“I lost my ability to see them many years ago,” said Butch’s Pa. “So far as your boy is concerned, it may be that only the children of certain races—”
“But they must see us,” Pa insisted. “Otherwise, how would they be able to bring good luck or bad?”
“They do see us. In that, all are agreed. I assure you that the scientists of my planet have devoted many long and arduous years to the study of these beings.”
“And another thing. What is their purpose in adopting people? What do they get out of it? Why should they show all this favoritism?”
“We are not sure,” said Butch’s Pa. “There are several theories. One is that they have no life of their own, but must have a pattern in order to live. If they did not have a pattern, they would have no form nor senses and probably no perception. They are, it would seem, like parasites in many ways.”
But Pa interrupted him. Pa was all wound up and had a lot of thinking that he had to do out loud.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, “that they are doing it just for the hell of it. There must be a solid reason—there is to everything. It seems reasonable to me that everything is planned, that there’s nothing without purpose. There’s nothing, when you get right down to it, that basically is bad. Maybe these things, with the bad luck that they bring, are part of a plan to make folks face up to adversity and develop character.”
I swear it was the first time I had ever heard Pa sound like a preacher, but he sure did then.
“You may be right,” said Butch’s Pa. “There is no agreement entirely on the reason for their being.”
“They might,” suggested Pa, “be a sort of gypsy tribe, just wandering around. They might up and move away.”
Butch’s Pa sadly shook his head. “It almost never happens, sir, that they move away.”
“When I was a kid, I once went to the city with my Ma. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember standing in front of a great big window that was filled with toys and knowing that I could never have any one of them, and wishing hard that some day I might have just one of them. Maybe that’s the way it is with these folks. Maybe they’re just outside the window looking in on us.”
“Your analogy is exceedingly picturesque,” said Butch’s Pa with forthright admiration.
“But here I am running on,” Pa said, “as if I took for gospel every word of it. I don’t wish for the world to doubt you or what you told us …”
“But you do and I cannot find it in my breast to blame you. Would you, perhaps, believe more readily if your son could tell you that he saw them?”
“Why, yes,” Pa said thoughtfully. “I surely would.”
“Before I came to Earth, I was a worker in the field of optics, and it may be possible that I can grind a set of lenses that would allow your son to see halflings. I am not sure he could, of course, but it is a chance worth taking. He is of the age to have still that ability to peer beyond reality. It may be that all his vision needs is a slight correction.”
“If you could do that, if Steve here could really see these things, then I would believe you without the slightest question.”
“I’ll get on with it immediately,” said Butch’s Pa. “Later on, we can discuss the ethics of the situation.”
Pa sat watching Butch and his Pa going down the road, and he sort of shuddered. “Some of these aliens sure-God come up with queer ideas. A man has got to watch himself or he might swallow some of them.”
“These ones are all right,” I told him.
Pa sat there thinking and I could almost see the wheels whirring in his brain. “I don’t know too much about it, but the more one thinks about it, the more sense it makes. It seems reasonable to me that there might be just so much good luck and so much bad luck, and ordinarily both the good and the bad would be handed out in somewhat equal parts. But suppose something came along and corralled all the good luck for one particular man, then there ain’t anything but bad luck left for the rest.”
I wished that I could see it as clear as Pa. But the more I thought, the more like Greek it seemed.
“Maybe,” said Pa, “when you get to the root of it, it’s nothing more than simple competition. What is good luck for one man is bad luck for another. Say there is a job that everybody wants. One man gets it and that’s good luck for him, but bad luck for the others. And say that this bear back in the woods just had to raid a hive. It would be bad luck for the man whose hive was raided, but good luck—or at least not bad luck—for the man whose hive the bear passed up. And say again that someone’s tractor had to get busted …”
Pa went on like that for quite a while, but I don’t think he even fooled himself. Both of us knew, I guess, that there would have to be more to it than that.
Fancy Pants and Nature Boy were sore at me for not coming back with the crowbar. They said I stood them up and I had to explain to them I hadn’t and I had to tell them exactly what had happened before they would believe me. I suppose it might have been better if I had kept my mouth shut, but in the end I don’t believe it made much difference.
Anyhow, we got to be friends again and we all liked Butch, so we had good times together. The other two kidded Butch a lot about the halflings at first, but Butch didn’t seem to mind, so they gave it up.
We certainly had a good time that summer. There was the lizard and a lot of other things as well, including the family of skunks that fell in love with Nature Boy and followed him around. And there was the time Fancy Pants hauled all of Carter’s machinery out into the back forty, with Andy hunting for it like lost cows and madder by the minute.
At home, and elsewhere in the neighborhood, there was still bad luck. The day the barn caved in, Pa was ready to admit flat out that there was something to what Butch’s Pa had said. It was all Ma could do to keep him from going up the road to see Andy Carter and talk to him by hand.
I had another birthday and the folks gave me a live-it set and that was something I had not expected. I had wanted one, of course, but I knew they cost a lot and with all the bad luck they had been having, the folks were short of money.
You know what a live-it is, of course. It’s something like TV, only better. TV you only watch and with a live-it set you live it.
It’s a viewer that you clamp onto your head and you look into it and you pick your channel and turn it on, then settle back and live the things you see.
It doesn’t take any imagination to live it, because it all is there—the action and the sound and smell and even, to some extent, the actual feel of it.
My set was just a kid’s set and I could only get the kid channels. But that was all right with me. I wouldn’t have wanted to live through all that mushy stuff.
All morning I spent with my live-it. There was one thing called “Survey Incident” and it was all about what happened when a human survey team put down on an alien planet. Another one was about a hunting trip on a jungle world and a third was “Robin Hood.” I think, of the three of them, I liked “Robin Hood” the best.
I was all puffed up with pleasure and pride and I wanted to show the kids what the folks had given me. So I took the live-it and went down to Fancy Pants’ place. But I never got a chance to show the live-it to him.
Just before I got to the gate, I saw Fancy Pants floating along, silent and sneaky—and floating along beside him, not more than a yard away, was that poor, beat-up, bedraggled cat that Fancy Pants was always pestering. He had the cat all wrapped up in a tight bundle and it couldn’t move a muscle, but I could see its eyes were wide with fright. If you ask me, that cat had a right to be afraid. There was scarcely anything in the book Fancy Pants hadn’t done to it.