He added commercial fertilizers and
nitrates to it--the nitrates were, of course, distinct from the gaseous
nitrogen that had been held, spongelike, by the subsoil, and had helped
supply the greenhouse with atmosphere. Then he harrowed the ground
again. The tractor worked fine, except that the feeble gravity made the
lugs of its wheels slip a lot. He repeated his planting, in the
old-fashioned manner.

Under ideal conditions, the inside of the great bubble was soon a mass
of growing things. Rose had planted flowers--to be admired, and to help
out the hive of bees, which were essential to some of the other plants,
as well. Nor was the flora limited to the Earthly. Some seeds or spores
had survived, here, from the mother world of the asteroids. They came
out of their eons of suspended animation, to become root and tough,
spiky stalk, and to mix themselves sparsely with vegetation that had
immigrated from Earth, now that livable conditions had been restored
over this little piece of ground. But whether they were fruit or weed,
it was difficult to say.

Sometimes John Endlich was misled. Sometimes, listening to familiar
sounds, and smelling familiar odors, toward the latter part of his
reprieve, he almost imagined that he'd accomplished his basic desires
here on Vesta--when he had always failed on Earth.

There was the smell of warm soil, flowers, greenery. He heard irrigation
water trickling. The sweetcorn rustled in the wind of fans he'd set up
to circulate the air. Bees buzzed. Chickens, approaching adolescence,
peeped contentedly as they dusted themselves and stretched luxuriously
in the shadows of the cornfield.

For John Endlich it was all like the echo of a somnolent summer of his
boyhood. There was peace in it: it was like a yearning fulfilled. An end
of wanderlust for him, here on Vesta. In contrast to the airless
desolation outside, the interior of this five-acre greenhouse was the
one most desirable place to be. So, except for the vaguest of stirrings
sometimes in his mind, there was not much incentive to seek fun
elsewhere. If he ever had time.

And there was a lot of the legendary, too, in what his family and he had
accomplished. It was like returning a little of the blue sky and the
sounds of life to this land of ruins and roadways and the ghosts of dead
beauty. Maybe there'd be a lot more of all that, soon, when the rumored
major influx of homesteaders reached Vesta.

"Yes, Johnny," Rose said once. "'L