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.
“Family group,” Jonathan agreed. He suspected his voice sounded ragged. So what, though? By God, hadn’t he earned the right to sound a little ragged just now?
“Three generations for the price of one,” she said. “You could all be brothers.”
By body time, they could have been. Not many sets of brothers were spread as far apart as the three of them, but some were. And yet… “You’d have to go some to find three brothers as different as we are,” Jonathan said.
“Can’t be helped,” Richard said. “We are what we are, that’s all, and we have to make the best of it.”
“ ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves,’ ” Sam quoted. “Except that’s not true, not this time. If it weren’t for Tau Ceti, everything would be normal.” He sipped from his drink. “Of course, I wouldn’t be here, so I’m not about to complain.”
Strictly by the calendar, Jonathan would turn ninety in December, so he wasn’t about to complain, either. “Can you imagine how strange it would be if there were thousands and thousands of families trying to sort this out?” He pointed to his father. “How much fun are you going to have trying to renew your driver’s license when you tell a clerk-or more likely a computer-you were born in 1907?”
Sam winced. “Hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, it ought to make some electronics start chasing their own tail.”
“How do the Lizards handle it?” Diane asked, and started to laugh. “I’ve got three of the world’s best experts here to answer my question.”
Richard Yeager looked to his father and grandfather. “I defer to the people who’ve been on the spot, which I haven’t.”
“You know more about it than we do, son,” Jonathan said. “We were either stuck in a hotel trying to be diplomats or we were out being tourists, which isn’t exactly a scientist’s dream, either.”
“That’s about the size of it,” his father agreed. “Besides, since your wife asked, only fair you should show off in front of her. I’m sure she’s never heard you do it before.”
Diane Yeager snickered. Richard turned red. He said, “The two big things the Race has going for it are its longer lifespan and its different social structure. It doesn’t have families to be disrupted the way we do. We were talking about this in the car on the way down, in fact.”
“Truth,” Jonathan said in the Race’s language. He went on, “Even so, there’s a clique of star travelers who stick together because they aren’t so connected to the present. I suppose that would have happened with us, too.”
“Probably,” Richard said. “Better this way, though. Now we don’t have to spend some large part of our loved ones’ lifetime traveling from star to star.”
Before Jonathan or his father could add anything to that, Donald came up to them. He aimed one eye turret at Jonathan, the other at Sam. “Did the two of you have any idea-any idea at all-what you were doing to Mickey and me when you decided to raise us as people?” he demanded.
“No,” Jonathan and his father said at the same time. Sam went on, “Do you know of Kassquit, the girl the Race raised?”
“We’ve heard of her,” Donald answered. “We’d like to meet her one of these days. If anybody would understand some of the things we’ve been through growing up, she’s the one.”
“She’s said the same thing about the two of you,” Jonathan said.
“The Race tried to raise a human as much like one of their kind as they could,” his father said. “We did the same thing with you. When we met Kassquit, we realized how unfair that was to you, but we were committed to doing it.”
“National security,” Donald said scornfully. He stuck out his tongue. “This for national security. You ruined our lives for the sake of national security.”
“Things could be worse,” Jonathan pointed out. “You’ve made a lot of money. People admire you. Millions of them watch you every night. And Mickey’s prosperous, too, even if he’s less public about it.”
“Yes, we have money. You know that old saying about money and happiness? It’s true,” Donald said. “All the money in the world can’t make up for the simple truth: we’re sorry excuses for males of the Race and we’re even sorrier excuses for humans. You want to know how sorry? I really do leer at Rita, because that’s what a man would do. I can’t do anything with her. Even if I smelled pheromones from a female of the Race and got excited, I couldn’t do anything with her. But I leer anyway. There they are, hanging out, and I stare at them.”
What could you say to something like that? Jonathan looked to his father, who didn’t seem to have any idea, either. “I’m sorry,” Jonathan said at last. “We did the best we could.”
“I know that. I never said you didn’t,” Donald answered. “But there’s a goddamn big difference between that and good enough.” He used an emphatic cough. It didn’t sound like the one an ordinary Lizard would have made. He had most of the same accent a human English-speaker would have. All by itself, that went a long way toward proving his point.
Jonathan wondered again if coming home had been such a good idea after all.
Of all the things Glen Johnson had looked for while orbiting Home, boredom was the last. He didn’t know why that was so. He’d spent a lot of time on the Lewis and Clark bored. Maybe he’d thought seeing the Lizards’ home planet would make sure he stayed interested. No such luck.