I can’t help thinking of the story as “Huck Finn meets the aliens.”
Ma and Pa were fighting again, not really mad at one another, but arguing pretty loud. They had been at it, off and on, for weeks.
“We just can’t up and leave!” said Ma. “We have to think it out. We can’t pull up and leave a place we’ve lived in all our lives without some thinking on it!”
“I have thought on it!” Pa said. “I’ve thought on it a lot! All these aliens moving in. There was a brood of new ones moved onto the Pierce place just a day or two ago.”
“How do you know,” asked Ma, “that you’ll like one of the Homestead Planets once you settle on it? It might be worse than Earth.”
“We can’t be any more unlucky there than we been right here! There ain’t anything gone right. I don’t mind telling you I am plumb discouraged.”
And Pa sure-God was right about how unlucky we had been. The tomato crop had failed and two of the cows had died and a bear had robbed the bees and busted up the hives and the tractor had broken down and cost $78.90 to get fixed.
“Everyone has some bad luck,” Ma argued. “You’d have it no matter where you go.”
“Andy Carter doesn’t have bad luck!” yelled Pa. “I don’t know how he does it, but everything he does, it turns out to a hair. He could fall down in a puddle and come up dripping diamonds!”
“I don’t know,” said Ma philosophically. “We got enough to ebyat and clothes to cover us and a roof above our head. Maybe that’s as much as anyone can expect these days.”
“It ain’t enough,” Pa said. “A man shouldn’t be content to just scrape along. I lay awake at night to figure out how I can manage better. I’ve laid out plans that should by rights have worked. But they never did. Like the time we tried that new adapted pea from Mars down on the bottom forty. It was sandy soil and they should have grown there. They ain’t worth a damn on any land that will grow another thing. And that land was worthless; it should have been just right for those Martian peas. But I ask you, did they grow there?”
“No,” said Ma, “now that I recollect, they didn’t.”
“And the next year, what happens? Andy Carter plants the same kind of peas just across the fence from where I tried to grow them. Same kind of land and all. And Andy gets bow-legged hauling those peas home.”
What Pa said was true. He was a better farmer than Andy Carter could ever hope to be. And he was smarter, too. But let Pa try a thing and bad luck would beat him out. Let Andy try the same and it always went right.
And it wasn’t Pa alone. It was the entire neighborhood. Everybody was just plain unlucky, except Andy Carter.
“I tell you,” Pa swore, “just one more piece of bad luck and we’ll throw in our hand and start over somewhere fresh. And the Homestead Planets seem the best to me. Why, you take …”
I didn’t wait to hear any more. I knew it would go on the way it always had. So I snuck out without their seeing me and went down the road, and as I walked along, I worried that maybe one of these days they might make up their mind to move to one of the Homestead Planets. There had been an awful lot of our old neighbors who’d done exactly that.
It might be all right to emigrate, of course, but whenever I thought about it, I got a funny feeling at the thought of leaving Earth. Those other planets were so awful far away, one wouldn’t have much chance of getting back again if he didn’t like them. And all my friends were right in the neighborhood, and they were pretty good friends even if they were all aliens.
I got a little start when I thought of that. It was the first time it had occurred to me that they were all aliens. I had so much fun with them, I’d never thought of it.
It seemed a little queer to me that Ma and Pa should be talking about leaving Earth when all the farms that had been sold in our neighborhood had been bought up by aliens. The Homestead Planets weren’t open to the aliens and that might be the reason they came to Earth. If they’d had a choice, maybe they would have gone to one of the Homesteads instead of settling down on Earth.
I walked past the Carter place and saw that the trees in the orchard were loaded down with fruit and I figured that some of us could sneak in and steal some of it when it got ripe. But we’d have to be careful, because Andy Carter was a stinker, and his hired man, Ozzie Burns, wasn’t one bit better. I remembered the time we had been stealing watermelons and Andy had found us at it and I’d got caught in a barbed-wire fence when we ran away. Andy had walloped me, which was all right. But there’d been no call for him going to Pa and collecting seven dollars for the few melons we had stolen. Pa had paid up and then he’d walloped me again, worse than Andy did.
And after it was over, Pa had said bitterly that Andy was no great shakes of a neighbor. And Pa was right. He wasn’t.
I got down to the old Adams place and Fancy Pants was out in the yard, just floating there and bouncing that old basketball of his.
We call him Fancy Pants because we can’t pronounce his name. Some of these alien people have very funny names.
Fancy Pants was all dressed up as usual. He always is dressed up because he never gets the least bit dirty when he plays. Ma is always asking me why I can’t keep neat and clean like Fancy Pants. I tell her it would be easy if I could float along like him and never had to walk, and if I could throw mudballs like him without touching them.
This Sunday morning he was dressed up in a sky-blue shirt that looked like silk, and red britches that looked as if they might be velvet, and he had a green bow tied around his yellow curls that floated in the breeze. At first glance, Fancy Pants looked something like a girl—but you better never say so, because he’d mop up the road with you. He did with me the first time I saw him. He didn’t even lay a hand on me while he was doing it, but sat up there, cross-legged, about three feet off the ground, smiling that sweet smile of his on his ugly face, and with his yellow curls floating in the breeze. And the worst of it was that I couldn’t get back at him.
But that was long ago and we were good friends now.
We played catch for a while, but it wasn’t too much fun.
Then Fancy Pants’ Pa came out of the house and he was glad to see me, too. He asked about the folks and wanted to know if the tractor was all right, now that we’d got it fixed. I answered him politely because I’m a little scared of Fancy Pants’ Pa.
He is sort of spooky—not the way he looks, the way he does things. From the looks of him, he wasn’t meant to be a farmer, but he does all right at it. He doesn’t use a plow to plow a field. He just sits cross-legged in the air and floats up and down the field, and when he passes over a strip of ground, that strip of ground is plowed—and not only plowed, but raked and harrowed until it is as fine as face powder. He does all his work that way. There aren’t any weeds in any of his crops, for he just sails up and down the rows and the weeds come out slick and clean, with the roots intact, to lie on the ground and wither.
It doesn’t take too much imagination to see what a guy like that could do if he ever caught a kid in any sort of mischief, so all of us are thoughtful and polite whenever he’s around.
So I told him how we’d got the tractor all fixed up and about the bear busting up the bee hives. Then I asked him about his time machine and he shook his head real sad.
“I don’t know what’s the matter, Steve,” he said. “I put things into it and they disappear, and I should find them later, but I never have. If I’m moving them in time, I’m perhaps pushing them too far.”