Read Online The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones - Free Book Online Page A

but they can. And they always do. They can’t have Homeward Bounders getting together. Oh no. That wouldn’t do at all.
    You wouldn’t believe how lonely you get. I got so bad sometimes that I couldn’t think of anything but Home. I remembered it over and over, those ordinary twelve years, until I felt it was plainer to me than when I lived there. I even used to dwell on the rows I had with Rob, and the way Rob and I used to tease Elsie. Elsie was good to tease, having ginger hair and a hot temper. I remembered her stamping and yelling, “I’m better at football than you! So!” Maybe she was better. She never kicked the ball into people’s washing, the way I did. It would give me that cold foot ache inside, wanting to go back and play football in the alley again. I knew it was all there, just the same as I remembered, waiting for me to come back. I knew it must be. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be a boy.
    When I got really miserable, I found I couldn’t help remembering him on his rock too. That always made me worse. He was still there too. I think I never hated Them as much on my own account as I did on his.
    Anyway, that’s enough of that. All I really meant to say was that I had been on a good hundred worlds before the next important thing happened. I had gone in a great slow circle, starting from the place where I nearly drowned, out and some way back again. If you walk the Bounds long enough, you get the feeling of where you’ve been, and I know that’s what I’d done. I’d seen more kinds of worlds than you’d believe possible, more peculiar differences, and more samenesses than I like to think. I was a thoroughly hardened Homeward Bounder. There seemed nothing I didn’t know.
    Then I ran into Helen. My friendly neighborhood enemy. There really was nothing like Helen on any world I’d ever been to. I sometimes didn’t think she was human at all.

V
    It happened in a casual sort of way. I’d been landed on this real swine of a world. It really was the worst I’d ever been on. Everything about it was awful: the weather, the food, the local animals, and as for the people, they were not only brutes, but their habits were worse than that. It will show you when I say that no one lived in a house: they all lived in fortresses, half underground. Anyone outside a fortress was fair game. The Them playing it must have been right swine.
    I was only on it a week. I’ve never been so glad when the Bounds called. I made haste through the pouring rain and sleet to get to the Boundary as fast as I could.
    I’d still got half a mile to go—I could see something ahead through the lashing rain that had to be the Boundary—when the rain stopped. The sun came out for the first time since I’d been there. And it was typical of that beastly world that it got hotter than an oven in seconds. Instead of rain, the air was full of steam. It was like a hot fog. Worse than that, the mud I’d been wading through all that time dried out like ink on blotting paper. The water just sank away out of it and left me toiling through deep sand. I could hardly walk. I said some more of the bad words I’d been saying all that week. The Bounds were calling hard, and the slower you go the worse they get.
    Then the steam cleared away like the mud had done. I was left floundering through a blazing white desert. It was so bright that I screwed my eyes almost shut and hunched in a heap. My bad words died away in a sort of moan. It was so hot and bright that it hurt.
    Then I heard someone coming crunching quickly up behind me. In that world, you didn’t let people come up behind you. I turned round, even though I was fairly sure this person must be another Homeward Bounder, and tried to open my eyes. Everything was blue-bright. I could only see the person as a black shape. The shape was about the same size that I was and seemed to have its back to me. I was