Homeward Bound (74 page)

“Well, well,” he said. “We’ve got a welcoming committee. Only thing I don’t see is the brass band.”

Karen didn’t see a brass band, either. What she did see were cops and soldiers all around, pistols and rifles at the ready. The soldiers’ uniforms looked something like the ones she’d known in 1994, but only something. The same applied to their weapons. A captain—her rank badge hadn’t changed, anyway—who surely hadn’t been born in 1994 came up to the Yeagers. “Please come with me, folks,” she said.

“Like we’ve got a choice,” Jonathan said.

She gave him a reproachful look. “Do you really want to stand on the cement for the rest of the day?” She added an interrogative cough.

“Since you put it that way, no,” Karen said. “Just don’t go too fast. We’ve been light for a while.”

The shuttlecraft terminal was a lot bigger and fancier than Karen remembered. Some of the columns supporting things looked as if they’d fall down in a good-sized earthquake. Karen hoped that meant building techniques had improved, not that people had stopped worrying about quakes.

She and her husband and her father-in-law didn’t have much luggage. Customs officials pounced on what they did have. “We’re going to irradiate this,” one of them declared.

“For God’s sake, why?” Karen asked.

“Who knows what sort of creatures you’re bringing back from Home?” the woman answered.

“Isn’t that locking the barn door after the horse is gone?” Sam asked.

“We don’t think so,” the customs inspector replied. “The Lizards have brought in what they wanted here. That’s been bad enough. But who knows what sort of fungi or pest eggs you’re carrying? We don’t want to find out. And so—into the X-ray machine everything goes.”

“Do you want us to take off what we’re wearing?” Karen inquired.

She intended it for sarcasm, but the inspector turned and started talking with her boss. After a moment, she turned back and nodded. “Yes, I think you had better do that. You come with me, Mrs. Yeager.” A couple of male inspectors took charge of Jonathan and Sam.

That’ll teach me to ask questions when I don’t really want to know the answers,
Karen thought. She stripped and sat draped in a towel till they deigned to give her back her clothes. She half expected to see smoke rising from her shoes when she finally did get them back, but they seemed unchanged. The inspector led her out of the waiting room. Her husband and father-in-law emerged from another one five minutes later.

“Boy, that was fun,” Jonathan said.

“Wasn’t it just?” his father agreed. “Are we all right now?” he asked one of the inspectors riding herd on him.

“We think so, sir,” the man answered seriously. “We’re going to take the chance, anyhow.” He sounded like a judge reluctantly letting some dangerous characters out on parole.

Signs and painted arrows led the Yeagers to the reception area. Waiting there were more cops and soldiers. Some of them were holding reporters at bay, which seemed a worthwhile thing to do. Others kept a wary eye on Karen and Jonathan and Sam.
What do they think we’ll do?
Karen wondered. This time, she didn’t ask; somebody might have told her.

Also waiting in the reception area were two men about halfway between Jonathan and Sam in age and two Lizards. Karen saw that the Lizards were Mickey and Donald a heartbeat before she realized the two men had to be her sons. She’d known time had marched on for them. She’d known, yes, but she hadn’t
known.
Now the knowledge hit her in the belly.

It hit Richard and Bruce at the same time, and just about as hard. They both seemed to go weak in the knees for a moment before they hurried forward. “Mom? Dad? Grandpa?” They sounded disbelieving. Mickey and Donald followed them.

Then they were all embracing, people and Lizards alike. Tears ran down Karen’s face, and not hers alone. Everybody kept saying things like, “My God!” and, “I don’t believe it!” and, “I never thought I’d see the day!”

“Where are the grandchildren? Where are the great-grandchildren?” Karen asked.

“Add a generation for me, please,” Sam said, and everybody laughed.

“They’re at my house,” Bruce answered. “I’m living in Palos Verdes, south of where your house was.”

Sam pointed at Donald. “You have a lot to answer for, buster.”

“They drugged me,” Donald said. “They held a gun to my head. They waved money under my nose. How was I supposed to tell them no?”

“He always was a ham,” Mickey said sadly.

“You always were a bore,” Donald retorted. “And they always liked you best.”

“We did not!” Karen, Jonathan, and Sam all said it at the same time. Karen and Jonathan added emphatic coughs.

Donald’s face couldn’t show much expression, but his body language did. What it showed was scorn. “I pretend to be human better than you people pretend to be Lizards,” he said.

“You’ve had more practice,” Karen said mildly.

Bruce said, “Let’s go to the cars, shall we? We can wrangle about this some more when we get back to my house. The kids will want to get in on it and throw rocks, too.” He sounded more weary than amused. How often had this argument played itself out—or, more likely, gone round and round without getting anywhere?
It’s a family. Of course it has squabbles,
Karen thought.

Two different sets of bodyguards formed up around them as they went to the parking lot. One bunch belonged to Donald. Celebrities had needed protection from their fans in Karen’s day, too; she wasn’t surprised to see that hadn’t changed. The other contingent kept an eye on her father-in-law. That worried her. The two groups of hard-faced men and women affected not to notice each other.

Cars reminded her much more of the ones she’d seen on Home than those she remembered from before she went on ice. The designs were simpler, more sensible, less ornate. “Are any gasoline-burners left?” she asked. Bruce shook his head. Richard held his nose. Karen wasn’t surprised. The cleaner air had made her suspect as much. She hadn’t been quite sure, though. With its constant sea breeze, the airport had always had some of the best air in the L.A. basin.

The ride down to Palos Verdes was . . . strange. It went through parts of town Karen knew well—or had known well. Some of the buildings were still there. Others had vanished, to be replaced by some that seemed as strange as the shuttlecraft terminal. Karen noticed Sam doing even more muttering than she and Jonathan were. He’d gone into cold sleep seventeen years earlier than they had. The South Bay had to look stranger to him than it did to them.

“It’s not even like I’ve been away since 1977,” he said after a while. “I only remember the time since I woke up in orbit around Home, and I keep thinking it couldn’t have changed that much since then. And it didn’t—but I have to keep reminding myself.”

“So do we,” Karen said.

Bruce’s house impressed her. To her eye, it seemed almost as big as the hotel where the Americans had stayed in Sitneff. She soon realized that was an exaggeration, but her son had done well for himself. So had the other people whose large houses loomed on nearby large lots. Palos Verdes had always been a place where people who’d made it lived.

Both sets of bodyguards piled out of their cars. They formed a defensive perimeter—or was it two? People Karen had never seen came spilling out of the house. Having children calling her grandmother would have been strange enough. Having grownups she’d never seen before, grownups approaching middle age, calling her that felt positively surreal.

Jonathan looked as shellshocked as she felt. “It’s a good thing they figured out how to go faster than light,” he said. “Otherwise, lots of people would have to try to get used to this, and I think they’d go nuts.”

“It gives the Lizards trouble, and they live longer and change slower than we do—and they don’t have families the way we do, either,” Sam said. “But a lot of their males and females who travel from star to star have their own clique. They understand how strange it is, and nobody who hasn’t done it can.”

“I know what I understand.” Karen turned to her younger son, who seemed to wear more years than she did. “I understand that I could use a drink.” She added an emphatic cough.

“Well, that can be arranged,” Bruce said. “Come on in, everybody, and have a look around.”

Jonathan Yeager felt besieged by relatives. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren seemed to know everything about him up till the minute he and Karen went into cold sleep. But that was almost forty years ago now, and he didn’t know anything about these people. To him, they might almost have been so many friendly strangers.

That went even for his sons. Richard and Bruce still had the same basic personalities he remembered—Richard a little more like him, Bruce more outgoing like Karen—but they weren’t college kids finding out about the world any more. They’d had all those years to grow into themselves. They seemed to have done a good job of it, but he couldn’t say he knew them. The same went for Mickey and Donald—especially Donald.

He walked over to his father, who was sitting with his legs crossed and a drink balanced on his right knee. “Hi, Dad,” Jonathan said. “Congratulations.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sam Yeager looked up at him. “How come?”

“Because of all the people here, you’re the only one who’s even more out of it than I am,” Jonathan answered.

“Oh.” His father thought that over. Then he said, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk. Only trouble is, it’s a darn long walk back to Home.”

“Yeah. That occurred to me, too,” Jonathan said. “We’re here. We’ll just have to make the best of it. They won’t throw us in the poorhouse, anyhow. We’ve got a lot of back pay coming to us.”

“Hot diggety.” His father made a sour face. “Do you suppose there’s anybody else on the face of the Earth who says ‘hot diggety’ any more? The more I listen to people nowadays, the more I’m convinced I really do belong in a museum. Me and the Neanderthals and the woolly mammoths and all the other things you wouldn’t want to see in your driveway at three in the morning.”

Bruce’s daughter Jessica was sitting a couple of feet away. She smiled. “Don’t be silly, Great-grandfather. You can show up in my driveway any time you want.”

“Thanks for all of that except the ‘Great-grandfather,’ ” Sam Yeager said. “It makes me feel a million years old, and I’m not—quite.”

“What do you want me to call you?” she asked.

“How about Sam? It’s my name.” Jonathan’s father pointed at him. “You can call this guy Gramps, though.”

“Thanks a lot, Dad,” Jonathan said.

“Any old time, kiddo—and I do mean old,” his father answered.

Jessica looked from one of them to the other. Amusement danced in her eyes. She was somewhere in her thirties: a blue-eyed blonde with strong cheekbones. Jonathan tried to see either himself or Karen in her face, and didn’t have much luck. Maybe she looked like her mother, the woman Bruce hadn’t stayed married to. She said, “You’re quite a pair, aren’t you?”

“You should see us on TV,” Jonathan said. “We’re funnier than Donald, and we don’t have to paint ourselves into tuxes.”

“Nope—just corners,” Sam agreed. Jessica made a face at him. He got to his feet. “I need another drink.”

“Now that you mention it, so do I.” Jonathan followed him over to the bar. His father picked up a bottle of bourbon. He poured some into a glass, then added ice cubes. “Alcohol with flavorings I like, by God. And I don’t have to get into a brawl with the Lizards to get ice.” He raised his glass. “Mud in your eye.”

Jonathan built a drink for himself. “Same to you,” he said. They both sipped. Jonathan wasn’t so sure he liked bourbon any more. It did taste like home, though: home with a small
h.

Richard came over to the two of them. He made his own drink—something with rum and fruit juice. Jonathan wouldn’t have wanted it anywhere this side of a beachfront hotel at Waikiki. But his son was entitled to his own taste. Richard kept staring now at Jonathan, now at Sam. “This is crazy. You’re going to laugh at me,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “You both look just the way I remember you, but it’s been a hell of a long time.”

“You were a little kid when I went on ice,” Sam said accusingly. “How come you’re not a little kid any more?”

Richard hadn’t been a little kid when Jonathan went into cold sleep. But he hadn’t been older than his father by body time, either. They didn’t look like father and son these days. They looked like brothers, and Richard was definitely the more weathered of the two. Jonathan knocked back a good slug of bourbon. “I’m not laughing at anything right now,” he said. “It’s just starting to hit me that the country I grew up in—the country where I lived my whole life—is almost as alien to me as Home. Everything here seems strange to me, so I don’t know why I ought to be surprised that I seem strange to you.”

“That’s . . . fair enough, I suppose,” his son said. “I hadn’t really thought about what all this must be like from your point of view.”

Jonathan put a hand on his father’s shoulder. “It’s got to be even weirder for Dad. He went into cold sleep quite a while before I did.”

“That’s only half the problem,” Sam said. “The other half is, I was
born
quite a while before you were. All my attitudes are ancient history now. I’ve tried to outgrow some of the worst ones, but they’re still there down underneath. I felt like a geezer in 1977. I’m worse than a geezer now. Christ! It’s more than a hundred years since I tore up my ankle and turned into a minor leaguer for good. That was in Birmingham, Alabama, and nobody thought anything of it when they made colored people sit by themselves in the lousy seats.”

“Blacks,” Jonathan said.

“African Americans,” Richard said. Jonathan shook his head, like a man in a bridge game who’s been overtrumped.

Three generations of Yeagers. Three men whose births spanned more than sixty years. By body time, fewer than twenty years separated them, and the one who should have been youngest was in the middle. Jonathan shook his head again. Such things shouldn’t have been possible. Here they all were, though.

Richard’s wife came over to them. Diane Yeager was younger than Jonathan’s son—say, about the same age he was himself. She didn’t say a whole lot, but Jonathan got the impression she was hard to faze. “Family group,” she remarked now, her eyes going from her husband to his father to his grandfather.