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 B

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