In the first place, Professor Dayton sat under a small glass dome with a dashboard of dials and meters directly at his elbow. His class, on the other hand, sat in the open air.
Now and then a head turned to gaze through one of the windows at the dull, brick-colored desert land outside, the low, gently rolling hills that quietly told the story of Mars' long and ancient past.
"Today is your last day of class," Professor Dayton said into the portable microphone. "You have been good students, all of you, a credit to your mother-Earth. Now, I should like to—"
He stopped abruptly. One of the young men was standing, waving him to silence. Dayton knew him well, a bright eager youngster who called himself Bar. All of the others turned their faces to him as to a natural leader.
Leader! Dayton felt a shiver of apprehension. How long had he half-expected this? Since the day, seven years before, when they had all changed their names? Or even earlier, when they had begun to notice?
He stared out, directly at Bar, keeping his face expressionless. We're powerless, he thought, powerless against them. Bar was six feet and eight inches tall, and his height was not unusual in his group. His skin had been burnt through the years by an unhampered Mars sun to a russet-brown; and out of the saddle color, his blue eyes gleamed like sapphires.
Bar was broad, broader than any man had ever been, with a huge rib-cage to take in the thin air of Mars. Around his waist was fastened a one-piece garment of light-weight cloth which was his costume night and day; for Bar, like the others now gazing up at him almost in adoration, had a thick layer of skin that hardly felt the piercing cold of a Martian night. Thinking of this, Dayton shivered a little in his warm woolen robes.
For the hundredth time, Dayton told himself: "We did too good a job." He was thinking of the master-plan that had made a new race of Martians out of ordinary Earth children, the plan which had started twenty years before.
Dayton had looked at the fifty-three babies two decades before with mixed emotions of hope and fear, sharing the misgivings that had plagued the other scientists and teachers. It had been a daring idea, this patient dream that was now reaching fulfillment. First the babies would have to become accustomed gradually to the thin atmosphere, and lower gravity of Mars. Then, as adults, they would be able to march at will over the planet, breathing freely.