a dozen other useful things. But I never learnt 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.)
On this first occasion, Mrs Chief sent two hairy riders after me and they rounded me up just like a cow.
“What do you think you’re doing, going off on your own like that?” she screamed at me. “Suppose you meet an enemy!”
“First I heard you had any enemies,” I said sulkily. The pulling and the yearning were terrible.
She made me ride in the middle of the girls after that, and wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I’ve learnt to hold my tongue when the Bounds call now. It saves trouble. Then, I had to wait till night came, and it was agony. I felt pulled out of shape by the pull and sick with the longing – really sick: I couldn’t eat supper. Waste of a good beef steak. Worse still, I was all along haunted by the idea I was going to be too late. I was going to miss my chance of getting Home. I had to get to some particular place in order to move to other worlds, and I wasn’t going to get there in time.
It was quite dark when at last I got the chance to slip away. It was a bit cloudy and there was no moon – some worlds don’t have moons: others have anything up to three – but that didn’t matter to me. The Bounds called so strongly that I knew exactly which way to head. I went that way at a run. I ran all through the warm moisty night. I was drowned in sweat and panting like someone sawing wood. In the end, I was falling down every few yards, getting up again, and staggering on. I was so scared I’d be too late. By the time the sun rose, I think I was simply going from one foot to the other, almost on the spot. Stupid. I’ve learnt better since. But this was the first time, and, when there was light, I shouted out with joy. There was a green flat space among the green hills ahead, and someone had marked the space with a circle of wooden posts.
At that, I managed to trot and lumbered into the circle. Somewhere near the middle of it, the twitch took me sideways again.
You’ve probably guessed what happened. You can imagine how I felt anyway. It was dawn still, a lurid streaky dawn. The green ranges had gone, but there was no city – nothing like one. The bare lumpy landscape round me was heaped with what looked like piles of cinders, and each pile had its own dreary little hut standing beside it. I had no idea what they were – they were mines, actually. You weren’t a person in that new world if you didn’t have your own hole and keep digging coal or copper out of it. But I didn’t care what was going on. I was feeling the air, as I did before, and realising that this was yet another different world. And at the same time, I realised that I was due to stay here for rather a long time.
It was on this world that I began to understand that They hadn’t told me even half the rules. They had just told me the ones that interested Them. On this world I was starved and hit, and buried under a collapsed slag-heap. I’m not going to describe it. I hate it too much. I was there twice too, because what happened was that I got caught in a little ring of worlds and went all round the ring two times. At the time, I thought they were all the worlds there were – except for Home, which I never seemed to get to – and I thought of them as worlds, which they are not, not really.
They are separate universes, stacked in together like I saw the triangular rooms of Them before They sent me off. These universes all touch somewhere – and where they touch is the Boundary – but they don’t mix. Homeward Bounders seem to be the only people who can go from one universe to another. And we go by walking the Bounds until we come to a Boundary, when, if one of Them has finished his move, we get twitched into the Boundary in another Earth, in another universe. I only understood this properly when I got to the sixth world round, where the stars are all different.
I looked at those stars. “Jamie boy,” I said. “This is crazy.” Possibly I was a little crazy then, too, because Jamie answered me, and said, “They’re probably the stars in the Southern hemisphere – Australia and all that.” And I answered him. “It’s still crazy,” I said. “This world’s upside down then.”
It was upside down, in more ways than that. The Them that played it must have been right peculiar. But it was that which made me feel how separate and – well – universal each world was. And how thoroughly I was a discard, a reject, wandering through them all and being made to move on all the time. For a while after that, I went round seeing all worlds as nothing more than coloured lights on a wheel reflected on a wall. They are turning the wheel and lighting the lights, and all we get is the reflections, no more real than that. I still see it that way sometimes. But when you get into a new world, it’s as solid as grass and granite can make it, and the sky shuts you in just as if there was no way through. Then you nerve yourself up. Here comes the grind of finding out its ways and learning its language.
You wouldn’t believe how lonely you get.
But I was going to tell you about the rules that They didn’t tell me. I mentioned some of the trouble I had in the mining world. I had more in other worlds. And none of these things killed me. Some of them ought to have done, specially that slag-heap – I was under it for days. And that is the rule: call it Rule One. A random factor like me, walking the Bounds, has to go on. Nothing is allowed to stop him. He can starve, fall off a mile high temple, get buried, and still he goes on. The only way he can stop is to come Home.
People can’t interfere with a Homeward Bounder either. That may be part of Rule One, but I prefer to call it Rule Two. If you don’t believe people can’t interfere with me, find me and try it. You’ll soon see. I’ll tell you – on my fifth world, I had a little money for once. A whole gold piece, to be precise. I got an honest job in a tannery – and carried the smell right through to the next world with me too. On my day off, I was strolling in the market looking for my favourite cakes. They were a little like Christmas puddings with icing on – gorgeous! Next thing I knew, a boy about my own age had come up beside me, given me a chop-and, chop-and – it darned well hurt too – and run off with my gold piece. Naturally, I yelled and started to run after him. But he was under a waggon the next moment, dead as our neighbour’s little girl back Home. His hand with the gold piece in it was sticking out, just as if he was handing it back to me, but I hadn’t the heart to take it. I couldn’t. It felt like my fault, that waggon.
After a while, I told myself I was imagining that rule. That boy’s corpse could have had a bad effect on play, just as They said mine would have done. But I think that was one of the things They meant by the risk adding to the fun. I didn’t imagine that rule. The same sort of thing happened to me several times later on. The only one I didn’t feel bad about was a rotten Judge who was going to put me in prison for not being able to bribe him. The roof of the courthouse fell in on him.
Rule Three isn’t too good either.
