ey never got
another assignment.

He had resisted their demands. Five years was a short enough time. Some
organisms took longer than that to develop in the human body or mind, to
make their inimical presence known. Some did not show up until the
second or third generation; which was the reason for the second-phase
colonists, to live there for three generations, before the planet could
be opened to young John Smith and his wife Mary who dreamed of owning a
little chicken ranch out away from it all. He had argued that boredom
might be just the very inimical condition they were having to test.

Cal felt a twinge of disappointment here. Perhaps the dissatisfied
colonists had merely gone on strike! Unable to get satisfaction from
their administrator, they chose not to communicate as a means of drawing
attention, getting an investigation of their plight. Drastic, perhaps,
but man had been known to do drastic things before when he felt treated
unfairly.

This seemed such a likely solution that for a moment he let his
disappointment override his interest. Such would be an administrative
hassle, nothing to challenge an E at all, not even a Junior.

Still, it might not be the solution. He had better listen to the whole
of the problem.

The colonists had chosen a large island for their first settlement. In
the center was a small mountain. It had been given the name of Crystal
Palace Mountain because it was crested with an outcropping of
amethystine quartz-crystal structures in _natural_ pillars, domes,
arches, spires.

Like spokes of a wheel radiating out from the hub, ridges fell away
from this mountain, and in between the ridges there lay fertile valleys
watered by perpetual streams.

It was in one of these valleys, about halfway between the mountain and
the sea, that the colonists settled. Some bucolic wit had named the
first settlement Appletree, because there they would gain knowledge, and
everybody knows that the apple was the Garden of Eden's fruit of
knowledge. No one quite knew when the name Eden was first applied to the
planet. Suddenly, during the first scientific expedition, everyone was
referring to it that way.

"For exactitude," the administrator said diplomatically. "Of course we
still designate it as Ceti II."

As was customary, the colony had communicated multitudes of progress
pictures over the space-jump band. Here was the valley before they had
started to fell trees. Here it was in progress of clea