Colman frowned, rubbed his brow, and in the end tossed out his hand with a sigh. “No . . . we’re not making the right point somehow. Let’s put it this way–how can you measure who owes who what?” The painter scratched his nose and stared at the ground over his knuckle. Clearly the notion was new to him. –
“How do you know when you’ve done enough work?” Jay asked him, trying to make it simpler.
The painter shrugged. “You just know. How do you know when you’ve had enough to eat?”
“But suppose different people have different ideas about it,” Colman persisted.
The painter shrugged again. “That’s okay. Different people value things differently. You can’t tell somebody else when they’ve had enough to eat.”
Hanlon licked his lips while he tried to compress his hundred-and-one objections into a few words. “Ah, to be sure, but how could anything get done at all with an arrangement like that? Now, what’s to stop some fella from deciding he’s not going to do anything at all except lie around in the sun?”
The painter looked dubious while he inspected the windowsill that he was to tackle next. “That doesn’t make much sense,” he murmured after a while. “Why would somebody stay poor if he didn’t have to? That’d be a strange. kind of way to carry on.”
“He wouldn’t get away with it, surely,” 1ay said incredulously. “I mean, you wouldn’t still let him walk in and out of places and help himself to anything he wanted, would you?”
“Why not?” the painter asked. ‘~You’d have to feel kind of sorry for someone like that. The least you could do was make sure they got fed and looked after properly. We do get a few like that, and that’s what happens to them. It’s a shame, but what can anybody do?” –
“You don’t understand;” Jay said. “On Earth, a lot of people would see that as their big ambition in life.”
The painter eyed him for a moment and nodded his head slowly. “Hmmm … I kinda figured it had to be something like that,” he told them.
Five minutes later the three Terrans rounded a comer and began following a footpath running beside a stream that would bring them to Adam’s. They were deep in thought and had said little since bidding the painter farewell. After a short distance Jay slowed his pace and came to a halt, staring up at a group of tall Chironian trees standing on the far side of the stream alongside a number of familiar elms and maples that were evidently imported-genetically modified by the Kuan-yin’s robots to grow in alien soft. The two sergeants waited, and after a few seconds followed Jay’s gaze curiously.
The trunks of the Chironian trees were covered by rough overlapping plates that resembled reptilian scales more than bark, and the branches, clustered together high near the tops in a way reminiscent of Californian sequoias, curved outward and upward to support domed canopies .of foliage like the caps of gigantic mushrooms. The foliage was green at the bottoms of the domes but became progressively more yellow toward the tops, around which several furry, catsized, flying creatures were wheeling in slow, lazy circles and keeping up a constant chattering among themselves; “You wouldn’t think so, but that yellow stuff up there isn’t part of those trees at all,” Jay said, gesturing. “Jeeves told me about it. It’s a completely different species’–a kind of fern. Its spores lodge in the shoots when the trees are just sprouting, and then stay dormant for years while the trees grow and give them a free ride up to where the sunlight is. It invades the leaf-buds and feeds through the tree’s vascular system.”
“Mmm …” Colman murmured. Botany wasn’t his line. Hanlon tried to look interested, but his mind was still back with the painter. After a few seconds he looked at Colman. “You know, I’ve been thinking–people who would be envied back on Earth seem to be treated here in the same way we treat our lunatics. Do you think we’re all crazy to the Chironians?”
“It’s a thought,” Colman replied vaguely. The same idea had crossed his mind while the painter was talking. It was a sobering one.