“Hi, Fancy Pants!” I yelled.
He put a finger to his lips and crooked another finger to let me know I could join him in whatever he was doing. So I jumped the fence and Fancy Pants floated lower until he was about my level.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“He went away and forgot to close the padlock,” whispered Fancy Pants.
“Who went away?”
“My Pa. He forgot to lock the door to the old machine shed.”
“But that’s where—”
“Sure,” said Fancy Pants. “That’s where he’s got the time machine.”
“Fancy Pants, you don’t intend to put that cat in there!”
“Why not? Pa ain’t ever tried a living thing in it and I want to see what happens.”
I didn’t like it and yet I wanted awful bad to see that time machine. I wondered what one looked like. No one had seen the time machine except Fancy Pants’ Pa.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Fancy Pants. “Are you going chicken on me?”
“But the cat!”
“For the love of Mike, it’s nothing but a cat.”
And that was right, of course. It was nothing but a cat.
So I went along with him and we sneaked into the shed and pulled the door behind us. And there was the time machine in the middle of the floor.
It didn’t look like much. It was a kind of hopper, and a bunch of things like coils ran around the throat where the hopper narrowed down, and that was all except for a crude control board that was nailed onto a post and hooked up to the hopper with a lot of wires.
The hopper came up to my chest and I put my live-it down on the edge of it and craned my neck to look into the throat to see what I could see.
At just that moment, Fancy Pants threw the switch that turned it on. I jerked away. For it was a scary business when you turned that hopper on.
When I sneaked back to have another look, it looked for all the world as if it were a whirlpool of cream, sort of thick and rich and shiny—and it was alive. You could see the liveness in it. And there was a feeling in it that maybe you should just jump in head first and I had to grip the edges of the hopper hard not to.
I might have dived in, if the cat at that very moment hadn’t somehow wiggled free from Fancy Pants.
I don’t know how that cat did it. Fancy Pants had it all rolled into a ball and really buttoned up. Maybe Fancy Pants got careless or maybe the cat had finally figured out an angle. But, anyhow, Fancy Pants had the cat poised above the hopper and was about to let it fall. The cat didn’t get loose in part—it got loose entirely—and there it was, yowling and screaming, tail fluffed out, clawing at thin air to keep from falling down into the hopper. It managed to throw itself to one side as it fell and the claws of one paw hooked onto the hopper’s edge while the other hooked into my live-it set.
I let out a yell and made a grab to try to save the live-it, but I was too late. The cat dragged it off balance and it slid down into that creamy whirlpool and was gone.
The cat shimmied up a post and up into the rafters and hung there, screaming and wailing.
Just then the door came open and there floated Fancy Pants’ Pa and we were caught red-handed.
I figured Fancy Pants’ Pa would give me the works right then and there.
But he didn’t do a thing. He just floated there for a moment looking at the two of us.
Then he looked at me alone and said: “Steve, please leave.”
I went out that door as fast as I could go, with just a fast glance back over my shoulder at Fancy Pants. He was pale and already beginning to appear a little shriveled. He knew what he had coming to him, and even while I realized that he deserved every bit of it, I still felt sorry for him.
But staying wouldn’t help him and I was glad enough to get off scot-free.
Except that it wasn’t scot-free.
I don’t know what was the matter with me—just scared stiff, I guess. Anyhow, I went straight home and told Pa right out about it and he took down the strap from behind the door and let me have a few.
But it seemed to me that he didn’t have his heart in it. He was getting a little uneasy about all these alien goings-on.
For several days, I didn’t go off the place. To have gone anywhere, I would have had to walk past Fancy Pants’ house and I didn’t want to see him—not for a while, at least.
Then one day Butch and his Pa showed up and they had the glasses.
“I don’t know if they’ll fit,” said Butch’s Pa. “I had to guess the fitting.”
They looked just like any other glasses except that the lenses had funny lines running every which way, as if someone had taken the glass and twisted it until it was all crinkled out of shape.
I put them on and they were a bit loose and things looked different through them, but not a great deal different. I was looking at the barnyard when I put them on. The barnyard was still there, but it appeared strange and a little weird, although it was hard to put a finger on what was wrong with it. It was a bright, hot August day and the sun was shining hard, but when I put the glasses on, it seemed suddenly to get cloudy and a little cold. And that was some of the difference, but not all of it.
There was a feeling of strangeness that sent a shiver through me, and the light was wrong, and worst of all was the sense that I didn’t belong. But there was nothing you could say flat out was absolutely wrong.
“Is it any different, son?” asked Pa.
“Some different,” I answered.
“Let me see.”
He took the glasses off me and put them on himself.
“I can’t see a thing,” he said. “Just a lot of color.”
“I told you,” said Butch’s Pa, “that only the young can see. You and I are too fixed in reality.”
Pa took the glasses off and let them dangle in his hand.
“Did you see any halflings?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“There are no halflings here,” said Butch.
“To see the halflings,” Butch’s Pa put in, “we must journey to the Carter place.”
“Well, then,” said Pa, “what are we waiting for?”
So the four of us went up the road to the Carter place.
There didn’t seem to be anyone at home and that was rather queer, for either Carter himself or Mrs. Carter or Ozzie Burns, the hired man, always stayed at home if the others had to go to town or anywhere.
We stood in the road and Butch had himself a good look. There weren’t any halflings around the buildings and there weren’t any in the orchard or in any of the fields, so far as Butch could see. Pa was getting impatient. I knew what he was thinking—that he had been made a fool of by a bunch of aliens.
Then Butch said excitedly that he thought he saw a halfling down in one corner of the pasture, just at the edge of the big Dark Hollow woods, where Andy had a hay barn, but it was so far away that he could not be sure.
“Give your boy the glasses,” said Butch’s Pa, “and let him have a look.”
Pa handed me the glasses and I put them on. I had a hard time getting familiar landmarks sorted out, but finally I did, and sure enough, down in the corner of the pasture, there were things moving around that looked like human beings, but mighty funny human beings. They had a sort of smoky look about them, as if you could blow them away.
“Well, what do you see?” asked Pa.
I told him what I saw and he stood there considering, rubbing his hand back and forth across his chin, with the whiskers grating.
“There doesn’t seem to be a soul around,” he said. “I don’t suppose it would hurt if we went down there. If the things are there, I want Steve to have a good, hard look at them.”
“You think it is all right?” asked Butch’s Pa, worried. “It’s not unethical?”