The Homeward Bounders Read Free Page B

the effect of a corpse on play.”
    â€œRight you are,” said the first one.
    They both leaned over the machines. I could see Them through the white sheets of reflected sky, looking at me carefully and then looking down to press another button. It was the way my mother kept looking at the color of our curtains when she was choosing new wallpaper. After that, They turned their attention to another part of the machine and gazed at it, rather dubiously. Then They went down the room to look at that huge flickering table.
    â€œHm,” said the first one. “Play is quite delicately poised at the moment, isn’t it?”
    â€œYes,” said the second. “If it was on your side, it would help bring your revolution closer, but I can’t afford any urban unrest for a couple of decades or more. I claim unfair hazard. Let’s discard. Agreed?”
    The first one came back and stood looking into the machine in the intent way They did. “It would make good sense,” he said, “if we could go back over the family of this discard and scrub all memory of it.”
    â€œOh no,” said the other, moving up too. “It’s against the rules for a discard. The anchor, you know. The anchor.”
    â€œBut we can scrub with a corpse. Why don’t we?”
    â€œBecause I’ve already claimed unfair hazard. Come on. Make it a discard.”
    â€œYes, why not?” said the first one. “It’s not that important. What’s the rule? These days we have to check with the rest in case the Bounder circuits are overloaded, don’t we?”
    As I sit here, it’s true! They said all that, talking about me just as if I were a wooden counter or a piece of card in a game. And I floated there and couldn’t do a thing about it. Next thing I knew, They were punching more buttons, round the end of the machines.
    And the place opened up.
    You know if you go to a barber’s shop with a lot of mirrors, how you can sit looking into one mirror and see through it into the mirror behind you, over and over again, until it goes all blurred with distance? Well, what happened was like that. Over and over again, and all blurred, there were suddenly triangular rooms all round. They were slotted in on both sides, and beyond and behind that, and underneath, down and down. They were piled up on top of us too. I looked, but it made me feel ill, seeing two of Them walking about up there, and others of Them above and beside that, all strolling over where They could see me. They all wore those cloaks, but They weren’t just reflections of the first two. They were all different from one another. That was about all I could tell. It was all so blurry and flickery, and the reflection of the canal arches went striding through the lot, as if that was the only real thing there.
    â€œYour attention for a moment,” said one of Them who was with me. “We are about to make a discard. Can you confirm that there is still room on the Bounds?”
    A distant voice said, “Computing.”
    A nearer, hollower voice asked, “What’s the reason for the discard?”
    The second one of my Them said, “We’ve had an intrusion by a random factor, entailing the usual danger of feedback into the native world here. I’ve claimed unfair hazard against reinsertion as a corpse.”
    â€œThat seems adequate,” said the hollow voice.
    Almost at once, the distant voice said, “The Bounds have space for four more discards. Repeat, four more only. Is the reason good enough?”
    There was a little murmuring. For a moment, I thought I was going to end up as a corpse. I still didn’t know what I was in for, you see. Then the murmur grew—with an air of surprise to it, as if They were wondering what They were being asked for. “Reason sufficient. Sufficient reason,” came rumbling from all round, above and underneath.
    â€œThen I must caution you,” said