t made himself keep awake because the
committee was coming right over, and he didn't want to wake up all
groggy, the way a man does when he sleeps in the daytime. Couldn't
afford to be groggy because the committee was all set up to scrap out
something that was splitting the colony right down the middle.

He remembered looking out at the fields where the grains and vegetables
were growing, thinking how easy it was to farm here--plenty of rain,
plenty of sun, no storms to flatten and ruin the crops, not even enough
insect pests to worry a man. He looked out at the fenced pastures where
the colony's community stock grazed.

The horses had eaten their fill and were ambling up from the drinking
pond, getting ready to take a siesta of their own in the shade of some
trees at the corner of their pasture. The cows were already lying down
in a grove of trees and were sleepily chewing their cuds. The green
grass around them was so tall he could barely see their heads and backs.

His house was on top of a little hill, knoll you might call it. Martha,
like himself, had been raised in West Texas where all you could see, as
the city feller said, was miles and miles of miles and miles. She never
could stand not being able to see a long ways off, and she'd picked out
this spot herself. They could see all the valley and the sea, and some
dim shapes of islands in the distance. Right nice.

Yes, it was all very peaceful--and tame.

That was the main trouble in the colony. Too tame. Some of them got
restless. They argued the five-year test was all right for most planets.
You needed every bit of it to prove that man could make it there, or
couldn't, or how much help he would need from Earth, maybe for a while,
maybe always.

On Eden you didn't have to prove anything. There wasn't anything to make
a man feel like a man, proud to be one. Maybe that would be all right
for ordinary folks, but for experimental colonists it was a slow
death--almost as bad as living on Earth.

Sure, they'd made their complaints to Earth. Half a dozen times or maybe
more. They'd asked for an inspector to come out and see for himself, and
see what it was doing to the colonists. Jed put it right up to E.H.Q.
that they were plumb ruining a prime batch of colonists with this easy
living.

A man had to stretch himself once in a while if he expected to grow
tall.

Some of the colonists were getting so lazy they'd stopped bitching and
were even talking about may