The Homeward Bounders Read online

  Not a bad idea, I thought, as I went up the steps to the thick shut front door. I rang at the brass bell beside it and heard it go clang clang clang in the silence deep inside. My heart seemed to be clanging too, so hard that it hurt. Then I waited. When one of Them came, I was going to say, “Your groceries, sir. Like me to put them in the kitchen for you?” Not a bad idea.

  I waited. And I waited. The stamped-out anchor was on the part of the door plate level with my eyes, and now, while I waited, I stared at it and saw that there was a crown over the end of it—the part they call the shank. And, after a while, my heart stopped clanging and I began to get annoyed. I rang again. And a third time. By that time I was hating that crowned anchor personally—but nothing like I did later. I’ve come upon pubs and inns all over the place called The Crown and Anchor. No matter how desperate I am, I can’t ever bring myself to go into them. I always suspect that They are waiting inside.

  Around five o’clock, I saw that it was no good. This is ridiculous! I thought. What do they do for groceries? Don’t they eat? But really what I thought was that five o’clock was after office hours, and that the fellows had probably taken off their gray cloaks and gone home.

  Well, there was an easy answer to that one. Go and take a look. What a fool I was!

  So round the corner to the side street goes this fool, carrying his box of groceries, along to the best place to climb the wall. I put the box down in the street and used it to tread on to get a leg up. There was an awful squishy crunching as I took off from it—eggs probably—but I took no notice and got on top of the wall. Maybe I was more scared than I would admit. I did stay on top of that wall a minute or so. I discovered that if I put my head right over, the noise from the city went, just like that. Then if I moved my head back again—pop!—the noises were back. I did that several times before I finally swung down into the silence among the trees. Then furious curiosity took hold again. I refused to be beat. I crept to the place where I could look in that window again.

  And They were there. Both of Them, lounging in a sort of chatty way beside Their machine, half hidden from me by the milky reflections of trees.

  That settled it. They must have heard the bell and hadn’t bothered to answer. Obviously it was very secret, what They did. So it stood to reason that it was worth finding out about. It also stood to reason that this park, or garden, where I was, was Their private one, and They must come out and walk in it from time to time. Which meant there had to be a door round on the other wall of the triangular fort, the wall I hadn’t seen.

  I went round there, through the bushes. And, sure enough, there was a door, in the middle of that side. A much more easy and approachable-looking door than that front door. It was made of flat glass, with a handle in the glass. I looked carefully, but it seemed dark behind the glass. All I could see were the reflections of the park in it and the reflection of the canal too. Its arches were right above me on that side. But what I didn’t see was my own reflection in that door as I dashed across the gravel. I should have thought about that. But I didn’t. It was probably too late by then anyway.

  The door opened on to a sort of humming vagueness. I was inside before I knew it. They both turned round to look at me. Of course I saw what a fool I’d been then. The building was triangular. There was no room for the door to open anywhere except into the room with the machines. I had assumed that it didn’t, because I hadn’t been able to see it through the glass door. There were the machines in front of me now, a triangular patch of them, winking and blinking, and I ought to have been able to see them just as clearly through that door.

  An awful lot in that place was vague, including Them. The shadow of the canal was in here too, and the only things I could see clearly were those that happened to come in the slabs of dark shadow where the arches were. In between, it was white sky, with everything confused in it. They were in the sky. You never see Them clearly. All I did see was a huge table standing down at the wide end of the triangular room. There was a sort of flickering going on over it and some huge regular shapes hanging in the air above it. I blinked at those shapes. They were like enormous dice.

  So there is a game going on! I thought.

  But it was the queerest feeling. It was like having got into a reflection in a shop window. And, at the same time, I had a notion I was really standing outside in the open air, under the canal arches somewhere. I thought at first that it was this feeling that kept me standing there. I thought I was plain confused. It only came to me gradually that I was sort of hanging there, and that I couldn’t move at all.

  II

  The one of Them nearest me walked round behind me and shut the door. “Another random factor,” he said. He sounded annoyed. It was the way my mother would say, “Bother! We’ve got mice again.”

  And the other one said, “We’d better deal with that before we go on then.” He said it the way my father would answer, “You’d better set traps again, my dear.”

  “How?” asked the first one, coming back round me to the machines. “Can we afford a corpse at this stage? I do wish we could do without these randoms.”

  “Oh but we can’t,” said the other. “We need them. Besides, the risk adds to the fun. I think we’d better discard this one to the Bounder circuits—but let’s get a readout first on the effect of a corpse on play.”

  “Right you are,” said the first one.

  They both leaned over the machines. I could see Them through the white sheets of reflected sky, looking at me carefully and then looking down to press another button. It was the way my mother kept looking at the color of our curtains when she was choosing new wallpaper. After that, They turned their attention to another part of the machine and gazed at it, rather dubiously. Then They went down the room to look at that huge flickering table.

  “Hm,” said the first one. “Play is quite delicately poised at the moment, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said the second. “If it was on your side, it would help bring your revolution closer, but I can’t afford any urban unrest for a couple of decades or more. I claim unfair hazard. Let’s discard. Agreed?”

  The first one came back and stood looking into the machine in the intent way They did. “It would make good sense,” he said, “if we could go back over the family of this discard and scrub all memory of it.”

  “Oh no,” said the other, moving up too. “It’s against the rules for a discard. The anchor, you know. The anchor.”

  “But we can scrub with a corpse. Why don’t we?”

  “Because I’ve already claimed unfair hazard. Come on. Make it a discard.”

  “Yes, why not?” said the first one. “It’s not that important. What’s the rule? These days we have to check with the rest in case the Bounder circuits are overloaded, don’t we?”

  As I sit here, it’s true! They said all that, talking about me just as if I were a wooden counter or a piece of card in a game. And I floated there and couldn’t do a thing about it. Next thing I knew, They were punching more buttons, round the end of the machines.

  And the place opened up.

  You know if you go to a barber’s shop with a lot of mirrors, how you can sit looking into one mirror and see through it into the mirror behind you, over and over again, until it goes all blurred with distance? Well, what happened was like that. Over and over again, and all blurred, there were suddenly triangular rooms all round. They were slotted in on both sides, and beyond and behind that, and underneath, down and down. They were piled up on top of us too. I looked, but it made me feel ill, seeing two of Them walking about up there, and others of Them above and beside that, all strolling over where They could see me. They all wore those cloaks, but They weren’t just reflections of the first two. They were all different from one another. That was about all I could tell. It was all so blurry and flickery, and the reflection of the canal arches went striding through the lot, as if that was the only real thing there.

  “Your attention for a moment,” said one of Them who
was with me. “We are about to make a discard. Can you confirm that there is still room on the Bounds?”

  A distant voice said, “Computing.”

  A nearer, hollower voice asked, “What’s the reason for the discard?”

  The second one of my Them said, “We’ve had an intrusion by a random factor, entailing the usual danger of feedback into the native world here. I’ve claimed unfair hazard against reinsertion as a corpse.”

  “That seems adequate,” said the hollow voice.

  Almost at once, the distant voice said, “The Bounds have space for four more discards. Repeat, four more only. Is the reason good enough?”

  There was a little murmuring. For a moment, I thought I was going to end up as a corpse. I still didn’t know what I was in for, you see. Then the murmur grew—with an air of surprise to it, as if They were wondering what They were being asked for. “Reason sufficient. Sufficient reason,” came rumbling from all round, above and underneath.

  “Then I must caution you,” said the hollow voice. “Rule seventy-two thousand now comes into play. The final three discards must only be made with extreme caution and at the most pressing need.”

  With that, They all faded away, into the reflection of the sky again, and left just my two.

  The second one came sweeping towards me. The first was standing with his hand ready on a handle of some kind. The second one spoke to me, slowly and carefully, as if I was an idiot. “You are now a discard,” he said. “We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are. The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can. If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner.”

  I looked up at him. He was a gray blurred figure behind a sheet of white reflected sky. So was the other one, and he was just about to pull down the lever. “Hey! Wait a minute!” I said. “What’s all this? What are these rules? Who made them?”

  Both of Them stared at me. They looked like you would if your breakfast egg had suddenly piped up and said, “Don’t eat me!”

  “You’ve no right to send me off without any explanation, like this!” I said.

  He pulled the lever while I was saying it. You might whack your egg on top with your spoon the same way. The sideways twitch came while I was saying “explanation.” As I said “like this!” I was somewhere else entirely.

  And I mean somewhere else. It’s hard to explain just how different it was. I was standing out in the open, just as I’d half thought that I was out in the open under the canal arches before, only this was real, solid and real. There was green grass going up and down over hills in all directions. Across the valley in front of me, there was a group of black-and-white animals, eating the grass. I thought they were cows, probably. I’d never seen a live cow till then. Beyond that, going up against the sunset, was a spire of smoke. And that was all. The place was empty otherwise, except for me. I turned right round to make sure, and it was the truth.

  That was shock enough, if you were a city boy like me. It was a horrible feeling. I wanted to crouch down and get my eyes to the top of my head somehow, like a frog, so that I could see all round me at once. But there was more to it than that. The air in that place was soft and mild. It smelled different and it felt different. It weighed on you in a different way, sort of sluggishly. The grass didn’t look quite right, and even the sun, setting down over the hill where the spire of smoke was, was not like the sun I was used to. It was making the sunset the wrong color.

  While I was turning round the second time, it came to me that the slanting dip in the valley just behind me was the same shape as Their triangular park, where the statue was. Then I looked very carefully over the rest of the green slopes. Yes. The valley in front was where the smart part of the city should be, and the railway, and the hill beside me, and the one where the sun was setting, were the two hills the canal went between on its arches. The slope on the other side of me was going up to where our courtyard should have been. But the city had gone.

  “I hate Them!” I screamed out. Because I knew then, without having to think it out, that I was on another world. This world seemed to have the same shape as mine, but it was different in every other way. And I didn’t know how to get back to mine.

  For a while, I stood there and yelled every cussword I knew at Them, and I knew quite a few, even then. Then I set off to walk to that line of smoke going up into the sunset. There must be a house there, I thought. There’s no point starving. And, as I walked, I thought over very carefully what They had said. They had talked of Bounds and Bounder circuits and discards and random factors and rules. I could see those were words in an enormous serious game. And I was a random factor, so They had discarded me, but there were still rules for that. And these rules said—The one who spoke to me at the end might have talked as if I was an idiot, but the way he had done it was rather like a policeman talks to someone he’s arresting: “Everything you say can be taken down and may be used in evidence.” They had told me the rules, and those said I could get Home if I could manage it. Well I would. I might be a discard on the Bounder circuits, but I was a Homeward Bounder, and They had better not forget it! I was going to get Home and spite Them. Then They had better watch out!

  By this time, I had got near the cows. Cows are always bigger than you expect, and their horns are sharp. They have this upsetting way of stopping eating when you come up, and staring. I stopped and stared back. I was scared. I didn’t even dare turn round and go back, in case they came galloping up behind me and pronged me on those horns like toast on a toasting fork. Heaven knows what I would have done, if some men had not come galloping up just then to round up the cows. They were hairy, dirty men, dressed in cowhide, and their horses were as bad. They all stared at me, men, horses and cows, and one of those men was the image of the printer who owned the printing press in the courtyard up the road from ours.

  That made me feel much better. I didn’t think he was the printer—and he wasn’t of course—but I got on with the printer, and I thought I could get on with this copy of him too. “Hello,” I said. “You don’t happen to want a boy for odd jobs, do you?”

  He grinned, a big hairy split in his beard. And he answered. And here was another blow. It was gabble. I could not understand one word. They spoke quite a different language to mine.

  “Oh mother!” I wailed. “I’ll get Them for this, if it’s the last thing I do!”

  In fact, the hairy herdsmen were nice to me. I was lucky in a way. Some Homeward Bounders have to begin much harder than I did. Allowing for language problems, my start wasn’t at all bad. They helped me up on the horse behind the printer, and they rode off with me and the cows to where they lived. And they lived in tents—a set of large smelly leather tents with the hair still on them in patches. The line of smoke was from the sort of bonfire they used for cooking on. I felt I could stand that. I told myself it was an adventure. But I couldn’t stand their Chief. She was a great huge wobbly woman with a voice like a train whistle. She was always scolding. She scolded the men for bringing me and me for coming, and me for speaking gibberish and wearing peculiar clothes, and the fire for burning and the sun for setting. Or I think she did. It took me days to understand the first word of their lingo.

  I’ve got used to learning languages since. You get a system. But this one was a real shocker anyhow—they had sixteen words for cow and if you got the wrong one, they fell about laughing—and I think I wasn’t trying properly. I wasn’t expecting to be there that long. I was going Home. And it didn’t help that Mrs. Chief decided to give me language lessons herself. She had the idea that if she scolded loud enough I would have to understand by sheer noise-power. We used to sit cross-legged facing one another, her scolding away at top shriek, and me nodding and smiling.

  “Th
at’s right,” I would say, nodding intelligently. “Yell away, you old squish-bag.”

  At this, she would be pleased, because I seemed to be trying, and scream louder than ever. And I would smile.

  “And you smell too,” I would say. “Worse than any of your cows.”

  Well, it kept me sane. And it gave her an interest in life. It was pretty boring, life on the cattle-range. The only excitement they had was if a bull got nasty, or another tribe of herders went by on the horizon. All the same, I had to keep telling myself very firmly, “This is not so bad. It could be worse. It’s not a bad life.” That kept me sane too.

  After six weeks or so, I had the hang of the language. I could sit on a horse without finding myself sitting on the ground the next second, and I could help round up cows. I was learning how to make leather rope and tan leather and weave hurdles, and a dozen other useful things. But I never learned how to milk a cow. That was sacred. Only women were allowed to do that. And at this stage, they took down their tents and moved on to find better grass. They never reckoned to stay in one place much over a month.

  I was riding along with them, helping keep the cattle together, when, about midday, I had the most peculiar sensation. It was like being pulled, strongly and remorselessly, sideways from the way we were going. With it, came a worse feeling—from inside me. It was a terrible yearning and a longing. My throat hurt with it. And it was like an itch too. I wanted to get inside my head and scratch. Both feelings were so strong that I had to turn my horse the way they pulled me, and as soon as I had, I felt better—as if I was now doing the right thing. And, no sooner was I trotting away in that direction, than I was full of excitement. I was going Home. I was sure of it. This was how you were moved along the Bounds. I had been right to think I was only going to be a short time in this world.

  (That was about the only thing I was right about, as it happened. You nearly always get a feeling, when you first come into a world, how long you’re going to have to stay there. I’ve only ever known myself wrong once. And that time was twice as long as I thought. I think one of Them must have changed his mind about his move.)