"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.