Homeward Bound

And now he understood Kassquit in a way he hadn’t while he was raising her. In the huge, frightening world of interspecies rivalries and new technologies, what was he but a tiny hatchling calling out for someone, anyone, to help make him feel safe?

He didn’t think Pesskrag could do for him what he’d once done for Kassquit. He didn’t think anyone could-not Atvar, not even the 37th Emperor Risson himself. He suspected they were all looking for reassurance in the same way he was, and for the same reasons. That didn’t make him crave it any less.

Change was here. For mille

Now, though, like it or not, change was hissing at the door. If the Race couldn’t change… If the Race couldn’t change, then in a certain ultimate sense those hundred thousand years of peace and stability might not matter at all.

Ttomalss shivered. Few males or females had ever bumped snouts with the extinction of their species. That was what he saw now. Maybe it was nothing but panic over the arrival of the Commodore Perry. On the other hand, maybe panic was what the arrival of the Commodore Perry demanded. However much he wished it didn’t, the second seemed more likely than the first.

The wild Big Uglies hadn’t panicked when the conquest fleet arrived. They’d fought back more ferociously and more ingeniously than the Race dreamt they could. Now the Race had to respond in turn. Could it? Ttomalss shivered again. He just didn’t know.

There was Home, spi

When Johnson said that out loud, Walter Stone shook his head. “Not quite yet,” he said. “We still have another few weeks of serious duties to perform. Till the Commodore Perry goes to Earth and then comes back here, we’re the ones on the spot. Up to us to keep the Lizards from doing something everybody would regret.”

He was right. He usually was. And yet, his being right suddenly seemed to matter very little. “Yes, sir,” Johnson said. “Sorry about that. We’re not a historical afterthought right this minute. But we will be any day now.”

Stone gave him a fishy stare. “You never have had the right attitude, have you?”

Johnson shrugged, there in the control room. “The right attitude? I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, we’re about the most obsolete set of spacemen God ever made. We spent all those years weightless, and now we can’t be anything else. And we made a fine, successful crew for a cold-sleep starship-the only problem being that they won’t make any more of those. Buggy whips, slide rules-and us. What do the Russians call it? The ash-heap of history, that’s what it is. And that’s where we’re at.”

Brigadier General Stone’s gaze got fishier yet. “If we are, Johnson, you’re still a pain in the ash.”

“Aiii!” Johnson looked back reproachfully. “And here I thought you were you, and not Mickey Fly

“Is someone taking my name in vain?” Fly

“Native talent?” Johnson suggested.

Fly

“Why not?” Stone asked. “It makes sense to me.”

“As if that proved anything,” Fly

“He’s got a point,” Johnson said.

Stone shrugged this time. “Well, what if he does?” Without waiting for an answer, he pushed off, slid gracefully past Fly

“Was it something I said?” Fly

“Nope. He just doesn’t care to be last year’s model, but he can’t do anything about it,” Johnson answered.

“Anybody who can remember when rockets to the Moon were the province of pulp magazines is not going to be right up to date,” Fly

“That’s true,” Johnson said. “I was never on the Moon. Were you? And here we are in orbit around Home. It’s pretty peculiar, when you think about it.”

“The Moon’s not worth going to. This place is,” Fly

He wasn’t wrong about that, either. The Lizards had been amused when humans flew to the Moon. Since the Race was used to flying between the stars, that first human journey to another world must have seemed like the smallest of baby steps. And when people went to Mars, the Lizards were just plain perplexed. Why bother? The place obviously wasn’t worth anything.

“Heck,” Johnson said, “they didn’t even get all that hot and bothered when we went out to the asteroid belt in the Lewis and Clark. ”

“At least they were curious then,” Fly

Johnson laughed. “Oh, yeah. I remember spoofing one of them when I was in a scooter. I signaled to it just the same way as I had to some of the bases we’d set up on the rocks close by the ship.”

“That should have given some Lizard monitoring the signals the spy machine was picking up a case of the hives,” Fly

“Well, I hope so. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know for sure, though,” Johnson said. “What I do know for sure is, it gave our dearly beloved commandant a case of the hives. He called me into his lair, uh, office to grill me on the weird signal I’d sent. Somehow, he never appreciated my sense of humor.”

“He probably thought it lacked that quality of mirth known as being fu

“Thanks a hell of a lot, Mickey. I’ll remember you in my nightmares.” Johnson wished he could have left the control room in a display of at least medium dudgeon, the way Walter Stone had. But it was still his shift. He did everything required of him. He always had. He always would, for as long as he was physically able to. He was damned and double-damned if he would give Lieutenant General Healey the excuse to come down on him for something small like that.

He laughed out loud. “Are you attempting to contradict me?” Fly

Johnson explained, finishing, “Of course Healey doesn’t come down on me for the small stuff. He comes down on me for big stuff instead.”

After grave consideration, Fly

“I should say not,” Johnson replied. “They’re dead.”

“I don’t even think you’d get them worried enough to start spi

“How’s he going to spin in his grave? He’s still alive,” Johnson said. “And so is that gal called Rita-oh, yeah.” Recordings of You’d Better Believe It had made it to the Admiral Peary. Some people found Donald fu

“Two more reasons, I’d say.” Mickey Fly

Except for the minor detail that gravity would quickly kill him, Johnson was in reasonably good shape for his age, which was about the same as Fly

“Maybe you would-if they still have sugar daddies back on Earth,” Fly

“They will. That, I’m not worried about.” Johnson spoke with great conviction. “As long as old guys have more money than they know what to do with, pretty girls’ll give ’em ideas.”

“Hmm. On those grounds, I might even qualify for sugar daddyhood myself,” Fly

Johnson laughed at him. “If we’re back on Earth-or in orbit around it, anyway-there’ll be enough girls to go around. You get one, I’ll get another one. Hell, get more than one if you want to.”

“An embarrassment of riches. And, probably, a richness of embarrassments,” Fly

How did he mean that? Johnson refused to give him the satisfaction of asking. Instead, he said, “It’s pretty good weightless, from what I remember. Of course, it’s pretty damn good any which way.”

“There, for once, I find I ca

Johnson patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. It won’t last.” Fly

When Johnson’s shift ended, he went down to the refectory. A couple of doctors were in there, talking while they ate about how they could reacquaint themselves with the state of the art once they got back to Earth. They’d been weightless only since reviving aboard the Admiral Peary. Johnson was jealous of them; he couldn’t go all the way home again.

He got himself a chopped-meat sandwich and a squeeze bottle full of rhubarb juice. The juice wasn’t bad-was damn good, in fact. He wouldn’t have been surprised if somebody on the starship were fermenting it. The meat was full of pepper and cumin and other spices. That helped keep people from thinking about what it was: rat or guinea pig. The Admiral Peary hadn’t brought along any regular domestic animals, and the frozen beef and pork and lamb was long gone. The rodents could live-could thrive-on the vegetable waste from the hydroponic farm. Better just to contemplate them as… meat.