The cube vanished from his hand.
It appeared on the platform of the time machine.
“See? Five minutes before I shall place it there, it is there!”
His other colleague frowned at the cube. “But,” he said, “what if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o’clock? Wouldn’t there be a paradox of some sort involved?”
“An interesting idea,” Professor Johnson said. “I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not…”
There was no paradox at all. The cube remained.
But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.
KEEP OUT
Daptine is the secret of it. Adaptine, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt.
They explained it all to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars.
“You’re home, children,” the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend.
And that evening he told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from inside his helmet.
“Children,” he said, “you are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors.
“Then you will go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and your children will breed true. They too will be Martians.
“It is time you were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.”
Then he told us.
Man, he said, had first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks.
* * * *
For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome which had been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome much smaller and less than a mile away.
It had looked as though mankind could never spread to the other planets of the solar system besides Earth for of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he couldn’t live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others.
And then, in 2034, thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymouth had discovered daptine. A miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given, but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation.
It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made gradually.
Dr. Waymouth had inoculated and then mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions, he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have killed one of its parents within minutes.
Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those conditions.
“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 exc
eption. 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.
The Fredric Brown Megapack: 33 Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 5