Without mystery adventuring would quickly lose its zest, and science would just as quickly lose its Peters. Could science afford such a loss?
Susan appeared to think so. She almost pulled Peter into the shack, and forced him to sit down in the middle of the floor.
"You talk too much, Peter," she said.
Buried somewhere in the myths and legends of childhood there is reputed to be a magical box which at one time contained, incredibly folded and shrunken, all of the animals that ever were.
Small on the outside, large within. The shack wasn't magical, but it did seem to swallow up and shrink the children in much the same fashion. Little white ghosts they might have seemed to a not too observant eavesdropper, sitting side by side in the middle of the floor.
Above them arched a shining roof of crystal clear quartz, and they had only to raise their eyes to see the Martian sky, cold, cloudless and eerily remote.
"I don't hate Mr. Caxton," Peter said. "I just feel sorry for him."
"Mr. Caxton thinks I'm hungry, but I'm not," Susan said. "I don't want any supper. He'll be madder than ever when he finds out we've gone to sleep without giving him a chance to punish us."
Susan fell silent, leaning her head against her brother's shoulder.
On Mars the night does not creep treacherously over the desert amidst clusters of lengthening shadows. It sweeps down on pinions of pulsating blackness, with hardly a glimmer of twilight to herald its coming.