"But now, esteemed Professor, we want to be free. We don't want to walk on our planet for Earthlings. We are Martians...."
There was a murmur of assent from the others.
"We are bronze-skinned Martians," Bar went on. "And Mars is ours, by all rights. Earth may be our mother, but Mars is our father. And, like all good sons, we stay with our father!"
A cheer went up, and again Dayton shivered. His mind flashed back and for the second time he asked himself: "How long have I half-expected this?"
The children were all seven and a half years old, and they had made remarkable progress. One month earlier, they had been taken out of their air-bubbles. All the scientists had watched them with trepidation, but nothing had gone wrong. The children had not even noticed the difference. Their little lungs had already swelled and they inhaled and exhaled the vague air as they might have inhaled the normal air on Earth.
They were still bundled tightly against the cold, but—for the first time—they were permitted to run around. They could actually run; they didn't leap and spring like so many pogo-sticks, as did the older men. They ran, they played, and the heavy little muscles in their young legs held them down.
Around them were always three men, supervising. Dayton was one of the supervisors that day. Bar was the ring-leader, only then his name had been David Lombardy. He was a sharp one, the first to discover that they could out-run, out-leap, out-maneuver their elders.
"Catch me!" he taunted Dayton, evading the latter's grip at every turn. "Catch me, if you can!"
And the others took it up, laughing and screaming and running helter-skelter.