The Homeward Bounders Read Free Page A

that wall a minute or so. I discovered that if I put my head right over, the noise from the city went, just like that. Then if I moved my head back again—pop!—the noises were back. I did that several times before I finally swung down into the silence among the trees. Then furious curiosity took hold again. I refused to be beat. I crept to the place where I could look in that window again.
    And They were there. Both of Them , lounging in a sort of chatty way beside Their machine, half hidden from me by the milky reflections of trees.
    That settled it. They must have heard the bell and hadn’t bothered to answer. Obviously it was very secret, what They did. So it stood to reason that it was worth finding out about. It also stood to reason that this park, or garden, where I was, was Their private one, and They must come out and walk in it from time to time. Which meant there had to be a door round on the other wall of the triangular fort, the wall I hadn’t seen.
    I went round there, through the bushes. And, sure enough, there was a door, in the middle of that side. A much more easy and approachable-looking door than that front door. It was made of flat glass, with a handle in the glass. I looked carefully, but it seemed dark behind the glass. All I could see were the reflections of the park in it and the reflection of the canal too. Its arches were right above me on that side. But what I didn’t see was my own reflection in that door as I dashed across the gravel. I should have thought about that. But I didn’t. It was probably too late by then anyway.
    The door opened on to a sort of humming vagueness. I was inside before I knew it. They both turned round to look at me. Of course I saw what a fool I’d been then. The building was triangular. There was no room for the door to open anywhere except into the room with the machines. I had assumed that it didn’t, because I hadn’t been able to see it through the glass door. There were the machines in front of me now, a triangular patch of them, winking and blinking, and I ought to have been able to see them just as clearly through that door.
    An awful lot in that place was vague, including Them . The shadow of the canal was in here too, and the only things I could see clearly were those that happened to come in the slabs of dark shadow where the arches were. In between, it was white sky, with everything confused in it. They were in the sky. You never see Them clearly. All I did see was a huge table standing down at the wide end of the triangular room. There was a sort of flickering going on over it and some huge regular shapes hanging in the air above it. I blinked at those shapes. They were like enormous dice.
    So there is a game going on! I thought.
    But it was the queerest feeling. It was like having got into a reflection in a shop window. And, at the same time, I had a notion I was really standing outside in the open air, under the canal arches somewhere. I thought at first that it was this feeling that kept me standing there. I thought I was plain confused. It only came to me gradually that I was sort of hanging there, and that I couldn’t move at all.

II
    The one of Them nearest me walked round behind me and shut the door. “Another random factor,” he said. He sounded annoyed. It was the way my mother would say, “Bother! We’ve got mice again.”
    And the other one said, “We’d better deal with that before we go on then.” He said it the way my father would answer, “You’d better set traps again, my dear.”
    â€œHow?” asked the first one, coming back round me to the machines. “Can we afford a corpse at this stage? I do wish we could do without these randoms.”
    â€œOh but we can’t,” said the other. “We need them. Besides, the risk adds to the fun. I think we’d better discard this one to the Bounder circuits—but let’s get a readout first on