The Homeward Bounders Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 realizing that this was yet another different world. And at the same time, I realized 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 colored 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