Homeward Bound Read online

  Dr. Kleinfeldt wrote a note on the chart. “This is what I thought you’d decide. When do you want to undergo the procedure?”

  “Let me have a couple of weeks,” Yeager answered; he’d been thinking about the same thing. “I’ve got to finish putting my affairs in order. It’s like dying, after all. It’s just like dying, except with a little luck it isn’t permanent.”

  “Yes, with a little luck,” Kleinfeldt said; he might almost have been Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado” intoning, Yes, for the love of God. He looked at the calendar. “Then I’ll see you here on . . . the twenty-seventh, at eight in the morning. Nothing by mouth for twelve hours before that. I’ll prescribe a purgative to clean out your intestinal tract, too. It won’t be much fun, but it’s necessary. Any questions?”

  “Just one.” Sam tapped his top front teeth. “I’ve got full upper and lower plates—I’ve had ’em since my teeth rotted out after the Spanish flu. What shall I do about those? If this does work, I don’t want to go to Home without my choppers. That wouldn’t do me or the country much good.”

  “Take them out before the procedure,” Dr. Kleinfeldt told him. “We’ll put them in your storage receptacle. You won’t go anywhere they don’t.”

  “Okay.” Yeager nodded. “Fair enough. I wanted to make sure.” He did his best not to dwell on what Kleinfeldt called a storage receptacle. If that wasn’t a fancy name for a coffin, he’d never heard one. His wife had always insisted on looking for the meaning behind what people said. He muttered to himself as he got up to leave. He and Barbara had had more than thirty good years together. If he hadn’t lost her, he wondered if he would have been willing to face cold sleep. He doubted it. He doubted it like anything, as a matter of fact.

  After reclaiming his car from the parking lot, he drove south on the freeway from downtown Los Angeles to his home in Gardena, one of the endless suburbs ringing the city on all sides but the sea. The sky was clearer and the air cleaner than he remembered them being when he first moved to Southern California. Most cars on the road these days, like his, used clean-burning hydrogen, a technology borrowed—well, stolen—from the Lizards. Only a few gasoline-burners still spewed hydrocarbons into the air.

  He would have rattled around his house if he’d lived there alone. But Mickey and Donald were plenty to keep him hopping instead of rattling. He’d raised the two Lizards from eggs obtained God only knew how, raised them to be as human as they could. They weren’t humans, of course, but they came closer to it than any other Lizards on this or any other world.

  The Race had done the same thing with a human baby, and had had a twenty-year start on the project. He’d met Kassquit, the result of their experiment. She was very bright and very strange. He was sure the Lizards would have said exactly the same thing about Mickey and Donald.

  “Hey, Pop!” Donald shouted when Sam came in the door. He’d always been the more boisterous of the pair. He spoke English as well as his mouth could shape it. Why not? It was as much his native tongue as Sam‘s. “What’s up?”

  “Well, you know how I told you I might be going away for a while?” Yeager said. Both Lizards nodded. They were physically full grown, which meant their heads came up to past the pit of Sam’s stomach, but they weren’t grownups, or anything close to it. He went on, “Looks like that’s going to happen. You’ll be living with Jonathan and Karen when it does.”

  Mickey and Donald got excited enough to skitter around the front room, their tailstumps quivering. They didn’t realize they wouldn’t be seeing him again. He didn’t intend to explain, either. His son and daughter-in-law could do that a little bit at a time. The Lizards had taken Barbara’s death harder than he had; for all practical purposes, she’d been their mother. Among their own kind, Lizards didn’t have families the way people did. That didn’t mean they couldn’t get attached to those near and dear to them, though. These two had proved as much.

  One of these days before too long, the Race would find out what the United States and the Yeagers had done with the hatchlings. Or to them, Sam thought: they were as unnatural as Kassquit. But, since they’d meddled in her clay, how could they complain if humanity returned the compliment? They couldn’t, or not too loudly. So Sam—so everybody—hoped, anyhow.

  He did put his affairs in order. That had a certain grim finality to it. At least I get to do it, and not Jonathan, he thought. He took the Lizards over to Jonathan and Karen’s house. He said his good-byes. Everybody kissed him, even if Donald and Mickey didn’t have proper lips. I may be the only guy ever kissed by a Lizard, was what went through his mind as he walked out to the car.

  Next morning, bright and early—why didn’t doctors keep more civilized hours?—he went back to Dr. Kleinfeldt’s. “Nothing by mouth the past twelve hours?” Kleinfeldt asked. Sam shook his head. “You used the purgative?” the doctor inquired.

  “Oh, yeah. After I got home yesterday.” Sam grimaced. That hadn’t been any fun.

  “All right. Take off your clothes and lie down here.”

  Sam obeyed. Kleinfeldt hooked him up to an IV and started giving him shots. He wondered if he would simply blank out, the way he had during a hernia-repair operation. It didn’t work out like that. He felt himself slowing down. Dr. Kleinfeldt seemed to talk faster and faster, though his speech rhythm probably wasn’t changing. Sam’s thoughts stretched out and out and out. The last thing that occurred to him before he stopped thinking altogether was, Funny, I don’t feel cold.

  Kassquit bent herself into the posture of respect before Ttomalss in his office in a starship orbiting Tosev 3. Since she didn’t have a tailstump, it wasn’t quite perfect, but she did it as well as anyone of Tosevite blood could. Why not? She’d learned the ways of the Race, of the Empire, since the days of her hatchlinghood. She knew them much better than she did those of what was biologically her own kind.

  “I greet you, superior sir,” she said.

  “And I greet you, Researcher,” Ttomalss replied, an odd formality in his voice. He was the male who’d raised her. He was also the male who’d tried, for the most part unintentionally, to keep her dependent on him even after she grew to adulthood. That he’d failed, that she’d carved out her own place for herself, went a long way towards accounting for his constraint.

  “By now, superior sir, you will, I am sure, have read my message,” Kassquit said. She couldn’t resist tacking on an interrogative cough at the end of the sentence, even if she claimed to be sure.

  Ttomalss noticed that, as she’d intended. The way he waggled his eye turrets said he wasn’t too happy about it, either. But he held his voice steady as he answered, “Yes, I have read it. How did you learn that the Big Uglies are experimenting with the technology of cold sleep?”

  “That is not the question, superior sir,” Kassquit said. “The question is, why was I not informed of this as soon as we discovered it? Am I not correct in believing the wild Big Uglies have been developing their techniques for more than ten local years now?”

  “Well . . . yes,” the male who’d raised her admitted uncomfortably.

  “And is it not also true that the Tosevite male named Sam Yeager availed himself of these techniques five local years ago, and in fact did not die, as was publicly reported, and as I was led to believe?”

  Ttomalss sounded even more uncomfortable. “I believe that to be the case, but I am not altogether sure of it,” he replied. “The American Big Uglies are a great deal less forthcoming about their experiments, this for reasons that should be obvious to you. What we think we know is pieced together from intelligence sources and penetrations of their computer networks. They are, unfortunately, a good deal better at detecting, preventing, and confusing such penetrations than they were even a few years ago.”

  “And why did you prevent me from gaining access to this important—indeed, vital—information?” Kassquit demanded.

  “That should also be obvious to you,” Ttomalss said.

  “What is obvious to me, superior sir, i
s that these techniques offer me something I never had before: a chance of visiting Home, of seeing the world that is the source of my . . . my being,” Kassquit said. That wasn’t biologically true, of course. Biologically, she was and would always be a Big Ugly. After years of shaving her entire body to try to look more like a female of the Race—forlorn hope!—she’d acknowledged that and let her hair grow. If some reactionary scholars here didn’t care for the way she looked, too bad. Culturally, she was as much a part of the Empire as they were. Even Ttomalss sometimes had trouble remembering that. Kassquit continued, “Now that I have this opportunity, I will not be deprived of it.”

  After a long sigh, Ttomalss said, “I feared this would be your attitude. But do you not see how likely it is that you do not in fact have the opportunity at all, that it is in fact a snare and a delusion?”

  “No.” Kassquit used the negative gesture. “I do not see that at all, superior sir. If the technique is effective, why should I not use it?”

  “If the technique were proved effective, I would not mind if you did use it,” Ttomalss replied. “But the Big Uglies are not like us. They do not experiment and test for year after year, decade after decade, perfecting their methods before putting them into general use. They rashly forge ahead, trying out ideas still only half hatched. If they are mad enough to risk their lives on such foolishness, that is one thing. For you to risk yours is something else. For us to let you risk yours is a third thing altogether. We kept these data from you as long as we could precisely because we feared you would importune us in this fashion.”

  “Superior sir, my research indicates that I have probably already lived more than half my span,” Kassquit said. “Must I live out all my days in exile? If I wait for certain perfection of these methods, I will wait until all my days are done. For a species, waiting and testing may be wisdom. For an individual, how can they be anything but disaster?” Tears stung her eyes. She hated them. They were a Tosevite instinctive response over which she had imperfect control.

  “If the Big Uglies’ methods fail, you could give up your entire remaining span of days,” Ttomalss pointed out. “Have you considered that?”

  Now Kassquit used the affirmative gesture. “I have indeed,” she answered. “First, the risk is in my opinion worth it. Second, even if I should die, what better way to do so than completely unconscious and unaware? From all I gather, dying is no more pleasant for Tosevites than for members of the Race.”

  “Truth. At any rate, I believe it to be truth,” Ttomalss said. “But you have not considered one other possibility. Suppose you are revived, but find yourself . . . diminished upon awakening? This too can happen.”

  He was right. Kassquit hadn’t thought about that. She prided herself on her fierce, prickly intelligence. How would she, how could she, cope with the new world of Home if she did not have every bit of that? “I am willing to take the chance,” she declared.

  “Whether we are willing for you to take it may be another question,” Ttomalss said.

  “Oh, yes. I know.” Kassquit did not bother to hide her bitterness. By the way Ttomalss’ eye turrets twitched uncomfortably, he understood what she felt. She went on, “Even so, I am going to try. And you are going to do everything you can to support me.” She used an emphatic cough to stress her words.

  The male who’d raised her jerked in surprise. “I am? Why do you say that?”

  “Why? Because you owe it to me,” Kassquit answered fiercely. “You have made me into something neither scale nor bone. You treated me as an experimental animal—an interesting experimental animal, but an experimental animal even so—for all the first half of my life. Thanks to you, I think of myself at least as much as a female of the Race as I do of myself as a Tosevite.”

  “You are a citizen of the Empire,” Ttomalss said. “Does that not please you?”

  “By the Emperor, it does,” Kassquit said, and used another emphatic cough. Ttomalss automatically cast his eye turrets down toward the metal floor at the mention of the sovereign. Kassquit had to move her whole head to make the ritual gesture of respect. She did it. She’d been trained to do it. As she usually wasn’t, she was consciously aware she’d been trained to do it. She continued, “It pleases me so much, I want to see the real Empire of which I am supposed to be a part. And there is one other thing you do not seem to have considered.”

  “What is that?” Ttomalss asked cautiously—or perhaps fearfully was the better word.

  “If the Big Uglies are working on cold sleep, what are they likely to do with it?” Kassquit asked. Her facial features stayed immobile. She had never learned the expressions most Big Uglies used to show emotion. Those cues required echoes during early hatchlinghood, echoes Ttomalss had been unable to give her. If she could have, though, she would have smiled a nasty smile. “What else but try to fly from star to star? If they reach Home, would it not be well to have someone there with at least some understanding and firsthand experience of them?”

  She waited. Ttomalss made small, unhappy hissing noises. “I had not considered that,” he admitted at last. “I do not believe anyone on Tosev 3 has considered it—not in that context, at any rate. You may well be right. If the Big Uglies do reach Home, we would be better off having individuals there who are familiar with them from something other than data transmissions across light-years of space. The males and females back on Home at present plainly do not qualify.”

  “Then you agree to support my petition to travel to Home?” Kassquit asked, eagerness in her voice if not on her face.

  “If—I repeat, if—the Big Uglies’ techniques for cold sleep prove both effective and safe, then perhaps this may be a justifiable risk.” Ttomalss did not sound as if he wanted to commit himself to anything.

  Kassquit knew she had to pin him down if she possibly could. “You will support my petition?” she asked again, more sharply this time. “Please come straight out and tell me what you will do, superior sir.”

  That was plainly the last thing Ttomalss wanted to do. At last, with obvious reluctance, he made the affirmative gesture. “Very well. I will do this. But you must see that I do it much more for the sake of the Race and for Home than for your personal, petty—I might even say selfish—reasons.”

  “Of course, superior sir.” Kassquit didn’t care why Ttomalss was doing as she wanted. She only cared that he was doing it. “Whatever your reasons, I thank you.”

  “Make your petition. It will have my full endorsement,” Ttomalss said. “Is there anything else?”

  “No, superior sir.” Kassquit knew a dismissal when she heard one. She hurried out of Ttomalss’ office. Inside, her liver was singing. The Big Uglies spoke of the heart as the center of emotion, but she was too much under the influence of the Race’s language—the only one she spoke—to worry about that foolish conceit.

  Even after she submitted her petition, wheels turned slowly. More than a year of the Race went by before it was finally approved. She watched Tosev 3 from orbit. She had never visited the planet on which she’d been hatched. She did not think she ever would. Because she’d been exposed to so few Tosevite illnesses when young, her body had inadequate defenses against them. What would have been a trivial illness or no illness at all for the average wild Big Ugly might have killed her.

  Another snag developed when the American Big Uglies proved reluctant to send a physician up to her starship to give her the treatment she needed. At last, though, they were persuaded. Kassquit didn’t know what went into the process of persuasion, but it finally worked.

  “So you will be going to Home, will you?” the Tosevite asked. Even in the warmth of the starship—the Race naturally heated the interior to their standards of comfort, which were hotter than most Tosevites cared for—he wore white cloth wrappings. He also wore a cloth mask, to keep from infecting her with microorganisms. He spoke the language of the Race reasonably well. These days, most educated Tosevites did.

  “I hope so, yes,” she answered.

 
“All right.” He bobbed his head up and down, the Big Uglies’ equivalent of the affirmative gesture. “Our treatment is based on the one the Race uses. I will leave detailed instructions with the Race on how to care for you, what injections to give you when you are revived, the proper temperature at which to store you, and so on. And I will wish you luck. I hope this works. We are still learning, you know.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Kassquit said. “To see Home, I would take almost any risk. I am not afraid. Do what you need to do.” She lay down on the sleeping mat.

  The Race gave injections with a high-pressure spray that painlessly penetrated scaly hides. Big Uglies used hollow needles. They stung. Kassquit started to tell the physician as much, but the world around her slowed down and it no longer seemed important. The fluorescent lights overhead blurred and then went dark.

  Glen Johnson and Mickey Flynn floated in the Lewis and Clark’s control room. The glass in the broad view windows had been treated to kill reflections, leaving them with a splendid view of the local asteroids—quite a few of which now sported American installations, or at least motors adequate to swing them out of orbit—and of far more stars than they would have seen from beneath Earth’s thick mantle of air. The sky was black—not just blue-black, but sable absolute.

  “We’ve spent a hell of a lot of time out here,” Johnson remarked, apropos of nothing in particular. He was a lean man of not quite sixty; because he’d spent the past twenty years weightless, his skin hadn’t wrinkled and sagged the way it would have in a gravity field. Of course, everything came at a price. If he had to endure much in the way of gravity now, it would kill him in short order.

  “We volunteered,” Flynn replied. He’d been round under gravity; he was rounder now, but he also did not sag so much. With dignity, he corrected himself: “I volunteered, anyhow. You stowed away.”