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results weren’t to his satisfaction, he was perfectly willing to let the government deal with the Big Uglies without him.
    He sent Facaros an electronic message, letting the other male—and those behind him—know what he’d done.
This does not surprise me,
Facaros wrote back.
Why should you trust those of your own kind, those who are on your side?
    I do trust,
Atvar wrote.
But trust must be verified. This too is a lesson of Tosev 3.
He got no reply to that. He hadn’t really expected one.
    When he went into a hospital for the cold-sleep treatment, the physician there asked him, “Have you undergone this procedure before?”
    “Twice,” he answered.
    “Oh,” the physician said. “You will have traveled between the stars, then?”
    “Not at all,” Atvar told her. “I did not care for what was being televised, and so I thought I would store myself away, hoping for an improvement some years down the line. No luck the first time, so I tried a second. I am sure this third time will prove a success.”
    The physician gave him a severe look. “I do not believe you are being serious,” she said, and used an emphatic cough to let him know how much she did not believe it.
    “Believe what you please,” Atvar told her. She did not seem to have the slightest idea who he was. In a way, that was annoying. In another way, it was a relief. In spite of everything televisors and pundits could do, he managed to escape into anonymity every now and again. Even his fancy body paint meant less here than it had on Tosev 3.
    “Give me your arm, please,” the physician said. Atvar obeyed. In all his time on Tosev 3, he hadn’t had to obey anyone, not till he got the summons to return to Home. He’d given orders. He hadn’t taken them. Now he did. He hissed as the jet of air blasted drugs under his scales. The physician sighed at his squeamishness. “You cannot tell me that really hurt.”
    “Oh? Why not?” he said.
    His reward was another injection, and another. Presently, the physician said, “You are tolerating the procedure very well.”
    “Good.” Atvar’s mouth fell open not in a laugh but in an enormous yawn. Whatever else the physician did to him, he never knew it.
    When Glen Johnson woke, he needed some little while to realize he was awake and to remember he’d gone into cold sleep. Something here was emphatically different from the way things had been on the
Lewis and Clark,
though. He had weight. He didn’t have much—only a couple of pounds’ worth—but it was the first time he’d had any since the
Lewis and Clark
got out to the asteroid belt. The
Admiral Peary
stayed under acceleration all the time.
    “Here,” a woman said. “Drink this.”
Dr. Blanchard,
he thought as his wits slowly trickled back into his head.
Her name is Dr. Blanchard.
She handed him a plastic squeeze bulb. The liquid in the bulb had weight, too, but not enough to keep it from madly sloshing around in there.
    It tasted like chicken soup—hot and salty and fatty and restorative. And he needed restoring. He had trouble finishing the bulb, even though it wasn’t very big. Sucking and swallowing all but drained him of strength. “Thanks,” he said. “That was good. What was it?”
    “Chicken broth,” she answered, and he would have laughed if he’d had the energy. Little by little, he noticed he was hooked up to a lot of electronic monitors. Dr. Blanchard checked the readouts. “Sleep if you want to,” she told him. “That seems normal enough.”
    “Seems?” he said around a yawn. He did want to sleep. Why not? The habit of a lot of years was hard to break.
    “Well,” she answered, “we haven’t thawed out a whole lot of people yet. We’re still learning.”
    He yawned again. “Why am I one of your guinea pigs?” he asked. If she answered, he didn’t hear her. Sleep reclaimed him.
    When he woke again, he felt stronger. Dr. Blanchard gave him more chicken soup, even if she primly insisted on calling it chicken broth.