The Big Front Yard and Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online

one ordinarily would pay Beasly much attention, but if he yapped long enough and wild enough, they’d probably do some checking. They’d come storming up here and they’d give the place a going over and they’d stand goggle-eyed at what they found in front and pretty soon some of them would have worked their way around to sort of running things.
    And it was none of their business, Taine stubbornly told himself, his ever-present business sense rising to the fore. There was a lot of real estate lying around out there in his front yard and the only way anyone could get to it was by going through his house. That being the case, it stood to reason that all that land out there was his. Maybe it wasn’t any good at all. There might be nothing there. But before he had other people overrunning it, he’d better check and see.
    He went up the stairs and out into the garage.
    The sun was still just above the northern horizon and there was nothing moving.
    He found a hammer and some nails and a few short lengths of plank in the garage and took them in the house.
    Towser, he saw, had taken advantage of the situation and was sleeping in the gold-upholstered chair. Taine didn’t bother him.
    Taine locked the back door and nailed some planks across it. He locked the kitchen and the bedroom windows and nailed planks across them, too.
    That would hold the villagers for a while, he told himself, when they came tearing up here to see what was going on.
    He got his deer rifle, a box of cartridges, a pair of binoculars and an old canteen out of a closet. He filled the canteen at the kitchen tap and stuffed a sack with food for him and Towser to eat along the way, for there was no time to wait and eat.
    Then he went into the living room and dumped Towser out of the gold-upholstered chair.
    â€œCome on, Tows,” he said. “We’ll go and look things over.”
    He checked the gasoline in the pickup and the tank was almost full.
    He and the dog got in and he put the rifle within easy reach. Then he backed the truck and swung it around and headed out, north, across the desert.
    It was easy traveling. The desert was as level as a floor. At times it got a little rough, but no worse than a lot of the back roads he traveled hunting down antiques.
    The scenery didn’t change. Here and there were low hills, but the desert itself kept on mostly level, unraveling itself into that far-off horizon. Taine kept on driving north, straight into the sun. He hit some sandy stretches, but the sand was firm and hard and he had no trouble.
    Half an hour out he caught up with the band of things – all sixteen of them – that had left the house. They were still traveling in line at their steady pace.
    Slowing down the truck, Taine traveled parallel with them for a time, but there was no profit in it; they kept on traveling their course, looking neither right or left.
    Speeding up, Taine left them behind.
    The sun stayed in the north, unmoving, and that certainly was queer. Perhaps, Taine told himself, this world spun on its axis far more slowly than the Earth and the day was longer. From the way the sun appeared to be standing still, perhaps a good deal longer.
    Hunched above the wheel, staring out into the endless stretch of desert, the strangeness of it struck him for the first time with its full impact.
    This was another world – there could be no doubt of that – another planet circling another star, and where it was in actual space no one on Earth could have the least idea. And yet, through some machination of those sixteen things walking straight in line, it also was lying just outside the front door of his house.
    Ahead of him a somewhat larger hill loomed out of the flatness of the desert. As he drew nearer to it, he made out a row of shining objects lined upon its crest. After a time he stopped the truck and got out with the binoculars.
    Through the glasses, he saw that the shining things were the same