Harry Turtledove - Homeward Bound

Jonathan Yeager had started shaving his head when he was a teenager. It made him look more like a Lizard, and he’d wanted nothing so much as to be as much like a male of the Race as he could. He still shaved his head here in 1994, though he wasn’t a teenager any more; he’d had his fiftieth birthday the December before. The Race still fascinated him, too. He’d built a good career out of that fascination.

His father had gone into cold sleep seventeen years earlier. Most people thought Sam Yeager was dead. Even now, cold sleep wasn’t much talked about. Back in 1977, it had been one notch higher than top secret. Of the few aware of it nowadays, fewer still knew it had existed that long.

As Jonathan checked the incoming electronic messages on his computer, he muttered under his breath. The mutter wasn’t particularly happy. To this day, people seldom thought of him as Jonathan Yeager, expert on the Race. They thought of him as Sam Yeager’s kid. Even to males and females of the Race, for whom family was much more tenuous than it was for humans, he was Sam Yeager’s hatchling as often as not.

“Not fair,” he said quietly. He was as good with Lizards as anybody breathing. No one had ever complained about his ability. The trouble was, his father had had something more than ability. His father had had precisely the right instincts to think like a male of the Race, instincts that amounted to genius of a highly specialized sort. Even the Lizards admitted as much.

For whatever reasons of background and character and temperament, Jonathan didn’t quite have those same instincts. He was an expert. He was damned good at what he did. It wasn’t the same. It left him stuck being Sam Yeager’s kid. He’d be Sam Yeager’s kid till the day he died.

“What’s not fair?” Karen said from behind him.

He spun in his chair. “Oh, hi, hon,” he said to his wife. “Nothing, really. Just woolgathering. I didn’t know you were around.”

Karen Yeager shook her head. Her coppery hair flipped back and forth. She was almost his own age; these days, she had help keeping her hair red. “Don’t talk nonsense,” she said briskly. “We’ve known each other since high school. We’ve been married almost thirty years. Do you think I can’t tell when something’s eating you?” She ended the sentence with an interrogative cough, tacked on almost automatically; she was as much an expert on the Lizards as he was.

Jonathan sighed. “Well, you’re not wrong.” He didn’t say anything more.

He didn’t have to. Karen pounced. “You’re letting your dad get you down again, aren’t you?”

More than a little shamefaced, he nodded. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Dumb.” She didn’t hesitate about giving her verdict. “Dumb, dumb, dumb, with a capital D.” This time, she added an emphatic cough. “You’re here. He’s not. He was good. So are you.” Another emphatic cough followed that.

“He was better than good, and you know it.” Jonathan waited to see if she’d have the nerve to tell him he was wrong.

She didn’t. He wished she would have. She said, “You’re as good as anyone in the business nowadays. I’m not lying to you, Jonathan. If anybody ought to know, it’s me.”

She was probably right about that. It made Jonathan feel very little better. “I’m not a spring chicken any more,” he said. “I’m not a spring chicken, and I’m still in my father’s shadow. I don’t know that I’ll ever get out of it, either.”

“I’m in his shadow, too,” Karen said. “Anybody who has anything to do with the Race nowadays is in his shadow. I don’t see what we can do about that.”

Jonathan hadn’t looked at it that way. He’d always imagined Sam Yeager’s shadow over himself alone. What son of an illustrious father-especially a son in the same line of work-doesn’t? Grudgingly, he said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe, nothing. It’s truth.” Karen put the last word in the Lizards’ language, and added another emphatic cough. She went on, “And Mickey and Donald think you’re pretty hot stuff.”

He couldn’t deny that, because it was obviously true. The two Lizards raised as human beings took him as seriously as they’d ever taken his father. That they were adults now astonished Jonathan as much as having one son in graduate school at Stanford and the other a junior at UCLA. The boys were both studying the Race; that passion had passed on to the third generation. Will they ever think of me the way I think of my old man? Jonathan wondered.

He didn’t try to answer the question. Just posing it was hard enough. To keep from having to think about it, he said, “Mickey and Donald didn’t turn out too bad. Of course, we couldn’t isolate them from other Lizards as much as the Race isolated the human they raised Lizard-style.”

“Right,” Karen said tightly. Jonathan knew he’d goofed by referring to Kassquit, even if he hadn’t named her. Thirty years earlier, he’d been her introduction to humanity, and to a lot of the things humans did. That had almost cost him Karen, though he still didn’t think it was all his fault. He hadn’t planned to go up and visit Kassquit just at the time when war broke out between the Race and the Reich. That had kept him up there with her a lot longer than he’d expected, and had let things between Kassquit and him get more complicated and more intimate than he’d thought they would.

Karen looked as if she was about to say something more, too. She hadn’t let him completely off the hook for Kassquit, not after all this time. That Kassquit herself had been in cold sleep for years and was probably on her way back to Home by now had nothing to do with anything, not as far as Karen was concerned.

Before the squabble could really flare up, the telephone on Jonathan’s desk rang. Saved by the bell, he thought, and almost said it aloud. Instead, though, he just picked up the phone. “Jonathan Yeager speaking.”

“Hello, Yeager.” The voice on the other end of the line didn’t identify itself. It carried so much authority, it didn’t really need to. “Are you by any chance familiar with the Admiral Peary ?”

Ice and fire chased themselves through Jonathan. Not a whole lot of people knew about the Admiral Peary. Officially, he wasn’t one of them. Unofficially… Unofficially, everybody in the first rank of American experts on the Race had been salivating ever since that name leaked out. “Yes, sir,” Jonathan said. “I have heard of it.” He didn’t say how or when or where, or what the Admiral Peary might be; no telling how secure the telephone line was.

The authoritative voice on the other end of the line said what he’d most wanted to hear ever since that name began being bandied about: “How would you like to be aboard, then?”

And Jonathan said what he’d long since made up his mind he would say: “You are inviting Karen and me both, right?”

For close to half a minute, he got no answer. Then the voice, suddenly sounding not quite so authoritative, said, “I’ll get back to you on that.” Click. The line went dead.

“What was that all about?” Karen asked. “Inviting us where?”

“Aboard the Admiral Peary, ” Jonathan answered, and her eyes got big. Then he said something he wished he didn’t have to: “So far, the call is just for me.”

“Oh.” He watched her deflate, hating what he saw. She said, “That’s why you asked whether it was for both of us.”

“Yeah.” He nodded, then took a deep breath. They’d never talked about this, probably because it cut too close to the bone. It had been in Jonathan’s mind a lot the past few years. It had to have been in Karen‘s, too. He said, “If they say it’s just me, I’m not going. I don’t need to see Home bad enough to get a divorce to do it, and you deserve the trip as much as I do.”