Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove

understand better.” He paused for more thought. “So they put you away in . . . 1984?” His wits were clearer, but still slow.
    “That’s right.” Johnson nodded again. “How about you?”
    “Me? It was 1977.”
    They looked at each other. Neither said anything. Neither needed to say anything. They’d both gone into cold sleep—been urged, almost forced, to go into cold sleep—years before the
Admiral Peary
was ready to fly. The reasons behind that seemed altogether too obvious.
    “Isn’t it great to be politically reliable?” Sam murmured.
    “Who, me?” Glen Johnson said, deadpan. They both laughed. Johnson went on, “Actually, depending on how you look at things, it’s not that bad. They were so eager to send us far, far away, they gave us the chance to see Home.” He said the name in English and then in the Lizards’ language.
    “Well, that’s true,” Sam said. “They can get some use out of us here, and we’re too far away to get into a whole lot of trouble.”
    “That’s how I figure it, too,” Johnson agreed. “And speaking of seeing Home, how would you like to
see
Home?”
    “Can I?” Sam forgot about the straps and tried to zoom off the table. That didn’t work. He looked at Dr. Blanchard. “May I?”
    “If you’ve got enough coordination to undo those straps, you’ve got enough to go up to the control room,” she told him.
    He fumbled at them. Glen Johnson laughed—not mockingly, but sympathetically. He said, “I’ve done that twice now.”
    “Twice?” Sam tried to make his fingers obey him. There! A buckle loosened.
    “Yeah, twice,” Johnson said. “They woke me halfway through so I could help in the turn-ship maneuver. Everybody here will get a good look at Home pretty soon. I saw the sky with no sun anywhere.” A certain somber pride—and more than a little awe—filled his voice.
    Yeager tried to imagine how empty that sky would seem—tried and felt himself failing. But his hands seemed smarter when he wasn’t telling them what to do. Two more latches came loose. He flipped back the belts that held him to the table.
    That was when he realized he was naked. Melanie Blanchard took it in stride. So did Johnson. Sam decided he would, too. She tossed him underpants and shorts and a T-shirt like the pilot’s. “Here,” she said. “Put these on, if you want to.” He did. He thought the underpants were the ones he’d been wearing when he went downtown to go into cold sleep. The shirt, like Johnson‘s, had eagles pinned to the shoulders.
    “Come on,” Johnson said, and went up the hatchway.
    Slowly, creakily, Sam followed. Johnson was smooth in weightlessness. He would be, of course. Yeager was anything but. A splash of sunlight brightened the top of the corridor. He paused there to rest for a moment before going up into the control room. “Oh,” he said softly. Here he was, resting like a cat in the sunlight of another star.
    Tau Ceti was a little cooler, a little redder, than the Sun. Sam stared at the light. Was there a difference? Maybe a little. The Lizards, who’d evolved here, saw a bit further into the infrared than people could, but violet was ultraviolet to them.
    “Come on,” Glen Johnson said again.
    “I’m coming.” Sam thrust himself up into the control room. Then he said, “Oh,” once more, for there was Home filling the sky below him. With it there,
below
suddenly had a meaning again. He had to remind himself he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, fall.
    He’d seen Earth from orbit, naturally. The cloud-banded blue, mingled here and there with green and brown and gold, would stay in his memory forever. His first thought of Home was,
There’s a lot less blue.
On Earth, land was islands in a great, all-touching sea. Here, seas dotted what was primarily a landscape. The first Lizards who’d gone around their world had done it on foot.
    And the greens he saw were subtly different from those of Earth. He couldn’t have said how, but they were.