“Have you?” Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “You never said anything about it to me-or to Mom, either, that I know of.”
“Nope.” His father shook his head. “Not much point to talking about suspicions when you don’t know for sure. Last time I was back in Little Rock, I did ask President Stassen about it.”
“Did you?” That his father was in a position to ask questions of the president of the United States still sometimes bemused Jonathan. “What did he tell you?”
“Not much.” His father looked grim. “I didn’t really expect him to. He was probably afraid I’d go running to the Lizards with whatever I heard. That’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense I’m going to be stuck with for the rest of my life.”
“That’s not fair!” Jonathan exclaimed with the ready outrage of youth.
“Probably not, but I’m stuck with it, as I said.” His dad shrugged. “I could go on and talk about what sort of lesson that should be for you, and that you should always keep an eye on your reputation no matter what. But if I did that, you’d probably look around for something to hit me over the head with.”
“Yeah, probably,” Jonathan agreed. “You’re not too bad as far as lectures go, but-”
“Thanks a lot,” his father broke in. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”
Jonathan grinned at him. “Any old time, Dad.” But the grin had trouble staying on his face. “What are the Lizards going to do, out there in the asteroid belt? If they try doing anything, will we fight them?”
“It’s like I told Ed Webster: if we don’t do anything to get ’em twitchy, I think we can ride out the storm,” his father answered. “But I also think they have to think we’d fight if they did try anything out there. A lot of the time, you end up not having to fight if you show you’re ready to in a pinch.”
“If we did fight the Race, we’d lose, wouldn’t we?” Jonathan asked.
“Now? Sure we would, same as we would have last summer,” his father replied. “But that’s not the point, or it’s only part of the point. The other part is how bad we’d hurt ’em if we went down swinging. They don’t like what the Nazis did to them, and we’d do more and worse.” He sighed. “If that outbound probe of theirs hadn’t spotted our rocket lighting up, we could have built a much stronger position out in the asteroid belt before the Race caught on.”
A strong position in the asteroid belt was something less than important to Jonathan. “Do you think there’ll be a war, or not?” he asked. “The whole idea of fighting the Race seems like such a waste of everything worthwhile to me…”
“I know it does,” his father said slowly. “It seems that way to a lot of kids in your generation. I’ll tell you something, though: when the Lizards first came to Earth, they shot up the train I was riding on, and I volunteered for the Army as soon as I made it into a town where they’d take me. So did Mutt Daniels, my manager, and he was about as old then as I am now. They took both of us, too. They didn’t even blink. That’s how things were back in those days.”
Jonathan knew that was how things had been back in those days. He tried to imagine it, tried and felt himself failing. Stumbling a little, he said, “But the Race isn’t so bad, really. You know that’s true, Dad.”
“I know it’s true now,” Sam Yeager said. “I didn’t know it then. Nobody knew it then. All we knew was that the Lizards came out of nowhere and started beating the crap out of us. And if we-and the Reds, and the Nazis, and the British, and the Japs-hadn’t fought like mad bastards, the Lizards would’ve conquered the whole world, and you and your pals wouldn’t be looking at them from the outside and thinking how hot they are. You’d be looking at ’em up from under, and no way to get out from under ’em.”
“Okay. Okay.” Jonathan hadn’t expected a speech. Maybe his dad hadn’t expected to make one, either, because he looked a little surprised at himself. Jonathan went on, “I understand what you’re saying, honest. Things do seem different to me, though. I can’t pretend they don’t.”
“I know they do.” His father’s laugh was rueful. “You take the Race and spaceships and explosive-metal bombs and computing machines for granted. They’re part of the landscape to you. You’re not an old fogy who remembers the days before they got here.”
“No, not me.” Jonathan shook his head. The old days, like Dad said, he thought, and then, The bad old days. People didn’t know much back then.
Now his father was the one who said, “Okay. You can’t help being young, any more than I can help being… not so damn young.” He ran a hand through his hair, which really was getting thin on top. But even if he wasn’t so young, even if he was going bald, his eyes could still get a wicked twinkle in them. “Of course, if it weren’t for the Lizards, you wouldn’t be here at all, because I never would have met your mother if they hadn’t come.”
“I know. You’ve told me that before. I don’t like thinking about it.” Jonathan didn’t like thinking about that at all. Imagining his own existence as depending on a quirk of fate was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? Hell, it was downright terrifying. As far as he could tell, he’d always been here and always would be here. Anything that shook such foundations was not to be trusted.
“What do you like thinking about?” his father asked slyly. “Your wedding, maybe? Or your wedding night?”
“Dad!” Reproach rang in Jonathan’s voice. His father was an old man. He had no business thinking about stuff like that.
“Just wait till you have kids,” his father warned him. “You’ll tell them about what it might have taken to make sure they weren’t born, and they won’t want to listen to you, either.”
“I hope I don’t go and do stuff like that,” Jonathan said. “Maybe I’ll remember how much I hated it when you did it to me.”
His dad laughed at him, which only annoyed him more than ever. Sam Yeager said, “Maybe. But don’t bet anything much on it, or you’ll be sorry. I didn’t like it when my father did it to me, but that’s not stopping me. Once you get to a certain age and see your kid acting a certain way, well, you just naturally start acting a certain way yourself.”
“Do you?” Jonathan said darkly. He wanted to think he’d be different when he turned into an old man, but would he? How could he tell now? A lot of years lay between him and his father’s age, and he was in no hurry to pass through them.
“Yeah, you do,” his father said, “however much you think you won’t till you get there.” He grinned at Jonathan again, this time less pleasantly. Jonathan scowled. His father could outguess him better than the other way round. That struck Jonathan as most unfair, too. Once upon a time, his dad had been young, and he still-sometimes, sort of-remembered what it was like. But Jonathan hadn’t got old yet, so how was he supposed to think along with his father?
He gave ground now: “If you say so.”
“I damn well do,” his dad said. “How are you coming along with figuring out how to tie a bow tie?”
Jonathan threw his hands in the air in almost theatrical despair. “I don’t think I’ll ever get it so it looks right with a fancy tux.”
That made his father laugh. “It wasn’t anything I had to worry about when I married your mother. I was in uniform and she was wearing blue jeans. That great metropolis of-”
“Chugwater, Wyoming,” Jonathan chorused along with his father. If he’d heard about the tobacco-chewing justice of the peace who’d married his folks once, he’d heard about him a hundred times. The fellow had been post-master and sheriff, too. Not having to worry about a tux did give the story a slightly different slant, but only slightly.
His father’s eyes went far away. “Things haven’t worked so bad for Barbara and me, though,” he said, more than half to himself. “No, not so bad at all.” For a couple of seconds, he neither looked nor sounded like an old man, not even to Jonathan. He might have been looking forward to a wedding himself, not back on the one he’d had a long time ago.