"Wait a little, Bar. We'll leave, but first there are many things you should—"
"No, Professor! Go now!" A mighty fist doubled, and a large dark-brown finger pointed out the window. The professor followed the finger's direction with his eyes, until they lighted upon the slim bullet-shaped ship in the near distance—the space ship, Albatross, lying securely berthed in a hammock of sand that shimmered eerily in the clashing sunlight.
That night, the fifty-three Martians herded their former teachers into the Albatross. The scientists stood at the video screen in the nose of the ship, and watched the greenhouses, the ranches, the home-dwellings, all the marks of Earth, being wrecked with fiery precision. Then, their beloved charts, the carefully-written notes, the photograph albums, everything that told of the slow growth of fifty-three Earthling babies to huge-chested Martians ... all these, piled in a heap, to be ignited.
Someone—Bar, Dayton thought—took the torch and threw it on the paper. In the clear cold air, the books took fire slowly, tiny blue flames licking up through them, and then, suddenly, a brief, intense glare of red and orange and yellow. In the firelight, the brown faces looked almost savage.
The pilot shrugged his shoulders. "There'll be a war in twenty-five years," he said.
"No," Dayton said softly, and behind him, the others nodded silently. "We have no need to worry."
The pilot looked at him strangely, then shrugged. Ah well, he had a job: to get them home and warn the Earth government.
The silver ship took off with hardly a sound from the dim sands of Mars. In three minutes, it was a tiny star, flickering in the skies with billions of other winking pin-points of light. And down below, the new, self-appointed citizens of Mars danced around the still glowing ashes of their history....
Dayton got the inter-space call five years later. He knew what it was. He had awaited it with the same patience and silence with which he had awaited Bar's speech on Mars.