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I’ll tell you about my Home,” I said. “You may recognize something. First, my name’s Jamie H—”
    But he raised his skeleton hand again. “Please. We do not give names. We think it is not permitted.”
    Here, one of his crew came to the door and did a jabber-jabber. He was a man too, but I saw why I had taken him for a monkey. He was so stick-thin. He was more or less naked too, and the parts of him that weren’t burnt dark brown were covered with hair. Men are very like monkeys really.
    The Dutchman listened for a little. Then he said, “Ja, ja,” and got up and went out.
    It was not very interesting in the cabin and it smelled of mold, so after a bit I got up and went on deck too. The sea was there, all round. It gave me the pip at first, just like the wide-open cattle country. But you get used to it quite soon. The sailors were all scrambling about the rakish masts above me. They were struggling with the great black torn sails, and they seemed to be trying to hoist a few more. Every so often, a rotten rope would snap. There would be some resigned jabber, and they would mend it and carry on. This made it quite a long business, getting any extra sails up.
    The Dutchman was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the reason for all this pother. It was another ship, a beauty, about midway between us and the horizon. It was like an arrow or a bird, that ship—like everything quick and beautiful. I had to gasp when I saw it. It had a bank of white sails, white as a swan. But, as I watched, I could see frenzied activity among those white sails. Shortly, a whole lot more white sails came up, some above, some overlapping the others, until there were so many sails up that you thought the thing was going to topple over and sink from sheer top-heaviness. Like that, the white ship turned and, with a bit of a waggle, like a hasty lady, made her way over the horizon. Our sails were still not set.
    The Dutchman sighed heavily. “Always they go. They think we are unlucky.”
    â€œAre you?” I asked, rather worried on my own account.
    â€œOnly to ourselves,” he sighed. He gave out some jabbering. The monkeys up aloft gave up struggling with the sails and came down to the deck again.
    After that, I was sure they would be thinking of breakfast. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and I was starving. Well, I suppose a Homeward Bounder can never exactly starve, but put it this way: it never feels that way, and my stomach was rolling. But time went on, and nobody said a word about food. The monkeys lay about, or carved blocks of wood, or mended ropes. The Dutchman strode up and down. In the end, I got so desperate that I asked him right out.
    He stopped striding and looked at me sadly. “Eating? That we gave up long ago. There is no need to eat. A Homeward Bounder does not die.”
    â€œI know,” I said. “But it makes you feel a whole lot more comfortable. Look at you. You all look like walking skeletons.”
    â€œThat is true,” he admitted. “But it is hard to take on board provisions when you sail on, and ever on.”
    I saw the force of that. “Don’t you ever fetch up on land then?” And I was suddenly terrified. Suppose I was stuck on this ship, too, forever, without any food.
    â€œSometimes we go to land, ja,” the Dutchman admitted. “When we come through a Boundary and we can tell we have time, we find an island where is privacy, and we land. We eat then sometimes. We may eat maybe when we come to land to put you ashore.”
    That relieved my mind considerably. “You should eat,” I said earnestly. “Do, to please me. Can’t you catch fish, or something?”
    He changed the subject. Perhaps he thought catching fish was not permitted. He thought no end of things were not permitted. I had opportunity to know how many things, because I was on that ship for days. And a more