“What’s going on?” I asked.
He kept on looking at something in the orchard. I took a look where he was looking and I couldn’t see a thing.
Then he turned around like a flash and jumped the fence on the downhill side of the road and went lickety-split down across the field opposite the orchard. I jumped the fence and ran after him and caught him just before he reached the woods. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around to face me. it wasn’t hard to do, he was such a spindly kid.
“What’s the matter with you?” I hollered. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home to get my gun!”
“Your gun? What for?”
“There’s a whole bunch of them up there! We have to clean them out!”
He must have seen I didn’t understand.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, “that you didn’t see them?”
I shook my head. “There wasn’t anything there.”
“They’re there, all right,” he said. “Maybe you can’t see them. Maybe you’re like old folks.”
There’s no one who can accuse me of a thing like that. I doubled up my fist and poked it underneath his nose. He hurried up to explain.
“They’re things that only kids can see. And they bring bad luck. You can’t leave them around or you’ll have bad luck all the time.”
I didn’t believe it right away. But after all the things I’d seen done by Nature Boy and Fancy Pants, you don’t ever catch me saying straight out that a thing’s impossible.
And after I’d thought it over for a minute, it made a silly sort of sense. For the folks certainly had been plagued by hard luck for a long time now and it didn’t stand to reason that luck should be all bad and never any good unless there was something making it that way.
And it wasn’t the folks alone, but all the other neighbors—all of them, of course, except Andy Carter, and Andy Carter was too mean to be bothered by bad luck.
We were, I thought, sure a hard-luck neighborhood.
“All right,” I said to Butch. “Let’s go and get that gun.”
And I was thinking even as I said it that it must be a funny kind of gun that would shoot a thing one couldn’t even see.
We made it back to the old Pierce place in almost no time at all. Butch’s Pa was sitting out underneath a tree, feeling sorry for himself. Butch came up to him and started jabbering and I couldn’t understand a word.
His Pa listened to him for a while and then broke in. “You should talk this planet’s language, son. It is most impolite to do otherwise. And you want to become a good citizen of this great and glorious planet, I am sure, and there’s no better way to do it than to talk its language and observe its customs and try to live the way its people do.”
I’ll say this much for him: Butch’s Pa sure knew how to fling around the words.
“Is it true, mister,” I asked him, “that these things can bring bad luck?”
“Most assuredly,” said Butch’s Pa. “Back on our old home planet, we know them well.”
“Pa,” asked Butch, “should I get my gun?”
“Now I don’t know,” said his Pa. “It’s something we have to give some study. Back on our home planet, there would be no question of it. But this is a different planet and it may have different ways. It may be that the man who has these creatures would object to your shooting them.”
“But there isn’t anyone really got them,” I declared. “How can you have a thing when you can’t even see it?”
“I was thinking about the gentleman in whose orchard they appeared.”
“You mean Andy Carter. He doesn’t know anything about them.”
“That does not matter,” said Butch’s Pa, with a great deal of righteousness. “It becomes, it would seem to me, a quite deep problem in ethics. On our home planet, no man would want these things; he’d be ashamed to have them. But here it might be different. They bring good luck, you see, to the ones that they adopt.”
“You mean they bring good luck to Andy?” I asked him. “But I thought you said that they brought bad luck.”
“So they do,” said Butch’s Pa, “except to the ones that they adopt. To them they bring good luck, but bad luck to all the others. For it is an axiom that fortune for one man is misfortune for the rest. That is why we do not let them adopt any of us on our home planet.”
“You think they have adopted Andy and that’s why he has good luck?”
“You are most correct,” said Butch’s Pa. “You have admirably grasped the concept.”
“Well, gee, why don’t we just go in and shoot them?”
“This Carter gentleman would not object to your doing so?”
“Of course he would, but that’s what you would expect of him. He’d probably run us off the place before we got the job half done, but we could sneak back again …”
“No,” Butch’s Pa said flat out.
He was an awful stickler for doing the right thing, Butch’s Pa was—bound and determined he wasn’t going to get caught off base doing something wrong.
“That is not the way to do,” he said. “It is most unethical. You think that if this Carter knew he had these things, he would want to keep them?”
“I am sure he would. He doesn’t care for anybody but himself.”
Butch’s Pa heaved a big sigh and crawled to his feet. “Young man, would your father be at home?”
“He most likely would.”
“We’ll go and talk with him,” he said. “He is a native of this planet and an honest man and he will tell us what is right.”
“Mister,” I asked him, “what do you call these things?”
“We have a name for them, but it does not translate into your tongue with anything like ease. We call them something that is neither here nor there, something that is halfway between. Halfling would be the word for it, if there is such a word.”
“I don’t know if there is or not,” I said, “but it sounds right.”
“Then,” decided Butch’s Pa, “for sheer convenience we shall call them that.”
At first, Pa was as flabbergasted as I was, but the more he listened to Butch’s Pa and the more he thought about it, the more he seemed to become convinced there might be something to it.
“There sure-God has been something causing all this hard luck of ours,” he declared. “A man can’t turn his hand to a thing but it goes wrong on him. And I must admit that it makes a man sore to have all these things happen to him and then look at Carter and see all the good luck he has.”
“I am profoundly sorry,” said Butch’s Pa, “to discover halflings exist on this planet. There were many on our old home planet and on some of the neighboring worlds, but I had no idea they had spread this far.”
“What I don’t rightly understand,” said Pa, lighting up his pipe and settling down to hash the matter over, “is how they can be here and a man not see them.”
“There is a most precise scientific explanation, but I have not the language to translate it. You might say that they are off-phase of this existence, but still not quite into it. The child eye is undulled, the mind unclosed, so that they can see somewhat, a fraction, just a little, beyond reality. And that is why they can be seen by children but are invisible to adults. I, in my time, when I was a child, saw and killed my share of them. You understand, sir, that on my planet, it is an accepted childish chore to be eternally on watch for them and vigilantly keep their numbers down.”
Pa asked me: “You didn’t see these things?”
“No, Pa,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“And you didn’t see them, either?” Pa asked Butch’s Pa.