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as good as anyone here, I promise you!”
    â€œOh, Father,” said Joe. “You’re wrong. Everyone on this expedition counts for something. We are all in it together, and all equal. You don’t need to fuss.”
    â€œWell, well,” said Father. “We’ll see.”

Chapter 4
    When the wheat was in the ground, a bad time began. At first the grownups were pleased with themselves. Everyone had worked hard. The harrow from the spaceship had been hauled over the furrows to cover the seeds over. The land truck had pulled it across about half the acres and then run dry. So the men had pushed it out of the way, and begun to drag the harrow themselves, in teams of six at a time. When it was all done, everyone was tired but triumphant. And then we had all to wait and see if it would grow, and if it would not, we would starve.
    The first really bad thing that went wrong was all our rabbits dying. We had made them so hungry they had begun to eat the gray grass. One morning when we woke up they were all sick, lying in a heap in a corner of their hutch, with sad cloudy eyes. And by the next day they were all dead. Sarah said they died of homesickness; Father thought they might have caught some kind of virus; most people thought they had been killed by eating the crystalline plants. The chickens were all right; and they had eaten only Earth-grown grain. All the children were sad about the rabbits; Jason even cried. But it was lucky about the chickens, because we hoped to get some eggs to eat soon. The iron rations from Earth wouldn’t last forever.
    And, of course, once the sowing was done, there was time to think, and worry. Most families dug their vegetable patches, and planted lettuces and carrots and beans from the seed reserves. And what made the worry worse was that nothing would grow in the vegetable patches. Lettuces didn’t come up at all, and carrots came black and hard as bones, and all twisted, so everyone pinned their hopes on the beans. Beans are important food. They grew nice green leaves, though after a while the leaves had mottled patches of glassy clear specks. The pods were a brownish color when they formed, and the beans themselves just didn’t grow inside the pods—they were little withered specks instead of nice fat eatable seeds.
    Of course, it took time to find out that the vegetables wouldn’t grow; life was full of time, full of waiting. Father kept busy with his gadgets, and Malcolm with testing things to see what we could eat. He didn’t find anything much. There was a kind of shellfish, and one or two bitter herbs, but nothing easy and nice. Every time a seed went wrong in a vegetable patch, people got gloomier. Everyone was worried, and everyone except Malcolm and Father was bored. Once you got used to it, life at Shine was deadly. No records, no television, no books, nothing. Once it was dark, you just sat by your fire, lit up bright green by a jellyfish, and gloomed.
    Joe read nothing but Father’s technology book. Even Sarah didn’t want her pony book any more. Ponies were about as relevant on Shine as the natural history of little green men would have been on Earth. That left Robinson Crusoe . The trouble was, it all seemed rather silly. He seemed to have it easy compared to us; there was plenty to eat on his island, and when he planted things they grew, and all the time a ship might just come by and take him home, and he seemed such a stiff old bore about it all. We began to read it aloud to each other in the evenings, but we soon stopped. Yet we needed something.
    For one thing, just sitting all evening like a zombie soon gets a bit much, and for another, all the things that were happening to us were just slopping around in our heads, and we needed some stories to cheer us up. Stories are tidy; they don’t just slop around like happenings. Just once, Sarah said to Pattie, “Oh, Pattie, if only you…” Then she stopped herself.