“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.