Mr. Caxton bent, and picked up a thin reed switch. He flourished it threateningly. "Go away," he growled. "Get out of my sight. Can't you see I'm busy?" "Come on," Peter urged, tugging at his sister's sleeve. "If he hits me you'll start crying." "I won't, Peter. I'll show him." "I'd rather take a whipping than see you cry. Do you want me to take a whipping?" "No, Peter." "Then let's go." Peter and Susan turned, and went racing across the hot red sand to the prefabricated metal shack which they shared with their parents when Martian archeology wasn't waging relentless warfare on the domestic instincts of Dr. Kenneth Ashley, and his gifted, scholarly wife. "Just wait until papa gets back!" Susan whispered, stopping to loosen her oxygen mask at the door of the shack. "Papa doesn't know how mean Mr. Caxton gets when he's been drinking." "He doesn't have to drink to be mean," Peter reminded her. "Next time we go exploring I'll play dumb." Peter's voice came out thin, and muffled through his oxygen mask. But there was a ring of angry defiance in it. "He doesn't know how an explorer feels anyway. He's awfully educated, but Mr. Walgreen says you can't just pop knowledge into your mouth like a pill, and swallow it." Self-portrait of Peter. A boy with shining eyes, and curly dark hair who loves knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge and a lot of other things, eh, Peter? The wind ruffling the tumbled dunes, the bone-white summits of the buried Martian cities, and, just for good measure, the dawn with its banners of fire. Why shouldn't an eager, inquiring boy of ten see a few strange clawmarks in the sand? What right had Mr. Caxton or anyone else to disillusion and shake the faith of a budding explorer in the strange, the incredible? Without mystery adventuring would quickly lose its zest, and science would just as quickly lose its Peters. Could science afford such a loss? Susan appeared to think so. She almost pulled Peter into the shack, and forced him to sit down in the middle of the floor. "You talk too much, Peter," she said. Buried somewhere in the myths and legends of childhood there is reputed to be a magical box which at one time contained, incredibly folded and shrunken, all of the animals that ever were. Small on the outside, large within. The shack wasn't magical, but it did seem to swallow up and shrink the children in much the same fashion. Little white ghosts they might have seemed to a not too observant eavesdropper, sitting side by side in the middle of the floor. Above them arched a shining roof of crystal clear quartz, and they had only to raise their eyes to see the Martian sky, cold, cloudless and eerily remote. "I don't hate Mr. Caxton," Peter said. "I just feel sorry for him." "Mr. Caxton thinks I'm hungry, but I'm not," Susan said. "I don't want any supper. He'll be madder than ever when he finds out we've gone to sleep without giving him a chance to punish us."