No Life of Their Own And Other Stories

No Life of Their Own

Ma and Pa were fighting again, not really mad at one another, but arguing pretty loud. They had been at it, off and on, for weeks.

“We just can’t up and leave!” said Ma. “We have to think it out. We can’t pull up and leave a place we’ve lived in all our lives without some thinking on it!”

“I have thought on it!” Pa said. “I’ve thought on it a lot! All these aliens moving in. There was a brood of new ones moved onto the Pierce place just a day or two ago.”

“How do you know,” asked Ma, “that you’ll like one of the Homestead Planets once you settle on it? It might be worse than Earth.”

“We can’t be any more unlucky there than we been right here! There ain’t anything gone right. I don’t mind telling you I am plumb discouraged.”

And Pa sure-God was right about how unlucky we had been. The tomato crop had failed and two of the cows had died and a bear had robbed the bees and busted up the hives and the tractor had broken down and cost $78.90 to get fixed.

“Everyone has some bad luck,” Ma argued. “You’d have it no matter where you go.”

“Andy Carter doesn’t have bad luck!” yelled Pa. “I don’t know how he does it, but everything he does, it turns out to a hair. He could fall down in a puddle and come up dripping diamonds!”

“I don’t know,” said Ma philosophically. “We got enough to ebyat and clothes to cover us and a roof above our head. Maybe that’s as much as anyone can expect these days.”

“It ain’t enough,” Pa said. “A man shouldn’t be content to just scrape along. I lay awake at night to figure out how I can manage better. I’ve laid out plans that should by rights have worked. But they never did. Like the time we tried that new adapted pea from Mars down on the bottom forty. It was sandy soil and they should have grown there. They ain’t worth a damn on any land that will grow another thing. And that land was worthless; it should have been just right for those Martian peas. But I ask you, did they grow there?”

“No,” said Ma, “now that I recollect, they didn’t.”

“And the next year, what happens? Andy Carter plants the same kind of peas just across the fence from where I tried to grow them. Same kind of land and all. And Andy gets bow-legged hauling those peas home.”

What Pa said was true. He was a better farmer than Andy Carter could ever hope to be. And he was smarter, too. But let Pa try a thing and bad luck would beat him out. Let Andy try the same and it always went right.

And it wasn’t Pa alone. It was the entire neighborhood. Everybody was just plain unlucky, except Andy Carter.

“I tell you,” Pa swore, “just one more piece of bad luck and we’ll throw in our hand and start over somewhere fresh. And the Homestead Planets seem the best to me. Why, you take …”

I didn’t wait to hear any more. I knew it would go on the way it always had. So I snuck out without their seeing me and went down the road, and as I walked along, I worried that maybe one of these days they might make up their mind to move to one of the Homestead Planets. There had been an awful lot of our old neighbors who’d done exactly that.

It might be all right to emigrate, of course, but whenever I thought about it, I got a funny feeling at the thought of leaving Earth. Those other planets were so awful far away, one wouldn’t have much chance of getting back again if he didn’t like them. And all my friends were right in the neighborhood, and they were pretty good friends even if they were all aliens.

I got a little start when I thought of that. It was the first time it had occurred to me that they were all aliens. I had so much fun with them, I’d never thought of it.

It seemed a little queer to me that Ma and Pa should be talking about leaving Earth when all the farms that had been sold in our neighborhood had been bought up by aliens. The Homestead Planets weren’t open to the aliens and that might be the reason they came to Earth. If they’d had a choice, maybe they would have gone to one of the Homesteads instead of settling down on Earth.

I walked past the Carter place and saw that the trees in the orchard were loaded down with fruit and I figured that some of us could sneak in and steal some of it when it got ripe. But we’d have to be careful, because Andy Carter was a stinker, and his hired man, Ozzie Burns, wasn’t one bit better. I remembered the time we had been stealing watermelons and Andy had found us at it and I’d got caught in a barbed-wire fence when we ran away. Andy had walloped me, which was all right. But there’d been no call for him going to Pa and collecting seven dollars for the few melons we had stolen. Pa had paid up and then he’d walloped me again, worse than Andy did.

And after it was over, Pa had said bitterly that Andy was no great shakes of a neighbor. And Pa was right. He wasn’t.

I got down to the old Adams place and Fancy Pants was out in the yard, just floating there and bouncing that old basketball of his.

We call him Fancy Pants because we can’t pronounce his name. Some of these alien people have very funny names.

Fancy Pants was all dressed up as usual. He always is dressed up because he never gets the least bit dirty when he plays. Ma is always asking me why I can’t keep neat and clean like Fancy Pants. I tell her it would be easy if I could float along like him and never had to walk, and if I could throw mudballs like him without touching them.

This Sunday morning he was dressed up in a sky-blue shirt that looked like silk, and red britches that looked as if they might be velvet, and he had a green bow tied around his yellow curls that floated in the breeze. At first glance, Fancy Pants looked something like a girl—but you better never say so, because he’d mop up the road with you. He did with me the first time I saw him. He didn’t even lay a hand on me while he was doing it, but sat up there, cross-legged, about three feet off the ground, smiling that sweet smile of his on his ugly face, and with his yellow curls floating in the breeze. And the worst of it was that I couldn’t get back at him.

But that was long ago and we were good friends now.

We played catch for a while, but it wasn’t too much fun.

Then Fancy Pants’ Pa came out of the house and he was glad to see me, too. He asked about the folks and wanted to know if the tractor was all right, now that we’d got it fixed. I answered him politely because I’m a little scared of Fancy Pants’ Pa.

He is sort of spooky—not the way he looks, the way he does things. From the looks of him, he wasn’t meant to be a farmer, but he does all right at it. He doesn’t use a plow to plow a field. He just sits cross-legged in the air and floats up and down the field, and when he passes over a strip of ground, that strip of ground is plowed—and not only plowed, but raked and harrowed until it is as fine as face powder. He does all his work that way. There aren’t any weeds in any of his crops, for he just sails up and down the rows and the weeds come out slick and clean, with the roots intact, to lie on the ground and wither.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see what a guy like that could do if he ever caught a kid in any sort of mischief, so all of us are thoughtful and polite whenever he’s around.

So I told him how we’d got the tractor all fixed up and about the bear busting up the bee hives. Then I asked him about his time machine and he shook his head real sad.

“I don’t know what’s the matter, Steve,” he said. “I put things into it and they disappear, and I should find them later, but I never have. If I’m moving them in time, I’m perhaps pushing them too far.”

He would have told me more about his time machine, but there was an interruption.

While we had been talking, Fancy Pants’ Pa and me, the Fancy Pants dog had run a cat up a maple tree. That is the normal situation for any cat and dog—unless Fancy Pants is around.

For Fancy Pants wasn’t one to leave a situation normal. He reached up into the tree—well, he didn’t reach up with his hands, of course, but with whatever he reaches with—and he nailed this cat and sort of bundled it up so it couldn’t move and brought it down to the ground.

Then he held the dog so the dog couldn’t do more than twitch and he put that bundled-up cat down in front of the twitching dog, then let them loose with split-second timing.

The two of them exploded into a blur of motion, with the weirdest uproar you ever heard. The cat made it to the tree in the fastest time and nearly took off the bark swarming up the trunk. And the dog miscalculated and failed to put on his brakes in time and banged smack into the tree spread-eagled.

The cat by this time was up in the highest branches, hanging on and screaming, while the dog walked around in circles, acting kind of stunned.

Fancy Pants’ Pa broke off what he was saying to me and he looked at Fancy Pants. He didn’t do or say a thing, but when he looked at Fancy Pants, Fancy Pants grew terribly pale and sort of wilted down.

“Let that teach you,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “to leave those animals alone. You don’t see Steve here or Nature Boy mistreating them that way, do you?”

“No, sir,” mumbled Fancy Pants.

“And now get along, the two of you. You have things to do.”

I got this to say for Fancy Pants’ Pa: he gives Fancy Pants his lickings, or whatever they may be, and then he forgets about it. He doesn’t keep harping at it for the rest of the day.

So Fancy Pants and me went down the road, me shuffling along, kicking up the dust, and Fancy Pants floating along beside me.

We got down to Nature Boy’s place and he was waiting out in front. I knew he had been hoping someone would come along. There were a couple of sparrows sitting on his shoulder and a rabbit hopping all around him and a chipmunk in the pocket of his pants, looking out at us with bright and beady eyes.

Nature Boy and I sat down underneath a tree and Fancy Pants came as close as he ever does to sitting down—floating about three inches off the ground—and we talked about what we ought to do. Trouble was, there wasn’t really anything that needed any doing. So we sat there and talked and tossed pebbles and pulled stems of grass and put them in our mouths and chewed them, while Nature Boy’s pet wild things gamboled all around us and didn’t seem to be afraid at all. Except that they were a little leery of Fancy Pants. He is, when you come right down to it, a sort of sneaky rascal. Me they are fast friends with when I’m with Nature Boy, but let me meet them when I am alone and they keep their distance.

I can see how wild things might take to Nature Boy. He is fur all over, real sleek, glossy fur, and he wears nothing but that little pair of pants. Turn him loose without those pants and someone would be bound to take a shot at him.

So we sat there wondering what to do. Then I remembered that Pa had said a new family had moved onto the Pierce place and we decided to go down and see if they had any kids.

We went down the road to the old Pierce place and it turned out there was one just about our age. He was a sort of runty little kid, with a peaked face and big round eyes and kind of eager look about him, like a stunted hoot owl.

He told us his name and it was even worse than Nature Boy’s and Fancy Pants’ names, so we had a vote on it and decided we would call him Butch. That suited him just fine.

Then he called out his family and they stood in a row, like a bunch of solemn, runty owls roosting on a limb, while he introduced them. There was his Ma and Pa and a little brother and a kid sister almost as big as he was. The rest of them went back into the house, but Butch’s Pa squatted down and began to talk with us.

You could see from the way he talked that he was a little scared of this farming business. He admitted he really was no farmer, but an optical worker, and explained to us that an optical worker designed lenses and ground them. But, he said, there was no future in a job like that back on his old home planet. He told us how glad he was to be on Earth and how he wanted to be a good citizen and a good neighbor, and a lot of other things like that.

When he started to run down, we got away from him. There ain’t anything more embarrassing than a crazy adult who likes to talk with kids.

We decided that maybe we should show Butch around a bit and let him in on some of the things we had been doing.

So we struck off down Dark Hollow and we didn’t make much time because all of these friends of Nature Boy were popping out to join him. Before very long, we were a sort of traveling menagerie—rabbits and chipmunks and a gopher or two and a couple of raccoons.

I like Nature Boy, of course, and I’ve had some good times with him, but he has spoiled a lot of fun as well. Before he showed up in the neighborhood, I did a lot of fishing and hunting, but that is all spoiled now. I can’t shoot a squirrel or catch a fish without wondering if it is a friend of Nature Boy’s.

After a while, we got down to the creek bed where we were digging out the lizard. We’d been at it all summer long and we hadn’t uncovered very much of him, but we still figured that some day we might get him all dug out.

You understand that it wasn’t a live lizard we were digging out, but a lizard that had turned to stone a zillion years ago.

There is a place where the stream runs down a limestone ledge and the limestone lies in layers. The lizard was between two of those layers. We’d got four or five feet of his tail uncovered. But the digging was getting harder, for we were working back into the limestone ledge and there was more of it to move.

Fancy Pants floated up above the limestone ledge and got himself set as solid as he could. Sitting there, he hit that limestone ledge a tremendous whack, being very careful not to crack the lizard. It was one of his better whacks, busting up a lot of stone, and while Fancy Pants rested up to take another one, the three of us piled in and threw out the busted rock.

But there was one big piece he had loosened up that we couldn’t move.

“Hit it just a tap,” I told him. “Break it up a little and we can get it out.”

“I got it loose,” he said. “It’s up to you to get it out.”

There was no sense arguing with him. So the three of us wrestled at the rock, but we couldn’t budge it and Fancy Pants sat up there, fat and sassy, taking it easy and enjoying himself.

“You ought to have a crowbar,” he told us. “If you had a crowbar, you could pry that rock out.”

I was getting sick and tired of Fancy Pants, and so, just to get away from him for a while, I said I’d go and fetch a crowbar. And this new kid, Butch, said he’d go along with me.

So we left Nature Boy and Fancy Pants and climbed up to the road and started out for my place. We didn’t hurry any. It would serve Fancy Pants right if he had to wait, and Nature Boy as well, for all his showing off with his animals.

We walked along the road and talked. Butch told me about the planet he had come from and it sure was a poor-mouth place, and I told him about the neighborhood, and we were getting to be friends.

We reached the Carter place and were walking past the orchard when Butch stopped dead in the middle of the road and went sort of stiff, like a hunting dog will go when he scents a bird.

I was walking right behind him and I bumped into him, but he just stood there with those eager eyes agleam and his entire body tense—so tense it seemed to quiver when it really didn’t.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He kept on looking at something in the orchard. I took a look where he was looking and I couldn’t see a thing.

Then he turned around like a flash and jumped the fence on the downhill side of the road and went lickety-split down across the field opposite the orchard. I jumped the fence and ran after him and caught him just before he reached the woods. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face me. it wasn’t hard to do, he was such a spindly kid.

“What’s the matter with you?” I hollered. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Home to get my gun!”

“Your gun? What for?”

“There’s a whole bunch of them up there! We have to clean them out!”

He must have seen I didn’t understand.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, “that you didn’t see them?”

I shook my head. “There wasn’t anything there.”

“They’re there, all right,” he said. “Maybe you can’t see them. Maybe you’re like old folks.”

There’s no one who can accuse me of a thing like that. I doubled up my fist and poked it underneath his nose. He hurried up to explain.

“They’re things that only kids can see. And they bring bad luck. You can’t leave them around or you’ll have bad luck all the time.”

I didn’t believe it right away. But after all the things I’d seen done by Nature Boy and Fancy Pants, you don’t ever catch me saying straight out that a thing’s impossible.

And after I’d thought it over for a minute, it made a silly sort of sense. For the folks certainly had been plagued by hard luck for a long time now and it didn’t stand to reason that luck should be all bad and never any good unless there was something making it that way.

And it wasn’t the folks alone, but all the other neighbors—all of them, of course, except Andy Carter, and Andy Carter was too mean to be bothered by bad luck.

We were, I thought, sure a hard-luck neighborhood.

“All right,” I said to Butch. “Let’s go and get that gun.”

And I was thinking even as I said it that it must be a funny kind of gun that would shoot a thing one couldn’t even see.

We made it back to the old Pierce place in almost no time at all. Butch’s Pa was sitting out underneath a tree, feeling sorry for himself. Butch came up to him and started jabbering and I couldn’t understand a word.

His Pa listened to him for a while and then broke in. “You should talk this planet’s language, son. It is most impolite to do otherwise. And you want to become a good citizen of this great and glorious planet, I am sure, and there’s no better way to do it than to talk its language and observe its customs and try to live the way its people do.”

I’ll say this much for him: Butch’s Pa sure knew how to fling around the words.

“Is it true, mister,” I asked him, “that these things can bring bad luck?”

“Most assuredly,” said Butch’s Pa. “Back on our old home planet, we know them well.”

“Pa,” asked Butch, “should I get my gun?”

“Now I don’t know,” said his Pa. “It’s something we have to give some study. Back on our home planet, there would be no question of it. But this is a different planet and it may have different ways. It may be that the man who has these creatures would object to your shooting them.”

“But there isn’t anyone really got them,” I declared. “How can you have a thing when you can’t even see it?”

“I was thinking about the gentleman in whose orchard they appeared.”

“You mean Andy Carter. He doesn’t know anything about them.”

“That does not matter,” said Butch’s Pa, with a great deal of righteousness. “It becomes, it would seem to me, a quite deep problem in ethics. On our home planet, no man would want these things; he’d be ashamed to have them. But here it might be different. They bring good luck, you see, to the ones that they adopt.”

“You mean they bring good luck to Andy?” I asked him. “But I thought you said that they brought bad luck.”

“So they do,” said Butch’s Pa, “except to the ones that they adopt. To them they bring good luck, but bad luck to all the others. For it is an axiom that fortune for one man is misfortune for the rest. That is why we do not let them adopt any of us on our home planet.”

“You think they have adopted Andy and that’s why he has good luck?”

“You are most correct,” said Butch’s Pa. “You have admirably grasped the concept.”

“Well, gee, why don’t we just go in and shoot them?”

“This Carter gentleman would not object to your doing so?”

“Of course he would, but that’s what you would expect of him. He’d probably run us off the place before we got the job half done, but we could sneak back again …”

“No,” Butch’s Pa said flat out.

He was an awful stickler for doing the right thing, Butch’s Pa was—bound and determined he wasn’t going to get caught off base doing something wrong.

“That is not the way to do,” he said. “It is most unethical. You think that if this Carter knew he had these things, he would want to keep them?”

“I am sure he would. He doesn’t care for anybody but himself.”

Butch’s Pa heaved a big sigh and crawled to his feet. “Young man, would your father be at home?”

“He most likely would.”

“We’ll go and talk with him,” he said. “He is a native of this planet and an honest man and he will tell us what is right.”

“Mister,” I asked him, “what do you call these things?”

“We have a name for them, but it does not translate into your tongue with anything like ease. We call them something that is neither here nor there, something that is halfway between. Halfling would be the word for it, if there is such a word.”

“I don’t know if there is or not,” I said, “but it sounds right.”

“Then,” decided Butch’s Pa, “for sheer convenience we shall call them that.”

At first, Pa was as flabbergasted as I was, but the more he listened to Butch’s Pa and the more he thought about it, the more he seemed to become convinced there might be something to it.

“There sure-God has been something causing all this hard luck of ours,” he declared. “A man can’t turn his hand to a thing but it goes wrong on him. And I must admit that it makes a man sore to have all these things happen to him and then look at Carter and see all the good luck he has.”

“I am profoundly sorry,” said Butch’s Pa, “to discover halflings exist on this planet. There were many on our old home planet and on some of the neighboring worlds, but I had no idea they had spread this far.”

“What I don’t rightly understand,” said Pa, lighting up his pipe and settling down to hash the matter over, “is how they can be here and a man not see them.”

“There is a most precise scientific explanation, but I have not the language to translate it. You might say that they are off-phase of this existence, but still not quite into it. The child eye is undulled, the mind unclosed, so that they can see somewhat, a fraction, just a little, beyond reality. And that is why they can be seen by children but are invisible to adults. I, in my time, when I was a child, saw and killed my share of them. You understand, sir, that on my planet, it is an accepted childish chore to be eternally on watch for them and vigilantly keep their numbers down.”

Pa asked me: “You didn’t see these things?”

“No, Pa,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“And you didn’t see them, either?” Pa asked Butch’s Pa.

“I lost my ability to see them many years ago,” said Butch’s Pa. “So far as your boy is concerned, it may be that only the children of certain races—”

“But they must see us,” Pa insisted. “Otherwise, how would they be able to bring good luck or bad?”

“They do see us. In that, all are agreed. I assure you that the scientists of my planet have devoted many long and arduous years to the study of these beings.”

“And another thing. What is their purpose in adopting people? What do they get out of it? Why should they show all this favoritism?”

“We are not sure,” said Butch’s Pa. “There are several theories. One is that they have no life of their own, but must have a pattern in order to live. If they did not have a pattern, they would have no form nor senses and probably no perception. They are, it would seem, like parasites in many ways.”

But Pa interrupted him. Pa was all wound up and had a lot of thinking that he had to do out loud.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, “that they are doing it just for the hell of it. There must be a solid reason—there is to everything. It seems reasonable to me that everything is planned, that there’s nothing without purpose. There’s nothing, when you get right down to it, that basically is bad. Maybe these things, with the bad luck that they bring, are part of a plan to make folks face up to adversity and develop character.”

I swear it was the first time I had ever heard Pa sound like a preacher, but he sure did then.

“You may be right,” said Butch’s Pa. “There is no agreement entirely on the reason for their being.”

“They might,” suggested Pa, “be a sort of gypsy tribe, just wandering around. They might up and move away.”

Butch’s Pa sadly shook his head. “It almost never happens, sir, that they move away.”

“When I was a kid, I once went to the city with my Ma. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember standing in front of a great big window that was filled with toys and knowing that I could never have any one of them, and wishing hard that some day I might have just one of them. Maybe that’s the way it is with these folks. Maybe they’re just outside the window looking in on us.”

“Your analogy is exceedingly picturesque,” said Butch’s Pa with forthright admiration.

“But here I am running on,” Pa said, “as if I took for gospel every word of it. I don’t wish for the world to doubt you or what you told us …”

“But you do and I cannot find it in my breast to blame you. Would you, perhaps, believe more readily if your son could tell you that he saw them?”

“Why, yes,” Pa said thoughtfully. “I surely would.”

“Before I came to Earth, I was a worker in the field of optics, and it may be possible that I can grind a set of lenses that would allow your son to see halflings. I am not sure he could, of course, but it is a chance worth taking. He is of the age to have still that ability to peer beyond reality. It may be that all his vision needs is a slight correction.”

“If you could do that, if Steve here could really see these things, then I would believe you without the slightest question.”

“I’ll get on with it immediately,” said Butch’s Pa. “Later on, we can discuss the ethics of the situation.”

Pa sat watching Butch and his Pa going down the road, and he sort of shuddered. “Some of these aliens sure-God come up with queer ideas. A man has got to watch himself or he might swallow some of them.”

“These ones are all right,” I told him.

Pa sat there thinking and I could almost see the wheels whirring in his brain. “I don’t know too much about it, but the more one thinks about it, the more sense it makes. It seems reasonable to me that there might be just so much good luck and so much bad luck, and ordinarily both the good and the bad would be handed out in somewhat equal parts. But suppose something came along and corralled all the good luck for one particular man, then there ain’t anything but bad luck left for the rest.”

I wished that I could see it as clear as Pa. But the more I thought, the more like Greek it seemed.

“Maybe,” said Pa, “when you get to the root of it, it’s nothing more than simple competition. What is good luck for one man is bad luck for another. Say there is a job that everybody wants. One man gets it and that’s good luck for him, but bad luck for the others. And say that this bear back in the woods just had to raid a hive. It would be bad luck for the man whose hive was raided, but good luck—or at least not bad luck—for the man whose hive the bear passed up. And say again that someone’s tractor had to get busted …”

Pa went on like that for quite a while, but I don’t think he even fooled himself. Both of us knew, I guess, that there would have to be more to it than that.

Fancy Pants and Nature Boy were sore at me for not coming back with the crowbar. They said I stood them up and I had to explain to them I hadn’t and I had to tell them exactly what had happened before they would believe me. I suppose it might have been better if I had kept my mouth shut, but in the end I don’t believe it made much difference.

Anyhow, we got to be friends again and we all liked Butch, so we had good times together. The other two kidded Butch a lot about the halflings at first, but Butch didn’t seem to mind, so they gave it up.

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?” asked 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.

But I needn’t have worried about them, for when we got out to the road they were waiting for us, breathing kind of hard and considerably scratched up. The way they’d gone through that brush and all those blackberry patches must have been a caution.

“I am glad to see,” said Butch’s Pa, “that you got back safely.”

“Don’t mention it,” Pa told him coldly, and went on down the road, hanging tight onto my hand so that I had to trot along.

We got back home and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water.

Pa said to me, “Steve, have you got those glasses?”

I dug them out of my pocket and handed them to him. He put them on the shelf above the washstand.

“Leave them there,” he said. “Don’t touch them again—not ever. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

To tell the truth, I would have liked it better if he’d gone ranting up and down. I was afraid that what had happened out there in the woods had made him decide to go to one of the Homestead Planets. I told myself he maybe already had made up his mind and didn’t need to rant.

But he never said a word about the fight with Andy nor about the Homestead Planets and he wasn’t sore at me. He kept on being quiet and I knew that he still was mad clean through and I figured that he was mostly sore at Butch and Butch’s Pa for their having made a complete fool of him.

I did a lot of wondering about what I’d seen down there in Andy’s hayfield. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that I had grasped the secret of how the halflings operated.

For I must have been seeing in two different times when I’d been looking at the ladder. I must have looked into the future and seen the ladder slip. Except it never slipped, for the halflings, seeing that it would slip, had made one leg of it settle in the ground. And then, with the ladder sitting solid, it never slipped, of course. The halflings had done no more than look ahead a bit and then righted something that was about to happen before it had a chance to happen.

And that, I told myself, was the basis of good luck and bad. The halflings could spot disaster coming and try to head it off. Except they couldn’t always make it. They had tried to protect Andy when Pa took a lick at him and they had failed. So I figured that they weren’t infallible and that made me feel some better.

For if they could make good luck for Andy, it stood to reason they could make bad luck for the rest of us. All they had to do, if they had a mind to, was to see good luck heading for us and change it into bad.

It might even be possible, I told myself, that the halflings lived ahead of us, by a few seconds or so, and that the only thing which separated us from them was this matter of a different time.

But there was something else that troubled me a lot. Why had I been able to see two different times? It was clear to me that Butch and his people couldn’t, for if they could, they’d have more answers to the halfling situation. They’d been studying it for years, and so far as I could figure, they didn’t know for certain about this two-time business.

It seemed to me, when I thought about it, that Butch’s Pa might have ground better than he knew when he made my glasses. He might have put in something or taken out something or done something he didn’t know about at all.

Or it might be that the human race had a different kind of vision, or maybe just a little different, and when you added the correction for Butch’s kind of vision to our kind of vision, you brought out a thing you couldn’t even guess at.

I tried and tried to get it clear within my mind, but I couldn’t do it. I just went around in circles.

I stayed close to home for several days because I had a feeling that I should be ignoring Butch to uphold the family honor and that is how I missed the big hassle between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy.

It seems that Nature Boy got sick and tired of how Fancy Pants was mistreating that poor, bedraggled cat. So he took one member of the skunk family that had fallen in love with him and he clipped and dyed that skunk to look exactly like the cat. And one day he sneaked over to Fancy Pants’ place and switched the skunk for the cat without anyone seeing him.

The skunk didn’t want to be Fancy Pants’ skunk; he belonged to Nature Boy. So he started beating it back home as fast as he could go, which wasn’t very fast.

Just then Fancy Pants floated out of the door and he saw the skunk going through the gate. He thought the cat was trying to sneak away from him, so he reached out and grabbed it up and rolled it into a ball and tossed it pretty high into the air, sort of careless like, to teach that cat a lesson.

It went up in the air and came down smack-dab on top of Fancy Pants, who was floating out there in the yard a few feet off the ground.

The skunk was scared witless. As soon as it got its claws fastened into Fancy Pants and had some leverage, it retaliated with enthusiasm. And for the first time in his life, Fancy Pants thumped down to the ground and, among other things, he got his clothes as dirty as any other kid.

I would give a zillion dollars to have seen it.

For a while, they figured that they might have to take Fancy Pants out somewhere and bury him for a week or two to make him presentable again. But they finally got him to a point where one could come near him.

Fancy Pants’ Pa went storming down to talk with Nature Boy’s Pa and the two of them put on a ruckus that had the neighborhood chuckling for a week.

And now I was really strapped for playmates. I was still cold-shouldering Butch and I knew better than to take up again with either Nature Boy or Fancy Pants. They both were mean cusses when they set their mind to it. I was sure we hadn’t heard the last of this feud of theirs and I didn’t want to get tangled up in it by being friends with either one of them.

It was plenty tough, let me tell you. Here I was with vacation almost ended and no one to pal around with and my live-it gone. I watched the days slip past and regretted every minute of it.

Then one day the sheriff drove up to the house.

Pa and I were out in the barnyard trying to tinker up a corn binder that was all tied together with haywire and other makeshift odds and ends. Pa had been threatening to buy one for a long time now, but with all the tough luck we’d been having, there wasn’t any money.

“Good morning, Henry,” the sheriff said to Pa.

Pa said good morning back.

“I hear you been having a little trouble with your neighbors,” said the sheriff.

“Not what you would call real trouble,” Pa told him. “I busted one in the snoot the other day is all.”

“Right on his own farm, too.”

Pa quit working on the binder and squatted back on his heels to look up at the sheriff. “Andy been around complaining?”

“He was in the other day. Said you had swallowed some fool story that this new alien family started. About some sort of bad-luck critters he’d been harboring on his farm.”

“And you talked him out of it?”

“Well, now,” said the sheriff, “I am a peaceable man and I hate to see two neighbors fighting. Andy wanted to put you under peace bond, but I said I’d come over and have a talk with you.”

“All right,” invited Pa. “Go ahead and talk.”

“Now look here, Henry. You know the story about them hard-luck critters is so much poppycock. I’m surprised you took any stock in it.”

Pa got up slowly. He had a hard look on his face and I thought for a minute he was about to bust the sheriff. I was scared, I tell you, for that is something no one should ever do—up and bust a sheriff.

I don’t know what he might have done or what he might have said, for at that moment Nature Boy’s Pa came tearing down the road in his old jalopy and pulled in behind the sheriff’s car, intending to park there. But he miscalculated some and he smacked into the sheriff’s car hard enough to skid it ahead six feet or so with the brakes all set.

The sheriff broke into a run. “By God!” he said. “It isn’t even safe to drive out into this corner of the county!”

The two of us ran along behind him. I was running just because there was some excitement, but I figure maybe Pa was running so he could help Nature Boy’s Pa if the sheriff should take it into his head to get feisty with him.

And the funny thing about it was that Nature Boy’s Pa, instead of sitting there and waiting for the sheriff, had jumped out of his car and was running up the slope to meet us.

“They told me I’d find you here,” he panted to the sheriff.

“You found me, all right,” said the sheriff, practically breathing fire. “Now I’m going to—”

“My boy is gone!” yelled Nature Boy’s Pa. “He wasn’t home last night …”

The sheriff grabbed him and said to him: “Now let’s take this easy. Tell me exactly what happened.”

“He went off yesterday, early in the morning, and he didn’t show up for meals, but we didn’t think too much of it—he often goes off for an entire day. He has a lot of friends out there in the woods.”

“And he didn’t come home last night?”

Nature Boy’s Pa shook his head. “Along about dusk, we got worried. I went out and hunted for him and I didn’t find him. I hunted all night long, but there wasn’t any sign of him. I thought maybe he’d just holed up for the night with one of his friends in the woods. I thought maybe he’d show up when it got light, but he never did.”

“Well, all right,” said the sheriff, “you leave it to me. We’ll rouse out all the neighbors and organize a hunt. We’ll find him.” He said to me: “You know the lad? You did some playing with him?”

“All the time,” I answered.

“Lead us to all the places where you played. We’ll look there first.”

Pa said: “I’ll start phoning the neighbors. I’ll get them here right away.”

He ran up the hill toward the house.

In an hour or less, there were a hundred people gathered and the sheriff took them all in hand. He divided them into posses and appointed captains for each posse and told them where to hunt.

It was the most excitement we’ve ever had in the neighborhood.

The sheriff took me with the posse he headed up and we went down Dark Hollow. I took them to the place where we were digging out the lizard and the place where we had started to dig ourselves a cave and the hole in the creek where Nature Boy had made friends with some whopping trout, and some other places, too. We found some old tracks of Nature Boy’s, but there was no fresh sign, although we hunted up and down the hollow clear to where it flowed into the river, and we trailed back come night, and I was tuckered out.

And a little scared as well.

For an awful suspicion had come to me.

And no matter how hard I tried to keep from thinking of it, I couldn’t help myself, for all the time I was trying to remember if the hopper in that time machine had been big enough to take a kid the size of Nature Boy.

Ma fed me and sent me up to bed and later she came up and tucked me in and kissed me. She hadn’t done that in years. She knew I was too big to be tucked in and kissed, but she did it anyhow.

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.

It seemed only natural, of course. A halfling would get a lot more good out of a real live human inside that world of theirs than they would someone they could only see from behind a plate-glass window.

I took the glasses off and put them in my pocket and got to work. It was no easy job to saw through that padlock. The steel was awfully hard and the blade was dull and I was afraid it might break before I got through the steel. I cussed myself for not thinking to bring along an extra blade or two.

The sawing made an awful racket because I had forgotten to bring along some oil to squirt into the cut. But nobody heard the sawing.

Finally I got through.

I opened the door and stepped into the shed and the time machine was there, just the way I remembered it. I laid down the rope and went over to the control board and studied it, but it wasn’t very complicated.

I got it turned on and the creamy whirlpool was sliding in the hopper’s throat.

I picked up the rope and put my glasses on and got an awful fright. The machine shed was built on a gentle slope and the floor I was standing on was four or five feet above the ground and there I was, standing in the air, or so it seemed to me.

I had a sense, not of falling, but that by rights I should be falling, that any minute now I would begin to fall. I knew I wouldn’t, naturally—I was standing on a transparent but solid floor. But knowing that didn’t help much. That horrible, dreamlike feeling that I was about to tumble to the ground still kept hold of me.

And to make it even worse, there was Nature Boy, standing underneath me, with his head about level with my feet, looking up at me. His face was hopeful and he was motioning me to get busy with the rope.

Moving cautiously, even if there was no need of caution, I took one end of the rope and tossed it down the hopper and felt the suck and tug of the creamy whirlpool pulling down the rope. Down underneath the hopper, I could see the rope coming out, dangling into that place where Nature Boy was trapped. He moved over quickly and grabbed hold of the rope and I could feel the weight of the pull he put on it.

Nature Boy was about my size, perhaps a little smaller, and I knew I’d have to pull as hard as ever I could to get him out of there. I even wound a hitch around my hand to make sure it wouldn’t slip. I pulled with all my might. And that rope didn’t budge. It felt as if I were pulling against a house. I couldn’t gain an inch.

So I quit pulling and knelt down, still hanging to the rope, peering at the base of the time machine.

It was a funny thing. The rope went to the bottom of the hopper’s throat and then it skipped a foot or two. There was a foot or so of sidewise space where there wasn’t any rope, and then the rope took up again, dangling down into that other place where Nature Boy had hold of it.

It didn’t make sense. That rope should have gone into that other world in a straight and simple line. But the fact was that it didn’t. It went off somewhere else before it fell into the other world.

And that, I figured, was the reason I couldn’t pull it out.

You could put a thing through the time machine, but you couldn’t pull it back.

I looked down at Nature Boy and he looked back at me. I knew he’d seen it and knew as well as I did exactly what it meant. He looked pretty pitiful and I don’t suppose I looked any better.

Just then the machine shed door screeched open.

I jumped up, still hanging to the rope, and there was Fancy Pants’ Pa.

He was all burned up and I couldn’t blame him. Not after seeing how I had sawed the padlock to break into the place.

“Steve,” he said, and you could hear him fighting to keep his voice level, “I thought I told you to keep out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “but Nature Boy’s in there.”

“Nature Boy!” he shouted. Then his voice dropped. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. How could he get in?”

“I don’t know,” I said, though I could have told him.

“Those glasses you are wearing,” asked Fancy Pants’ Pa. “Are those the ones that were made for you by Butch’s father?”

I nodded.

“Then you can see?”

“I can see Nature Boy,” I said. “Just as plain as day.”

I let go of the rope to take my glasses off and the rope slid down that hopper slicker than a whistle.

“It’s all right, I guess,” I said. “I couldn’t pull him out.”

“Steve,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “I want you to tell me the truth. You’re not just thinking up a story? You are not pretending?”

He was awful pale and I saw what he was thinking—if Nature Boy had gone down that hopper, the entire neighborhood would be down on him like a ton of bricks.

I crossed my heart. “And hope to die,” I added.

That seemed good enough for him.

He shut off the time machine, then went outdoors. I followed him.

“Now,” he said, “you stay right here. I’ll be back immediately.”

He floated off in somewhat of a hurry, zooming away above the pasture woods. He was out of sight in no time.

I sat down with my back against the machine shed and I was feeling pretty low. I knew I should put on my glasses, but I kept them in my pocket. I couldn’t have stood the sight of Nature Boy looking out at me.

It was done and over with, I knew. There was no way in the world for me or anyone to rescue Nature Boy. He was gone for good and all. He was worse than gone.

And sitting there, I thought up some pretty dreadful things to do to Fancy Pants. For there was no doubt in my mind that Fancy Pants had got into the shed and had grabbed Nature Boy, just like he did the cat, and dumped him down the hopper.

He was pretty sore, I knew, about the trick that Nature Boy had played on him with that skunk disguised as a cat. There was nothing he would have stopped at to get even.

I was sitting there and thinking when Fancy Pants’ Pa came floating up the road, and panting along behind him were Pa and the sheriff and Butch’s Pa and Nature Boy’s Pa and some other neighbors.

The sheriff came straight for me and he grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a good, sharp shake.

“Now,” he bellowed, “what is this foolishness? I warn you, boy, it will go hard with you if you’ve been pulling our leg.”

I tried to break away from him, but he wouldn’t let me go. Then Pa stepped up and flung out his arm so that it caught the sheriff straight across the chest and sent him staggering back.

“You keep your hands off him,” Pa said to the sheriff.

“But that story,” blustered the sheriff. “You surely don’t believe—”

“I do,” said Pa. “I believe every word of it. My boy doesn’t lie.”

I’ll say this for Pa: He may storm around and yell and he may take the strap to you for a lot of trifling things, but when it comes down to the pinch, he’s standing there beside you.

“I’ll remind you, Henry,” said the sheriff, bristling, “that you’re not entirely in the clear yourself. There’s that business of the breach of peace I talked Andy Carter out of.”

“Andy Carter,” said Pa, speaking more slowly than one would expect him to. “He’s the man who lives just down the road, if I recall correctly. Has there been any of you who have seen him lately?”

He looked around the crowd and it seemed that no one had.

“Last time I talked to Andy,” said Pa, “was when I called him on the phone and told him we needed help. He said he was too busy to go hunting any alien whelp. He said it would be good riddance if all of them got lost.”

He looked around the crowd and no one spoke a word. I don’t suppose it was quite polite of Pa to say what he had, with Nature Boy’s Pa and Butch’s Pa and all the rest of those alien people standing there before us. But it sure-God was the truth, and they needed it right then, and Pa was the one who was not afraid to give it to them right between the eyes.

Then someone spoke up from the crowd and there were so many of them I couldn’t be sure exactly who it was. But whoever it was said: “I tell you, folks, it was nothing but plain justice when Andy’s barn burned down.”

The sheriff bristled up. “If I thought one of you had a hand in that, I would—”

“You wouldn’t do a thing,” said Pa. He turned to me. “All right, Steve, tell us what you have to tell. I promise you that everyone will listen and there won’t be any interruptions.”

He looked straight at the sheriff when he was saying it.

“Just a second, sir,” said Butch’s Pa. “I want to voice one important point. I know this boy can see the halflings, for I myself am the one who made the glasses for him. I know it is immodest of me to say a thing like this, but if I am nothing else, I am one fine optician.”

“Thank you, sir,” Pa said. “And now, Steve, go ahead.”

But I never got a chance to say a single word, for Butch came stumbling around the barn and he had the gun with him. Or at least I took it for the gun, although it didn’t look like one. It was a sticklike thing and it glittered in the sunlight from all sorts of prisms and mirrors set into it at all kinds of crazy angles.

“Pa,” yelled Butch, “I heard about it and I brought the gun. I hope I’m not too late.”

He ran up to his Pa and his Pa took the gun away from him and held it with everyone looking at him.

“Thank you, son,” said Butch’s Pa. “It was good of you, but we won’t need a gun. We aren’t shooting anything today.”

Then Butch cried out: “There he is, Pa! There’s Nature Boy!”

I am not too sure that all of them believed I had found Nature Boy. Some might have had their reservations, and kept quiet about it because they didn’t want to tangle with my Pa. But Butch was a different matter. He could see these things without any silly glasses. And he was an alien, and everyone expected aliens to do these sort of crazy things.

“All right,” admitted the sheriff, “so I guess he must be there. Now what do we do?”

“There doesn’t seem to be much to go on,” said Pa, “but we can’t leave the boy in there.” He looked at Nature Boy’s Pa. “Don’t you worry. We’ll figure a way to get him out.”

But he spoke with so much confidence that I knew he was only talking so that Nature Boy’s Pa would know we weren’t giving up.

Personally, I could see no hope. If you couldn’t get him out the way he had gotten in, there didn’t seem to be any other way. There were no doors into that other place.

“Gentlemen,” said Butch’s Pa, “I have a small idea.”

We all turned and waited.

“This gun,” he said, “is used to keep down the number of halflings. It ruptures the wall between the two worlds sufficiently to let a bullet through. There might be an adaptation made of it, and we can do that later, or have someone do it for us, if that be necessary. But it seems possible to me we could use the gun itself.”

“But we don’t want to shoot the boy,” the sheriff protested. “What we want to do is get him out.”

“I have no intention, sir, of shooting him. There will be no bullet in the gun. All we’ll use is the device to rupture the curtain or whatever it may be that lies between the worlds. And I can—what is the word?—tinker, I believe. I can tinker up the gun so that rupture will be greater.”

He sat down on the ground and began working on the gun, shifting prisms here and there and adjusting tiny mirrors.

“There is just one thing,” he said. “The rupture will last for but a moment. The boy must be immediate to take advantage of it. He must leap outward instantly the rupture should appear.”

He turned to me. “Steve, can you communicate with him?”

“Communicate?”

“Talk to him. With signs, perhaps? Or the reading of the lips? Or some other way?”

“Sure, I can do that.”

“Please, would you do it then?”

So I put on my glasses and looked around until I found Nature Boy. I had quite a time making him understand what we planned to do. It wasn’t any easier to talk with him with all those crazy halflings standing all around him and making motions at me and pointing at the live-it, then tapping their own heads.

I was sweating plenty, for I was afraid that I had not got it all across to him, but I knew that any more of it would do no more than confuse him.

So I told Butch’s Pa that we were all set, and Butch’s Pa handed Butch the gun, and the rest stepped back a ways, and there was Butch with the gun and me standing right behind him. And there was Nature Boy standing in that other place, and a bunch of those silly halflings clustered all about him, and they sure didn’t know about the alien gun or they’d not have been standing there. And Nature Boy looked like someone who’d been stood against a wall and was being executed without even any blindfold.

Out of the tail of my eye, I saw Fancy Pants floating off to one side of us, and he was the saddest-looking sack you ever saw.

Suddenly there was a strange white flash of brilliance as all the prisms and the mirrors moved on the gun that Butch was holding. He had pulled a trigger, or whatever it was.

For a second, straight in front of us, a funny sort of hole seemed to open up in the place that should not have been there at all—a jagged, ragged hole that appeared in nothingness. And I caught sight of Nature Boy jumping through the hole the second it stayed open.

And there he was, staggering a bit from the jump that he had made—only he was not alone. He had one of the halflings with him!

He had him by the wrist in a good tight grip and it was plain to see that he had jerked him through with him, for the halfling did not seem at all happy about what had happened to him. I saw at once that it was the halfling who had the live-it on his head.

Butch pushed the halfling toward me and he said: “Here, Steve. It was the only way I could get your live-it back.”

I saw that Butch was letting go of the halfling and I grabbed quick by the other wrist and was somewhat surprised to find that he was solid. I would not have been astonished if my hand had gone right through him, for he still had that swirl-smoky look about him, although it seemed to me he might be hardening up a bit and becoming more substantial.

Pa moved over close beside me, saying, “You be careful, Steve!”

“Aw, he’s all right,” I said. “He’s not even trying to get away from me.”

Someone raised a shout and I whirled around and stared.

A half-dozen of the halflings had grabbed hold of the edges of that door into the other world, and they were tugging for dear life so it would stay open, and pouring out of it was that entire herd of halflings! They were shoving and pushing and scrambling to get through, and there were a lot more of them, it seemed to me, than I had thought there were.

We just stood there and watched them until they all were through. We didn’t do a thing because there was not a thing we could do. And they stood there in a bunch, packed tight together, staring back at us.

The sheriff came alongside Pa. He pushed back his hat until it roosted on his neck. You could see that the sheriff was flabbergasted and I enjoyed it, for it had been apparent from the very first that the sheriff hadn’t believed a word he’d heard about the halflings.

I don’t know, maybe he still was thinking that it might be nothing but some sort of alien joke. You could see, without half trying, that the sheriff didn’t cotton to any aliens.

“How come,” he asked suspiciously, “that this one here has got a live-it on?”

So I told him and he blinked at me, dazed and dumfounded, but he said nothing back. I sure had shut him up.

Fancy Pants’ Pa had floated up while I was telling it and he said I told the truth, for he’d been there and seen it.

Everyone began to talk at once, but Fancy Pants’ Pa floated up a little higher and held up his hand to command attention.

“Just a moment, if you please,” he said. “Before we get down to more serious business, I have something you must hear. As you may suspect, knowing the episode of the skunk, my family undoubtedly has a great deal to answer for in this incident.”

A human saying things like that would sound silly and pompous, but Fancy Pants’ Pa could get away with it.

“So,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “I now announce to you that my malefactor son, for the forthcoming thirty days, must walk upon his feet. He must not float an inch. If the punishment does not seem sufficient—”

“It’s enough,” Pa cut in. “The boy has to learn his lesson, but there is no use being harsh with him.”

“Now, sir,” said Nature Boy’s Pa, being very formal, “it is not necessary—”

“I insist,” Fancy Pants’ Pa said. “I really must insist. It can be no other way.”

“Say,” bawled the sheriff, “will someone explain to me what this is all about?”

“Sheriff,” Pa said to him, “your understanding of this matter is of no great importance and it would take too long to explain. We have more important business we should be attending to.” He turned around a bit so he faced the crowd. “Well, gentlemen, what do we do next? It appears to me that we have some guests. And remembering that these critters are bearers of good luck, it would seem to me we should treat them as kindly as we can.”

“Pa,” I said, tugging at his coat sleeve, “I know how we can get them over on our side. Every one of them wants a live-it set.”

“That’s right,” spoke up Nature Boy. “All the time I was in there, they pestered me and pestered me about how to get the sets. All the time they squabbled over who would get to use Steve’s set next.”

“You mean,” the sheriff asked, in a weak voice, “that these things can talk?”

“Why, sure they can,” said Nature Boy. “They learn a lot more back in that world of theirs than you could ever guess.”

“Well, now,” Pa said with a lot of satisfaction, “if that is all they want, it’s not too great a price for us to pay to get us some good luck. We’ll just buy a lot of live-it sets. We can probably get them wholesale—”

“But if we get the live-its,” objected Butch’s Pa, “they’ll just lie around and use them and be of no help to us at all. They won’t need us any more. They’ll have all these patterns they need from the live-it sets.”

“Well, anyhow,” said Pa, “even if that should be true, we’ll get them off our necks. They won’t pester us with this bad luck they commit.”

“It won’t do us any good however you look at it,” declared Butch’s Pa, who had a mighty low opinion of the halflings. “They all live together. That’s the way it’s always been. They never helped an entire neighborhood, but just one man or family in the neighborhood. A whole tribe of them comes in and they give one family all the benefit. You couldn’t get them to split up and work for all of us.”

“If you jerks would listen,” said the halfling with the live-it on his head, “I can get you straightened out.”

It was a shock, I tell you, to hear him speak at all. He was the kind of thing you’d figure shouldn’t speak at all—just a sort of dummy. And the way he spoke and the tone he used made it even worse. It was the way Andy Carter always talked—either wild and blustering, or out of the corner of his mouth, sarcastic. After listening to Andy all these years, that poor halfling didn’t know any different.

Everyone just stood there, staring at the halfling who had spoken, while all the other halflings were nodding their heads in such mad agreement with him that I thought they’d snap their necks.

Pa was the first one to get his feet back under him.

“Go ahead,” he said to the halfling. “We all are listening.”

“We’ll make a deal with you,” said the halfling, using ornery words but speaking most respectful, “but you’ll have to level with us, see? We’ll work hard for you and guard against mishap, but we got to have the live-its and no mistake about it. One for each of us—and if I was you, mister, I wouldn’t try to chisel.”

“Well, now,” said Pa, “that sounds fair enough. But you mean all of us?”

“All of you,” the live-it halfling said.

“You mean you will split up?” asked Pa. “Each of us will have at least one of you? You won’t all live together any more?”

“I think, sir,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “that we can depend on that. I believe I understand what this gentleman is thinking. It is something that happened with the human race on Earth.”

“What happened here on Earth?” asked Pa, sort of flabbergasted.

“Why,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “the elimination of the need for social clustering. There was a time when the human race found it necessary to congregate in families and tribes for companionship and entertainment. Then the race got the record player and the radio and TV and there was less need for get-togethers. A man had entertainment of his own in his home. He need not move beyond his living room to be entertained. So the spectator and group sports simply petered out.”

“And you think,” asked Pa, “that the same thing will happen with the halflings if we gave them live-its?”

“Certainly,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa. “We supply them, as it were, entertainment for the home, personal entertainment. There will be no further need for tribal living.”

“You said it, pal!” the halfling said enthusiastically.

All the rest of them were nodding in agreement.

“But it’s still no good,” yelped Butch’s Pa, getting real riled. “They’re in this world now, and how do you get them back? And while they’re here, can they do anything for us?”

“You can stop shooting off your mouth right now,” the halfling said to Butch’s Pa with utmost respect. “We can’t do anything here for you, that’s sure. In this world of yours, we can’t see ahead. And to do you any good, we have to see ahead.”

“You mean that if we give you live-its, you’ll go back home again?” asked Pa.

“Sure,” said the halfling. “Back there is our home. Just try to keep us from it.”

“We won’t even try,” Pa said. “We might even push you back. We’ll give you the live-its and you get back there and start to work for us.”

“We’ll work for you hard,” said the halfling, “but not all the time. We take out some time for looking at the live-it. That all right with you?”

“Sure,” Pa agreed. “Sure, that’s O.K. with us.”

“All right,” said the halfling, “get us back where we belong.”

I turned around and walked out of the crowd, out to the edge of it. For it was all settled now and I had a belly full of it. It would be all right with me if we never had any more excitement in the neighborhood.

Up by the barn I saw Fancy Pants limping along on the ground. He was having a tough time walking. But I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for him. He had it coming.

I figured in just a little while I’d go up around the barn and clobber him for that time he mopped up the road with me.

It should be an easy job, I told myself, with him grounded by his Pa for thirty days.