No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online Page A

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