No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5)

by Clifford D. Simak

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  No Life of Their Own

  And Other Stories

  The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Five

  Introduction by David W. Wixon

  Introduction

  Clifford Simak’s Country

  “A cawing crow skimmed over a distant ridge and slanted down into the valley shadow. From far away, down the river, came the quacking of a flock of mallards.”

  —Clifford D. Simak, in “Census”

  On numerous occasions during the last decades of his life, Clifford D. Simak was described, often with admiration but sometimes with just a tinge of disdain, by such phrases as “the pastoral voice of science fiction” or “the poet of rural space.” He was not put off by such language; he interpreted it as recognition of his love for the land in which he grew up and the people who lived there and in other similar locations. He believed that he came from a special place, and he was right.

  The work of some writers is so distinctive that a discerning and experienced reader can sometimes name the author even if no name is attached to a particular story, but it can be harder to pin down exactly what distinctive trait is being recognized: Is it plot, or theme, or tone? Is it something about the characters, or even the “purple”-ness, or lack thereof, of the prose?

  But when you’re asking questions like that about Clifford D. Simak, you’ll find that most knowledgeable critics—or even many casual readers—point, immediately and without hesitation, to the settings of his stories: settings that, over the decades, caused him to be described in the phrases noted above. And many of those readers use the phrase Simak Country as a shorthand for these settings.

  Nonetheless, many would be surprised to learn how often Cliff Simak’s stories were not set in Simak Country. For every “Big Front Yard,” for example, there was a “Limiting Factor”; for every “No Life of Their Own,” a “Construction Shack.”

  So what exactly do we mean when we refer to “Simak Country”? When I say that Clifford D. Simak was born on a farm on the south side of the Wisconsin River, not far from where that stream meets the Mississippi, some will think that means he was raised on the flat Midwestern prairies. But that’s not true.

  One could attempt to figure out exactly how many of Cliff Simak’s stories could be characterized as taking place in Simak Country, but that would require closely reading all of those stories and deciding what characteristics place a story into that category. For “Simak Country” is an ephemeral place, one of the mind and of attitude, and stories that never mention Wisconsin or the little town of Millville may nevertheless take place there. In fact, even stories set on other planets sometimes have a touch of “Simak Country,” for example, when a character remembers growing up on a chicken farm back on Earth. That mere mention tells the reader something about the person.

  “Brother” is clearly set in Simak Country: Edward Lambert’s memories of his life on the family farm paint a place similar to the Simak family farm. And the mention that Lambert can see ships landing at the spaceport on the Iowa bluffs is enough to situate the Lambert’s farm in extreme western Wisconsin. “The Ghost of a Model T,” with its loving descriptions of country dance halls and old roads climbing the sides of ridges, fits the category. And the novel Time Is the Simplest Thing is also set in Simak Country. Although it starts in Mexico, the climax takes place along the Missouri River in South Dakota, where there is a little village set above the river, and a people set apart from the majority.

  Consider the landscape into which Cliff was born.

  Clifford Simak himself occasionally spoke of his land as a unique and special place. At one point, he described it as “an incredibly ancient land.” And, indeed, his land had an unusual history, one that geologists recognize as part of a geological anomaly known as the “Driftless Area,” so named because it largely lacked the “drifts” of material—ranging from gravel to gigantic boulders—generally left behind by retreating or melting glaciers. And that was because the Driftless Area—which encompasses a large chunk of southwestern and central Wisconsin as well as smaller portions of northwestern Illinois, northeastern Iowa, and southeastern Minnesota—did not get covered by ice during the most recent glaciation, even though lobes of ice almost surrounded it. (This is not to say that glaciers never covered Cliff’s land, but it was spared the most recent encroachment.)

  For that reason, the land largely retained the shape predating that most recent Ice Age; it was not ground down by the weight of moving ice, nor buried by mounds of gravel. Its only changes were a result of the slow actions of wind, rain, and the rivers.

  Today, that terrain consists of ridges cut by the small valleys created by streams making their way to larger rivers such as the Wisconsin, and the combination creates a complex pattern of steep-sided branching valleys. Roads crossing the area often have to twist and curve, using switchbacks to make the steep climb from the deep valley bottoms to the ridge tops, only to face the choice of either following the ridge top, or descending into the next valley. For a long time, people living in those areas found it difficult to travel. Moreover, the land was thickly wooded, so that farms had to be literally chopped out of the forest. (Starting a farm on virgin prairie was not easy—the sod was difficult for the first plows to break through, which led to the term sodbuster—but it is at least arguable that having to cut down a small forest was worse.)

  Knowing that, we can reasonably say that Simak stories set on or near the lower reaches of the Wisconsin River—or in similar rural settings, even if there’s no mention of the Wisconsin—are set in “Simak Country.” Look for such clues as mentions of Platteville limestone, a creek whose waters gurgle over stony shallows before swirling into a deeper pool, little hidden valleys (“hollows”), lilacs, deep ravines, narrow ridge-top roads, obscure paths vanishing among the trees …

  And yet, having laid out for you some images to look for if you want to recognize “Simak Country,” I must add that these physical things alone are not required. Cliff himself once said that his country “was not only a physical environment, but psychological as well.” While any similar setting can be called “Simak Country” regardless of where it might be, the truth is that the most important trait that makes a place part of Simak Country is the character, the manners, of the people. Any country, after all, is best described through the character of its people.

  The portrayal of such people was how Clifford Simak tried to make the people who populated his stories ordinary. Despite what he sometimes did to sell his fiction, he did not want to tell stories about heroes—once, when someone told him that his characters were often losers, his reply was simply that “I like losers!”

  David W. Wixon

  No Life of Their Own

  This story was, I believe, sent to Horace Gold in late November 1958, under the title “Rabbit’s Feet, Inc.” Originally published in the August 1959 issue of Galaxy Magazine, this is yet another story about aliens coming to live and work on Earth—and the most fantastic element in the entire piece is that the Earthians accept them.

  I can’t help thinking of the story as “Huck Finn meets the aliens.”

  —dww

  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.”

  He would have told me more about his time machine, but there was an interruption.

  While we had been talking, Fancy Pants’ Pa and me, the Fancy Pants dog had run a cat up a maple tree. That is the normal situation for any cat and dog—unless Fancy Pants is around.

  For Fancy Pants wasn’t one to leave a situation normal. He reached up into the tree—well, he didn’t reach up with his hands, of course, but with whatever he reaches with—and he nailed this cat and sort of bundled it up so it couldn’t move and brought it down to the ground.

  Then he held the dog so the dog couldn’t
do more than twitch and he put that bundled-up cat down in front of the twitching dog, then let them loose with split-second timing.

  The two of them exploded into a blur of motion, with the weirdest uproar you ever heard. The cat made it to the tree in the fastest time and nearly took off the bark swarming up the trunk. And the dog miscalculated and failed to put on his brakes in time and banged smack into the tree spread-eagled.

  The cat by this time was up in the highest branches, hanging on and screaming, while the dog walked around in circles, acting kind of stunned.

  Fancy Pants’ Pa broke off what he was saying to me and he looked at Fancy Pants. He didn’t do or say a thing, but when he looked at Fancy Pants, Fancy Pants grew terribly pale and sort of wilted down.

  “Let that teach you,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “to leave those animals alone. You don’t see Steve here or Nature Boy mistreating them that way, do you?”

  “No, sir,” mumbled Fancy Pants.

  “And now get along, the two of you. You have things to do.”

  I got this to say for Fancy Pants’ Pa: he gives Fancy Pants his lickings, or whatever they may be, and then he forgets about it. He doesn’t keep harping at it for the rest of the day.

  So Fancy Pants and me went down the road, me shuffling along, kicking up the dust, and Fancy Pants floating along beside me.

  We got down to Nature Boy’s place and he was waiting out in front. I knew he had been hoping someone would come along. There were a couple of sparrows sitting on his shoulder and a rabbit hopping all around him and a chipmunk in the pocket of his pants, looking out at us with bright and beady eyes.

  Nature Boy and I sat down underneath a tree and Fancy Pants came as close as he ever does to sitting down—floating about three inches off the ground—and we talked about what we ought to do. Trouble was, there wasn’t really anything that needed any doing. So we sat there and talked and tossed pebbles and pulled stems of grass and put them in our mouths and chewed them, while Nature Boy’s pet wild things gamboled all around us and didn’t seem to be afraid at all. Except that they were a little leery of Fancy Pants. He is, when you come right down to it, a sort of sneaky rascal. Me they are fast friends with when I’m with Nature Boy, but let me meet them when I am alone and they keep their distance.