The Homeward Bounders (17 page)

“If you want to,” I said weakly.

So Adam coolly walked over and interrupted the teacher's musings. “Sir, I think it's time to go now, sir.”

I looked at Joris. We both sat down on the grass and unbuckled our splints as fast as we could go. But of course, the other boys weren't wearing any. We looked up to find ourselves in a ring of white-clothed legs.

“Not thinking of going, were you?” Adam said.

We stopped thinking of going just then. We put the idea off until they would be busy changing their clothes.

Adam had thought of that. Not a single boy changed. Nearly all of them stayed milling round Joris and me as we walked across the field. A few of them dashed into the house-thing and came out laden with everyone's clothes. By this time, the rest of us were in a crowd round the vehicle, and the schoolmaster was sitting in the front of it, ready to drive it. The last boy locked the house-thing and brought the key to the master.

The master seemed puzzled. “Why are none of you changed?”

“We're all going to tea with Macready, sir,” the boy said. “We can change at his house.”

I didn't like the sound of this at all. They were meaning to load us on that vehicle and take us off somewhere. Even if nothing else happened, we were going to lose Helen. There was no sign of Helen.

Adam stood by the door of the vehicle. “In you get,” he said to me, with a chilly smile.

I dived sideways and tried to run. They had been expecting that. Four of them caught me as I dived. “No fighting now!” said the teacher from inside.

“It's all right, sir,” said someone. He hauled my arm up my back and twisted it. “He just fell over.” A knee went into my back and pushed me up the steps into the vehicle. Nothing happened to anyone. Rule Two didn't seem to be working, much as I wished it would. Perhaps it didn't work because Joris got into the vehicle behind me without giving any trouble at all.

There were lots of seats inside. Boys pushed past us and spread out into the seats. As they did so, Helen stood up from between two seats at the back. She had made one of her mistakes again. She had thought the vehicle was the safest place to hide in.

You get quite a shock when you first see Helen. It's the way she doesn't seem to have a face. The boy nearest her went
“Aah!”
and backed away. He was really scared, but he tried to make a joke of it. “They've landed! There's a faceless wonder here!”

“Ah,” said Adam, looking over my shoulder. “The female of the species.”

“What's going on
now
?” the schoolmaster asked wearily.

I never heard what they told him, because Joris looked at Helen and burst out laughing. Helen took a wisp of her hair away to look at me. She was laughing too.

“What's so funny?” asked someone.

“They don't understand!” I said. “They're having a joke on me! It's not fair! This could happen to anyone!”

Adam looked at me. It was a colorless, blank look, stony with suspicion. It shut me up at once. But it didn't shut Joris up. He kept bowing over and laughing. He went on doing it after the vehicle started and all the time the schoolmaster was driving us back towards the city. Joris was still red in the face and gurgling when the teacher called back over his shoulder, “Macready. Where do you and your gang want to be dropped?”

This meant Adam. Macready was his surname. He said, “I'll show you, sir,” and went and stood behind the schoolmaster's shoulder. “This'll do, sir. By that lamp post.”

The vehicle stopped. All the boys surged to their feet. Somebody lugged me along. Joris came too, still amused, like somebody who is coming along to watch the fun. That was one of the times I could have shaken Joris. He didn't see the trouble we were in at all. Helen clattered off the vehicle as well, at the end of the line. I hoped she could do something to help at least. The boys didn't know what to make of Helen at all. They tried to pretend she wasn't really there. They clustered in a group at the edge of a busy road, surrounding Joris and me, but leaving Helen standing out beyond, beside one of the trees that lined the street.

“Where to?” one of them asked Adam.

“Up here,” Adam answered. “There's a lonely alley that will suit us perfectly.”

I had been afraid there would be an alley. It was uncanny how the streets in this city were like mine. It was a broad street, with unusually broad pavements. In this world, there were trees lining the pavements and shops standing back behind the trees. In my world, this street was the worst part of the slums, with rubbish heaped on the broad pavements and tramps and ruffians camped out among the rubbish. You could get robbed in the alley. In this world, clean and orderly though it was, there was a tramp on the wide pavement too. He was asleep under the next tree along from Helen. I noticed him because my resisting feet were dragged round his dirty old boots as the boys pulled me towards the alley.

“I hope you meant that about tea, Adam,” somebody said, as they pushed Joris and me up the steps that led to the alley.

“Sure,” said Adam. “My parents are away for the weekend. They left loads of food. Just deal with these two yobboes first. I want them to know how it feels to have their clothes stolen.”

By that I knew we were going to get robbed in this alley too. I've told you what happens if people rob a Homeward Bounder. And, as if that weren't enough, I knew that the way to make Joris really fighting mad was to do something to his precious demon hunter's uniform.

Our many feet went clopper-popper inside the high red walls of the alley. It was like being marched off to an execution—only it was the firing-squad who were marching off to commit suicide. Without knowing they were.

“Look,” I said, “I've told you you can have your trousers back. Take them.”

“Ah, but I want your shirt too,” said Adam.

“You can have it. I'll give it you,” I said.

By now, we had got to a place where the alley curved, shutting us off from the view of anyone coming from either way. The boys stopped and dumped their clothes in a heap by the wall. Then they spread out so that there was a group round me and another round Joris.

“You are a coward, aren't you?” Adam said. He really disliked me. I felt the same about him.

“That's got nothing to do with it,” I said. “You take anything of ours and you'll get killed. It's as simple as that. I don't care two hoots about you, but it seems a bit hard on the rest of them.” I said that to try and make Joris understand about Rule Two. “It would be safer for you just to beat us up,” I said. “We'd prefer that, wouldn't we, Joris?”

I couldn't tell what Joris thought. His mind worked on such different lines from mine. But I could see what the boys thought. They thought I was just trying to talk us out of it. They simply closed in.

Then I had to fight. It was the daftest situation. All the reasons were upside down. All the same, I went for Adam with a will, and tried to get his glasses off and stamp on them, while a whole crowd of others tried to get Adam's trousers off me.

Someone shouted, “Look out! He's got a knife!”

Everyone stampeded away backwards, with me in their midst.

That left Joris alone in a ring of us, standing in an expert-looking crouch. The knife Joris was holding looked very nasty. It was a thin glimmering prong, like a slice of glass. “This is a demon knife,” Joris said. He was fighting mad all right. “I'll only have to touch you. Who comes first?” He followed up this invitation by advancing on the nearest boy.

“No! Stop it, Joris!” I shouted. “You can't! That's entering play!”

“Why should I keep
Their
rules?” said Joris. He glared round the ring of us as if we were all
Them
. Then he went crouching towards the nearest boy again, who flattened himself against the wall of the alley, terrified.

I remembered that it was only yesterday that Joris had stood inside a ring of
Them
. I suppose this had taken him right back to it. I unwrapped what felt like sixteen boys' arms from my neck and arms. Joris raised the prong-like knife. I charged forward and tried to grab Joris.

Joris knew it was me. I could see from his face that he wasn't meaning to hurt me. But, the very instant I grabbed him, a loud, quavering voice cried out, “For shame! For shame! A man's hand against his brother!”

Joris jumped, and so did I. The knife stabbed down towards the terrified boy. And the next thing I knew, there was a sort of fizzle, and my left arm was pouring blood.

I clutched at my arm, trying to keep the cut closed, and leaned against the wall. I could see everyone staring at me in horror, Joris most of all. “It only takes a touch!” he said. “I've killed you!”

You say things you shouldn't say, when you've had a shock. I said, “Now you'll see what a mortal wound's like on a Homeward Bounder. I won't die, you fool. Rule One.”

“I'm sorry,” Joris said abjectly.

“Hope not to die! Hope not at all!” cried the quavering voice. It was the old tramp who had been asleep against the tree. Helen was with him. She had one side of her hair hooked up to stare at the blood running out of my arm. The sacred face looked unusually pale and upset. Beyond her, I could grayly see quite a few of the boys picking their clothes out of the heap and tiptoeing off. “Hope is an anchor, they say!” howled the tramp. “Indeed this is true. Hope you bear, bound to you like a millstone round the neck. I say cast it from you! Cast hope aside!”

I looked at the tramp, feeling decidedly gray and wavery, and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the ground. From down there, the old man looked truly disgusting. He had a whole bank of withered, wrinkled chins, loosely scattered with long strands of gray hair. Dirty white hair stuck up from under his filthy hat. His watery black eyes gleamed with a mad light, and his nose stuck out from below them, sharp and long and starved as the prow of the Flying Dutchman. I could tell he was a Homeward Bounder. That was why Helen had fetched him. But it was quite obvious that he was stark, raving mad too.

By this time, nearly all the boys had picked up their clothes and filtered away. I didn't blame them. What with the knife and the blood and the discovery that they were dealing with lunatics, the alley must have seemed to them the kind of place you forget about quickly. In fact, before the old tramp had said very much more, only Adam was left. Adam seemed to be trying to do something to my arm. It hurt. I pulled aside. “Leave me be.”

“Hold still,” Adam said. “You can stop the bleeding like this. Have you another handkerchief?”

I hadn't, of course. “Joris,” I said. “Something to stop the bleeding.”

Poor Joris. His face was cheesy-looking. He was carefully putting that knife of his into a sheath, but he stopped when I spoke to him. “Oh,” he said. “As to that.” And he felt inside his leather jerkin. In spite of everything, I started to laugh.

“If you cast hope aside,” the old tramp lectured us, “then all evil is cast out with it. Love and beauty enter in and a new world dawns.”

“What are you laughing at?” said Adam.

“Everything,” I said. I leaned back and giggled. Helen knelt down beside me with both sides of her hair hooked back. By this time, Joris had done his conjuring trick and brought out a First Aid kit. Adam seemed to approve of it. He and Joris got to work with it on one side of me. Helen was on the other side. I suppose Helen thought they weren't attending to her, because the old tramp was still preaching away. But Adam was listening. I knew, because you can always tell, if someone is touching you. Their fingers go light and tense, not to interfere with what they're hearing.

“What happened?” Helen said. “
How
did it happen? I was looking straight at you, and Joris didn't even have his knife
near
you!”

“Them,”
I said. “Another rule I hadn't noticed before. Joris ought to have got that boy against the wall. But he couldn't, because that would be entering play. It would have killed the boy. I suppose if I hadn't been near, he'd have had to stab himself.” Then I burst out laughing again, for Adam's benefit.
They
would make sure Adam didn't understand. I hoped he'd think we were all lunatics and creep away like the other boys.

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.