Harry Turtledove - Homeward Bound

“ They don’t think so,” Karen said bitterly. She gave him a kiss, then asked, “Are you sure about this? If you say no now, you’ll never get another chance.”

“I’m sure,” he said, and so he was-almost. “Some things aren’t worth the price, you know what I mean?”

“I know you’re sweet, is what I know,” Karen said. “What did the man say when you told him that?”

“He said, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ and then he hung up on me.”

“That doesn’t tell us much, does it?”

“Doesn’t tell us a damn thing,” Jonathan answered. “If he calls back with good news, he does. And if he calls back with bad news or he doesn’t call back-well, close but no cigar. This is the way I want it to be, hon. I like being married to you.”

“You must,” Karen said, and then looked out the window and across the street so she wouldn’t have to say anything more. For a moment, Jonathan didn’t understand that at all. Then he did, and didn’t know whether to laugh or get mad. Yes, Kassquit probably was Homeward bound right now. Karen meant he was throwing over a chance to see her along with a chance to see the Race’s world.

He wanted to remind her it had been thirty years since anything beyond electronic messages lay between Kassquit and him, ten years since Kassquit herself had gone into cold sleep. He wanted to, but after no more than a moment he decided he’d be better off if he didn’t. Even now, the less he said about Kassquit, the better.

“Did this man say how long it would be before he got back to you?” Karen asked.

“Nope.” Jonathan shook his head. “Nothing to do but wait.”

“Any which way, there’ll be-” Karen broke off, just in time to rouse Jonathan’s curiosity.

“Be what?” he asked. She didn’t answer. When she still didn’t answer, he used an interrogative cough all by himself. The Lizards thought that was a barbarism, but people did it all the time these days, whether using the Race’s language, English, or-so Jonathan had heard-Russian. But Karen just kept standing there. Jonathan clucked reproachfully, a human noise. “Come on. Out with it.”

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.