“Yes, it was really,” Adam assured her. “It was the kind we call Fantasy War Gaming. Any number of people can play that. Look. I can’t show you it set out, because we play with just a referee and a map.” He took Helen and me over to a shelf at one side of the room where there were piles of hand-drawn maps. They looked like mazes—or pictures of the travels of an earthworm. “These are underground maps,” Adam explained, full of enthusiasm, “with masses of traps, pitfalls and monsters. Basically, the referee sets the players’ men going through one of these places, and they see if they can fight their way out of it before something gets them. There’s something horrendous every few yards.”
“That’s Helen’s world!” I said.
“You made it sound like one of my outside Fantasy maps,” Adam said, leafing through his heap. “Players can take over a fort in those. Oh, and a lot of emphasis is put on the endowments of the players’ men—how strong they are, and how persistent, and whether they’re fighting men or thieves or clerks, and what class of man or magic user they’ve got to. Is your world like that?”
“Yes,” said Helen. “I am a cleric and a magic user.” This was news to me, but, when I thought about it, what else could she have been?
Joris came up with the book of rules just then, looking puzzled. “This War isn’t like ours with the demons, not really.”
“No,” said Adam. “From what you said, yours is a version of the game in Helen’s world. That’s why they threw dice so much. When a player’s man meets a monster—or a demon—he’s allowed a saving throw, to give him some kind of chance. We use these many-sided dice—”
“Some of Their dice had many sides,” Joris said.
Helen said loudly, “I’m angry. How dare They play games!”
“Quite,” said Adam. “What worries me is that this world—my world—has to be a game like the one on the table. And when They start playing Their next war, it’s going to be a nuclear one. You know—radiation.”
“Demon rays,” Helen and Joris said together. I didn’t say anything. I was remembering that Adam’s world was ninth in a war series. My home was so like his, that it was probably tenth. They could be playing that kind of war there at the moment. Or worse—my Home could have been the world just before Adam’s, the one with the demon rays. But I couldn’t let myself think that. I couldn’t!
Adam turned and opened boxes of different kinds of soldiers, red-coated, blue-coated, in armor, and in kilts. I don’t think he was attending to them any more than I was. He had taken his glasses off to twiddle. “How does one get rid of Them?” he said.
But, just then there was a terrific clatter of feet, and someone with flaming red hair in a flaming rage came shooting down the steps into the basement. “Adam! Adam! I draw the line at pet mice on the kitchen table!” She was a grown-up lady, but she really was pretty, in spite of too much makeup and the rage she was in. She would have been worth every penny of sixty thousand crowns. “A tame mouse!” she shouted. “Eating biscuits on the table!”
“It wasn’t tame,” said Adam. “It was quite, quite wild. I hoped it would tear you to bits.” And he said to us, “My sister. Vanessa.” He had introduced Fred the skeleton in a much more friendly way.
“Oh you would have visitors!” said Vanessa. “You always do when I’m really mad with you!” She came towards us trying to pretend it was a joke. But it wasn’t. I could see Adam really annoyed her.
Joris backed away from her. He was thoroughly embarrassed. He remembered the conversation about the price of handsome virgins as well as I did. Helen was ashamed about the mouse. Her hair came down like a curtain. Which left me standing out in front.
Vanessa wasn’t very tall. Even with the high-heeled shoes ladies wore in Adam’s world, she wasn’t much taller than me or Adam. That made me feel I knew her quite well, somehow. Her face, the same level as mine, lost its annoyance and its false smile as soon as she looked at me. She looked at my arm in the kitchen towel, and she looked back at my face. “What’s been happening to you? You look really ill!”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “I had a bit of an accident.”
“It was me—” began Joris.
“Not to worry,” Adam cut in quickly. “Joris and me gave him First Aid. He’s Jamie, by the way. This is Helen, the one without a face.”
It was no good. Vanessa was used to Adam. She just stuck to her point. “Let me look at it at once,” she said to me. “Adam doesn’t know the first thing—”
“I do,” Joris said timidly, and Adam said, “I do!” but Vanessa took not the blindest bit of notice of either. She simply dragged me off to a place where there were a great many strong-smelling medicines and bandages and things. While she stripped off the kitchen towel, she told me she was nineteen and had just started training to be a doctor, so I could have every confidence. Then she saw the cut. It gave her rather a shock—demon knives are pretty vicious things—and she wanted to rush me off to the hospital at once to have it stitched.
I refused to go. I knew it would mean no end of trouble in a well-organized world like this one. I thought they would probably end up putting me in a madhouse. So I talked and talked at Vanessa to persuade her to forget about the hospital. I haven’t the faintest memory of what I said. It’s a funny thing—if people get sympathetic and start worrying about you, you always feel twice as ill. I felt really gray. I remember talking, and Vanessa answering in a humoring sort of way, but I’ve no idea what I said. But it turns out I told her all about Adam and the game and the alley, and half my life as a Homeward Bounder as well. Helen swore I did, so I suppose I must have done. I must have thought Vanessa wouldn’t believe a word.
Anyway, she put a dressing on my arm and made it much more comfortable. Then she made me go and lie down in their front room. I thought of it as their parlor—we’d have called it a parlor at Home. It had smart velvet chairs and a piano and wax fruit and photographs of relatives, just as ours did. But I think they called it a living room. That was daft, because the room was much posher than our parlor. Even the relatives in the photographs were all much posher than ours—imposing old fellows in whiskers and ladies in a lot of hat. There was one photograph of a lady in a hat just over the smart sofa I was lying on, and I kept staring at it. The lady didn’t look at all like Vanessa—when do relatives in photos ever look like anyone alive?—but I kept thinking I’d seen her before. I dozed off, and woke up, and looked at the photographed lady several times, and each time she looked more familiar.
The rest of them thought I was asleep all the time. They kept creeping in, pretending they were having a look at me, in order to have private talks.
I woke up to hear Adam whispering. “That knife just leaped at him. I’ve never seen anything like it! Joris thought he’d killed him. He is OK, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but it’s a nasty cut,” Vanessa whispered back. “I wish he’d go to the hospital. Adam, don’t slide off. Have they told you—? If all this about Them is true, oughtn’t we to do something?”
“I know we ought!” Adam whispered. “It’s serious. I’m not going to sit about waiting to be someone’s toy soldier.”
“Or something’s,” said Vanessa.
“Too right!” said Adam.
A bit later on, I opened my eyes to look at the lady in the photograph and heard Joris talking: “… all my fault,” he was saying, “because it was a silly joke between me and Helen. Only Helen won’t talk to me now, so can I talk to you?”
“Yes, if you want,” Vanessa said. “But don’t wake Jamie up.”
“Helen says Jamie kept getting her into messes,” said Joris. “She said he showed off. But I don’t think that was fair, because Jamie does know. It was my fault. I took too long stealing a coat, and then I lost my head in the alley. I hate myself. And there’s another thing.”
“What is that?” said Vanessa.
Joris said, “I think slavery is wrong.”
“Well,” said Vanessa, “you should know.”
Once he was on Konstam again, I went straight back to sleep. I was amused. I could see Joris was trying to warn Vanessa about Adam’s plans for her. I wondered what made him so sure that being a slave would be a bad thing for Vanessa, if it wasn’t for him.
The next time I woke up and looked at the familiar lady in the photograph, it was because someone was crying. I moved round very gently and sort of stretched my eyes sideways to see who it was. I thought it was Joris again, to tell the truth. But it was Helen! I was shocked. I hadn’t thought Helen could cry. But there she was, sitting on the sofa across from mine, with her hands to her face, howling her eyes out. Vanessa was sitting on the floor beside the sofa with both arms round Helen. I thought, poor Vanessa! She’s having quite a time among all of us!
“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 thin
k 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.
The Homeward Bounders Page 14
