Homeward Bound Read online

  When he and the guards left the department store, one of them asked, “Where would you like to go now, superior Tosevite? Back to your hotel?” He sounded quite humanly hopeful.

  Sam made the negative hand gesture. He stood out in the middle of the vast parking lot surrounding the department store. Lizards driving in to shop would almost have accidents because they were turning their eye turrets to gape at him instead of watching where they were going. The weather was—surprise!—hot and dry, about like an August day in Los Angeles. He didn’t mind the heat, or not too much. It felt good on his old bones and made him feel more limber than he really was.

  “Well, superior Tosevite, if you do not want to go back to the hotel, where would you like to go?” the guard asked with exaggerated patience. Plainly, the Lizard thought Sam would have no good answer.

  But he did: “If you would be so kind, would you take me to a place that sells old books and periodicals?”

  His guards put their heads together. Then one of them pulled out a little gadget that reminded Sam of a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio, but that they insisted on calling a telephone. It did more than any telephone Yeager had ever imagined; they could even use it to consult the Race’s Home-spanning electronic network.

  Here, the Lizard simply used it as a phone, then put it away. “Very well, superior Tosevite. It shall be done,” she said. “Come with us.”

  His official vehicle had been—somewhat—adapted to his presence. It had almost enough leg room for him, and its seat didn’t make his posterior too uncomfortable. Still, he wasn’t sorry whenever he got out of it. The guards had taken him to an older part of Sitneff. How old did that make the buildings here? As old as the Declaration of Independence? The discovery of America? The Norman conquest? There were towns in Europe with buildings that old. But had these been around for the time of Christ? The erection of Stonehenge? Of the Pyramids? Lord, had they been around since the domestication of the dog? Since the last Ice Age? If the guards had said so, Sam would have been in no position to contradict them. He saw old, old sidewalks and weathered brick fronts on the buildings. How long would the brickwork have taken to get to look like that? He had not the faintest idea.

  The sign above the door said SSTRAVO’S USED BOOKS OF ALL PERIODS. That certainly sounded promising. Sam had to duck to get through the doorway, but he was just about used to that. An electronic hiss did duty for the bell that would have chimed at a shop in the United States.

  An old Lizard fiddled around behind the counter. On Earth, Sam hadn’t seen really old Lizards. The males of the conquest fleet and males and females of the colonization fleet had almost all been young or in their prime. Even their highest officers hadn’t been elderly, though Atvar and some others had long since left youth behind. But this male creaked. His back was bent. He moved stiffly. His scales were dull, while his hide hung loose on his bones.

  “I greet you,” he said to Sam Yeager, as if Yeager were an ordinary customer. “What can I show you today?”

  “You are Sstravo?” Sam asked.

  “I am,” the old male replied. “And you are a Big Ugly. You must be able to read our language, or you would not be here. So what can I show you? Would you like to see a copy of the report our probe sent back from your planet? I have one.”

  That report went back almost nine hundred years now. Was it a recent reprint, or did the Race’s paper outlast most of its Earthly equivalents? Despite some curiosity, Sam made the negative gesture. “No, thank you. I have seen most of that report in electronic form on Tosev 3. Can you show me some older books that are unlikely to have made the journey from your world to mine? They can be history or fiction. I am looking for things to help me understand the Race better.”

  “We often do not understand ourselves. How a Big Ugly can hope to do so is beyond me,” Sstravo said. “But you are brave—though perhaps foolish—to make the effort. Let me see what I can find for you.”

  He doddered over to a shelf full of books with spines and titles so faded Sam could not make them out and pulled one volume off it. “Here. You might try this.”

  “What is it called?” Sam asked.

  “Gone with the Wind,” Sstravo answered.

  Sam burst out laughing. Sstravo stared at him. That loud, raucous sound had surely never been heard in this shop before. “I apologize,” Sam said. “But that is also the title of a famous piece of fiction in my world.”

  “Ours dates from seventy-three thousand years ago,” Sstravo said. “How old is yours?”

  Even dividing by two to turn the number into terrestrial years, that was a hell of an old book. “Ours is less than two hundred of your years old,” Sam admitted.

  “Modern art, is it? I have never been partial to modern art. But ours may interest you,” Sstravo said.

  “So it may,” Sam said. “But since I only know your language as it is used now, will I be able to understand this?”

  “You will find some strange words, a few odd turns of phrase,” the bookseller said. “Most of it, though, you will follow without much trouble. Our language does not change quickly. Nothing about us changes quickly. But our speech has mostly stayed the same since sound and video recording carved the preferred forms in stone.”

  “All right, then,” Sam said. “What is the story about?”

  “Friends who separate over time,” Sstravo answered. One of the guards made the affirmative gesture, so maybe she’d read the book. Sam kept thinking of Clark Gable. Sstravo went on, “What else would one find to write about? What else is there to write about?”

  “We Tosevites feel that way about the attraction between male and female,” Sam said. Sstravo and the guards laughed. Sam might have known—he had known—they would think that was funny. He held up the copy of Gone with the Wind that owed nothing to Margaret Mitchell. Cro-Magnons hadn’t finished replacing Neanderthals when this was written. “I will take this. How do I make arrangements to pay you?”

  “I will do it,” one guard said. “I shall be reimbursed.”

  “I thank you,” Sam said. The guard gave Sstravo a credit card. The bookseller rang up the purchase on a register that might have been as old as the novel. It worked, though. “Gone with the Wind,” Sam murmured. He started laughing all over again.

  Jonathan Yeager hadn’t seen his father for seventeen years. For all practical purposes, his father might as well have been dead. Now he was back, and he hadn’t changed a bit in all that time. Jonathan, meanwhile, had gone from a young man into middle age. Cold sleep had a way of complicating relationships just this side of adultery.

  At least his father also recognized the difficulty. “You’ve changed while I wasn’t looking,” he said to Jonathan one evening as they sat in the elder Yeager’s inadequately air-conditioned room.

  “That’s what you get for going to sleep while I stayed awake,” Jonathan answered. He sipped at a drink. The Lizards had given them pure ethyl alcohol. Cut with water, it did duty for vodka. The Race didn’t use ice cubes, though, and seemed horrified at the idea.

  His old man had a drink on the low round metal table beside him, too. After a nip from it, he nodded. “Well, I was encouraged to do that. They didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the notion it was good for my life expectancy.” He shook his head in wonder. “Since I’m heading toward a hundred and twenty-five now, I guess it must have been— assuming I ever woke up again, of course.”

  “Yeah. Assuming,” Jonathan said. He’d got used to not having his father around, to standing on the front line in the war against Father Time. Now he had some cover again. If his father was still around, he couldn’t be too far over the hill himself, could he? Of course, his father had stood still for a while, even as he’d kept going over that hill himself.

  “They wanted to get rid of me, and they did,” his dad said. “They might have made sure I had an ‘accident’ instead, if they could have sneaked it past the Race. If I hadn’t taken cold sleep, they probably would have tried that. But after
Gordon tried to blow my head off and didn’t quite make it, the warning they got from the Lizards must have made them leery of doing it if they didn’t have to.”

  “So here you are, and you’re in charge of things,” Jonathan said. “That ought to make them start tearing their hair out when they hear about it ten-plus years from now.”

  “I thought so, too, when I woke up and the Doctor didn’t,” his father replied. “But now I doubt it. I doubt it like hell, as a matter of fact. They’ll be into the 2040s by the time word of that gets back to Earth. By then, it will have been more than sixty years since I went into cold sleep and more than seventy-five since I made a real nuisance of myself. Hardly anybody will remember who I am. If I do a decent job of dealing with the Lizards, that’s all that’ll matter. Time heals all wounds.”

  Jonathan thought it over, then slowly nodded. “Well, maybe you’re right. I sure hope so. But I still remember what happened in the 1960s, even if nobody back there will. What they did to you wasn’t right.”

  “It was a long time ago—for everybody except me,” his father said. “Even for me, it wasn’t yesterday.” He finished his drink, then got up and fixed himself another. “See? You’ve got a lush for an old man.”

  “You’re no lush,” Jonathan said.

  “Well . . . not like that,” Sam Yeager admitted. “When I was playing ball . . . Sweet Jesus Christ, some of those guys could put the sauce away. Some of ’em drank so much, it screwed them out of a chance to make the big leagues. And some of ’em knew they weren’t ever going to make the big leagues because they just weren’t good enough, and they drank even harder so they wouldn’t have to think about that.”

  “You weren’t going to,” Jonathan said incautiously.

  “And I drank some,” his father answered. “I might have made it to the top if I hadn’t torn up my ankle. That cost me most of a season and most of my speed. Hell, I might have made it if the Lizards hadn’t come. I could still swing the bat some, and I was 4-F as could be—they wouldn’t draft me with full upper and lower plates. But even if it was the bush leagues, I liked what I was doing. The only other thing I knew how to do then was farm, and playing ball beat the crap out of that.”

  Jonathan took another pull at his glass. It didn’t taste like much, but it was plenty strong. He said, “You like what you’re doing now.”

  “You bet I do.” His father dropped an emphatic cough into English. “There hasn’t been a really big war with the Lizards since the first round ended the year after you were born. The Germans were damn fools to take ’em on alone in the 1960s, but then, the Nazis were damn fools. If there’s another fight, it won’t just take out Earth. Home will get it, too.”

  “And the other worlds in the Empire,” Jonathan said. “We wouldn’t leave them out.”

  His father nodded. “No, I don’t suppose we would. They could hit back if we did. That’s a lot of people and Lizards and Rabotevs and Hallessi dead. And for what? For what, goddammit?” Every once in a while, he still cussed like the ballplayer he had been. “For nothing but pride and fear, far as I can see. If I can do something to stop that, you’d better believe I will.”

  “What do you think the odds are?” Jonathan asked.

  Instead of answering straight out, his father said, “If anything happens to me here, the Lizards are liable to ask for you to take over as our ambassador. Are you ready for that, just in case?”

  “I’m not qualified, if that’s what you mean,” Jonathan answered. “I’m not telling you any big secrets; you know it as well as I do. The only reason they might think of me is that I’m your kid.”

  “Not the only reason, I’d say.” His father drank another slug of ersatz vodka. “I’ve been studying ever since they revived me, trying to catch up on all the stuff that happened after I went into cold sleep. From everything I’ve been able to find out, you were doing a hell of a job as Lizard contact man. They wouldn’t have asked you to come on the Admiral Peary if you and Karen weren’t good.”

  “Oh, we are.” The hooch had left Jonathan with very little modesty, false or otherwise. “We’re damn good. And all those years of dealing with Mickey and Donald gave us a feel for the Race I don’t think anybody could get any other way. But neither one of us is as good as you are.”

  That wasn’t modesty. That was simple truth, and Jonathan knew it even if he didn’t like it. He and Karen and most human experts on the Race learned more and more over years about how Lizards thought and behaved. No doubt his old man had done that, too. But his father, somehow, wasn’t just an expert on the Race, though he was that. Sam Yeager had the uncanny ability to think like a Lizard, to become a Lizard in all ways except looks and accent. People noticed it. So did members of the Race. So had Kassquit, who was at the same time both and neither.

  He had the ability. Jonathan didn’t. Neither did Karen. They were both outstanding at what they did. That only illustrated the difference between being outstanding and being a genius.

  With a wry chuckle, the genius—at thinking like a Lizard, anyhow—who was Jonathan’s father said, “That’s what I get for reading too much science fiction. Nothing like it to kill time on a train ride or a bus between one bush-league town and the next.” He’d said that many times before. He claimed the stuff had loosened up his mind and helped him think like a Lizard.

  But Jonathan shook his head. “I used to believe that was what did it for you, too. But I read the stuff. I started younger than you, ’cause we had it in the house and I knew ever since I was little what I wanted to do. I liked it, too. It was fun. And I got to study the Race in college, where you had to learn everything from scratch. You’re still better at it than I am—better than anybody else, too.”

  “When I was a kid, I wanted to be Babe Ruth,” his father said. “The only times I ever got into a big-league ballpark, I had to pay my own way. You’re playing in the majors, son, and you’re a star. That’s not bad.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Jonathan had his own fair share of the gray, middle-aged knowledge that told him he’d fallen somewhat short of the place he’d aimed at when he was younger. That was somewhat mitigated because he hadn’t fallen as far short as a lot of people did. But that his father held the place he’d aimed for and couldn’t quite reach . . . “I do wonder how Babe Ruth’s kid would have turned out if he’d tried to be a ballplayer. Even if he were a good one, would it have been enough?”

  “I think Ruth had girls,” his father said.

  Jonathan sent him an angry look. How could he misunderstand what I was saying like that? he wondered. And then, catching the gleam behind his old man’s bifocals, Jonathan realized he hadn’t misunderstood at all. He’d just chosen to be difficult. “Damn you, Dad,” he said.

  His father laughed. “I’ve got to keep you on your toes somehow, don’t I? And if Babe Ruth’s son turned out to be Joe DiMaggio, he wouldn’t have one goddamn thing to be ashamed of. Do you hear me?”

  “I suppose so,” Jonathan said. In a way, being very good at what he’d always wanted to do was not only enough but an embarrassment of riches. He’d been good enough—and so had Karen—to get chosen to come to Home, as his father’d said. But that wasn’t all of what he’d wanted. He’d wanted to be the best.

  And there was his father, sitting in this cramped little Lizard-sized room with him, slightly pie-eyed from all that almost-vodka he’d poured down, and he was the best. No doubt about it, they’d broken the mold once they made Sam Yeager.

  How many human ballplayers had sons who couldn’t measure up to what they’d done? A good many. Most of them you never even heard about, because their kids couldn’t make the majors at all. How many had had sons who were better than they were? Few. Damn few.

  His father said, “When it comes to this stuff, I can’t help being what I am, any more than you can help being what you are. We both put in a lot of hard work. I know what all you did while I was awake to see it. I don’t know everything you did while I was in cold sleep, but you coul
dn’t have been asleep at the switch. You’re here, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Yeah,” Jonathan said in what he hoped wasn’t too hollow a voice. “I’m here.” He was an expert on the Race. He had busted his hump in the seventeen years after Dad went into cold sleep. And if expertise didn’t quite make up for genius, he couldn’t help it. His father was right about that.

  “I’m going to ask you one thing before I throw you out and flop,” Sam Yeager said, finishing his drink and standing up on legs that didn’t seem to want to hold him. “If you want to blame fate or God or the luck of the draw for the way things are, that’s fine. What I want to ask you is, don’t blame me. Please? Okay?”

  He really sounded anxious. Maybe that was the booze talking through him. Or maybe he understood just what Jonathan was thinking. After all, he’d had to deal with failure a lot larger than Jonathan’s.

  What would he have done if the Lizards hadn’t come? For all his brave talk, odds were he wouldn’t have made the big leagues. Then what? Played bush-league ball as long as he could, probably. And after that? If he was lucky, he might have hooked on as a coach somewhere, or a minor-league manager. More likely, he would have had to look for ordinary work wherever he happened to be when he couldn’t get around on a fastball any more.

  And the world never would have found out the one great talent he had in him. He would have gone through life—well, not quite ordinary, because not everybody could play ball even at his level, but unfulfilled in a certain ultimate sense. Jonathan couldn’t say that about himself, and he knew it. He nodded. He smiled, too, and it didn’t take too much extra effort. “Okay, Dad,” he said. “Sure.”

  Although Ttomalss had gone into cold sleep after all the Big Uglies who’d come to Home, he’d been awake longer than they had. His starship had traveled from Tosev 3 to Home faster than their less advanced craft. He called up an image of their ramshackle ship on his computer monitor. It looked as if it would fall apart if anyone breathed on it hard. That wasn’t so, of course. It had got here. It might even get back to Tosev’s solar system.