Chapter 12
As the wind faded and died, Dark released Maya and rose exultantly to his feet. Down below, he knew, Nuwell and the Masters were gasping out their lives in the thin air, like beached fish. Their recent attacker, Vidonati, lay half out of the door of the control room, his hands clutching convulsively at the floor.
"That's not the way I'd planned it, but it's just as good!" Dark exclaimed. "We've taken the farm!"
Then he remembered. Maya had no marshelmet!
Appalled, struck to the heart, he turned in his tracks.
Maya was standing behind him, calmly trying to rearrange her raven hair, tangled by the raging rush of wind.
"What's the matter?" she asked quietly, becoming aware of Dark's intent gaze.
"Maya! You don't have a helmet on! Are you breathing?"
She was silent for a moment, apparently examining herself.
"Why, no, I don't believe I am," she replied, just as calmly.
"How can you ...? Wait a minute!"
Dark sent his mind into the invisible. His probing thoughts fled over desert and lowland, seeking. They found the Martian, Qril, and he recognized that Qril responded immediately.
_Qril, how is it that Maya is able to live in the Martian atmosphere without breathing?_ asked Dark telepathically.
_She is as you_, replied Qril. _When she was a child, living among the Martians, we altered her physiological and genetic structure so that she, also, is able to utilize solar energy and exist without oxygen_.
_Why didn't you tell me this before, at Ultra Vires?_ demanded Dark.
_You did not ask_, replied Qril, and the mental contact faded out.
Dark turned to Maya, his face alight.
"Darling," he said, "our children will need no embryonic alterations. They will be born as we are, able to live under Martian conditions. And never again will either of us ever have to wear a marsuit!"
He felt the questing touch of Cheng's mind.
Cheng: _Are you there, Dark?_
Dark: _Here._
Cheng: _Are you all right?_
Dark: _We're both fine! We're coming out. Then we'll take off at once for the Icaria Desert, before the Mars City task force gets here._
He and Maya walked hand in hand through the blasted airlock. The three groundcars were there, waiting.
The two of them stood for a moment, before getting aboard the groundcars, and looked out together across the red desert toward the sinking sun.
Death? Desolation? No, not for them. This was life, and free, bleak beauty, for them and for their children.
The future of Mars was theirs.
End of Project Gutenberg's Rebels of the Red Planet, by Charles Louis Fontenay