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

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