Homeward Bound

Donald thrust his glass out to her. “May I have a refill, please?” Now he didn’t even give her the excuse of rudeness to say no.

“All right.” She wasn’t all that sorry for a chance to retreat.

“We do have a lot to answer for. I know that,” Jonathan said. “We went ahead even after we knew what Kassquit was like. That should have warned us-it did warn us. But we went ahead anyway.”

Mickey slid a sly eye turret in Donald’s direction. “Don’t beat yourselves up about it too much. For all you know, he would have been crazy if the Lizards raised him, too.”

Donald used a negative gesture that didn’t come from the Race but that nobody in the USA was likely to misunderstand. “You just give them excuses,” he snarled.

“Enough!” Karen said suddenly. “Enough with all of this. We did what we did. It wasn’t perfect. It couldn’t have been, by the nature of things. But it was the best we knew how to do. And it’s over. We can’t take it back. If you want to hate us for what we did, Donald, go right ahead. We can’t do anything about that, either.”

“Well, well.” If anything ever fazed Donald, he didn’t let it show. “And I thought I was the one with the sharp teeth.” Letting his lower jaw drop, he showed off a mouthful of them. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll make nasty jokes about you on the show?”

“Go ahead, if that’s what you want to do,” Karen answered. “They’ll make you look worse than they do us, and you’ll just give me more juicy bits for my book. Or would you rather I put you over my knee and paddled you?”

She hadn’t done that since Donald was much smaller. Sometimes, as with human children, it had been the only way to get his attention. He rose now with what might have been anger or dignity. “No, thanks,” he said. “However messed up I am, I don’t take pain for pleasure.”

“Take it, no,” Karen said. “Give it…?”

Donald spun and sped out of the apartment. He didn’t even slam the door behind him. “Congratulations, I think,” Mickey said. “I’ve never seen anybody do that to him before.”

Karen got herself another scotch. As she put ice cubes into the whiskey, she said, “I don’t want congratulations. I want to go back into the bedroom and cry. Rip van Winkle didn’t know what to do when he woke up, either, and we were asleep a lot longer than he was.”

“O brave new world, that has such difficult people in’t!” Jonathan misquoted.

“Now that you mention it, yes.” Karen turned to Mickey. “Nothing personal.”

He shook his head. “It’s all personal. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be so upset.”

He was right, of course, and Karen knew it. She’d thought they could come back to America and fit in better than they’d managed in the few months since they’d come down from the Commodore Perry. Maybe things would improve as time went by. She hoped so. It wasn’t the country she’d left close to forty years earlier. She hadn’t changed, and it had, and she had trouble getting used to it. Who was right? Was she, for thinking things had been fine the way they were? Was the rest of the country, for going on about its business without her? Was it even a question of right and wrong, or just one of differences? She knew she’d be looking for answers the rest of her life.

The refectory was the only chamber in the Admiral Peary big enough to gather most of the crew together. Even Lieutenant General Healey came to hear the presentation by the officer from the Tom Edison. Seeing Healey’s bulky form did nothing to delight Glen Johnson, but he stayed as far away from the commandant as he could.

Lieutenant Colonel Katherine Wiedema

“Not ‘we think we have the answer.’ Not ‘we have an answer,’ either,” Mickey Fly

“Hush,” Johnson said. But he took Fly

“You will have a choice,” Lieutenant Colonel Wiedema

No matter how stern she was, she had to pause there because everybody in the refectory started talking at once. Three people shouted the question that was also uppermost in Johnson’s mind: “How? How do we do that?”

With the help of her strong little wireless mike, Lieutenant Colonel Wiedema

This time, Johnson was one of the people calling questions: “What do we do when we get there?”

Maybe he was very loud. Or maybe she was going to answer that question next anyhow. “When you arrive in Earth orbit, you will have another choice,” she declared. “You may stay in orbit, in weightlessness, on one of the U.S. space stations, for the rest of your lives. The stronger of you may also choose to settle at Moon Base Alpha or Moon Base Beta. The gravity on the Moon is.16 g. Permission to settle there will be granted only with the approval of physicians at the space stations.”

Johnson tried to imagine himself with weight again. The trip back on the Tom Edison didn’t worry him so much; his effective weight there would be about eight pounds. He exercised regularly, and was sure he could deal with that. But if he tried to go live on the Moon, he’d weigh about twenty-five pounds. That was enough to notice. Some people-Fly

“What do we do if we stay?” someone asked.

“In that case, you will remain aboard the Admiral Peary, ” Lieutenant Colonel Wiedema

More questions followed, but those were the ones that mattered most. “What do you think?” Johnson asked Fly

“Interesting choice,” the other pilot answered. “We can be obsolescent here or obsolete there.”

That was about the size of it. Johnson said, “New faces back there.”

Fly

“Gee, thanks a bunch,” Johnson said. Mickey Fly

Lieutenant General Healey zoomed past, as usual a bull in a china shop. “No, I’m not going anywhere,” he said to anyone who would listen. “My assignment is commandant of the Admiral Peary, and I aim to carry it out. When I leave this ship, I’ll leave feet first.”

Johnson hadn’t been in much doubt about what he would do. Hearing that removed the last traces of it. Going back to Earth would be strange. Seeing it and not being able to land on it would be frustrating. Spending the rest of his life with Lieutenant General Healey would be like going to hell before he died.

He didn’t know how much that particular worry bothered other people, but a majority of the crew on the Admiral Peary, Mickey Fly

When a shuttlecraft took Johnson to the Tom Edison, his first thought was that the new starship felt much more finished than the Admiral Peary did. The Admiral Peary was a military ship first, last, and always, and had no frills or fanciness of any sort. The Tom Edison ’s accommodations, though cramped, were far more comfortable. And computers had come a long way since the Admiral Peary left the Solar System. Johnson discovered he had access to an enormous library of films and television programs, including a whole great swarm that were new to him because they’d been made since he went on ice. He hoped that meant he wouldn’t be bored on the way back to Earth.

No matter what Lieutenant Colonel Wiedema

Mickey Fly