Colonial teenagers Jim Marlowe and Frank Sutton travel to the Lowell Academy boarding school for the start of the academic year.

Jim takes along his native Martian pet, Willis the Bouncer, a round furry ball the size of a volleyball, who is about as intelligent as a human child and has a photographic memory for sounds, which he can also reproduce perfectly.

Worse, Beecher has secretly planned to prevent the annual migration of the colonists (to avoid 12 months of severe winter weather) in order to save money.

Howe locks himself in his office, while Beecher sets up automatic, photosensor-controlled weapons outside to stop the malcontents (as he calls them) from leaving.

The colonists organize a raiding party, with the boys taking part, capture Beecher's office and proclaim the colony's independence from Earth.

Several Martians enter the school area, and one of them shows up in the door leading to Howe's office, hiding him from sight.

Heinlein's publishers edited and changed this, as well as a discussion early in the novel in which MacRae expresses strong support for adults and older children being free to carry handguns, and opposition to any government which would restrict that.

The Martian setting is logically constructed and rich in convincing detail [while] the characters are engaging and the action develops naturally.

"[1] P. Schuyler Miller, reviewing the original edition, praised the novel's "verisimilitude, the attention to detail which Heinlein's adult readers know well.

It stems from early telescope observations of Mars by 19th century astronomers who, beginning with the Italian Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877, believed they saw straight lines on the planet.