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over my head, waiting for the rest of the tribe to get by before I dared get up—you get kicked in the head if you try crawling about under a crowd of horses—the next part of the call started: the “Hurry, hurry, you’ll be late!” It’s always sooner and stronger if you get it from a new direction. It’s always stronger from a RANDOM Boundary too. I don’t know why. This was so strong that I found I couldn’t wait any longer. I got up and started running.
    They shouted after me of course. They’re scared of people going off on their own, even though nothing ever happens to them. But I took no notice and kept running, and they didn’t have a Mrs. Chief with them—theirs was a sleepy girl who never bothered about anything—so they didn’t follow me. I stopped running when I was over the nearest hill and walked. I knew by then that the “Hurry, hurry!” was only meant to get me going. It didn’t mean much.
    It was just as well it didn’t mean much. It took me the rest of that day and all night to get there, and the funny colored sun was two hours up before I saw the Boundary. This was a new one. It was marked by a ring of stones.
    I stared at it a little as I went down into the valley where it was. They were such big stones. I couldn’t imagine any hairy cattle herders having the energy to make it. Unless They had done it, of course. I stared again when I saw the new sign scrawled on the nearest huge stone, some way above my head.
    â€œI wonder what that means,” I said. But I had been a long time on the way and the call was getting almost too strong to bear. I stopped wondering and went into the circle.
    And—twitch—I was drowning in an ocean.
    Yes, I saw the sea after all—from inside. At least, I was inside for what seemed about five minutes, until I came screaming and drowning and kicking up to the surface, and coughing out streams of fierce salt water—only to have all my coughing undone the next moment by a huge great wave, which came and hit me slap in the face, and sent me under again. I came up again pretty fast. I didn’t care that nothing could stop a Homeward Bounder. I didn’t believe it. I was drowning.
    It isn’t true what they say about your life passing before you. You’re too busy. You’re at it full time, bashing at the water with your arms and screaming “Help!” to nothing and nobody. And too busy keeping afloat. I hadn’t the least idea how to swim. What I did was a sort of crazy jumping up and down, standing in the water, with miles more water down underneath me, bending and stretching like a mad frog, and it kept me up. It also turned me round in a circle. Every way was water, with sky at the end of it. Nothing in sight at all, except flaring sunlit water on one side and heaving gray water on the other.
    That had me really panicked. I jumped and screamed like a madman. And here was a funny thing—somebody seemed to be answering. Next moment, a sort of black cliff came sliding past me, and someone definitely shouted. Something that looked like a frayed rope splashed down in the sea in front of me. I dived on it with both hands, which sent me under again, even though I caught the rope. I was hauled up like that, yelling and sousing and shivering, and went bumping up the side of that sudden black cliff.
    It was like going up the side of a cheese-grater—all barnacles. I left quite a lot of skin on there, and a bit more being dragged over the top. I remember realizing it was a boat and then looking at who’d rescued me. And I think I passed out. Certainly I remember nothing else until I was lying on a mildewy bed, under a damp blanket, and thinking, This can’t be true! I can’t have been pulled out of the sea by a bunch of monkeys! But that was what I seemed to have seen. I knew that, even with my eyes closed. I had seen skinny thin hairy arms and shaggy