No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (6 page)

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.