The Fredric Brown Megapack by Fredric Brown

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