The Homeward Bounders (20 page)

“It's
not
a gift!” Helen howled. “It's a d-d-deformity! It's not even properly a body! Joris said it wasn't.”

“Yes, but Joris was thinking of his own world,” Vanessa said. “I'm sure you can't judge one world by another. Helen, you'd be much better thinking of it as a gift you haven't found the use of yet. Haven't you ever been given a present like that? You can't think what to do with this gadget you've been given, but you know it'll come in handy for something.”

Helen managed to laugh and cry at once. “That's clever! I'll call my arm my gadget in future. What made you think of it?”

“Because I feel a bit like that myself,” Vanessa said. “I'm going to be a doctor, because that's what everyone is in my family, but there are all sorts of bits of me that I won't be using for that. And I keep thinking they must come in handy sometime.”

“I hope they do,” Helen said, sniffing.

Vanessa said, “Better now?”

“Yes,” said Helen. She went all fierce. “I shall use my gadget to exterminate
Them
, because of what
They
did to Jamie!”

A bit later on, Adam came and woke me up. “Vanessa says can you eat some supper when she's cooked it?”

“Sure,” I said. “I could even eat that wild mouse. Adam, who's that lady with the hat in that photo up there?”

Adam pushed his glasses up his nose to see. “Oh, her. That's my great-grandmother they've bored me with ever since I can remember. She was one of the first ever women doctors, or something. There's more pictures of her in that album over there, if you want to look.”

“Depends how soon supper is,” I said.

“Ten minutes,” Adam said. He fetched me the album. “I warn you,” he said, “they're all either her and a potted fern, or her cutting up a corpse. She only looks human in the first one. She was about fifteen in that one. They say she probably looked quite like Vanessa. Red hair photographed as black in those days.”

He went away, and I opened the album. I knew why the lady looked familiar at once. The apparently black-haired girl staring solemnly out of the first photograph was indeed like Vanessa, only not so pretty. Vanessa was older, of course. This girl was at the prim and fussy stage. You could see she'd fussed for hours about her clothes to be photographed in. But, even so, even more than Vanessa, that girl reminded me of my sister, Elsie—she reminded me so much of Elsie that I took a look at her feet, expecting to see Rob's cast-off boots on them. But of course she was wearing elegant little pointed shoes, of a kind my parents could never have afforded.

I didn't bother to look at the rest of the album. When Helen came to say supper was ready, she said, “Whatever's the matter, Jamie?”

I swallowed what felt like half my throat. “You behaved awfully well,” I said, “that time in the pantomime horse, when you thought you'd seen your mother. I wouldn't have been nearly so sensible.”

“I knew you were right,” said Helen. “Why?”

I showed her the photograph. “That could almost be my sister, Elsie,” I said. “This world's so like mine that I think mine may even be next one on.”

“Then why didn't you
say
so?” said Helen. “You shouldn't have let us make you stay here! I'll go and tell Joris, and we'll move on tomorrow.”

That cheered me up wonderfully. Supper cheered me up more, even though Vanessa was a really rotten cook. It turned out that Helen and Joris had helped Vanessa cook—in which case I shudder to think what Vanessa's food was like when she cooked it on her own. While we ate it, Joris talked about Konstam. He talked nonstop. He had two new listeners in Vanessa and Adam, and he made the best of them.

“Does he ever stop?” Adam muttered to me.

“He hasn't yet,” I said. “But he's only been on the Bounds two days.”

“Adam, it's rude to whisper,” said Vanessa.

“Who's a pink-haired trout then?” said Adam.

“You disgusting blind toad!” retorted Vanessa.

It amazed me how rude they were to one another. They didn't insult one another for fun, either. They both really meant it. But, when they stopped snarling insults, they seemed perfectly good friends. The sudden changes made me nervous. The third time they went at one another, they actually stopped Joris talking. There was total silence when they stopped.

“Sorry about that,” said Adam. He wasn't sorry at all. “Jamie, we want to do something about
Them
. We think we've discovered some weak points in
Their
rules.”

They had been discussing it while I was asleep. Adam had made a list of every single fact Helen or Joris knew about
Them
, and they had all remembered the things I had said. Then Adam had thought about it, hard.

“First,” he said, “
They
make the rules, and then the rules seem to work automatically, by themselves—as in a certain incident in a certain alley. Second, you lot are what
They
call random factors. Now that ought to mean something quite unpredictable, which crops up in spite of the rules. But I think
They
use it to mean more than that. What's the main thing you three have in common?”

“We've seen
Them
playing,” I said.

“Right,” said Adam. “And once you did, you were disconnected from the game—neutralized as Homeward Bounders. And all sorts of new rules came into operation to make sure you stayed that way. Why?”

“Because otherwise we'd tell ordinary people like you,” I said, “and you'd want to do something about
Them
.”

“Yes, that's what
They
want you to think,” said Adam. “But you're forgetting part of Helen's story. Helen's teacher couldn't see
Them
.”

I felt my mouth come open. I shut it quick. It was full at the time. What my mother would have said! “Then what are
They
playing at? You mean most people can't see
Them
at all?”

Adam's face gleamed with enthusiasm. “That's right! I know how it works! It's brilliant! I wish it was possible in ordinary War Gaming! It adds an extra game on the side, and turns
Their
game into a huge exciting gamble. What happens is that you prove that you can see
Them
and you become a Homeward Bounder in an enormous game of chance, like
Ludo
or
Snakes and Ladders
or something, going on round the edge of the War Game. Think. There are hundreds, or maybe millions of people wandering about who know what's going on. If these people come together with the right people at the right time, they can ruin everything for
Them
. Actually, the odds are on
Their
side. Think how many odds there must be against you three first coming together, then coming here, finding me, convincing me, and me happening to know about War Gaming—out of millions of worlds and millions of people who don't! But it can happen. It just has. And now it has, we can win the game and bring
Them
down.”

“Yes,” I said. “But you forget
They
know.
They
know everything.”

“But we still think we can do something,” Vanessa said. “I'm sure we can. This is my idea. There are only allowed to be a certain number of Homeward Bounders, aren't there? By the time Joris was—er—discarded, there was only room for one more after him. Maybe
They
've sent someone else off since. Anyway, the numbers are nearly full. So I think we ought to increase that number—overload the circuit, and see what happens.”

I didn't see it. I mean, I understood all right, but Vanessa didn't know
Them. They
'd just make the numbers right somehow—probably kill off old Ahasuerus or the Flying Dutchman, or one of us. I didn't say it, though. I said, “What do you aim to do?”

“I think,” said Vanessa, “that Adam and I have become random factors because we believe you. I think we should leave notes explaining all about
Them
to our parents, to make it thoroughly difficult for
Them
, and come with the three of you when you move on tomorrow.”

“I think that's what Ahasuerus meant,” said Helen.

“So when do the Bounds call next?” Adam asked.

“We don't need to wait for the call,” Joris pointed out.

Then they all looked at me to see what I thought. I still couldn't say. It wasn't only that I was twice as scared of
Them
than even Joris was. It wasn't only that I didn't like to say it was no use. What had suddenly got me was that I didn't know when the Bounds were going to call next in this world. I hadn't a clue. We seemed to have messed things up by going through Boundaries on our own. And that put me in a taking. Suppose the Bounds called suddenly—tonight—I would have to go to the nearest Boundary. And I knew the nearest Boundary couldn't be those vegetable patches. That was too far away. But those vegetable patches were the only Boundary where I could be reasonably sure of getting to my own Home. I didn't know what to do.

I must have looked gray again. Vanessa said, “We'll put you to bed, Jamie, and decide properly tomorrow morning. Adam's supposed to have school on Saturday mornings, but I expect a mysterious illness to strike him any moment. We shall have all tomorrow and most of Sunday to take action in. You sleep on it.”

I did sleep on it. I slept in a vast bed belonging to Adam's parents, under a thing I'd have called an eiderdown. Adam called it a duvet. Very posh. It must have taken a whole farmyard full of hens to stuff that thing. I sweltered. So did Joris. He was in the other side of the vast bed in the morning, and the hot eiderdown was piled up between us, and I hadn't even known he was there.

I lay for a while when I woke up, thinking it was lucky the Bounds hadn't called in the night. I'd been too fast asleep to hear them.

“How are you?” said Joris, when he saw I was awake.

I felt good. My arm hardly hurt at all. “All right,” I said. “Joris, what do
you
think of Vanessa's idea for getting rid of
Them
? Do you think it could be that simple?”

Joris considered. I could see in his face the horror of
Them
. He'd had
Them
a good bit more recently than me, after all. “No,” he said. “It can't be right. Helen says your world is next one on. I think we should go there.”

“Thanks!” I said. I was really relieved. “Let's sneak off straight after breakfast then.”

But we never got a chance. Joris and I were just coming downstairs, wondering what people ate for breakfast in this world, when the doorbell rang. We didn't know it was the doorbell. It made a gentle chime—
ping-pong
. We only realized what the noise was when Adam drifted across the hall, looking like someone from Creema di Leema in yellow pajamas with purple spots, and went out of sight round the corner to open the front door….

We heard Adam make a sort of
glunk
-noise. Someone outside said, “Forgive me. I have a hot reading for this house.” And then a man dressed just like Joris leaped energetically into the middle of the hall.

Joris let out a huge shout of
“Konstam!”
and came rushing downstairs so fast that I had to rush too in order not to be knocked over.

Yes, it was Konstam Khan. Ten-foot Konstam himself. I didn't believe it at first, any more than you do. But he was really there, standing just in front of Fred the skeleton, with his white boots planted wide apart on the hall carpet, looking anxiously at Joris. But when he saw Joris rushing at him in one piece, he smiled, showing amazingly white teeth, and his face sort of glowed. He put the little square instrument he had been carrying away in the front of his white leather jerkin—which had the same black sign on it as Joris's—and began stripping off his white leather gauntlets. He hung the gloves in his belt, beside the curved sword and the holstered gun which were already there.

“Joris, I'm sorry to have been so long coming to fetch you,” Konstam said.

By this time, Vanessa was in the doorway of the kitchen in a trailing blue dressing-gown, and Helen was on the stairs behind me. We all stared at Konstam.

Because the amazing thing about Konstam Khan was that he really was all the things that Joris said he was. You only had to look at him to see he was. You could tell he was brave and strong and heroic from the way he held his head and the way he moved—he moved so lightly that it was plain he had muscles most people don't even get born with. He had godlike good looks too. His skin was very brown, browner than Helen's. And one of the things which made Konstam so handsome was the faint glow of pink through the brown of his cheeks. I always liked that in Helen, but she only had that when she was in a good mood. Konstam glowed with health all the time. His blue-black hair waved crisply from his face. His black eyes flashed with health and keenness. He was considerate, and he was nice. You could tell that from the way he looked at Joris. He had that nice, straight way of looking that Joris had. In fact, he was as godlike as Joris had said—except for one thing. He was nothing like ten feet tall. He was about an inch shorter than Joris was.

I saw Joris notice Konstam's height as he rushed at Konstam. It obviously surprised him. Behind Joris's back, Adam put one hand as high as he could in the air, and then lowered it expressively to dwarf-height. I had to turn away and snore. Vanessa hid her face in the doorjamb.