Part 2

"Will, you can see that we're like you. Maybe we don't want to be, but we are, now. We can't drag you back again to Port Laribee."

The kid relaxed a little. His pale eyes turned puzzled but wary.

"About the other boy, Will--Danny Bryant?" Doran asked.

Will's lip curled. "He was weak and dumb," he said, fumbling with unused words. "I took him back long ago."

"You did fine, Will," Joe said. "Now what have you found here in the hills? You've been camping in one place for a while. Show us."

Joe had to use harsh command against the sullenness still in the boy. He did so bluntly, driven by grim hope and need.

Thus, before sunset, Doran and he found something they needed.

"Dad wanted such a place," the kid said, half-proudly.

* * * * *

It was less than optimism promised--just a small, deep valley, pretty as a painting, but quietly forbidding, too. Joe had seen others almost like it. Martian growths clogged it, sprouting new blue-green leaves. The ruins were far less damaged than in the cities. There were countless little domes of the ant-creatures, indicating some underground water.

Nimbly Will led the way downward and across the valley to a stout structure. It was not very unusual, just another relic in a region away from the fiercest path of war. Here might have been a last refuge, after the death of millions, the breakdown of machinery, and the rapid worsening of Martian climatic conditions. Crystal roofs lay shattered around the ornate central massiveness. But one wing with thicker glaze still stood--sealable.

Doran's eyes lighted as she and Joe and her nephew went into the deserted interior through the double doors of an airlock which some last, fleeing Martian had not closed.

Hardy wilderness plants had intruded into this hothouse but there still were troughs of soil, proving that this had been a garden sealed against cold, a place of fruit and flower.

"We might try to use this, Joe," Doran said, her voice thin in the heavy stillness.

He nodded. But his gratitude was tinged with scared and bitter overtones. He hurried to explore the central edifice, which must have been closed before the kid came, for the preservation of things inside was good. There were odd cylindrical cells, niches dark and dusty, cubicles piled with metal boxes. There was even what seemed a kind of machine-shop.

And there was a valve which, from the footprints in the dust, Will had tried to turn. Joe accomplished this now with a levering metal bar. Out in the dry hothouse pool a spout jetted rusty water.

"The underground storage cisterns are intact," Joe was soon explaining. "I prayed there'd be some."

Joe Dayton was grateful, yet not happy.

Grimly he began again the bitter toil of survival, the others helping. Like bizarre harvesters they tore up great bundles of roots and stalks and piled them inside the hothouse. Briefly the blue sunset shadows were long, over that weird, beautiful valley. Then the dusk came, and the faint frost haze of the always frigid nights.

"We'd better hurry before we freeze," Joe growled irritably. "When we get a lot of this stuff inside we'll tramp on it to break the oxygen-capsules. By morning there should be breathable atmosphere under this roof. Later, vegetation planted inside will keep it fresh."

Joe Dayton's mood now had a taint of despair. Forced to try to settle in this place, he felt more than ever trapped. More than ever he felt as if the souls of those eon-dead beings depicted on carven walls that Phobos, the nearer moon, now illuminated, had been crowding into his human flesh and brain to push his own ego out. No, it was not witchcraft--it was simpler. Mars had shaped its ancient inhabitants. Now it was working on Earthly material with the same, subtle, ruthless fingers.

When the task in the hothouse was finished, Joe went with his wife and nephew to burrow again away from the cold, and to eat and to sleep all in the manner which Mars compelled.

Joe wanted Doran and his child to keep their human ways. His child. That was his worst thought, now.

His mind pictured Will--tattered, wild, strange in thought and feeling. He had lived his first years on Earth. So how would it be with a child _born_ on Mars? Joe cursed into his burry beard--cursed the distance to Port Laribee which might as well not be there at all, so out of reach was it, so ineffectual, and so soon probably to be left deserted. Though bone weary, Joe did not sleep well that quiet night.

The next day, bathed and smiling, Doran still did not look quite Earthly to him. She was browned by Martian sun but the real difference that had come into her strong beauty was a thing of multiple detail, like the mark of persons used to the sea contrasted with those born to the plains--but deeper.

Scrubbed fairly clean, Will remained an urchin of Mars. Also scrubbed, and shaved, Joe felt more comfortable. Yet he knew that basically this restored nothing.

* * * * *

A day later he was wandering around outside the hothouse, trying to plan needed agricultural projects, when a faint scrape of pebbles made him wheel warily.

"People! Rescue!" were his first eager thoughts. But then he saw that the three figures, two large and one small, were creatures attuned to Mars in the same way as himself, and as helpless.

Yet when old friends were recognized, in spite of the deep changes, Joe Dayton felt a joyous lift.

"Doc Lorring!" he shouted. "Kettrich. And Tillie. Hey! Hey, Doran! Will! Come here!"

Doctor Lorring's tomboy daughter, a bit younger than Will, showed a grinning dirty face through a battered air-hood and said "Hi."

"We were trying to follow you most of the time, Dayton," Lorring stammered. "We hoped to find you and Doran, and maybe the Terry boy. But our tractor broke down, and we had to live off the land. While we still had the vehicle there didn't seem much reason why Tillie shouldn't come along. We'd begun to give up hope of finding any of you alive."

Minutes were spent questioning and explaining. They all went into the sealed hothouse. Kettrich, the biologist, had even saved a little coffee.

"For a celebration, if we ever located any of you missing ones," he said to Joe and Doran.

Kettrich sighed and went on, "Chief Vitrac, Lorson, and a dozen others are the only old timers left at the Port. The others have all gone, with Dolph Terry and the tourists. Humans are about done with Mars though I suppose a few will trickle out here from time to time."

With contemplative relish Doran sipped coffee brewed with crudely filtered water on an ato-stove. She smiled like any woman who has her man, and has found a place and a purpose.

"Not for humans," she mused. "That's one way of putting it. Still, it doesn't necessarily mean us. Let's face facts," she continued. "A natural selection was going on all the time. Thousands of people left, disgusted. A very few stayed grimly, or got trapped. On Earth I never thought much about Mars, but now I've been here so long. We're different, perhaps proudly so. Oh, we still like the things that Earth-people like, maybe more than ever. But the Old Ones here also had their comforts. We have Earth flesh and bone, we'll never be like them that way, and I'm glad. You can either say that Terrans are supremely adaptable, or that we are no longer quite human, and that there are Martians again. Because one _has_ to be that to really live here, doesn't he? Mars won't be left wasted and sad. We're some of its first new people. Among the explorers there must be others. More and more will come. Gradually, through the centuries, we'll build Mars back toward what it was."

Dayton stared at his wife, then down at the ancient flagging, then at the others. Tillie tittered. She was as brown as Will Terry and almost as attached to the Red Planet. Around her mended glove a fuzzy creature twined, chirping. Will and Tillie were children of Mars.

* * * * *

Doran's assessment of a situation in plain talk took away its dread for Joe, giving his Mars-love a chance. He began to feel at home. "Is my wife talking sense?" he asked puzzledly.

Kettrich and Lorring had both been fascinated by this world, too--willing to devote years to it.

"Well, we can still radio Port Laribee," Lorring chuckled. "But in any case we're stuck here for a long time. Meanwhile, there's food growing wild around us. There's water. There are tools, machines, and supplies to puzzle out. And a valley to reclaim as a start. Beyond that, the job gets bigger and more interesting."

Before sunset that day, Joe and Doran Dayton walked alone in the valley. The Earth-star was already silvery in the dark blue west. The hills were dun-hued and peaceful. The domes of the Mars-ants gleamed. Fantastic spring flowers wavered in the wind. Small dust-whirls stirred among the ruins.

Joe Dayton looked forward, gladly now, to the birth of his child on the Red Planet.

"I hope that the Neo-Martians won't become so separate that they'll forget to be friends with Terrans," Doran mused.

Joe nodded as his arm crept around her waist. To him legendary history and present fact had merged. The wind's rustle was no longer the whisper of the dead past.