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As the story begins, where are the children and what are they doing?

Ray Bradbury's story is set on the planet Venus on a very special day--the one day in every seven years that the rain stops and the sun comes out. The children featured in the story are nine-year-old schoolchildren--children of the "rocket men and women" who have come to build a civilization on Venus. Although most of the settlement the people have built on Venus consists of underground tunnels, the complex the school is in has...

Ray Bradbury's story is set on the planet Venus on a very special day--the one day in every seven years that the rain stops and the sun comes out. The children featured in the story are nine-year-old schoolchildren--children of the "rocket men and women" who have come to build a civilization on Venus. Although most of the settlement the people have built on Venus consists of underground tunnels, the complex the school is in has windows. One can imagine a hallway that slants upwards as it mounts to an observation room with "great thick windows." In this viewing area the children press together to look out on the outer environment that has produced rain for as long as they can remember. This area is described as the children's schoolroom. Whether other areas of the complex have windows or whether there are other schoolrooms like this one, the story does not say. 


On this day the children are all crowded around the window watching the weather. The weather is rainy as it always is, yet the children are pushing and shoving among each other to get close to the window. This is because they are anticipating a change in the weather that will occur this day--a change none of them can remember seeing. The last time the sun came out on Venus, these children were only two years old. Only Margot remembers seeing the sun before, and only Margot does not crowd in to look out the window. That's because Margot came to Venus five years ago and still remembers the sunny Earth, which sets her apart from the other students and makes her a target of their teasing and bullying. 

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