“Hi, there yourself,” Karen said. “How long was I out?”

“Just a couple of hours.” He waved papers at her. “This is stuff you’ll need to see-reports on what’s been going on back on Earth since we went under. We’ve got to be as up-to-date as the Lizards are, anyhow.”

“I’ll look at it.” Karen laughed. “It still feels like too much work.”

“Okay. I know what you mean,” Jonathan said. “I’m a day and a little bit ahead of you, and I’m still not a hundred percent, either-not even close. Still, one of these days before we go down to Home, it might be fun to try it weightless. What do you think?”

If Jonathan was chipper enough to contemplate sex, he was further ahead of Karen than he knew. What she said was, “Not tonight, Josephine.” What she thought was, Maybe not for the next six months, or at least not till all the drugs wear off.

She also almost reminded him that he’d already fooled around in space. At the last minute, she didn’t. It wasn’t so much that he would point out he hadn’t been weightless then; the Lizards’ ship had spun to give it artificial gravity. But she didn’t want him thinking about Kassquit, and about the days when he’d been young and horny all the time, any more than he had to. Yes, keeping quiet seemed a very good idea.

Sam Yeager spent as much time as he could in the Admiral Peary ’s control room. Part of that was because he couldn’t get enough of looking at Home. Part of it was because the control room wasn’t far from the revival room. He got the chance to say hello to some people he hadn’t seen for more than fifty years. That was what the calendar insisted, anyway. To him, it seemed like days or weeks. It was a matter of years to them, but not anything like fifty.

And he enjoyed the company of Glen Johnson and Mickey Flynn-and, to a lesser degree, that of Walter Stone. Stone was too much the regulation officer for Sam to feel completely comfortable around him. Such men were often necessary. Yeager knew as much. But he wasn’t one of them himself, and, as far as he was concerned, they were also often annoying. He gave no hint of that opinion any place where Stone could overhear him.

Johnson, now, Johnson was as much of a troublemaker as Sam was himself. The authorities had known as much, too. Yeager asked him, “Did you get the subtle hints that it would be a good idea for you to go into cold sleep if you wanted to have a chance to keep breathing?”

“Subtle hints?” The pilot considered. “Well, that depends on what you mean. Healey didn’t quite say, ‘You have been ordered to volunteer for this procedure.’ He didn’t quite say it, but he sure meant it. You, too, eh?”

“Oh, yes.” Sam nodded. “They looked at me and they thought, Indianapolis. I’m not sorry I’m a long way away.”

“I’ve been in Indianapolis,” Flynn said. “They should have given you a medal.”

Sam scowled and shook his head. Johnson said, “Not funny, Mickey.”

“They were people there. Everybody back in the States thought I forgot about that or didn’t care,” Sam said. “What they wouldn’t see was that the Lizards we blew up were people, too.”

“That’s it,” Johnson agreed. “I was up there on patrol when we did that. I figured it was the Reds or the Nazis, but it wasn’t. The Lizards would have got their own back against them. They had to against us, too.”

“We spent so much time and so much blood making the Race believe we were people, and deserved to be treated like people,” Yeager said. “Then we didn’t believe it about them. If that’s not a two-way street, it doesn’t work at all.”

Before either of the pilots could say anything, alarms blared. They both forgot about Sam and swung back to the instrument panels. Equipment failure? Lizard attack? No and no. The urgent voice on the intercom said what it was: “Code blue! Code blue! Dr. Kaplan to the revival room! Dr. Garvey to the revival room! Dr. Kaplan! Dr. Garvey! Code blue! Code blue!”

“Damn,” Glen Johnson said softly.

“Yeah.” Yeager nodded. When the Lizards went into cold sleep, they were all but guaranteed to come out again when revival time rolled around. As often happened when humans adopted and adapted the Race’s techniques, they made them work, but less efficiently. Sam often wondered how very lucky he was to have awakened here in orbit around Tau Ceti 2.

“Who’s getting revived now?” the pilot asked.

“I haven’t looked at the schedule for today,” Sam answered. “Do you have a copy handy?”

“I ought to, somewhere.” Johnson flipped through papers clipped together and held on a console by large rubber bands so they wouldn’t float all over the place. He found the one he wanted and went down it with his finger. Suddenly, he stopped. “Oh, shit,” he muttered.

“Who, for God’s sake?” Sam asked.

“It’s the Doctor,” Johnson said.

“Christ!” Sam exclaimed. People had been calling the diplomat the Doctor for years. He was a lucky Jew: his parents had got him out of Nazi Germany in 1938, when he was fifteen. He’d been at Harvard when the Lizards came, and spent a hitch in the Army afterwards. When the fighting ended, he’d gone back to school and earned his doctorate in nineteenth-century international relations.

He’d moved back and forth between universities and the government from that time on. Ever since Henry Cabot Lodge retired in the early 1970s, he’d been the U.S. ambassador to the Race. With his formidably intelligent face and his slow, ponderous, Germanic way of speaking, he was one of the most recognizable men on Earth. He would have been a natural to head up the first American mission to Home.

Sam wondered when the Doctor had gone into cold sleep. Probably not till just before the Admiral Peary took off. The two of them had met several times before Sam went under, and the Doctor had consulted him about the Race by telephone fairly regularly. Sam had looked forward to working with the diplomat here ever since spotting his name on the list.

He had, yes. Now… Hoping against hope, he asked, “Have they ever managed to revive anybody they’ve called a code blue on?”

Glen Johnson shook his head. “Not that I remember.”

“I didn’t think so. I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

He wondered if he ought to pull himself down the hatchway and see what was going on in the revival room. Regretfully, he decided that wasn’t a good idea. Everybody in there would be desperately trying to resuscitate the Doctor. As soon as anyone noticed him rubbernecking, they’d all scream at him to get the hell out of there.

“If the Doctor doesn’t make it,” Johnson said slowly, “who the hell dickers with the Lizards?”

“I haven’t studied the whole passenger list,” Sam said. “Besides, who knows how many people got important between the time when I went under and when the Admiral Peary took off?”

“Yeah, same goes for me,” the pilot said. “They put me in cold sleep after you, but before that I was as far away from everything that was happening on Earth as you could be if you weren’t on a starship.”

The only human-well, sort of human-on a starship before us was Kassquit, Sam thought. He hadn’t been surprised to find out she was here. It made sense for the Race to have their best experts on Big Uglies help deal with the wild ones. And who knew more about humans than somebody who biologically was one?

Dr. Blanchard came floating up into the control room. One look at her face told Sam all he needed to know. Back when he was a minor-league baseball player, he’d worn that same expression after grounding into a game-ending double play with the tying run at third. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“We did everything we knew how to do.” Dr. Blanchard might have been trying to convince herself as well as Yeager. “We did everything we knew how to do, but his heart just wouldn’t get going. Hard to revive a man if you can’t give him a heartbeat.”

“Cool him down again, then?” Sam asked. “Maybe they’ll have better techniques when we get back to Earth.” If we ever get back to Earth.

“Kaplan and Garvey are doing that,” Blanchard said. “I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, though. If we can’t revive him, he’s probably been dead-dead in slow motion, but dead-for a long time.”

“Dead in slow motion. There’s a hell of a phrase,” Glen Johnson said. “Reminds me of my ex-wife.” By the way Dr. Blanchard laughed, she might have had an ex-husband to be reminded of. But then Johnson’s face clouded. “She’s dead for real now. Everybody I knew back on Earth is probably dead now.”

“I’ve got two grandsons,” Sam said. “They were little boys when I went under. They’re middle-aged now-hell, if you’re not talking about clock time, they’re older than their dad and mom. I wonder if they remember me at all. Maybe a little.”

“Most of the people here don’t have a lot of ties back home,” Blanchard said. “I’ve got cousins and nieces and nephews there, but nobody I was real close to. Some of them are bound to be around now. But when we get back again?” She spread her hands and shook her head. “Cold sleep’s a funny business.”

“The Lizards have a whole little subsociety, I guess you’d call it, of males and females who spend a lot of time in cold sleep,” Sam said. “They keep one another company, because they’re the only ones who know what it’s like being cut off that way from the time they were hatched in. And they live longer than we do, and they’ve got faster starships, and their culture doesn’t change as fast as ours.”

“So you think we’ll do the same?” Johnson asked.

“You bet I do,” Sam said. “You ever see Joe DiMaggio play?”

“Sure.” The pilot nodded. “In Cleveland. I may even have seen you once or twice. I used to go to bush-league games now and then.”

“Thanks a lot,” Yeager said without rancor. “Forget about me. Remember DiMaggio. Suppose we come back in 2070-something and you start going on about Joltin’ Joe. Who’s going to know what you’re talking about, or if you’re talking through your hat? Nobody except a guy who’s spent a lot of years on ice.”

“I never saw DiMaggio play,” said Melanie Blanchard, who looked to be in her mid-forties. “He retired about the time I was born.”

“You at least know about him, though,” Sam said. “By the time we get home, he’ll be ancient history.” They went on talking about it, none of them getting too excited. It hurt less than talking about losing the Doctor would have.