Homeward Bound (77 page)

Sam Yeager came to the hotel room where he’d been politely and comfortably imprisoned to say good-bye. “I am surprised they let you in to see me,” Atvar said. “Do they not fear you will relay the secret orders I do not have to Reffet and Kirel, and so touch off our colony’s attack on your not-empire?”

“Some of them were afraid of that, yes,” the white-haired Big Ugly answered. “I managed to persuade them otherwise. It was not easy, but I managed. We have known each other a long time, you and I. We are not on the same side, but we are not enemies, either. Or I hope we are not.”

“Not through my eye turrets,” Atvar said. “And who knows? Maybe we shall see each other again. Now that cold sleep is no longer necessary—for your folk, anyhow—it could happen.”

“Well, so it could,” Yeager said. “If not for cold sleep, though, I would have died a long time ago. Even with it, who knows how much time I have?” He followed the interrogative cough with a shrug. “However long it is, I aim to try to make the most of it. Will you do me a favor when you get back to Home?”

“If it is anything I can do, I will,” Atvar replied.

“I thank you. I think you can. Send Kassquit my best, and my hatchling‘s.”

“It shall be done,” Atvar said. “Shall I also add a greeting from your hatchling’s mate?”

Sam Yeager laughed in the noisy Tosevite way. “If you like,” he answered. “But she would not send it, and Kassquit would not believe it if she got it. The two females did not get along as well as they might have.”

“This is unfortunate,” Atvar said. “Well, I think I will send it. Perhaps being light-years apart can bring peace between them.”

“Perhaps it can,” Yeager said. “I cannot think of anything else that would.”

The fleetlord endured another ride in a Tosevite-made shuttlecraft with a Big Ugly at the controls. The hop up to the orbiting
Tom Edison
was as smooth as it would have been going up to a ship orbiting Home. The pilot seemed perfectly capable. Atvar was nervous even so. Tosevites just didn’t take proper care in the things they made.

But they made things the Race couldn’t. The looming bulk of the
Tom Edison
as the shuttlecraft approached rubbed Atvar’s snout in that. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” a uniformed American Big Ugly said when Atvar came through the air lock. “Let me take you to your room.”

“I thank you,” Atvar replied.

“It is my pleasure, Exalted Fleetlord,” the Tosevite male said. Atvar didn’t care for the way his title sounded in the Big Ugly’s mouth. Like Nicole Nichols back on Home, the male didn’t take it seriously.

Atvar stared as he followed the guide. Not being under acceleration, the ship had no gravity, and they both pulled themselves along by the handholds in the corridors. The
Tom Edison
struck Atvar as being better finished than the
Commodore Perry.
If the Race hadn’t been satisfied with the
Commodore Perry,
the ship never would have flown. The Big Uglies let it go out, hoped for the best, and improved the next one. Their way produced more progress—and, every now and then, disasters the Race would not have tolerated.

“Here we are,” the Tosevite said. “This room will be yours. Please stay here until we are under acceleration. You can access entertainment in your language through the computer. Food will be brought to you. If you want any special refreshments, you may request them.”

“But in the meanwhile, I am a prisoner,” Atvar said.

The Big Ugly used the negative gesture. “A guest.”

Atvar used it, too. “If I were a guest, I would be able to move freely.”

With a shrug, the American Tosevite said, “I am sorry, Exalted Fleetlord, but I have my orders.” He sounded not the least bit sorry.

When Atvar tried the door after going inside, he discovered it would open, which surprised him. He wasn’t quite a prisoner, then. That made him decide to stay where he was. He would have caused more trouble—as much as he could—if he had been locked up. Not till later did he wonder whether the Big Uglies would anticipate that.

A day and a half later, it stopped mattering. With a deep rumble he felt in his bones, the
Tom Edison
left its place in orbit and began the journey out to where it could leap the gap between Tosev 3’s solar system and the one of which Home was a part. Full acceleration took a while to build up. Atvar thought he was a trifle heavier than he had been aboard the
Commodore Perry,
but he could not be sure.

One of the first Big Uglies he saw on emerging from his chamber was Frank Coffey. His dark skin made him easy to recognize. His leaf emblem had changed color, which meant he was a lieutenant colonel now. “So you are returning to Home?” Atvar said.

“That is a truth, Exalted Fleetlord. I am,” Coffey said. “I managed to talk my government into sending me back. I would like to be with Kassquit when my hatchling comes forth—and I have more experience on Home than anyone there now.”

While the second reason would have influenced the Race, the first was exclusive to the Big Uglies. Atvar did not know who had sired him or who had laid his egg. Except for the Emperor’s line and the possibility of inherited diseases, such things mattered little to the Race.

“It will be good, I think, for the American Tosevites on Home to have someone from your generation there with them,” Atvar said. “I mean no offense—or not much, anyhow—when I say they make too much of themselves.”

“I have no idea whether they will pay any attention to me once I get there.” Coffey sounded wryly amused. Atvar thought so, anyhow, though Big Uglies could still confuse him. The American officer went on, “My government says they are supposed to, but even with these new ships my government is a long way away.” He shrugged. “Well, we shall see what we shall see. However that works out, I am going back to Home, and I will be there when the hatchling comes forth.”

We shall see what we shall see.
Atvar thought about that after he went back to his room. It was a truth, but not, for him, a comfortable one. What he feared he would see, if he lived long enough, was the ruination of his species. And he did not know what he could do to stop it.

The journey back to Home was as boring as the one to Tosev 3 had been. Part of him hoped the
Tom Edison
would have a mishap, even if it killed him. Then he wouldn’t have to admit to everyone on Home that he’d crossed between stars twice in much less than a year, even counting the time he’d spent on the Big Uglies’ native world waiting for them to get ready to send him back.

Was it five and a half weeks till the starship got ready to jump the light-years? Again, Atvar thought not, but he wasn’t quite sure. He had to translate the awkward Tosevite term into the Race’s rational chronology to have any feel for how long it truly was. He hadn’t kept exact track on the journey to Tosev 3, so he couldn’t properly compare now. Not keeping track had been a mistake. He realized as much, but he didn’t see how he could have avoided it. He’d assumed he would go back on the same starship, not a revised model. As the Race so often was in its dealings with the Big Uglies, he’d been wrong.

When the time for the crossing came, the captain warned everyone in the ship to take a seat: first in English, then in the Race’s language. Atvar obeyed. For most of the travelers, it wouldn’t matter. Most Tosevites felt nothing. That seemed to be true for the Race, too; at least, neither Straha nor Nesseref had reported anything out of the ordinary.

Then that turned-inside-out feeling interrupted his thoughts. It lasted for a timeless instant that seemed to stretch out longer than the history of the Empire. He was everything and nothing, nowhere and everywhere, all at once. And then it ended—if it had ever really begun—and he was nothing but himself again. He didn’t know whether to be sorry or glad.

The captain spoke in English. Atvar waited for the translation: “We are inside Home’s solar system. Everything performed the way it should have. We expect a normal approach to the Race’s planet.”

Two ships. No—at least two ships. How many more did the Big Uglies have? They surely knew. Just as surely, Atvar didn’t. Were they visiting Rabotev 2 or Halless 1 even now? If they were, they would outrun news of their coming. They would find the Empire’s other two worlds undefended. They could do whatever they wanted. Home wouldn’t learn of it for years, not unless the Tosevites themselves chose to talk about it.

We shall see what we shall see,
he thought again. Whatever it was, he couldn’t do anything about it now.

He knew when the
Tom Edison
went into orbit around Home, because he went weightless. Before long, a Tosevite female came to escort him to the air lock. “We will take you down to Sitneff now, Exalted Fleetlord,” she said.

“I thank you so very much,” Atvar replied.

If she heard his sarcasm, she didn’t show it. “You are welcome,” she said. “I hope you had a pleasant flight.” Atvar didn’t dignify that with an answer. A hundred thousand years of peace, security, and dominance shattering like glass—and she hoped he had a pleasant flight? Not likely!

His shuttlecraft trip down to the surface of Home was routine in every way, and also less than pleasant. So was the discovery that Straha waited for him in the shuttlecraft terminal. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Straha said, and bent into a mocking posture of respect. “I trust you enjoyed yourself on Tosev 3?”

“Then you are a trusting fool,” Atvar snapped. “I knew you were a fool, but not one of that sort.”

Straha only laughed at him. “Still charming as ever, I see. Any residual doubts remaining? The signals arriving from Tosev 3 would kill them, if there are.”

“No, no residual doubts,” Atvar said. “They can do as they claim.”

“And that means?”

Hating him, Atvar said, “It means you are not only a trusting fool but a gloating fool.” Straha just laughed again.

B
ruce 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.”