The old man's voice came between blows. "You won't get rich anywhere." He said something Paul couldn't hear. "—not the type." He smiled as though it were a compliment. "But if you're thinking of watching peaches ripen—" The hammering drowned him out. "—and the drooling lip because that's what men get all alone on alien planets."
"Not me. Hey Cap, lay off for a minute. My folks homesteaded Syrtis Major. Before they shipped Harry and me off to school, I had the proverbial green thumb," he grinned. "Sure, get rich here and spend it for psycho treatments," the captain laughed. He was not familiar with what is called in small children at least, the negativistic reaction.
The old man, who still felt uncomfortable from what he might have seen on the hill, reinforced this with a mutter: "Only man in a world, with a hole for a belly and a spook for a shoulder."
To his own surprise almost as much as theirs, Paul set his feet firmly. "I'm going to cash in my sixteenth of this space coffin for supplies we got for the Mormon colony on Smith. I'll get rich here!"
The captain grew patient, then he grew angry. The rest gathered around, fifteen shareholders to one. But Paul would not pull in his neck. In a brawl on Mars while they were loading for the Outer Systems, the fifteen had seen him nearly kill a Guardsman with his feet and fists. Since Harry's death he was a terror. Also they would have only fifteen ways to split if he stayed here. Like all spacebums, they knew THIS time they would hit it rich.
Afterward, Paul stowed the seeds and hatching eggs in the dead freeze boxes where the mice could not get at them, reclimbed the hill to the peach tree, at least he thought it was peach, and made a little hole for the bones. A libation to the dead colonists he poured on the leaves, then swigged one for Harry, a third for himself, wondering what the old man had started to tell him when he slipped him the bottle. Probably that he would never get rich.
Blinking, he lazed on his back. When his face nuzzled the leaves, bean rows sprang higher than a man, leghorns were scratching everywhere and the spacemen came with bright sheaves of credits in their fists. The bean rows spread beyond the horizon and the dust of plowing tractors rose like smoke against the sky, while Paul and Harry, hardly distinguishable, for Paul was only three minutes older, proudly led a ragged old man and a slack-jawed captain through the flowering avenue of peach trees.
"Now you must meet my wife," said Paul, and he squirmed uncomfortably on the leaves.
He awoke bolt upright with his automatic pointing. Wind? Of course. He repeated the thought as he circled the hill on the double. A chip of damp leaves, dark side up with alien things dragging their larvae from the sun, down the slope another, he pursued scars in the leaves over the hill, down, lost the trail in the dry watercourse, zig-zagging, circling like a hound dog, found it again. Ran. His leg muscles were soft from months without gravity. Steep hills. Rollercoasters. Winded.