No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories Read online

  We certainly had a good time that summer. There was the lizard and a lot of other things as well, including the family of skunks that fell in love with Nature Boy and followed him around. And there was the time Fancy Pants hauled all of Carter’s machinery out into the back forty, with Andy hunting for it like lost cows and madder by the minute.

  At home, and elsewhere in the neighborhood, there was still bad luck. The day the barn caved in, Pa was ready to admit flat out that there was something to what Butch’s Pa had said. It was all Ma could do to keep him from going up the road to see Andy Carter and talk to him by hand.

  I had another birthday and the folks gave me a live-it set and that was something I had not expected. I had wanted one, of course, but I knew they cost a lot and with all the bad luck they had been having, the folks were short of money.

  You know what a live-it is, of course. It’s something like TV, only better. TV you only watch and with a live-it set you live it.

  It’s a viewer that you clamp onto your head and you look into it and you pick your channel and turn it on, then settle back and live the things you see.

  It doesn’t take any imagination to live it, because it all is there—the action and the sound and smell and even, to some extent, the actual feel of it.

  My set was just a kid’s set and I could only get the kid channels. But that was all right with me. I wouldn’t have wanted to live through all that mushy stuff.

  All morning I spent with my live-it. There was one thing called “Survey Incident” and it was all about what happened when a human survey team put down on an alien planet. Another one was about a hunting trip on a jungle world and a third was “Robin Hood.” I think, of the three of them, I liked “Robin Hood” the best.

  I was all puffed up with pleasure and pride and I wanted to show the kids what the folks had given me. So I took the live-it and went down to Fancy Pants’ place. But I never got a chance to show the live-it to him.

  Just before I got to the gate, I saw Fancy Pants floating along, silent and sneaky—and floating along beside him, not more than a yard away, was that poor, beat-up, bedraggled cat that Fancy Pants was always pestering. He had the cat all wrapped up in a tight bundle and it couldn’t move a muscle, but I could see its eyes were wide with fright. If you ask me, that cat had a right to be afraid. There was scarcely anything in the book Fancy Pants hadn’t done to it.

  “Hi, Fancy Pants!” I yelled.

  He put a finger to his lips and crooked another finger to let me know I could join him in whatever he was doing. So I jumped the fence and Fancy Pants floated lower until he was about my level.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  “He went away and forgot to close the padlock,” whispered Fancy Pants.

  “Who went away?”

  “My Pa. He forgot to lock the door to the old machine shed.”

  “But that’s where—”

  “Sure,” said Fancy Pants. “That’s where he’s got the time machine.”

  “Fancy Pants, you don’t intend to put that cat in there!”

  “Why not? Pa ain’t ever tried a living thing in it and I want to see what happens.”

  I didn’t like it and yet I wanted awful bad to see that time machine. I wondered what one looked like. No one had seen the time machine except Fancy Pants’ Pa.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Fancy Pants. “Are you going chicken on me?”

  “But the cat!”

  “For the love of Mike, it’s nothing but a cat.”

  And that was right, of course. It was nothing but a cat.

  So I went along with him and we sneaked into the shed and pulled the door behind us. And there was the time machine in the middle of the floor.

  It didn’t look like much. It was a kind of hopper, and a bunch of things like coils ran around the throat where the hopper narrowed down, and that was all except for a crude control board that was nailed onto a post and hooked up to the hopper with a lot of wires.

  The hopper came up to my chest and I put my live-it down on the edge of it and craned my neck to look into the throat to see what I could see.

  At just that moment, Fancy Pants threw the switch that turned it on. I jerked away. For it was a scary business when you turned that hopper on.

  When I sneaked back to have another look, it looked for all the world as if it were a whirlpool of cream, sort of thick and rich and shiny—and it was alive. You could see the liveness in it. And there was a feeling in it that maybe you should just jump in head first and I had to grip the edges of the hopper hard not to.

  I might have dived in, if the cat at that very moment hadn’t somehow wiggled free from Fancy Pants.

  I don’t know how that cat did it. Fancy Pants had it all rolled into a ball and really buttoned up. Maybe Fancy Pants got careless or maybe the cat had finally figured out an angle. But, anyhow, Fancy Pants had the cat poised above the hopper and was about to let it fall. The cat didn’t get loose in part—it got loose entirely—and there it was, yowling and screaming, tail fluffed out, clawing at thin air to keep from falling down into the hopper. It managed to throw itself to one side as it fell and the claws of one paw hooked onto the hopper’s edge while the other hooked into my live-it set.

  I let out a yell and made a grab to try to save the live-it, but I was too late. The cat dragged it off balance and it slid down into that creamy whirlpool and was gone.

  The cat shimmied up a post and up into the rafters and hung there, screaming and wailing.

  Just then the door came open and there floated Fancy Pants’ Pa and we were caught red-handed.

  I figured Fancy Pants’ Pa would give me the works right then and there.

  But he didn’t do a thing. He just floated there for a moment looking at the two of us.

  Then he looked at me alone and said: “Steve, please leave.”

  I went out that door as fast as I could go, with just a fast glance back over my shoulder at Fancy Pants. He was pale and already beginning to appear a little shriveled. He knew what he had coming to him, and even while I realized that he deserved every bit of it, I still felt sorry for him.

  But staying wouldn’t help him and I was glad enough to get off scot-free.

  Except that it wasn’t scot-free.

  I don’t know what was the matter with me—just scared stiff, I guess. Anyhow, I went straight home and told Pa right out about it and he took down the strap from behind the door and let me have a few.

  But it seemed to me that he didn’t have his heart in it. He was getting a little uneasy about all these alien goings-on.

  For several days, I didn’t go off the place. To have gone anywhere, I would have had to walk past Fancy Pants’ house and I didn’t want to see him—not for a while, at least.

  Then one day Butch and his Pa showed up and they had the glasses.

  “I don’t know if they’ll fit,” said Butch’s Pa. “I had to guess the fitting.”

  They looked just like any other glasses except that the lenses had funny lines running every which way, as if someone had taken the glass and twisted it until it was all crinkled out of shape.

  I put them on and they were a bit loose and things looked different through them, but not a great deal different. I was looking at the barnyard when I put them on. The barnyard was still there, but it appeared strange and a little weird, although it was hard to put a finger on what was wrong with it. It was a bright, hot August day and the sun was shining hard, but when I put the glasses on, it seemed suddenly to get cloudy and a little cold. And that was some of the difference, but not all of it.

  There was a feeling of strangeness that sent a shiver through me, and the light was wrong, and worst of all was the sense that I didn’t belong. But there was nothing you could say flat out was absolutely wrong.

  “Is it any different, son?” a
sked Pa.

  “Some different,” I answered.

  “Let me see.”

  He took the glasses off me and put them on himself.

  “I can’t see a thing,” he said. “Just a lot of color.”

  “I told you,” said Butch’s Pa, “that only the young can see. You and I are too fixed in reality.”

  Pa took the glasses off and let them dangle in his hand.

  “Did you see any halflings?” he asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “There are no halflings here,” said Butch.

  “To see the halflings,” Butch’s Pa put in, “we must journey to the Carter place.”

  “Well, then,” said Pa, “what are we waiting for?”

  So the four of us went up the road to the Carter place.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone at home and that was rather queer, for either Carter himself or Mrs. Carter or Ozzie Burns, the hired man, always stayed at home if the others had to go to town or anywhere.

  We stood in the road and Butch had himself a good look. There weren’t any halflings around the buildings and there weren’t any in the orchard or in any of the fields, so far as Butch could see. Pa was getting impatient. I knew what he was thinking—that he had been made a fool of by a bunch of aliens.

  Then Butch said excitedly that he thought he saw a halfling down in one corner of the pasture, just at the edge of the big Dark Hollow woods, where Andy had a hay barn, but it was so far away that he could not be sure.

  “Give your boy the glasses,” said Butch’s Pa, “and let him have a look.”

  Pa handed me the glasses and I put them on. I had a hard time getting familiar landmarks sorted out, but finally I did, and sure enough, down in the corner of the pasture, there were things moving around that looked like human beings, but mighty funny human beings. They had a sort of smoky look about them, as if you could blow them away.

  “Well, what do you see?” asked Pa.

  I told him what I saw and he stood there considering, rubbing his hand back and forth across his chin, with the whiskers grating.

  “There doesn’t seem to be a soul around,” he said. “I don’t suppose it would hurt if we went down there. If the things are there, I want Steve to have a good, hard look at them.”

  “You think it is all right?” asked Butch’s Pa, worried. “It’s not unethical?”

  “Well, sure,” said Pa, “I suppose it is. But if we are quick about it and get out right away, Andy never need know.”

  So we crawled underneath the fence and went over the pasture and crossed into the woods so we could sneak up on the place where we had seen the halflings.

  The going was a little rough, for in places the brush was rather heavy, and there were thick blackberry patches with the bushes loaded with black and shiny fruit.

  But we sneaked along as quietly as we could and we finally reached a point opposite the place where we had seen the halflings.

  Butch nudged me and whispered fiercely: “There they are!”

  I put the glasses on and there they were, by golly.

  Up at the edge of the hayfield, just beyond the woods, stood Andy’s hay barn, really just a roof set on poles to cover the hay that Andy didn’t have the room to get into his regular barn.

  It was a rundown, dilapidated thing, and there was Andy standing up there on the roof, and some packs of shingles sat on the roof beside him, while climbing up a ladder with a bunch of shingles on his shoulder was Ozzie Burns, the hired man. Andy was reaching down to get the shingles that Ozzie was carrying up the ladder, and at the foot of the ladder, hanging onto it so it wouldn’t tip, was Mrs. Burns. And that was the reason none of them had been around—they were all down here, fixing to patch up the shingles on the barn.

  And there were the halflings, a good two dozen of them. A bunch of them were up on the roof with Andy and a couple on the ladder with the hired man and a couple more of them helping to hold up the ladder. They looked busy and energetic and efficient, and every single one of them was the spitting image of Andy Carter.

  Not that they really resembled Andy, for they didn’t. They were actually wraithlike things that seemed to have but little substance to them. They were little more than a smoky outline, but those smoky outlines—every single one of them—was the squat, bulldog outline of Andy Carter. And they walked like him, with a belligerent swagger, and all their motions were like his, and you could sense the meanness in them.

  In the time that I was gaping at them, Ozzie Burns had handed the shingles up to Andy and clambered up on the roof beside him and Mrs. Burns had stepped away from the ladder, not needing to hold it any longer, since Ozzie was safe up on the roof. I saw the ladder was standing on uneven ground and that was why she’d had to hold it.

  Andy had been crouched down to lay the pack of shingles on the roof. Now he straightened up and looked toward the woods and he saw us standing there.

  “What are you doing here?” he roared at us, and started down the ladder.

  And now comes the funny part of it. I’ll have to take it slow and try to tell it straight.

  To me, it seemed the ladder separated and became two ladders. One was standing there against the hay barn and the other left it, and the top of this second ladder began to slide along the roof and was about to fall and carry Andy with it to the ground, just as sure as shooting.

  I was about to shout for Andy to look out, although I don’t know why I should have. If he fell and broke his neck, it’d have been all right with me.

  But just as I was about to yell, two halflings moved fast and this second ladder disappeared. It had been sliding along the roof and was about to fall, with a second Andy clinging to it and beginning to look scared—and then suddenly there was just one ladder and one Andy instead of two.

  I stood there, shaking, and I knew what I had seen, but at the moment I wouldn’t admit it, not even to myself.

  It was, I told myself, as if I had been looking at two separate times—at a time when the ladder should have fallen and at another time when it had not fallen because the halflings hadn’t let it. I had seen good luck in actual operation. Or the averting of bad luck. Whichever it might be, it all came out the same.

  And now Andy was almost at the ladder’s foot and the halflings were coming down from off the roof in a helter-skelter fashion—some of them jumping off and others dropping off, and if they had been human instead of what they were, there would have been a flock of broken legs and necks.

  Pa stepped out of the woods into the field and I stepped along with him. We knew we were walking into trouble, but we weren’t ones to run. And trailing along behind us were Butch and his Pa, but both of them looked scared and you could see they had no heart for it.

  Then Andy was down off the ladder and walking straight toward us and he sure was on the warpath. And walking along beside him, in a line on either side of him, were all those halflings, and they kept in step with him and swung their arms like him and looked as mean as he did.

  “Now, Andy,” said Pa, trying to be conciliatory, “let us be reasonable.” But it was quite an effort, I can tell you, for Pa to speak that way. He hated Andy Carter clear up from the ground and he sure-God had his reasons. Andy had been a rotten neighbor for an awful lot of years.

  “Don’t you tell me to be reasonable!” yelled Andy. “I been hearing all this talk about how you are blaming me for what you call hard luck. And I tell you to your face it ain’t hard luck at all. It’s plain downright shiftlessness and bad management. And if you think you’re going to get anywhere with all this talk of yours, you are just plain crazy. You been taken in by a lot of alien nonsense. If I had my way, I’d run all those stinking aliens right the hell off the planet.”

  Pa took a quick step forward and I thought he was about to clobber Andy. But Butch’s Pa jumped forward and grabbed him by the arm.

/>   “No! No!” he shouted. “There’s no need to fight him! Let us go away!”

  Pa stood there with Butch’s Pa hanging to his arm and I wondered for a minute which one he would clobber, Butch’s Pa or Andy.

  “I never liked you,” Andy said to Pa, “from the first day I saw you. I had you figured for a bum and that is what you are. And this taking up with aliens is the lowest thing any human ever did. You ain’t no better than they are. Now get off this place and don’t you ever dare set foot on it again.”

  Pa jerked his arm and sent Butch’s Pa staggering to one side. Then he brought it up and back. I saw Andy’s head start moving to one side, dropping over toward his shoulder, and for a second it looked like he had the beginning of two heads. And I knew that I was watching another accident beginning to unhappen, although it was no accident, for Pa sure meant to paste him.

  But they weren’t fast enough to get Andy’s head tilted out of danger. They weren’t dealing this time with a slowly sliding ladder.

  There was a solid crack like someone had hit a tree with an axe on a frosty morning, and Andy’s head jerked back and his feet came off the ground and he went tincup over teakettle, flat on his back.

  And there were all those silly halflings standing in a row, with shocked looks upon their faces, as if they couldn’t quite believe it. You could have bought the lot of them for no more than half a buck.

  Pa turned around and held out his hand to me and said: “Come on, Steve. Let’s go.”

  He said it in a quiet voice that was clear and level, and there was, I thought, a note of pride in it. And we turned around, the two of us, and we walked away from there, not hurrying any and not even looking back.

  “I swear to God,” said Pa, “I’ve meant to do that ever since I laid eyes on him fifteen years ago.”

  I hadn’t noticed what had happened to Butch or to his Pa and I wondered where they might have gone to, for there wasn’t hide nor hair of them. But I didn’t say anything to Pa about it, for I had a hunch he might not be harboring exactly friendly feelings toward Butch’s Pa.