The Fredric Brown Megapack (6 page)

“Ten years later, ten years ago,” the Head Teacher told us, “you children were born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing conditions.

“From the time you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants; when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of Mars, the difference will be even greater.

“Your bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to survive conditions that seem normal to you.

“In another ten years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air; its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you.

“It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first Martians.”

Of course we had known a lot of those things already.

* * * *

The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open.

The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right.

Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians,
the
Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet.

Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day.

And tomorrow is the final day.

Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy.

We have dissimulated for years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly, misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty hairless skins.

We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too.

If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.

This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep off!

THE GEEZENSTACKS

One of the strange things about it was that Aubrey Walters wasn’t at all a strange little girl. She was quite as ordinary as her father and mother, who lived in an apartment on Otis Street, and who played bridge one night a week, went out somewhere another night, and spent the other evenings quietly at home.

Aubrey was nine, and had rather stringy hair and freckles, but at nine one never worries about such things. She got along quite well in the not-too-expensive private school to which her parents sent her, she made friends easily and readily with other children, and she took lessons on a three-quarter-size violin and played it abominably.

Her greatest fault, possibly, was her predilection for staying up late of nights, and that was the fault of her parents, really, for letting her stay up and dressed until she felt sleepy and wanted to go to bed. Even at five and six, she seldom went to bed before ten o’clock in the evening. And if, during a period of maternal concern, she was put to bed earlier, she never went to sleep anyway. So why not let the child stay up?

Now, at nine years, she stayed up quite as late as her parents did, which was about eleven o’clock of ordinary nights and later when they had company for bridge, or went out for the evening. Then it was later, for they usually took her along. Aubrey enjoyed it, whatever it was. She’d sit still as a mouse in a seat at the theater, or regard them with little-girl seriousness over the rim of a glass of ginger ale while they had a cocktail or two at a night club. She took the noise and the music and the dancing with big-eyed wonder and enjoyed every minute of it.

Sometimes Uncle Richard, her mother’s brother, went along with them. She and Uncle Richard were good friends. It was Uncle Richard who gave her the dolls.

“Funny thing happened today,” he’d said. “I’m walking down Rodgers Place, past the Mariner Building—you know, Edith; it’s where Doc Howard used to have his office—and something thudded on the sidewalk right behind me. And I turned around, and there was this package.”

“This package” was a white box a little larger than a shoe box, and it was rather strangely tied with gray ribbon. Sam Walters, Aubrey’s father, looked at it curiously.

“Doesn’t look dented,” he said. “Couldn’t have fallen out of a very high window. Was it tied up like that?”

“Just like that. I put the ribbon back on after I opened it and looked in. Oh, I don’t mean I opened it then or there. I just stopped and looked up to see who’d dropped it—thinking I’d see somebody looking out of a window. But nobody was, and I picked up the box. It had something in it, not very heavy, and the box and the ribbon looked like—well, not like something somebody’d throw away on purpose. So I stood looking up, and nothing happened, so I shook the box a little and—”

“All right, all right,” said Sam Walters. “Spare us the blow-by-blow. You didn’t find out who dropped it?”

“Right. And I went up as high as the fourth floor, asking the people whose windows were over the place where I picked it up. They were all home, as it happened, and none of them had ever seen it. I thought it might have fallen off a window ledge. But—”

“What’s in it, Dick?” Edith asked.

“Dolls. Four of them. I brought them over this evening for Aubrey. If she wants them.”

He untied the package, and Aubrey said, “Oooh, Uncle Richard. They’re—they’re
lovely.
”

Sam said, “Hm. Those look almost more like manikins than dolls, Dick. The way they’re dressed, I mean. Must have cost several dollars apiece. Are you sure the owner won’t turn up?”

Richard shrugged. “Don’t see how he can. As I told you, I went up four floors, asking. Thought from the look of the box and the sound of the thud, it couldn’t have come from even that high. And after I opened it, well—look—” He picked up one of the dolls and held it out for Sam Walters’ inspection.

“Wax. The heads and hands, I mean. And not one of them cracked. It couldn’t have fallen from higher than the second story. Even then, I don’t see how—” He shrugged again.

“They’re the Geezenstacks,” said Aubrey.

“Huh?” Sam asked.

“I’m going to call them the Geezenstacks,” Aubrey said. “Look, this one is Papa Geezenstack and this one is Mama Geezenstack, and the little girl one—that’s—that’s Aubrey Geezenstack. And the other man one, we’ll call him Uncle Geezenstack. The little girl’s uncle.”

Sam chuckled. “Like us, eh? But if Uncle—uh—Geezenstack is Mama Geezenstack’s brother, like Uncle Richard is Mama’s brother, then his name wouldn’t be Geezenstack.”

“Just the same, it is,” Aubrey said. “They’re all Geezenstacks. Papa, will you buy me a house for them?”

“A doll house? Why—” He’d started to say, “Why, sure,” but caught his wife’s eye and remembered. Aubrey’s birthday was only a week off and they’d been wondering what to get her. He changed it hastily to “Why, I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

* * * *

It was a beautiful doll house. Only one-story high, but quite elaborate, and with a roof that lifted off so one could rearrange the furniture and move the dolls from room to room. It scaled well with the manikins Uncle Richard had brought.

Aubrey was rapturous. All her other playthings went into eclipse and the doings of the Geezenstacks occupied most of her waking thoughts.

It wasn’t for quite a while that Sam Walters began to notice, and to think about, the strange aspect of the doings of the Geezenstacks. At first, with a quiet chuckle at the coincidences that followed one another.

And then, with a puzzled look in his eyes.

It wasn’t until quite a while later that he got Richard off into a corner. The four of them had just returned from a play. He said, “Uh—Dick.”

“Yeah, Sam?”

“These dolls, Dick. Where
did
you get them?”

Richard’s eyes stared at him blankly. “What do you mean, Sam? I told you where I got them.”

“Yes, but—you weren’t kidding, or anything? I mean, maybe you bought them for Aubrey, and thought we’d object if you gave her such an expensive present, so you—uh—”

“No, honest, I didn’t.”

“But dammit, Dick, they couldn’t have fallen out of a window, or dropped out, and not broken. They’re wax. Couldn’t someone walking behind you—or going by in an auto or something—?”

“There wasn’t anyone around, Sam. Nobody at all. I’ve wondered about it myself. But if I was lying, I wouldn’t make up a screwy story like that, would I? I’d just say I found them on a park bench or a seat in a movie. But why are you curious?”

“I—uh—I just got to wondering.”

Sam Walters kept on wondering, too.

They were little things, most of them. Like the time Aubrey had said, “Papa Geezenstack didn’t go to work this morning. He’s in bed, sick.”

“So?” Sam had asked. “And what is wrong with the gentleman?”

“Something he ate, I guess.”

And the next morning, at breakfast, “And how is Mr. Geezenstack, Aubrey?”

“A little better, but he isn’t going to work today yet, the doctor said. Tomorrow, maybe.”

And the next day, Mr. Geezenstack went back to work. That, as it happened, was the day Sam Walters came home feeling quite ill, as a result of something he’d eaten for lunch. Yes, he’d missed two days from work. The first time he’d missed work on account of illness in several years.

And some things were quicker than that, and some slower. You couldn’t put your finger on it and say, “Well, if this happens to the Geezenstacks, it will happen to us in twenty-four hours.” Sometimes it was less than an hour. Sometimes as long as a week.

“Mama and Papa Geezenstack had a quarrel today.”

And Sam had tried to avoid that quarrel with Edith, but it seemed he just couldn’t. He’d been quite late getting home, through no fault of his own. It had happened often, but this time Edith took exception. Soft answers failed to turn away wrath, and at last he’d lost his own temper.

“Uncle Geezenstack is going away for a visit.” Richard hadn’t been out of town for years, but the next week he took a sudden notion to run down to New York. “Pete and Amy, you know. Got a letter from them asking me—”

“When?” Sam asked, almost sharply. “When did you get the letter?”

“Yesterday.”

“Then last week you weren’t— This sounds like a silly question, Dick, but last week were you thinking about going anywhere? Did you say anything to—to anyone about the possibility of your visiting someone?”

“Lord, no. Hadn’t even thought about Pete and Amy for months, till I got their letter yesterday. Want me to stay a week.”

“You’ll be back in three days—maybe,” Sam had said. He wouldn’t explain, even when Richard did come back in three days. It sounded just too damn silly to say that he’d known how long Richard was going to be gone, because that was how long Uncle Geezenstack had been away.

Sam Walters began to watch his daughter, and to wonder. She, of course, was the one who made the Geezenstacks do whatever they did. Was it possible that Aubrey had some strange preternatural insight which caused her, unconsciously, to predict things that were going to happen to the Walters and to Richard?

He didn’t, of course, believe in clairvoyance. But was Aubrey clairvoyant?

“Mrs. Geezenstack’s going shopping today. She’s going to buy a new coat.”

That one almost sounded like a put-up job. Edith had smiled at Aubrey and then looked at Sam. “That reminds me, Sam. Tomorrow I’ll be downtown, and there’s a sale at—”

“But, Edith, these are war times. And you don’t
need
a coat.”

He’d argued so earnestly that he made himself late for work. Arguing uphill, because he really could afford the coat and she really hadn’t bought one for two years. But he couldn’t explain that the real reason he didn’t want her to buy one was that Mrs. Geezen— Why, it was too silly to say, even to himself.

Edith bought the coat.

Strange, Sam thought, that nobody else noticed those coincidences. But Richard wasn’t around all the time, and Edith—well, Edith had the knack of listening to Aubrey’s prattle without hearing nine-tenths of it.

“Aubrey Geezenstack brought home her report card today, Papa. She got ninety in arithmetic and eighty in spelling and—”

* * * *

And two days later, Sam was calling up the headmaster of the school. Calling from a paystation, of course, so nobody would hear him.

“Mr. Bradley, I’d like to ask a question that I have a—uh—rather peculiar, but important, reason for asking. Would it be possible for a student at your school to know in advance exactly what grades…”

No, not possible. The teachers themselves didn’t know, until they’d figured averages, and that hadn’t been done until the morning the report cards were made out and sent home. Yes, yesterday morning, while the children had their play period.

“Sam,” Richard said, “you’re looking kind of seedy. Business worries? Look, things are going to get better from now on, and with your company, you got nothing to worry about anyway.”

“That isn’t it, Dick. It—I mean, there isn’t anything I’m worrying about. Not exactly. I mean—” And he’d had to wriggle out of the cross-examination by inventing a worry or two for Richard to talk him out of.

He thought about the Geezenstacks a lot. Too much. If only he’d been superstitious, or credulous, it might not have been so bad. But he
wasn’t.
That’s why each succeeding coincidence hit him a little harder than the last.

Edith and her brother noticed it, and talked about it when Sam wasn’t around.

“He
has
been acting queer lately, Dick. I’m—I’m really worried. He acts so— Do you think we could talk him into seeing a doctor or a—”

“A psychiatrist? Um, if we could. But I can’t see him doing it, Edith. Something’s eating him, and I’ve tried to pump him about it, but he won’t open up. Y’know—I think it’s got something to do with those damn dolls.”