rolling hills and many-shadowed valleys. One sun was nuzzling the horizon so the air was red with afternoon. The suns arranged it so there was no night.

"A fool," retorted the elected captain and he slammed the crowbar against the oxidation on the fin.

Above this continuing racket, Paul shouted: "A smart guy could get richer here than on one of those damned rocks."

The old man's voice came between blows. "You won't get rich anywhere." He said something Paul couldn't hear. "--not the type." He smiled as though it were a compliment. "But if you're thinking of watching peaches ripen--" The hammering drowned him out. "--and the drooling lip because that's what men get all alone on alien planets."

"Not me. Hey Cap, lay off for a minute. My folks homesteaded Syrtis Major. Before they shipped Harry and me off to school, I had the proverbial green thumb," he grinned. "Sure, get rich here and spend it for psycho treatments," the captain laughed. He was not familiar with what is called in small children at least, the negativistic reaction.

The old man, who still felt uncomfortable from what he might have seen on the hill, reinforced this with a mutter: "Only man in a world, with a hole for a belly and a spook for a shoulder."

To his own surprise almost as much as theirs, Paul set his feet firmly. "I'm going to cash in my sixteenth of this space coffin for supplies we got for the Mormon colony on Smith. I'll get rich here!"

The captain grew patient, then he grew angry. The rest gathered around, fifteen shareholders to one. But Paul would not pull in his neck. In a brawl on Mars while they were loading for the Outer Systems, the fifteen had seen him nearly kill a Guardsman with his feet and fists. Since Harry's death he was a terror. Also they would have only fifteen ways to split if he stayed here. Like all spacebums, they knew THIS time they would hit it rich.

Afterward, Paul stowed the seeds and hatching eggs in the dead freeze boxes where the mice could not get at them, reclimbed the hill to the peach tree, at least he thought it was peach, and made a little hole for the bones. A libation to the dead colonists he poured on the leaves, then swigged one for Harry, a third for himself, wondering what the old man had started to tell him when he slipped him the bottle. Probably that he would never get rich.

Blinking, he lazed on his 

 Prev. P 2/13 next