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

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