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

weirdest uproar you ever heard. The cat made it to the tree in the fastest time and nearly took off the bark swarming up the trunk. And the dog miscalculated and failed to put on his brakes in time and banged smack into the tree spread-eagled.
    The cat by this time was up in the highest branches, hanging on and screaming, while the dog walked around in circles, acting kind of stunned.
    Fancy Pants’ Pa broke off what he was saying to me and he looked at Fancy Pants. He didn’t do or say a thing, but when he looked at Fancy Pants, Fancy Pants grew terribly pale and sort of wilted down.
    “Let that teach you,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “to leave those animals alone. You don’t see Steve here or Nature Boy mistreating them that way, do you?”
    “No, sir,” mumbled Fancy Pants.
    “And now get along, the two of you. You have things to do.”
    I got this to say for Fancy Pants’ Pa: he gives Fancy Pants his lickings, or whatever they may be, and then he forgets about it. He doesn’t keep harping at it for the rest of the day.
    So Fancy Pants and me went down the road, me shuffling along, kicking up the dust, and Fancy Pants floating along beside me.
    We got down to Nature Boy’s place and he was waiting out in front. I knew he had been hoping someone would come along. There were a couple of sparrows sitting on his shoulder and a rabbit hopping all around him and a chipmunk in the pocket of his pants, looking out at us with bright and beady eyes.
    Nature Boy and I sat down underneath a tree and Fancy Pants came as close as he ever does to sitting down—floating about three inches off the ground—and we talked about what we ought to do. Trouble was, there wasn’t really anything that needed any doing. So we sat there and talked and tossed pebbles and pulled stems of grass and put them in our mouths and chewed them, while Nature Boy’s pet wild things gamboled all around us and didn’t seem to be afraid at all. Except that they were a little leery of Fancy Pants. He is, when you come right down to it, a sort of sneaky rascal. Me they are fast friends with when I’m with Nature Boy, but let me meet them when I am alone and they keep their distance.
    I can see how wild things might take to Nature Boy. He is fur all over, real sleek, glossy fur, and he wears nothing but that little pair of pants. Turn him loose without those pants and someone would be bound to take a shot at him.
    So we sat there wondering what to do. Then I remembered that Pa had said a new family had moved onto the Pierce place and we decided to go down and see if they had any kids.
    We went down the road to the old Pierce place and it turned out there was one just about our age. He was a sort of runty little kid, with a peaked face and big round eyes and kind of eager look about him, like a stunted hoot owl.
    He told us his name and it was even worse than Nature Boy’s and Fancy Pants’ names, so we had a vote on it and decided we would call him Butch. That suited him just fine.
    Then he called out his family and they stood in a row, like a bunch of solemn, runty owls roosting on a limb, while he introduced them. There was his Ma and Pa and a little brother and a kid sister almost as big as he was. The rest of them went back into the house, but Butch’s Pa squatted down and began to talk with us.
    You could see from the way he talked that he was a little scared of this farming business. He admitted he really was no farmer, but an optical worker, and explained to us that an optical worker designed lenses and ground them. But, he said, there was no future in a job like that back on his old home planet. He told us how glad he was to be on Earth and how he wanted to be a good citizen and a good neighbor, and a lot of other things like that.
    When he started to run down, we got away from him. There ain’t anything more embarrassing than a crazy adult who likes to talk with kids.
    We decided that maybe we should show Butch around a bit and let him in