The rocket’s metal cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family. The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the centre of a vacuum. His wife, before him, trembled. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes. The children looked up at him. His face was cold. “What’s wrong?” asked his wife. “Let’s get back on the rocket.” “Go back to Earth?” “Yes! Listen!” The wind blew, whining. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. He saw the old cities, lost and lying like children’s delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass. “Chin up, Harry,” said his wife. “It’s too late. We’ve come at least sixty-five million miles or more.” The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass. He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. “Here we go,” he said – a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned. They walked into town. Their name was Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Tim, Laura, and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr.Bittering and Mrs.Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening. “I feel like a salt crystal,” he often said, “in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don’t belong here. We’re Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven’s sake, Cora, let’s buy tickets for home!” But she only shook her head. “One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we’ll be safe here.” “Safe and insane!” Tick-took, seven o’clock sang the voice clock; time to get up. And they did.