A banquet, planned by the city to welcome home the conquering heroes, was cancelled. There were no heroes left to welcome back.
What was in the packing box?
'It's an animal,' Dr. Gilmer declared, 'and that's about as far as I would care to go. It seems to be alive, but that is hard to tell. Even when moving fast — fast, that is, for it — it probably would make a sloth look like chain lightning in comparison.'
Jack Woods stared down through the heavy glass walls that caged the thing Dr. Gilmer had found in the packing box marked 'Animal'.
It looked like a round ball of fur.
'It's all curled up, sleeping,' he said.
'Curled up, hell,' said Gilmer. 'That's the shape of the beast. It's spherical and it's covered with fur. Fur-Ball would be a good name for it, if you were looking for something descriptive. A fur coat of that stuff would keep you comfortable in the worst kind of weather the North Pole could offer. It's thick and it's warm. Mars, you must remember, is damned cold.'
'Maybe we'll have fur-trappers and fur-trading posts up on Mars,' Woods suggested. 'Big fur shipments to Earth and Martian wraps selling at fabulous prices.'
'They'd kill them off in a hurry if it ever came to that,' declared Gilmer. 'A foot a day would be top speed for that baby, if it can move at all. Oxygen would be scarce on Mars. Energy would be something mighty hard to come by and this boy couldn't afford to waste it by running around. He'd just have to sit tight and not let anything distract him from the mere business of just living.'
'It doesn't seem to have eyes or ears or anything you'd expect an animal to have,' Woods said, straining his eyes the better to see the furry ball through the glass.