There was a fear in him—of conforming for too long to the demands of this weird environment and of somehow losing a human heritage.
"I'm reading your mind, Joe," Doran laughed. "Don't worry. We both love the smell of coffee and bacon, too much. And music, and nice furniture, and walks in the park. We're not like Frank was, or young Will perhaps still is. No, this will make us want such things more—tie us tighter to Earth."
At dawn they blundered on. During their third night underground they were raided while they slept. Some chocolate bars and other food-concentrates disappeared. And a pencil of Joe's. Their two-way radio would no longer work. The chuckling, chirping inquisitive creatures of the Martian soil had crept into its case and broken it.
Thus the Daytons, out of contact with Port Laribee, did not hear how Danny Bryant staggered back, dazed, frost-bitten, and half smothered, to his parents' arms.
The storm ended after five days. The small sun blazed in the steely sky, which seemed as brittle as frozen air. There was a sharp lifting of mood. Go back to Port Laribee? The Daytons were tempted. But they had not yet found the boys. Besides, they were far afield. And with much of their supplies used up or stolen, the work of mere survival consumed time and energy and slowed travel. So it was almost as well to push on, wasn't it?
It seemed that they were always using pointed pipette and compressor to refill oxygen flasks from the hollow parts of vegetation. At dawn they collected hoar-frost crystals wrung from the arid atmosphere by the nocturnal cold, for drinking water. They ate underground fruit and the starchy pulps of certain roots. Wary of poison, they tasted untried things cautiously.
Mars hogs that tunnelled in an eternal blind search for food, were fair game in the darkness beneath the thicket leaf-carpets. Dayton had a tiny ato-stove that served for their meagre cooking.
Weeks passed and a strange life-pattern was set as the Daytons moved south, deeper into broadening Syrtis Major. Maybe it was a bit warmer. Some paper-dry growths were still blue-green. More were brown from the winter dryness. Necessities were harder to find.
Sometimes, among the pastel-tinted thickets and low hills, there were patches of real Martian desert, red and lifeless.
Night followed exhausting day, and how welcome was the warmth of a burrow where one could nurse the frostbites acquired in the frigid dawn.