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.”