The Homeward Bounders

  The tramp broke off preaching and frowned at me. “Laugh not at the words of truth, my fellow exile,” he said. “There is power in numbers.”

  “I wasn’t laughing at you,” I said.

  “You are young in the ways of the worlds,” stated the tramp, “old though you think yourself. Listen to me. Listen to the wisdom of Ahasuerus, who was among the first to have the Mark of Cain set on him.”

  I think that’s how he said his name. It sounded like a sneeze. “Listen to who?” I said.

  “Ahasuerus,” said the old tramp. “That same whom they term the Wandering Jew.”

  At this, Adam finished with my arm and sat back on his heels, listening frankly.

  “Never heard of you,” I said. I wanted to shut the old fellow up. But all I seemed to do was set him off again. He was worse than Joris. He began again on all that stuff about hope and anchors—he knew Them all right, that was for sure—and all I could do was sit and stare at his dirty big toe poking out of the front of one of his cracked old boots, and wait for him to stop.

  “I’m sorry I fetched him now,” Helen muttered. “I thought he’d help.”

  “They gave me to hope,” Ahasuerus said. “They hung me in hope as one in chains, and put a goal before me and set me on my way. But that goal always retreats from me, as mirage in the wilderness or star from star. I am weary now, and hope is a heavy burden. And They put a lie in my mouth, so that I may not tell the worlds about Them, but must say that I sinned against God. But this is a lie, and there is power in numbers. Before three of my own kind, I may speak the truth. For I was born with more sight than most, and I saw Them. I saw the gaming-board of Them and I saw the game They played with the nations. And I went out to preach and warn my people of Their coming ploy. And, for that reason, They took me, Ahasuerus, and hung chains upon me, and sent me forth with lies in my mouth, and I am called the Wandering Jew.”

  Having said all this, the tramp turned his watery black eyes particularly on Adam. “Have you heard and harkened to the words of Ahasuerus?” he asked him.

  “Oh yes,” Adam said, smiling politely. It was the smile you humor lunatics with. “Every word.”

  “Then my hope is lighter upon me,” said the tramp. “These three will bear witness that I spoke the truth.” He nodded round at Joris and Helen and me. “You three will soon be separated, one from another,” he said to us. “They will not let wanderers be long in company together. Make good use of your time.” Then, greatly to my surprise, because I could have sworn we’d be stuck with the old man for hours yet, he went shambling away down the alley.

  Adam stared after him. “If he was telling the truth,” he said, “he must be at least two thousand years old.”

  “He was mad as a hatter,” I said hastily. “A nut case, bonkers, round the bend, flipped—”

  “Yes, but you’re not,” said Adam.

  “Yes, we are,” I said. “Look at us. She hasn’t got a face. He thinks he hunts demons. I steal trousers all the time. The fact is—”

  Helen interrupted me. “Take no notice,” she said to Adam. “Jamie can’t help it. He’s scared of the rules all the time.”

  I might have known Helen would let me down. “Scared?” I said. “And so I should be! So should you. You’ve just seen two of them working. Joris kills me, because he ought to have killed someone else. And I don’t die, because I can’t.” I shouldn’t have said any of this. But I was shaken to pieces by all that had happened. And my arm hurt.

  “Exactly,” Adam said. “I’d welcome an explanation.”

  Helen said, “We’re all Homeward Bounders. So was the tramp.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “He won’t believe a word you say. They never do. They’re not allowed to.”

  Adam stood up. “Try me,” he suggested, in his coolest way. “If you can convince me, I’ll let you keep those trousers.”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself, even for a pair of trousers. Helen looked at Joris for support. Joris was leaning against the wall, looking like I felt. He said to me, “You ought to have your arm in a sling. Will it heal?”

  Before I could say that I’d had bigger holes in me than this, Adam said, “My house is near the end of this alley. We can find him a sling there.”

  Someone must have agreed to go to Adam’s house. I didn’t. I was feeling too gray. But I know we went there. I was feeling too gray to notice the house much, except that it was big and red, with trees in front. The first thing I properly remember is being in the front hall. There was a skeleton there. It was standing in the hall, looking at me.

  “Meet Fred,” Adam said.

  Fred was the skeleton’s name. It stood with its splay feet on a sort of plinth. On the plinth, there were gold letters: FREDERICK M. ALLINGTON.

  “How beautiful!” said Helen. Fred was just her sort of thing.

  “My father’s a doctor,” Adam explained. “I think I may be one too.” We were in the kitchen by then, and Joris was tying up my arm in a kitchen towel. Joris had recovered enough now to keep saying how sorry he was. They made me sit in a chair and drink a mug of sweet tea. I remember looking round the kitchen unfavorably while I drank it. It was so clean and white. Nowhere ever has good kitchens like my world. Our kitchen at Home was brown and warm and cluttered, and you could make toast at the range, even in summer. This one might have been a hospital. There was no range. I couldn’t see anywhere to make toast. Still, it was better than nothing. A lot of worlds don’t have kitchens at all.

  Then I came to myself to discover that Adam had by no means given up hope of finding out about us. You could hardly blame him. He had seen enough to make anyone curious. “I can tell you’re all from different places,” he said, fishing for information, “by the way you talk. Joris has an American accent—”

  “I haven’t,” said Joris. “But I still have a Kathayack twang.”

  “Ah,” said Adam. “Helen sounds foreign.” He was right there. Helen spoke good English, but it wasn’t her native language, and it showed. “I’d guess Helen was Pakistani,” Adam fished on.

  “The House of Uquar,” Helen said scathingly, “is in Spithicar.”

  “And I’m dead common,” I said, to stop Adam.

  “I was going to say,” Adam said, “that I can’t place you at all, Jamie. Have a biscuit.”

  As soon as Helen realized I was trying to stop Adam, she began to tell him all about us, and about Homeward Bounders, and Them, and the ways of the worlds, while Joris waited eagerly in the wings, ready to talk about Konstam the moment Helen stopped. But Joris was disappointed. Adam didn’t believe a word.

  He laughed. “Pull the other one!” he said. “Haras-uquara! Demons! Them! You’ve all been watching too much telly.”

  “Well, you asked us to tell you,” I said. I was really annoyed. It’s funny the way your mind works. I ought to have been relieved that Adam didn’t believe Helen, but I wasn’t. All of a sudden, I was desperate for him to believe. I wanted an ordinary person to understand about Homeward Bounders, just this once. Before I knew it, I was casting about for something that might convince Adam.

  There was Joris’s slave mark. But Adam could say, like Helen, that anyone could get tattooed. There was that silly whistle thing I still had from Creema di Leema. But Adam had probably seen things like it in his world too. I fetched it out of my shirt pocket and showed it to him, and he had. He said you could buy them at the newsagent’s down the street. But there was Helen’s arm.

  “Helen,” I said. “Show him your gift.”

  Helen’s nose and half one eye had been showing, but, when I said this, her hair fell down in front of them completely. “No,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said. She didn’t answer. “Oh, come on!” I said. “It’s the only thing that’s going to convince him. Why not?”

  One word came out of her hair. “Joris.”

  I looked at Joris, and Joris looked at me. Neither of us knew what this meant.

  “If
you mean her face is her gift,” Adam said, “I’ve seen it. It looks like a face to me.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s something else. Helen, what do you mean—Joris?”

  The ready-to-bite look came through Helen’s hair. “He’ll think I’m a demon.”

  “But I won’t! I can’t. I can see you’re not a demon!” Joris protested. “I promise I won’t.”

  Helen’s nose-tip reappeared. “All right. If you promise.” She began rolling up her sleeve.

  “Her arm is an arm too,” Adam said.

  “You wait,” I said.

  Helen did the elephant-trunk again. I think that was her favorite. She did it slowly too, so that Adam could see her normal brown skin turning into each gray wrinkle, further and further up her arm. Adam goggled. He was really impressed. But so was Joris, in a different way. Joris leaned back in his chair—he looked relaxed, but I could see he was tense all over—and his eyes went all narrow. He watched every movement of that trunk like a cat. I could see Helen’s eyes too, bright and black, watching Joris between strands of hair.

  When the elephant trunk curled up, showing there was no bone in it, Adam said, “I think I’m convinced.” He sounded shaken. But I could hardly attend, because of the way Joris was looking. When I think, I suspect that that was the thing which really convinced Adam—Joris’s reaction.

  “There,” Helen said defiantly, bending the pink nostrils of the trunk towards Joris. “Demons do that, don’t they? Am I a demon, Joris?”

  “I—don’t know what you are,” Joris said. “Demons—demons do that all over. Do you?”

  “Only one arm,” said Helen. “Is it more spirit than body?”

  “Yes,” said Joris, watching the gray trunk narrowly.

  “Well, I can’t help it,” said Helen.

  “No, and I don’t suppose demons can either,” I said. “Come off it, Joris. You promised.”

  “I know,” Joris said, in a quiet, firm, determined way. “But I think she is part-demon.”

  That was another time when I wanted to shake Joris. Helen sort of shut down. The elephant trunk grew into an arm again, from the top downwards. Then Helen pulled her sleeve down and sat there without a face. She wouldn’t speak whatever I said.

  I could see it made Adam quite uncomfortable. “Care to expand a bit?” he said to me. “On Homeward Bounders and the rules and so on?”

  So I told him. Adam made more tea—which Helen wouldn’t touch—while I did, and Joris waited for his turn. As soon as I stopped to drink, Joris started in. “Of course Konstam would tell this better than me,” he said. “Konstam—”

  I didn’t mean to groan, but I did. A faint moan came from behind Helen’s hair too. Now, you must have noticed that Adam was quick on the uptake. One side of his mouth gave a bit of a flicker, and he turned to Joris in a smooth way that I could tell was taking the Archangel. “Tell me all about Konstam,” he said.

  Naturally Joris did. After a solid half hour, if Adam hadn’t known Konstam was ten foot tall and a Great God, he had only himself to blame. It came pouring out: Konstam, Konstam, Konstam. Mixed with it was the story of Adrac and Them, which I think was much more interesting. But the thing which really interested Adam was the fact that Joris had been a slave.

  Adam got far more out of Joris about that than we had bothered to. Joris rolled up his sleeve and showed Adam the anchor mark, of course, but he also told Adam that it had been done at the slave mart when he was seven, because that was Kathayack State Law. Konstam and the two other Khans who had come to buy Joris there had not wanted him marked. But they were not allowed to take him out of the State without. Then he went on to tell Adam that, no, he had not been born a slave. His grandmother had sold him because the family was too poor to keep him.

  “How much did your grandmother get for you?” Adam asked. He was commercial-minded, like me.

  “Five thousand crowns,” said Joris. “The Khans gave ten thousand.”

  Adam whistled. “Some profit! Are you still worth that much?”

  “Twice as much,” Joris said modestly. “I’d have been worth twice as much again when I was fully trained.” He sighed. “Konstam—”

  Adam nipped Konstam in the bud. He began pointing at things in the kitchen and asking Joris how many crowns they were worth. Before long, Adam’s face was shining. “I make it a crown is worth slightly over a pound!” he said. “Are all slaves worth that much?”

  “No,” said Joris. “Only first-class boys. They get trained as runners or racing drivers. Girls go for a lot less when they’re small, but they can go up in value later, if they turn out pretty.”

  “How much,” said Adam, with bated breath, “for a pretty girl?”

  “Well, it depends how well brought up they’ve been,” said Joris, “and whether they’ve been taught music and dancing and massage—”

  “Oh very well brought up,” said Adam. “Knows everything.”

  “Then,” said Joris, “a handsome virgin, with accomplishments, can go for up to sixty thousand crowns.”

  “Does,” Adam asked eagerly, “color of hair and things like that make a difference to the price?”

  “Red hair does,” said Joris. “Because it’s uncommon. Red hair can add as much as five hundred crowns to the price.”

  Adam wrapped his arms round himself and rolled about in his chair, in an agony of avarice. “Oh!” he said. “Oooh! Lead me to your world, Joris! The money I’d make! Of course, I’d have to get Vanessa there too, but I could manage that. Oh, if only we had slaves here! I’d sell Vanessa tonight!”

  “Who’s Vanessa?” I said.

  “My sister,” said Adam. “My sneering, bossy, know-all, redheaded sister. Next time she goes on at me, I shall sit and think how much I can sell her for. Ooh! Oh! Ah! Sixty thousand, five hundred pounds!”

  This brought Helen’s nose out into the open. “Greedy pig!” she said. “And I thought Jamie was commercial-minded!”

  “Tell me about you,” Adam said quickly to the nose, before it could go in again.

  “I might,” said Helen. And she put a mouse she had been nursing down on the table. The critter ran like clockwork towards the biscuits.

  “I didn’t know you kept mice,” Adam said.

  “I don’t. It lives here,” said Helen. “It’s quite sweet, but I’d prefer it if you had rats.” This was quite true, but what it meant was that Helen was still in a bad mood. It took me quite a while to coax her into telling Adam how she saw Them at Their game in the House of Uquar.

  That story caused Adam to take his glasses off and twirl them about. He seemed to do that when he was thinking. I suspect that he thought a lot. His glasses were broken on both sides and mended with wire and sticking-plaster.

  “Funny,” he said, when Helen had finished. “You seem all to have seen Them differently. It’s given me quite a few ideas. I’m not sure I like my ideas, either. But I know what kind of games They were playing. Like to come and see one?”

  XI

  Adam took us through the hall, past Frederick M. Allington the skeleton, and down some steps to a big basement room. Like all the rest of his house, it was beautifully polished and painted and well kept. Rich. Posh. Adam switched on a bright light over a large table in the middle of the room.

  Even Helen recoiled. I jumped back. Joris had got right out of the door before Helen said, “It’s only models. Come back, fool.”

  She was right. But, for a moment, I could have sworn it was one of Their game tables. There was a real-looking landscape built on the table. Adam said it was made out of paper and glue and paint mostly. He was proud of it. He had made most of it. There were hills, a wood, bushes, a lake, and some clusters of houses. Over this landscape were arranged the soldiers and machines and guns of a mud-brown war. All the little figures were beautifully painted, to look as real as possible. Adam had done those too.

  “This is called a War Game,” Adam said. “This one’s a modern war I’m in the middle of playing with my father.?
?? He went up to the table and looked over the arrangement of models. He picked up one of the rulers lying on the landscape and made some measurements. The intent way he did it made all three of us think of Them. “I think I’ve got him,” he said. “When he comes back on Sunday, I’m going to crush him. It takes real skill, you know.”

  “Doesn’t it depend on luck at all?” I said, nodding to the handful of dice lying near the rulers.

  “They threw dice,” Joris said. He was staring at that table just as he had stared at Helen’s arm.

  “You told me,” said Adam. “You said They moved things on the table and sometimes threw dice after that. That was what made me sure it was War Gaming. You don’t use the dice every move—that’s why it takes skill—you use them to tell you the results of the battles, how many men get killed, and so on. We use dice for the weather too. We make it quite subtle. You can read the rules if you like.” He picked up a fat booklet from the edge of the table and passed it to Joris.

  Helen put her hair back to stare at the table of soldiers. That meant she was impressed. “But what do They use the machines for?”

  “Calculating the odds on this or that move, I should think,” Adam said. “Dad and I have often said we could do with a computer. Just think how much more you’d need one if you were playing with the whole world!” Adam’s face took on a blissful, wistful look. “Fancy a War Game with the whole world for a table!”

  “But where do They get the machines?” Helen persisted.

  “How should I know?” said Adam. “Though what I’d do if I was Them, would be to let people invent them, on this world or that, and then kill the people off and take the machines myself.”

  “So would I,” said Helen. “I think They do. But you may not be right. The game I saw Them playing in the House of Uquar wasn’t like this.”