ies.

"Have luck with them, Johnny! But watch out!" Rose flung after him by
helmet phone. With a warm laugh. Just for a moment he felt maybe a
little silly. Tomatoes! But they were what he was banking on, and had
forced toward maturity, most. The way he figured, they were the kind of
fruit that the guys in the camp--gagged by a diet of canned and
dehydrated stuff, because they were too busy chasing mineral wealth to
keep a decent hydroponic garden going--would be hungriest for.

Well--he was rather too right, in some ways, to be fortunate. Yeah--they
still call what happened the Tomato War.

Poor Johnny Endlich. He was headed for the commissary dome to display
his wares. But vague urges sidetracked him, and he went into the
recreation dome of the camp, instead.

And into the bar.

The petty sin of two drinks hardly merits the punishing trouble which
came his way as, at least partially, a result. With his face-window
open, he stood at the bar with men whom he had never seen before. And he
began to have minor delusions of grandeur. He became a little too proud
of his accomplishments. His wariness slipped into abeyance. He had a
queer idea that, as a farmer with concrete evidence of his skills to
show, he would win respect that had been denied him. Dread of
consequences of some things that he might do, became blurred. His hot
temper began to smolder, under the spark of memory and the fury of
insult and malicious tricks, that, considering the safety of his loved
ones, he had had no way to fight back against. Frustration is a
dangerous force. Released a little, it excited him more. And the tense
mood of the camp--a thing in the very air of the domes--stirred him up
more. The camp--ready to explode into sudden, open barbarism for
days--was now at a point where nothing so dramatic as fresh tomatoes and
farmers in a bar was needed to set the fireworks off.

John Endlich had his two drinks. Then, with calm and foolhardy
detachment, he set the six tomatoes out in a row before him on the
synthetic mahogany.

* * * * *

He didn't have to wait at all for results. Bloodshot eyes, some of them
belonging to men who had been as gentle as lambs in their ordinary lives
on Earth, turned swiftly alert. Bristly faces showed swift changes of
expression: surprise, interest, greed for possession--but most of all,
aggressive and Satanic humor.

"_Jeez--tamadas!_" somebody growled, amazed.

Under the ci