“Ours dates from seventy-three thousand years ago,” Sstravo said. “How old is yours?”
Even dividing by two to turn the number into terrestrial years, that was a hell of an old book. “Ours is less than two hundred of your years old,” Sam admitted.
“Modern art, is it? I have never been partial to modern art. But ours may interest you,” Sstravo said.
“So it may,” Sam said. “But since I only know your language as it is used now, will I be able to understand this?”
“You will find some strange words, a few odd turns of phrase,” the bookseller said. “Most of it, though, you will follow without much trouble. Our language does not change quickly. Nothing about us changes quickly. But our speech has mostly stayed the same since sound and video recording carved the preferred forms in stone.”
“All right, then,” Sam said. “What is the story about?”
“Friends who separate over time,” Sstravo answered. One of the guards made the affirmative gesture, so maybe she’d read the book. Sam kept thinking of Clark Gable. Sstravo went on, “What else would one find to write about? What else is there to write about?”
“We Tosevites feel that way about the attraction between male and female,” Sam said. Sstravo and the guards laughed. Sam might have known-he had known-they would think that was funny. He held up the copy of Gone with the Wind that owed nothing to Margaret Mitchell. Cro-Magnons hadn’t finished replacing Neanderthals when this was written. “I will take this. How do I make arrangements to pay you?”
“I will do it,” one guard said. “I shall be reimbursed.”
“I thank you,” Sam said. The guard gave Sstravo a credit card. The bookseller rang up the purchase on a register that might have been as old as the novel. It worked, though. “Gone with the Wind,” Sam murmured. He started laughing all over again.
Jonathan Yeager hadn’t seen his father for seventeen years. For all practical purposes, his father might as well have been dead. Now he was back, and he hadn’t changed a bit in all that time. Jonathan, meanwhile, had gone from a young man into middle age. Cold sleep had a way of complicating relationships just this side of adultery.
At least his father also recognized the difficulty. “You’ve changed while I wasn’t looking,” he said to Jonathan one evening as they sat in the elder Yeager’s inadequately air-conditioned room.
“That’s what you get for going to sleep while I stayed awake,” Jonathan answered. He sipped at a drink. The Lizards had given them pure ethyl alcohol. Cut with water, it did duty for vodka. The Race didn’t use ice cubes, though, and seemed horrified at the idea.
His old man had a drink on the low round metal table beside him, too. After a nip from it, he nodded. “Well, I was encouraged to do that. They didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the notion it was good for my life expectancy.” He shook his head in wonder. “Since I’m heading toward a hundred and twenty-five now, I guess it must have been-assuming I ever woke up again, of course.”
“Yeah. Assuming,” Jonathan said. He’d got used to not having his father around, to standing on the front line in the war against Father Time. Now he had some cover again. If his father was still around, he couldn’t be too far over the hill himself, could he? Of course, his father had stood still for a while, even as he’d kept going over that hill himself.
“They wanted to get rid of me, and they did,” his dad said. “They might have made sure I had an ‘accident’ instead, if they could have sneaked it past the Race. If I hadn’t taken cold sleep, they probably would have tried that. But after Gordon tried to blow my head off and didn’t quite make it, the warning they got from the Lizards must have made them leery of doing it if they didn’t have to.”
“So here you are, and you’re in charge of things,” Jonathan said. “That ought to make them start tearing their hair out when they hear about it ten-plus years from now.”
“I thought so, too, when I woke up and the Doctor didn’t,” his father replied. “But now I doubt it. I doubt it like hell, as a matter of fact. They’ll be into the 2040s by the time word of that gets back to Earth. By then, it will have been more than sixty years since I went into cold sleep and more than seventy-five since I made a real nuisance of myself. Hardly anybody will remember who I am. If I do a decent job of dealing with the Lizards, that’s all that’ll matter. Time heals all wounds.”
Jonathan thought it over, then slowly nodded. “Well, maybe you’re right. I sure hope so. But I still remember what happened in the 1960s, even if nobody back there will. What they did to you wasn’t right.”
“It was a long time ago-for everybody except me,” his father said. “Even for me, it wasn’t yesterday.” He finished his drink, then got up and fixed himself another. “See? You’ve got a lush for an old man.”
“You’re no lush,” Jonathan said.
“Well… not like that,” Sam Yeager admitted. “When I was playing ball… Sweet Jesus Christ, some of those guys could put the sauce away. Some of ’em drank so much, it screwed them out of a chance to make the big leagues. And some of ’em knew they weren’t ever going to make the big leagues because they just weren’t good enough, and they drank even harder so they wouldn’t have to think about that.”
“You weren’t going to,” Jonathan said incautiously.
“And I drank some,” his father answered. “I might have made it to the top if I hadn’t torn up my ankle. That cost me most of a season and most of my speed. Hell, I might have made it if the Lizards hadn’t come. I could still swing the bat some, and I was 4-F as could be-they wouldn’t draft me with full upper and lower plates. But even if it was the bush leagues, I liked what I was doing. The only other thing I knew how to do then was farm, and playing ball beat the crap out of that.”
Jonathan took another pull at his glass. It didn’t taste like much, but it was plenty strong. He said, “You like what you’re doing now.”
“You bet I do.” His father dropped an emphatic cough into English. “There hasn’t been a really big war with the Lizards since the first round ended the year after you were born. The Germans were damn fools to take ’em on alone in the 1960s, but then, the Nazis were damn fools. If there’s another fight, it won’t just take out Earth. Home will get it, too.”
“And the other worlds in the Empire,” Jonathan said. “We wouldn’t leave them out.”
His father nodded. “No, I don’t suppose we would. They could hit back if we did. That’s a lot of people and Lizards and Rabotevs and Hallessi dead. And for what? For what, goddammit?” Every once in a while, he still cussed like the ballplayer he had been. “For nothing but pride and fear, far as I can see. If I can do something to stop that, you’d better believe I will.”
“What do you think the odds are?” Jonathan asked.
Instead of answering straight out, his father said, “If anything happens to me here, the Lizards are liable to ask for you to take over as our ambassador. Are you ready for that, just in case?”
“I’m not qualified, if that’s what you mean,” Jonathan answered. “I’m not telling you any big secrets; you know it as well as I do. The only reason they might think of me is that I’m your kid.”
“Not the only reason, I’d say.” His father drank another slug of ersatz vodka. “I’ve been studying ever since they revived me, trying to catch up on all the stuff that happened after I went into cold sleep. From everything I’ve been able to find out, you were doing a hell of a job as Lizard contact man. They wouldn’t have asked you to come on the Admiral Peary if you and Karen weren’t good.”
“Oh, we are.” The hooch had left Jonathan with very little modesty, false or otherwise. “We’re damn good. And all those years of dealing with Mickey and Donald gave us a feel for the Race I don’t think anybody could get any other way. But neither one of us is as good as you are.”
That wasn’t modesty. That was simple truth, and Jonathan knew it even if he didn’t like it. He and Karen and most human experts on the Race learned more and more over years about how Lizards thought and behaved. No doubt his old man had done that, too. But his father, somehow, wasn’t just an expert on the Race, though he was that. Sam Yeager had the uncanny ability to think like a Lizard, to become a Lizard in all ways except looks and accent. People noticed it. So did members of the Race. So had Kassquit, who was at the same time both and neither.