No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (5 page)

And then she went downstairs and I lay there listening to some men who still were out there in the yard, talking among themselves. Some of the others still were hunting and I knew that I should be out there hunting with them, but I knew Ma wouldn’t let me go and I was glad of it. For I was tired all through and the woods at night can be a scary place.

I should by rights have gone straight to sleep. Any other night I would have. But I lay there thinking about that hopper in the time machine and I wondered how long it would take before someone told the sheriff about the ruckus between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy, and I thought perhaps they already had. And if so, the sheriff probably was looking into it right now, for the sheriff was nobody’s fool.

I wondered if I should tell him myself if no one else had. But that was one fight I didn’t have any hankering to get tangled up in.

Finally I went to sleep and it seemed to me I hadn’t been asleep any time at all when something woke me up. It still was dark, but there was a red glow shining through the window. I sat up quick, with my hair standing half on end.

I thought at first it might be our barn or the machine shed, but then I saw it wasn’t that close. I skinned out of bed and over to the window. That fire was a big one and it wasn’t too far up the road.

It looked as if it was on the Carter place, but I knew that must be wrong, for if bad luck like that struck anyone, it wouldn’t be Andy Carter. Unless, of course, he was loaded with insurance.

I went downstairs in my bare feet and Ma was standing at the door, looking up the road toward the blaze.

“What is it, Ma?” I asked.

“It’s the barn on the Carter place,” she said. “They phoned the neighborhood for help, but all the men are out hunting Nature Boy.”

We stood there, Ma and me, and watched until the blaze almost died out, and then Ma hiked me off to bed.

I crawled underneath the covers, weak with this new excitement. I wondered why we should tag along for months with nothing happening, and then all at once have it busting out all over.

I lay there and thought about Andy Carter’s barn and there was something wrong about it. Andy had been the luckiest man in seven counties and now, without any warning, he was having bad luck just like the rest of us.

I wondered if the halflings might have gone off and left him, and if that was the case, I wondered why they had. Maybe, I told myself, they had gotten plain disgusted with Andy’s meanness.

It was broad daylight when I woke again and I jumped straight out of bed and climbed into my clothes. I rushed downstairs to see if there was any word of Nature Boy.

Ma said there wasn’t, that the men were still out hunting. She had breakfast ready for me and insisted I eat it and warned me about wandering off or trying to join one of the searching parties. She said it wasn’t safe for me to be out in the woods with so many bears about. And that was funny, for she had never worried about the bears before.

But she made me promise I wouldn’t.

As soon as I got out, I zipped down the road as fast as I could go. I had to see the place where the Carter barn had burned down and I just had to talk with someone. And Butch was the only one left that I could talk to.

There wasn’t much to see at the Carter place, just burned and blackened timbers that still were smoking some. I stood out in the road a while and then I saw Andy come out of the house and he stood there for a minute looking straight at me. So I got out of there.

I went past Fancy Pants’ place real fast, hoping I wouldn’t see him. At the moment, I didn’t want a thing to do with Fancy Pants.

When I got to Butch’s place, his Ma told me he was sick in bed. She didn’t think it was catching, she said, so I went up to see him.

Butch sure looked terrible lying there—more like a runty hoot owl than he ever had before—but he was glad to see me. I asked him how he was and he said he felt better. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell his Ma, then told me that he’d got sick from eating some green apples he’d pinched off the Carter orchard.

He’d heard about Nature Boy and I told him in a whisper the suspicions I had.

He lay there looking at me solemnly and finally he said to me: “Steve, I should have told you this before. That is no time machine.”

“No time machine? How do you know?”

“Because I saw the stuff that Fancy Pants’ Pa put through it. It didn’t go anywhere. It still is lying there.”

“You saw …” And then I had it. “You mean it went to where the halflings are?”

“That’s what I mean,” said Butch.

Sitting there on edge of the bed, I tried to think it through, but there were so many questions bubbling up in me that I couldn’t do it.

“Butch,” I asked, “where is this place that the halflings are?”

“I don’t know,” said Butch. “It’s close to us, almost in the world, but not really.”

And I remembered something Pa had said several weeks before. “You mean it’s like a place behind a plate-glass window that’s between our world and theirs?”

“Something like that.”

“And if Nature Boy is there, what would happen to him?”

Butch shuddered. “I don’t know.”

“Would he be all right? Could he breathe in there?”

“I suppose he could,” said Butch. “I think the halflings do.”

I got up from the bed and started for the door. Then I turned back again.

“Butch, what are the halflings doing? What are they hanging around for?”

“No one’s sure,” said Butch. “There are a lot of ideas about what they are after. One is that they have to be near something that is living before they can live themselves. They can’t live a life themselves; they’ve got to have a life to—well, like imitate, only that’s not the word.”

“They need a pattern,” I said, remembering what Butch’s Pa had said that day, before Pa choked him off with his own rambling about what the halflings might be after.

“I guess you could call it that,” said Butch.

And I stood there thinking what a lousy life the halflings must have led, using Andy Carter as their pattern.

But that wasn’t so, for the halflings, that time I had seen them, had sure-God been happy. They’d been running around up there on the roof and keeping themselves busy and enjoying themselves.

And they had, every one of them, looked like Andy Carter. And of course they would, with Andy as their pattern.

Thinking about it, I could see how someone like Andy, with his kind of disposition, might enjoy being mean as dirt and ornery with his neighbors. He’d have a sense of independence and the feel of every hand being raised against him and him standing there like a mighty warrior, defying all of them. And from that he’d get a sense of strength and domination. All in all, I supposed, Andy, for a man like him, might be living a pretty darned satisfactory life.

I started for the door, and Butch called after me, “Where are you going, Steve?”

“I’m going to find Nature Boy,” I said.

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you stay in bed. Your Ma will skin both of us if you don’t.”

I got out of the house and headed fast for home, and as I ran, I kept on thinking about how the halflings had no life of their own, but had to find another life and pattern themselves on it.

Sometimes they’d be mighty lucky and fasten onto someone who’d give them a good and exciting life, or maybe a good and contented life, but other times they’d get a mighty poor one. But you had to say this for them—they gave all the help they could to the one they’d picked out as a pattern, and they kept working at it.

And I wondered how many persons who had been great successes might have been watched over by the halflings. What an awful letdown it would be if they were to learn that they had not become great or rich or famous through any particular effort or brilliance of their own, but by the grace of a bunch of things that helped them from outside.

I got home and went into the kitchen and over to the sink.

“Is that you, Steve?” Ma called from the living room.

“I’m getting a drink,” I told her.

“Where you been?”

“Just around.”

“Now don’t you go running off,” she warned.

“No, ma’am, I won’t.”

And all the time I was talking to her, I was climbing on a chair so I could reach those glasses where Pa had put them on the shelf and told me not to touch them again—not ever.

Then I had them in my pocket and was climbing off the chair.

I heard Ma heading for the kitchen and I hurried out as quietly as I could.

I didn’t put the glasses on until I got to where the Carter farm cornered on the road. I went along the road, watching carefully, and finally I found a bunch of halflings down in a fence corner just beyond the orchard. They were standing there and squabbling over something and they didn’t seem to notice me until I got real close.

Then they all swung around and stood facing me. They seemed to be talking among themselves and pointed at me.

And there on the head of one of them, pushed up on his forehead, was the live-it set I had lost down the time machine.

When I saw that, I realized Butch actually had seen the stuff that Fancy Pants’ Pa had put through the time machine.

At first I don’t think they realized that I could see them, but after I stood there for a while, staring at them, they began to move up closer to me.

I could feel the hair rearing right up on my head. There was nothing I wanted to do more than turn around and run. But I told myself they couldn’t reach me and there was nothing to be scared of, so I stood on my ground.

They reminded me of a bunch of crows. They must have seen I didn’t have a gun, or maybe this particular bunch didn’t know about the guns Butch’s people had. And they crowded up real close to me, like a flock of crows is not afraid of an empty-handed man, but will keep their distance when he has a gun.

I could see their mouths moving at me, but naturally I couldn’t hear a thing, and they kept pointing at the one that had my live-it on his head.

To tell the honest truth, I didn’t pay too close attention to what they might have been doing at the start of it. I was too busy looking at them and trying to figure out what might have happened to them. There was one thing certain—this either was a different bunch than I had seen down in Andy Carter’s hay field or they had changed a lot. There was still some of Andy in them, although not as much of him as someone else, as if Andy and someone else had gotten sort of scrambled together.

Finally I made out that they were pointing at the one with the live-it on his head and then tapping their own heads, and I figured out that each of them was asking for a live-it too.

I didn’t know what I would have said to them or how I would have said it, if I had had the chance, only I never had the chance. They suddenly parted, as if someone from behind had pushed them to one side, and there was Nature Boy, standing face to face with me.

We stood there and looked at one another for a good long time, not saying anything, not making any motion. Then he stepped forward and I stepped forward until we were almost nose to nose. I was afraid there, for a moment, we’d walk right through each other. What would have happened then? Probably nothing much.

“You O.K.?” I asked him, thinking maybe he could read my lips even if he couldn’t hear me, but he shook his head. So I asked him once again, talking slowly and forming my words as distinctly as I could. But he shook his head again.

Then I thought of something else.

I lifted up my hand and stuck out my finger and pretended I was writing on the imaginary window that separated us.

“YOU O.K.?” I wrote, taking it slow, because he’d have to read it backwards.

He didn’t get it right away and I did it once again and this time he understood.

“O.K.,” he wrote. And then he wrote real slow: “GET ME OUT!”

I stood there looking at him and it was horrible, for there he was and here I was, as so far as I could see, there was no way to get him out.

He must have sensed what I was thinking, because all at once his mouth trembled and that was the first time I’d ever seen Nature Boy even close to crying. Not even that time when we were digging out the lizard and a big rock fell on his toe.

I thought how bad it must have been for him, trapped in that place and able to see out, but knowing that no one could see in. He might even have followed some of the searching parties, hoping that someone might accidentally glimpse him, but knowing they couldn’t. Maybe he had trailed along behind his Pa, as close as he could get to him, and his Pa not knowing it. And maybe he’d gone back home and watched his family and been all the lonelier for their not knowing he was there. And undoubtedly he’d hunted around for Butch, who he knew could see him, only Butch had been sick in bed.

And while I was thinking all of this, I got a faint idea. I told myself that it probably wouldn’t work, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed it might.

So I reached up with my finger and I wrote: “MEET ME AT FANCY PANTS.”

I pocketed my glasses and hurried along home. I circled around the house because I didn’t want to take the chance of Ma seeing me and not letting me go. I went into the machine shed and found a length of rope and hunted up a hacksaw.

Lugging these, I made my way back to Fancy Pants’ place. The machine shed was back of the barn, so no one from the house could see me, and anyhow no one seemed to be around. I knew that Fancy Pants’ Pa, and maybe Fancy Pants himself, would be out with the searchers, floating around over places where it would be impossible for the men on foot to go.

I laid down the rope and hacksaw and put on my glasses and Nature Boy was there, right beside the machine shed door. He had some of the halflings with him, including the one who still had the live-it perched up on his forehead. And scattered all around the place, just like Butch had said, were tea cups and pie plates and children’s blocks and a lot of other junk—the stuff that Fancy Pants’ Pa had fed into the time machine.

I looked at the halflings again and all at once I knew what was different about them. They were still some of Andy, but they were Nature Boy as well. And then I knew why Andy’s barn had burned. These halflings of his had been so busy tagging around Nature Boy that they had not been able to give Andy their attention.