Reluctantly, she said, “Any which way, there’ll be a Yeager on the Admiral Peary. ”
“Oh. Yeah. Right.” That had occurred to Jonathan before, but not for a long time. His laugh wasn’t altogether comfortable. “Dad’s been on ice for a while now. Wer‘e a lot closer in age than we used to be. I wonder how that will play out. I don’t know whether it’s a reason to want to go or a reason to stay right where I am.”
“You won’t say no if they give you what you want,” Karen said. “You’d better not, because I want to go, too.”
“We have to wait and see, that’s all,” Jonathan said again.
Mr. Authoritative didn’t call back for the next three days. Jonathan jumped every time the phone rang. Whenever it turned out to be a salesman or a friend or even one of his sons, he felt cheated. Each time he answered it, he felt tempted to say, Jonathan Yeager. Will you for God’s sake drop the other shoe?
Then he started believing the other shoe wouldn’t drop. Maybe Mr. Authoritative couldn’t be bothered with him any more. Plenty of other people wouldn’t have set any conditions. Plenty of other people would have killed-in the most literal sense of the word-to get a call like that.
Jonathan had almost abandoned hope when the man with the authoritative voice did call back. “All right, Yeager. You’ve got a deal-both of you.” He hung up again.
“We’re in!” Jonathan shouted. Karen whooped.
We’re in. Karen Yeager hadn’t dreamt two little words could lead to so many complications. But they did. Going into cold sleep was a lot like dying. From a good many perspectives, it was exactly like dying. She had to wind up her affairs, and her husband‘s, as if they weren’t coming back. She knew they might, one day. If they did, though, the world to which they returned would be as different from the one they knew as today’s world was from that lost and vanished time before the Lizards came.
The Yeagers’ sons took the news with a strange blend of mourning and jealousy. “We’ll never see you again,” said Bruce, their older boy, who’d come down from Palo Alto when he got word of what was going on.
“Never say never,” Karen answered, though she feared very much that he was right. “You can’t tell what’ll happen.”
“I wish I were going, too,” said Richard, their younger son. “The Admiral Peary! Wow!” He looked up at the ceiling as if he could see stars right through it. Bruce nodded. His face was full of stars, too.
“One of these days, you may find a reason to go into cold sleep,” Karen told them. “If you do, it had better be a good one. If you go under when you’re young, you stay young while you’re going, you do whatever you do when you get there, you go back into cold sleep-and everybody who was young with you when you left will be old by the time you’re back. Everybody but you.”
“And if you’re not young?” Richard asked incautiously.
Karen had been thinking about that, too. “If you’re not young when you start out,” she said, “you can still do what you need to do and come back again. But most of what you left behind will be gone when you do.”
She sometimes-often-wished she hadn’t done such figuring. The Race had been flying between the stars for thousands of years. The Admiral Peary would be a first try for mankind. It wasn’t as fast as the Lizards’ starships. A round trip to Home and back would swallow at least sixty-five years of real time.
She looked at her sons. Bruce was a redhead like her. Richard’s hair was dark blond, like Jonathan‘s. Hardly anybody in their generation shaved his head; to them, that was something old people did. But if she and Jonathan came back to Earth after sixty-five years, the two of them wouldn’t have aged much despite all their travel, and their boys would be old, old men if they stayed alive at all.
Karen hugged them fiercely, each in turn. “Oh, Mom!” Richard said. “It’ll be all right. Everything will be all right.” He was at an age where he could still believe that-not only believe it but take it for granted.
I wish I could, Karen thought.
She not only had to break the news to the children of her flesh, she also had to tell Donald and Mickey. She’d been there when the two Lizards hatched from their eggs, even though Jonathan’s dad hadn’t really approved of that. She’d helped Jonathan take care of them when they were tiny, and she and Jonathan had raised them ever since Sam Yeager went into cold sleep. They were almost as dear to her as Bruce and Richard.
They were older in calendar years than her human sons. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure how much that meant. Lizards grew very rapidly as hatchlings, but after that they aged more slowly than people did. Some of the important males who’d come with the conquest fleet were still prominent today, more than fifty years later. That wasn’t true of any human leader who’d been around in 1942. Even Vyacheslav Molotov, who’d seemed ready to go on forever, was eight years dead now. He’d hoped for a hundred, but had got to only ninety-six.
The two Lizards raised as people listened without a word as she explained what would happen. When she’d finished, they turned their eye turrets towards each other, as if wondering which of them should say something. As usual, Donald was the one who did: “Are we going to go out there and live on our own, then?”
“Not right away,” Karen answered. “Maybe later. You’ll have to wait and see. For now, there will be other people to take you in.”
She didn’t like not telling them the whole truth, but she didn’t have the heart for it. The whole truth was that somebody would keep an eye on them for the rest of their lives, however long those turned out to be. The Race knew about them by now. By the very nature of things, some secrets couldn’t last forever. The Lizards’ protests had been muted. Considering Kassquit, their protests couldn’t very well have been anything but muted.
Karen didn’t care to consider Kassquit. To keep from thinking about the Lizard-raised Chinese woman, she gave her attention back to the two American-raised Lizards. “What do you guys think? Are you ready to try living on your own?”
“Hell, yes.” To her surprise, that wasn’t Donald. It was Mickey, the smaller and most of the time the more diffident of the pair. He went on, “We can do it, as long as we have money.”
“We can work, if we have to,” Donald said. “We aren’t stupid or lazy. We’re good Americans.”
“Nobody ever said you were stupid or lazy. Nobody ever thought so,” Karen answered. Some Lizards were stupid. Others didn’t do any more than they had to, and sometimes not all of that. But her scaly foster children had always been plenty sharp and plenty active.
“What about being good Americans?” Mickey’s mouth gave his English a slightly hissing flavor. Other than that, it was pure California. “We are, aren’t we?” He sounded anxious.
“Sure you are,” Karen said, and meant it. “That’s part of the reason why somebody will help take care of you-because you’ve been so good.”
Mickey seemed reassured. Donald didn’t. “Aren’t Americans supposed to take care of themselves?” he asked. “That’s what we learned when you and Grandpa Sam taught us.”
“Well… yes.” Karen couldn’t very well deny that. “But you’re not just Americans, you know. You‘re, uh, special.”
“Why?” Donald asked. “Because we’re short?”
He laughed out loud, which showed how completely American he was: the Race didn’t do that when it was amused. Karen laughed, too. The question had come from out of the blue and hit her right in the funny bone.
She had to answer him, though. “No, not because you’re short. Because you’re you.”
“It might be interesting to see Home,” Mickey said. “Maybe we could go there, too, one of these days.”
Did he sound wistful? Karen thought so. She didn’t suppose she could blame him. Kassquit had sometimes shown a longing to come down to Earth and see what it was like. Karen wasn’t sorry Kassquit hadn’t got to indulge that longing. Worry about diseases for which she had no immunity had kept her up on an orbiting starship till she went into cold sleep. Those same worries might well apply in reverse to Mickey and Donald.