's happened here? What's been going
on?"

"Cain't explain it," Dawkins said. "Sort of hoped you bein' an E, and
all ..."

"Maybe if you told me just what happened, started at the beginning when
everything was normal...."

"Something else you should tell him, Jed," Ahmed spoke up. He looked at
Cal, and explained himself. "We don't think easily," he added. "Can't
keep our minds on anything for more than a minute or so. In fact, I'm a
little surprised that we've been able to carry on the conversation this
long. From the way we've been behaving, I would have expected more that
we'd have wandered away back into the woods before now--simply left you
to your own devices without interest in you. Strange."

"Yeah," Jed confirmed, "I was thinkin' that, too. Funny thing. Right now
I feel like I could tell the whole yarn. I feel like ... Well, while I'm
in the mood I'd better git it said. Don't know how long I can keep
interested.

"Well, there we were, one day, seems like it ought to be about a week
ago, give or take a couple of days. Anyway, I remember it was around
noon...."

13

It was one day around noon.

Jed Dawkins had come in early from his experimental field to get his
dinner, well, city folks would call it lunch, and so he'd be ready
afterwards for a talk with the colony committee. He'd eaten his lunch,
all right, a good one. There was never any scarcity of food on Eden.
Always plenty, and wide variety. If anything, a man ate too much and
didn't have to work hard enough to get it. That was the main thing that
had been wrong with Eden, right from the start. Man was ordained to earn
his bread by the sweat of his brow, and there's no reason to sweat for
it on Eden.

He was lying on the hammock that was stretched between two big trees in
the front yard of his house. The house was set a little way off from the
rest of the village, oh maybe five hundred yards more or less, not so
far he couldn't be handy when he was needed by the colony, but still far
enough to give a man some space.

The domestic sound of rattled pots and pans came from the kitchen window
where his wife Martha was washing up after dinner. It was a drowsy,
peaceful time. Honeybees they'd brought from Earth were buzzing the
flowers Martha had planted all around. A bird was singing up in the
trees above him. A man ought to be pretty contented with a life like
that, he remembered telling himself. Ought to be.

He felt like taking a nap, bu