Bar was broad, broader than any man had ever been, with a huge rib-cage to take in the thin air of Mars. Around his waist was fastened a one-piece garment of light-weight cloth which was his costume night and day; for Bar, like the others now gazing up at him almost in adoration, had a thick layer of skin that hardly felt the piercing cold of a Martian night. Thinking of this, Dayton shivered a little in his warm woolen robes. For the hundredth time, Dayton told himself: "We did _too_ good a job." He was thinking of the master-plan that had made a new race of Martians out of ordinary Earth children, the plan which had started twenty years before. Dayton had looked at the fifty-three babies two decades before with mixed emotions of hope and fear, sharing the misgivings that had plagued the other scientists and teachers. It had been a daring idea, this patient dream that was now reaching fulfillment. First the babies would have to become accustomed gradually to the thin atmosphere, and lower gravity of Mars. Then, as adults, they would be able to march at will over the planet, breathing freely. Dayton's immediate superior, Dr. L'Hai of Evolutionary-Biogenetics, had voiced the half-felt sentiment, as the two of them, so long ago, had watched the young children crawling in their elaborately constructed play-pen of glass. The dial on the outside showed that the infants were receiving only a small percentage less oxygen than was normally found on Earth. The dial also pointed to a temperature of 58°, comfortable but cool for such young children. "Look at them," L'Hai said proudly. "They hardly know the difference. In three months--" with a gesture toward the dials--"a bit lower temperature, a bit thinner air. Slowly they will develop until they will be completely free of _our_ prison. _And they will build Mars!_" Dayton gazed around him at the flat countryside and the time-eroded mountains some five hundred miles distant, looming so clearly in the thin air they seemed barely fifty feet away. For acre upon acre, the flatland was unbroken, save by scrubs of a dingy greenish-blue hue and the ever-present crawling, red-tinged lichen. Not far from where the two scientists stood, there were three large plexi-glass bubbles, filled with oxygen: greenhouses containing vegetables, fruit, and stored protein foods. But what drew Dayton's eye, and interest more than anything else was far off. In the distance, one could discern the outlines of a half-toppled building, its crumbling contours jagged against the deep-blue sky. It was an old building of the dead Martians--the Martians who had embellished their civilization with huge, ornately carved stones; and then had died, leaving only the enormous blocks behind on a desolate waste land as mute testimony that once they had lived proudly. "Our children _will_ rebuild Mars," Dayton murmured to his colleague. "They will pick up that torch, and rekindle it!"