Homeward Bound

“Twice,” he answered.

“Oh,” the physician said. “You will have traveled between the stars, then?”

“Not at all,” Atvar told her. “I did not care for what was being televised, and so I thought I would store myself away, hoping for an improvement some years down the line. No luck the first time, so I tried a second. I am sure this third time will prove a success.”

The physician gave him a severe look. “I do not believe you are being serious,” she said, and used an emphatic cough to let him know how much she did not believe it.

“Believe what you please,” Atvar told her. She did not seem to have the slightest idea who he was. In a way, that was a

“Give me your arm, please,” the physician said. Atvar obeyed. In all his time on Tosev 3, he hadn’t had to obey anyone, not till he got the summons to return to Home. He’d given orders. He hadn’t taken them. Now he did. He hissed as the jet of air blasted drugs under his scales. The physician sighed at his squeamishness. “You ca

“Oh? Why not?” he said.

His reward was another injection, and another. Presently, the physician said, “You are tolerating the procedure very well.”

“Good.” Atvar’s mouth fell open not in a laugh but in an enormous yawn. Whatever else the physician did to him, he never knew it.

When Glen Johnson woke, he needed some little while to realize he was awake and to remember he’d gone into cold sleep. Something here was emphatically different from the way things had been on the Lewis and Clark, though. He had weight. He didn’t have much-only a couple of pounds’ worth-but it was the first time he’d had any since the Lewis and Clark got out to the asteroid belt. The Admiral Peary stayed under acceleration all the time.

“Here,” a woman said. “Drink this.” Dr. Blanchard, he thought as his wits slowly trickled back into his head. Her name is Dr. Blanchard. She handed him a plastic squeeze bulb. The liquid in the bulb had weight, too, but not enough to keep it from madly sloshing around in there.

It tasted like chicken soup-hot and salty and fatty and restorative. And he needed restoring. He had trouble finishing the bulb, even though it wasn’t very big. Sucking and swallowing all but drained him of strength. “Thanks,” he said. “That was good. What was it?”

“Chicken broth,” she answered, and he would have laughed if he’d had the energy. Little by little, he noticed he was hooked up to a lot of electronic monitors. Dr. Blanchard checked the readouts. “Sleep if you want to,” she told him. “That seems normal enough.”

“Seems?” he said around a yawn. He did want to sleep. Why not? The habit of a lot of years was hard to break.

“Well,” she answered, “we haven’t thawed out a whole lot of people yet. We’re still learning.”

He yawned again. “Why am I one of your guinea pigs?” he asked. If she answered, he didn’t hear her. Sleep reclaimed him.

When he woke again, he felt stronger. Dr. Blanchard gave him more chicken soup, even if she primly insisted on calling it chicken broth. He found out her first name was Melanie, right out of Gone with the Wind. She disco

“I thought so, too.” There was a familiar voice. “Then I found out what I’d have for company.”

“Well, well. Look what the cat drug in.” Johnson yawned again. Talking still took an effort. Getting his mind to work straight took a bigger one.

“I was thinking the same thing about you,” Mickey Fly

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Johnson said. Another yawn came out. He wondered if he would ever feel awake again. He looked around. The chamber where they’d revived him wasn’t big enough to swing the cat he and Fly

“The middle of nowhere,” Fly

Even in Johnson’s decrepit state, that sent awe prickling through him. But then he asked, “Why wake me up for this? I don’t know anything about flying the Admiral Peary out here. I’m the in-system pilot.”

“Two reasons,” Fly

“And the horse you rode in on,” Johnson said sweetly. The fog was begi

“Thank you so much,” the other pilot replied. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I wanted to see if you were alive. If by some mischance you weren’t, that would make me in-system pilot and change the revival schedule. So I needed to know. You went into cold sleep earlier than I did. The techniques have been improved since.”

“That’s ’cause you’re the teacher’s pet,” Johnson said. “Healey couldn’t wait to put me on ice, the son of a bitch.” He didn’t much care what he said. That was probably an effect of coming out from under the drugs, too.

“I could call that a slander on the whole of the Hibernian race,” Fly

Back on the Lewis and Clark, he never would have admitted such a thing. Of course, back on the Lewis and Clark he had to deal with Lieutenant General Healey. Now he must have been sure the bad-tempered officer was as far behind them as the rest of the Solar System. More than five light-years…

“You said there was more than one reason to wake me up now,” Johnson observed. He remembered. He was proud of himself for remembering. That said something about how fuzzy his wits had been before.

Mickey Fly

“What’s the other one?” Johnson asked.

“In my ignorance, I thought you might be interested in seeing what the sky looks like out here as we turn the ship,” Fly

“I should say not!” Johnson exclaimed, eagerness blazing through him no matter how weak and woozy he felt. “Most of the passengers will stay frozen from start to finish.” He turned to Dr. Blanchard. “Can I go up?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Can you?”

“We’ll find out.” He tried to lever himself off the table where he lay, only to discover he was strapped on. Melanie Blanchard made no move to set him free. It’s a test, he realized. If I can’t undo the straps, I don’t deserve to do anything else. His fingers were clumsy and stupid. They took longer than they should have to figure out how the latches worked, but they did it. He sat up, torn between triumph and worry. “My brains will come back?” he asked her.

“They’re supposed to,” she said, which struck him as imperfectly reassuring.

The Admiral Peary ’s acceleration produced barely enough weight to keep him on the table. When he slid off, he glided ever so slowly to the metal floor. He would have had to go off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote to do himself any serious damage. He bounced from the floor toward Fly

“That’s, ‘Lay on, Macduff.’ ” Fly

“At this late date and this distance, I doubt he’ll complain,” Johnson said.

“Oh, so do I,” the other pilot said. “That’s why I’m doing it for him.”

“Helpful,” Johnson observed, and Fly

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Fly

The Lewis and Clark had had observation windows fronted by antireflection-coated glass. The Admiral Peary had an observation dome, also made from glass that might as well not have been there. Coming up into it was like getting a look at space itself. Johnson stared out. Slowly, his jaw dropped. “Jesus,” he whispered.

Mickey Fly

“Yeah,” Johnson said, and said nothing else for the next several minutes.

There was no sun in the sky.

That hit home, sure as hell, like a left to the jaw. Johnson understood exactly what it meant. It wasn’t that the Sun was hiding, as it hid behind the Earth during the night. When it did that, you knew where it was, even if you couldn’t see it. Not here. Not now. There was nothing but blackness with stars scattered through it. And the closest of those stars was light-years away.

“And I thought the asteroid belt was a long way from home,” Johnson murmured at last. “I hadn’t even gone into the next room.”

“Does make you wonder why we thought we were the lords of creation, doesn’t it?” Fly

“Okay,” Johnson said, and he did. He knew how the stars were supposed to look from space. Not many humans-probably not many Lizards, either-knew better. As Fly

The outlines of the constellations were wrong.

Oh, not all of them. Orion looked the same as it always had. So did the Southern Cross. He knew why, too: their main stars were a long, long way from the Sun, too far for a mere five or six light-years to change their apparent position. But both the Dogs that accompanied Orion through the skies of Earth had lost their principal stars. Sirius and Procyon were bright because they lay close to the Sun. Going halfway to Tau Ceti rudely shoved them across the sky. Johnson spotted them at last because they were conspicuous and didn’t belong where they were.