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

when I’d been looking at the ladder. I must have looked into the future and seen the ladder slip. Except it never slipped, for the halflings, seeing that it would slip, had made one leg of it settle in the ground. And then, with the ladder sitting solid, it never slipped, of course. The halflings had done no more than look ahead a bit and then righted something that was about to happen before it had a chance to happen.
    And that, I told myself, was the basis of good luck and bad. The halflings could spot disaster coming and try to head it off. Except they couldn’t always make it. They had tried to protect Andy when Pa took a lick at him and they had failed. So I figured that they weren’t infallible and that made me feel some better.
    For if they could make good luck for Andy, it stood to reason they could make bad luck for the rest of us. All they had to do, if they had a mind to, was to see good luck heading for us and change it into bad.
    It might even be possible, I told myself, that the halflings lived ahead of us, by a few seconds or so, and that the only thing which separated us from them was this matter of a different time.
    But there was something else that troubled me a lot. Why had I been able to see two different times? It was clear to me that Butch and his people couldn’t, for if they could, they’d have more answers to the halfling situation. They’d been studying it for years, and so far as I could figure, they didn’t know for certain about this two-time business.
    It seemed to me, when I thought about it, that Butch’s Pa might have ground better than he knew when he made my glasses. He might have put in something or taken out something or done something he didn’t know about at all.
    Or it might be that the human race had a different kind of vision, or maybe just a little different, and when you added the correction for Butch’s kind of vision to our kind of vision, you brought out a thing you couldn’t even guess at.
    I tried and tried to get it clear within my mind, but I couldn’t do it. I just went around in circles.
    I stayed close to home for several days because I had a feeling that I should be ignoring Butch to uphold the family honor and that is how I missed the big hassle between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy.
    It seems that Nature Boy got sick and tired of how Fancy Pants was mistreating that poor, bedraggled cat. So he took one member of the skunk family that had fallen in love with him and he clipped and dyed that skunk to look exactly like the cat. And one day he sneaked over to Fancy Pants’ place and switched the skunk for the cat without anyone seeing him.
    The skunk didn’t want to be Fancy Pants’ skunk; he belonged to Nature Boy. So he started beating it back home as fast as he could go, which wasn’t very fast.
    Just then Fancy Pants floated out of the door and he saw the skunk going through the gate. He thought the cat was trying to sneak away from him, so he reached out and grabbed it up and rolled it into a ball and tossed it pretty high into the air, sort of careless like, to teach that cat a lesson.
    It went up in the air and came down smack-dab on top of Fancy Pants, who was floating out there in the yard a few feet off the ground.
    The skunk was scared witless. As soon as it got its claws fastened into Fancy Pants and had some leverage, it retaliated with enthusiasm. And for the first time in his life, Fancy Pants thumped down to the ground and, among other things, he got his clothes as dirty as any other kid.
    I would give a zillion dollars to have seen it.
    For a while, they figured that they might have to take Fancy Pants out somewhere and bury him for a week or two to make him presentable again. But they finally got him to a point where one could come near him.
    Fancy Pants’ Pa went storming down to talk with Nature Boy’s Pa and the two of them put on a ruckus that had the neighborhood chuckling for a week.
    And now I was really strapped for playmates. I was