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

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