn’t going anywhere. He walked over to the phone. “Hello?”

“Hi, Dad. What are you up to?”

“Oh, hello, Jonathan. I was reading the galleys for Safe at Home, as a matter of fact. They’ve got a tight deadline, and I want to make sure I get ’em done on time.”

“Good for you,” his son said. “Catch any juicy mistakes?”

“I think the best one was when ‘American helmet’ came out as ‘American Hamlet.’ That would have spread confusion far and wide if it got through.”

Jonathan laughed. “You’re not kidding. Are you too busy to come over for dinner tonight? I hope not-Karen’s got some mighty nice steaks.”

“Twist my arm,” Sam said, and then, “What time?”

“About six,” Jonathan answered.

“See you then.” Sam hung up. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past four. He worked on the galleys for a little while longer, spotting nothing more entertaining than “form” for “from.” Like the one he’d told Jonathan about, that passed muster on a computerized spelling program. Most of the errors he found were of that sort. The rest came on words and place names from the Lizards’ language: terms that weren’t in spelling programs to being with. With those, typesetters could inflict butchery as they had in years gone by.

He set down the red pen, put on a pair of slacks instead of the ratty jeans he’d been wearing, and went down to his car. On the way to Jonathan and Karen’s place, he stopped in a liquor store for a six-pack of beer. He remembered being disappointed with Budweiser ninety years ago, when it started reousting local beers after the first round of fighting between humans and Lizards ended. Things hadn’t got better up till he went into cold sleep. Bud and Miller and Schlitz and a couple of others had swept all before them. They were available, they were standardized, they were cheap… and they weren’t very interesting.

But while he’d been on ice, beer had had a renaissance. Oh, the national brands were still around. Even their packaging hadn’t changed much. But, to make up for it, swarms of little breweries turned out beer that cost more but made up for it by not only tasting good but by tasting good in a bunch of different ways. Who wanted to drink fizzy water with a little alcohol in it when porter and steam beer and barley wine were out there, too?

Jonathan laughed when Sam handed him the mix-and-match six-pack. “It’ll go with what I went out and bought,” he said.

“Fine. If I get smashed, you can put me on the couch tonight,” Sam said.

“If I get smashed, Karen’ll put me on the couch tonight,” his son said. “You can sleep on the floor.”

“If I’m smashed enough, I won’t care.” Sam sniffed. “Besides, I’ll be full of good food.” He pitched his voice to carry into the kitchen.

“You’re a nice man,” Karen called from that direction.

The steaks were as good as promised, butter-tender and rare enough to moo.

“What we had on Home wasn’t bad,” Sam said after doing some serious damage to the slab of cow in front of him. “It wasn’t bad at all. We didn’t have any trouble living on it. But this tastes right in a way that never could.”

“I’ve heard Lizards say the same thing, but with the opposite twist,” Jonathan said. “They don’t mind what they get here, but to them the good stuff is back on Home.”

“I’m not convinced,” Karen said. “Put us in Japan and we’ll think Japanese food is weird, too. Japanese people feel the same way about what we eat. A lot of it has to do with cooking styles and spices, not with the basic meat and vegetables. A lot more has to do with whether we’re used to eating what’s in front of us. Sometimes different is just different, not better or worse or right or wrong.”

Sam thought about that. After a few seconds, he nodded. “I’ve been used to eating my words for years, so they don’t taste bad at all. You’re right. I’m sure of it.”

No matter what he’d said to Jonathan, he didn’t get drunk. Back when he was a kid, he’d thought tying one on was fun. He wondered why. Part of it, he supposed, was coming to manhood during Prohibition. He was one of the last men alive who remembered it, and wondered if they even bothered teaching about it in U.S. history these days. It would be ancient history to kids growing up now, the way the presidency of John Quincy Adams had been for him.

But he’d gone right on getting smashed after drinking became legal again. A lot of his teammates had been hard drinkers. That wasn’t enough of an excuse for him, though, and he knew it. He’d enjoyed getting loaded. He hadn’t enjoyed it so much the morning after, but that was later. He wondered why he’d enjoyed it. Because it gave him an excuse to get stupid? That didn’t seem reason enough, not looking back on it.

Jonathan and Karen also held it to a couple of beers. He knew they’d done their share of drinking before he went on ice and stopped being able to keep an eye on them. He laughed at himself. No doubt they’d missed that a lot-just the way a frog missed a saxophone. They’d done fine without him, which was, of course, the way things were supposed to work.

He drove home with no trouble at all. His head was clear enough to work on the manuscript for a while before he went to bed. When he got up the next morning, he didn’t have a headache. He didn’t have any memories of stupidity or, worse, holes where he needed to find memories.

Aren’t I smug and superior? he thought as he sipped his morning coffee the next day. He was more sober than he had been once upon a time. So what? All over the world, people by the millions needed no excuse at all to drink as much as they could hold, or a little more than that.

He’d just come out of the shower when the phone rang. That made him smile: whoever‘d tried to catch him in there had missed. “Hello?”

“Yes. Is this Sam Yeager that I have the honor to be addressing?”

Alertness tingled through Sam. Though speaking English, that was a Lizard on the other end of the line.

“Yes, this is Sam Yeager. Who’s calling, please?”

Talking to members of the Race, once one of Sam’s greatest pleasures, was fraught with risk these days. They still hoped he might have a message from Home for them. The American government still feared he did. He didn’t, and wouldn’t have delivered it if he had. Nobody-not Lizards, not American officials-wanted to believe him when he said so.

“I am Tsaisanx, the Race’s consul in Los Angeles.”

Sam whistled softly. Tsaisanx should have known better. He’d been consul here for a human lifetime, and was a veteran of the conquest fleet. If he didn’t know better than to call here… maybe it was a mark of desperation. “I greet you, Consul,” Sam said, using the Race’s formula but sticking to English. “You do know, I hope, that anything we say will be monitored? You had better tell me very plainly what you want.”

Tsaisanx let out a hissing sigh. “I would rather talk in greater privacy…”

“I wouldn’t.” Sam used an emphatic cough. “I have nothing to say that others can’t hear. Nothing-do you understand me?”

“I cannot believe that,” Tsaisanx said. “You aided us before. Why not now?”

“I helped you when I thought we were wrong,” Sam said. “I’m not going to help you when I think we’re right. So we know something the Race doesn’t? All I have to say is, good for us. We didn’t do anything we shouldn’t have to learn it. All we did was make experiments and see where they led. If you want to do the same thing, okay, fine. Go right ahead.”

“You are not showing a cooperative attitude,” the Race’s consul complained.

“Tough.” Sam used another emphatic cough. “I’m very sorry, but I don’t feel like cooperating here. Not only that, I damn well can’t. Am I plain enough, or shall I draw you a picture?” He was about to hang up on the Lizard, a bit of rudeness he couldn’t have imagined before coming back to Earth on the Commodore Perry.

“You are painfully plain.” Tragedy trembled in Tsaisanx’s voice. “What is also plain is that my civilization-indeed, my entire species-trembles on the brink of extinction. And you-you do not feel like cooperating.”

“I’m afraid I can’t be polite about this, so I won’t bother trying,” Sam said. “When the conquest fleet came, you intended to do to us what you did to the Rabotevs and the Hallessi. You were going to turn us into imitations of the Race and rule us forever. If we didn’t like it, too bad. You were ready to kill as many of us as you needed to get the message across. I was there, too. I remember. If you think I’m going to waste a hell of a lot of sympathy on you now, you’d better think again. That’s all I’ve got to tell you.”

“Rabotev 2 and Halless 1 are both better, happier, healthier worlds than they were before they became part of the Empire,” Tsaisanx said. “Tosev 3 also would have been. We would have made sure of it.”

Take up the white man’s burden, Sam thought. He didn’t doubt that Tsaisanx meant it; the Lizard was nothing if not sincere. All the same, he said, “The United States is a better, happier, healthier place than it was before you got here, and we did it all by ourselves.”

“How much of our technology did you steal?” Acid filled Tsaisanx’s voice.

“A good bit,” Sam admitted. “But we would have done it without that, too. If you’d never come, we’d be better and healthier and happier than we were ninety years ago. We wouldn’t be the same as we are now, but we wouldn’t be the same as we were back then, either. You think progress is something to squash. We think it’s something to build on. And we would have, with you or without you.”

“We really have nothing to say to each other, do we?” Tsaisanx said sadly. “And here all this time, I thought you understood.”

“I do-or I think I do, anyhow,” Sam replied. “I just don’t agree. There’s a difference.”

“Farewell.” Tsaisanx hung up.

“So long,” Sam said, though the Lizard couldn’t hear him. He put the handset back in the cradle. Shaking his head, he returned to the galleys of Safe at Home.

A minute later, he stood up again. He couldn’t concentrate on the words in front of him. All these years, all these upheavals, and what did it mean? His own people thought he’d betrayed them, and now the Lizards thought he’d betrayed them, too? He wondered if he should have called the book A Moderate’s Story. What was a moderate but somebody both sides could shoot at?

But he still thought he’d had it right with Tsaisanx. Even if the Race hadn’t come, the United States would be a better place now than it was in 1942. The rest of the world might be better, too, in ways it had never had a chance to show with the Lizards sitting on half of it.

He shrugged and returned to the galleys. He’d already seen so much happen, more than almost any man alive. He’d gone from horse and buggy to spanning the light-years one way in cold sleep, the other in the wink of an eye.

And what would the next chapter be? He could hardly wait to find out.