At his elbow, his wife, Rose, her heart-shaped face and grey eyes framed by the wide face-window of her armor, was trying desperately to choke back tears, and be brave.
"Remember—we've got to make good here, Johnny," she was saying. "Remember what the Homesteaders Office people told us—that with modern equipment and the right frame of mind, life can be nice out here. It's worked on other asteroids. What if we are the first farmers to come to Vesta?... Don't listen to those crazy miners! They're just kidding us! Don't listen to them! And don't, for gosh sakes, get sore...."
Rose's words were now like dim echoes of his conscience, and of his recent grim determination to master his hot temper, his sensitiveness, his wanderlust, and his penchant for poker and the social glass—qualities of an otherwise agreeable and industrious nature, that, on Earth, had always been his undoing. Recently, back in Illinois, he had even spent six months in jail for all but inflicting murder with his bare fists on a bullying neighbor whom he had caught whipping a horse. Sure—but during those six months his farm, the fifth he'd tried to run in scattered parts of North America, had gone to weeds in spite of Rose's valiant efforts to take care of it alone....
Oh, yes—the lessons of all that past personal history should be strong in his mind. But now will power and Rose's frightened tones of wisdom both seemed to fade away in his brain, as jeering words from another source continued to drive jagged splinters into the weakest portion of his soul:
"Hi, you hydroponic pun'kin-head!... How yuh like your new claim?... Nice, ain't it? How about some fresh turnips?... Good luck, yuh greenhorn.... Hiyuh, papa! Tied to baby's diaper suspenders!... Let the poor dope alone, guys.... Snooty.... Won't take our likker, hunh? Won't take our money.... Wifey's boy! Let's make him sociable.... Haw-Haw-haw.... Hydroponic pun'kin-head!..."
It was a medley of coarse voices and laughter, matching the row of a dozen coarse faces and grins that lined the view-ports of the ship. These men were asteroid miners, space-hardened and space-twisted. They'd been back to Earth for a while, to raise hell and freshen up, and spend the money in their then-bulging pockets. Coming out again from Earth, across the orbit of Mars to the asteroid belt, they had had the Endlichs as fellow passengers.
John Endlich had battled valiantly with his feebler side, and with his social inclinations, all through that long, dreary voyage, to keep clear of the inevitable griefs that were sure to come to a chap like himself from involvement with such characters. In the main, it had been a rather tattered victory. But now, at the final moment of bleak anticlimax, they took their revenge in guffaws and ridicule, hurling the noise at him through the radiophones of the space-suit helmets that they held in their laps—space-suits being always kept handy beneath the traveler-seats of every interplanetary vessel.
"... Haw-haw-haw! Drop over to our camp sometime for a little drink, and a little game, eh, pantywaist? Tain't far. Sure—just drop in on us when the pressure of domesticity in this beootiful country gets you down.... When the turnips get you down! Haw-haw-haw! Bring the wife along.... She's kinda pretty. Ought to have a man-size fella.... Just ask for me—Alf Neely! Haw-haw-haw!"
Yeah, Alf Neely was the loudest and the ugliest of John Endlich's baiters. He had gigantic arms and shoulders, small squinty eyes, and a pendulous nose. "Haw-haw-haw!..."
And the others, yelling and hooting, made it a pack: "Man—don't he wish he was back in Podunk!... What!—no tomatas, Dutch?... What did they tell yuh back at the Homestead office in Chicago?—that we were in de-e-esperate need of fresh vegetables out here? Well, where are they, papa?... Haw-haw-haw!..."