Down to Earth (46 page)

“No, but you never can tell when it will,” his father said. “As for that, you’re lucky. When I was your age, I was living somewhere different every year. I never put down enough roots to be able to register and vote, so I never did, not till after the fighting stopped and I settled down with your mother.”

Jonathan hadn’t thought about that. Lord, his father had been an old man by the time he finally got the chance to vote. Before Jonathan could say anything about it, the pilot announced they’d be landing soon. This was Jonathan’s first flight. His father took airplanes for granted, so he did his best to do the same. It wasn’t easy. Watching the ground rush up, feeling the jounce as the plane hit the runway . . .

And you’ll be going into space in a couple of days,
he thought.
If you’re getting excited about airplanes, what will you do when you blast off?

A trim captain halfway between his age and his father’s took charge of them when they got off the plane. The captain gave Jonathan’s shaved a head a couple of glances, but didn’t say anything.

The officer drove through drizzle to a barracks. The quarters the two Yeagers got struck Jonathan as spartan. His father accepted them with the air of a man who’d known worse. Sometimes Jonathan wondered what all his old man had been through in the days before he’d reached the scene himself. His father didn’t talk about that much.

When they went to the mess hall, some of the soldiers there also gave Jonathan’s shiny skull and casual civilian clothes odd looks. He ignored them. He wished he could have ignored the food. You could eat as much as you wanted, but he couldn’t see why anybody would want to eat any of it.

Along with his father, he spent the time till he went into space getting lectured about everything that could go wrong and what to do if anything did. The short answer seemed to be,
If anything fails, you probably die.
The long answers were more complicated, but they added up to the same thing.

People did die going into space. He thought about that as he boarded the upper stage with
REDTAIL
painted on its nose. He didn’t think about it for long, though. At not quite twenty-one, he didn’t really believe he could die.

“Going to pay a call on the Lizards, eh?” said the pilot, a Navy lieutenant commander named Jacobson. “I’ll get you there and I’ll bring you home again—as long as we don’t blow up.”

“If we do, it’ll be over in a hurry,” Jonathan’s father said. “Plenty of worse ways to go, believe you me.”

“Oh, yeah.” The Navy man glanced over at Jonathan. “First time l ever took up a guy dressed like a Lizard, I’ll tell you that.”

Jonathan knew his dad would defend him if he didn’t speak up for himself. But he figured he was old enough to do that, even if he hadn’t hit twenty-one yet: “One of the reasons I’m going up is that I dress this way. It’s supposed to set their minds at ease, I guess you’d say.” He still kept quiet about Kassquit; the lieutenant commander didn’t need to know about her.

“Okay, kid,” Jacobson said. “You’re on the manifest, so you’re going. Strap in good there. I know your old man’s done this before, but you haven’t, have you?”

“No, sir.” Jonathan tried not to be nervous as he settled himself on the foam-padded seat. He didn’t know how much good the safety harness would do, but he fastened it.

“Been a while for me,” his father said. “But I know I’d rather go up there in just body paint and shorts than in my uniform here. The Race likes it hot.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Jacobson said. “Well, get as comfy as you can, because we’ve got an hour to kill now, waiting for launch time.”

That hour seemed to Jonathan to stretch endlessly. At last, though, the countdown, hallowed by endless books and films, reached zero. The rocket motor roared to life beneath him; all at once, it felt as if three or four guys had piled onto his chest. He’d had that happen in football games. But here, the guys didn’t get up. They couldn’t—they were him, his own body weight multiplied by acceleration. Though it was only a matter of minutes, the time felt as long as the hour’s wait before blastoff.

Beside him, his father forced out a sentence a word at a time: “Watch that first step—it’s a lulu.”

“You all right, Dad?” Jonathan asked: wheezed, actually. He wasn’t having too much trouble with the acceleration, but his father—heck, his father was practically an old man.

“I’ll manage,” Sam Yeager answered. “I reckon I was born to hang.”

Before Jonathan could answer that, he stopped weighing several hundred pounds. In fact, as the rockets cut off he stopped weighing anything at all. He discovered another reason for his safety harness: to keep him from floating all over the
Redtail
’s cramped little cabin. He also discovered his stomach was trying to climb up his gullet hand over hand. Gulping, he did his best to get it back where it belonged.

Lieutenant Commander Jacobson recognized that gulp. “Airsick bag to your right,” he said. “Grab it if you need it. Grab it before you need it, if you please.”

“I’ll try,” Jonathan said weakly. He found the bag, but discovered he didn’t have to clap it over his mouth, at least not right away. The pilot, meanwhile, was talking in the language of the Race and getting answers from the Lizards. Every so often, he’d use the
Redtail
’s motors to change course a little. Jonathan was too sunk in misery to pay much attention. His father was also quiet and thoughtful.

“We dock at the central hub of the Lizard ship,” Jacobson said after a while. “They spin most of their vessels for artificial gravity, but the axis stays weightless, of course.”

Again, Jonathan didn’t much care. The ship the
Redtail
approached looked big enough to have respectable gravity just from its own mass. Clanks and bangs announced contact. “Very neat,” his father said. “Very smooth.” It hadn’t felt smooth to him, but he had no standards of comparison.

“I’ll be waiting for you when the Lizards bring you back,” Jacobson said. “Have fun.” By his snort, he found that unlikely.

When the hatch opened, it revealed a couple of Lizards floating in a corridor. “The two Tosevites for the interview will come with us,” one of them said.

Jonathan undid his harness and pushed himself toward the Lizards. He flew as easily as if in a dream, but in a dream he wouldn’t have been fighting nausea. His father followed him. Sure enough, it was hot and dry in the spaceship, as hot and dry as it got in L.A. with the devil winds blowing.

Little by little, as Jonathan and his father followed the Lizards outward from the hub, weight, or a semblance of it, returned. By the time they got to the second deck out, they were walking, not floating. Jonathan approved. His stomach approved even more. The curved horizon of each deck seemed as surreal as something out of an Escher painting, but bodily well-being made him willing to forgive a lot.

At last, when his weight felt about the way it should have, the Lizard guides stopped using stairs and led his father and him along a corridor to a chamber with an open doorway. “The female Kassquit awaits within,” he said.

“We thank you,” Jonathan’s father replied in the language of the Race. He dropped back into English for Jonathan: “Let’s do it.”

“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said, also in English. “You go in first—that’s how they do things.” He was pleased he remembered some of what he’d learned.

“Right.” His father squared his shoulders and entered the chamber. As Jonathan followed, his father went back to the language of the Race: “I greet you, superior female. I am Sam Yeager; here with me is my hatchling, Jonathan Yeager.”

“I greet you, superior female,” Jonathan echoed. He had to work to hold his voice steady, but thought he managed. He’d known Kassquit would be naked, but knowing and experiencing were two different things, especially since she wasn’t just naked but shaved, not only her head but on all of her body.

“I greet you,” she said. She took her nudity altogether for granted. Her face showed nothing of what she thought. “How strange to make the acquaintance of my own biological kind at last.” She pointed to the body paint on Jonathan’s chest. “I see you are now wearing the marking of a psychological researcher’s assistant.”

“Yes,” Jonathan answered. “It is a true marking, for I assist my father here.” He tried to eye her paint without eyeing her breasts. “It is not much different from yours.”

“It is an accurate marking,” Kassquit said. “But it is not a true marking, for the Race did not give it to you.” She was as fussily precise as any real Lizard Jonathan had ever met.

His father asked, “How do you feel about meeting real Big Uglies at last?”

“Sore,” Kassquit replied at once. Jonathan was wondering whether he’d understood her correctly when she went on, “I had to be immunized against many Tosevite diseases before taking the risk of physical contact.”

“Ah,” Sam Yeager said. “Yes, you wrote to me about that. I respect your courage. I hope we bring you no diseases.”

“So do I,” Kassquit said. “I have never known illness, and have no desire to make its acquaintance.”

Jonathan gaped. He couldn’t help himself. She’d never been sick a day in her life? That hardly seemed possible. He wondered what his father was thinking—his father who’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and who complained these days that colds hung on a lot longer than they had when he was younger. Not wanting to contemplate his father’s mortality, he wondered if Mickey and Donald would grow up disease-free, too, because they wouldn’t meet any adult Lizards. He also wondered how many diseases Lizards had. They had doctors—he knew that much.

Kassquit said, “And what do you Big Uglies think of me?”

“You are an attractive young female,” Jonathan’s father answered. Jonathan would have agreed with that. His generation was a lot more relaxed about showing skin than his old man’s had been, but not so altogether oblivious about its even being an issue as Kassquit was. He had to work to keep his eyes on her face, not her breasts or the shaved place between her legs. His father went on, “The biggest differences between you and a wild Big Ugly are that you shave all your hair and that your face does not move much.”

“Your hatchling also shaves his hair,” Kassquit said.

“Uh—not as much of it as you do,” Jonathan said, and felt his face heat in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber. “I try to look like a member of the Race.”

“So do I—with rather more reason than you.” Kassquit could be tart when she chose. She went on, “As for my face, my caregiver, Ttomalss, speculates that I needed to see moving faces when newly hatched to learn to move mine as wild Tosevites do. Since his face cannot move, I never acquired the art myself. I do not miss it.” She shrugged. Her breasts were so small and firm, they hardly jiggled. Jonathan couldn’t help noticing that.

His father asked, “From what you know of life down on Tosev 3, what do you miss about it?”

“Nothing!” Kassquit used an emphatic cough. “Except genetically, I am not of your kind.”

“But that is a large exception,” Jonathan’s father said. “It means you can never be fully of the Race, either. What is it like, staying forever betwixt and between?”

What was going on behind Kassquit’s impassive mask? Jonathan couldn’t tell. At last, she said, “I was made to be a bridge between my kind and Big Uglies.” She pointed at Jonathan. “He—your hatchling—is a bridge between your kind and the Race. So are you, Sam Yeager—or should I say, Regeya? We reach from opposite sides toward each other.”

“To the Race, you are a Big Ugly, too,” Jonathan’s father pointed out.

Kassquit shrugged again. “I am of the Empire. You are not. Males and females of the Race, Rabotevs, Hallessi—they are my kind. You are not.”

“Look in a mirror,” Jonathan suggested. “Then try to say that. See if it is truth.”

For the first time, Kassquit raised her voice. “This interview is over,” she said sharply, with another emphatic cough. She strode out of the chamber through a side door Jonathan hadn’t noticed till she used it. He glanced over at his father, wondering if he’d horribly botched things. Only when his dad winked back at him did he relax—a little.

If Ottawa wasn’t the end of the line, you could see it from there. So thought David Goldfarb, at any rate, as he and his family stayed and stayed and stayed at the detention center for immigrants about whom the Canadians weren’t certain. People who’d come in after the Goldfarbs had already gone on their way, but the authorities remained dissatisfied with him.

He was dissatisfied with them, too, and with their country. Ottawa lay six degrees of latitude south of London, ten degrees south of Belfast. But, as 1964 drifted toward 1965, he thought he’d chosen to emigrate to Siberia. He’d never known such cold as he found every time he stuck his nose outdoors. Schoolchildren learned about what the Gulf Stream did for Britain’s climate, but he’d never had to think about it outside of school till now.

“How long?” Naomi asked one day after the children had gone to sleep. “How long can they keep us like this in—in purgatory, is that the word?”

“That’s the word, all right,” Goldfarb told his wife. It was, all things considered, not the worst of purgatories—the flat where they’d been installed was bigger and boasted more amenities than the one they’d had in married officers’ quarters back in Belfast. Still . . . “I just wish they’d let me get on with my life, dammit.” He’d wished that since summer. It hadn’t happened yet.

“Can your friend Jones do nothing about this?” she asked.

“If he could, I think he would have by now,” Goldfarb answered gloomily. “It’s not that I haven’t written him, you know. Trouble is, I haven’t just got friends in high places. I’ve got enemies there, too—too bloody many of them.”

“We’re here,” Naomi said. “I will thank God for that. There is no Canadian fascist party, and I will thank God for that, too. Canada looks to the USA, not to the
Reich
. I have been through pogroms once in my life. Once is too often.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know. I went to Poland during the fighting, remember. And I saw Marseille, and what was left of the synagogue there.”