"Oh?" said Paul calmly enough. "I have vegetables in the ground, your people are welcome to them."
They spread over the field, pulling carrots and potatoes and chewing them raw, for they had been a month now on concentrates.
Paul shrugged: "Just so you leave enough for seed."
The doctor chuckled at this. "Come on man. Put your arm about my shoulder, we will take you home."
Paul stood back with his thumb hooked in his belt.
"I wonder if you could pay me for the vegetables now, in books."
"Certainly, we have a first class library. Come aboard."
"You misunderstand, I want to read them here. Not trash; medical books, teachers' training, how-to-do-it manuals."
"You have been alone too long. You need not be afraid of our ways. We do not try to convert spacemen in any case." The doctor took a forward step but stopped, off balance, when Paul's hand slapped the automatic.
"My wife--," Paul had a perplexed, embarrassed look.
The old man was right about him never getting rich. "We have decided to stay here. This is our home."
He saw the doctor raise an eyebrow: no doubt he had run across spacemen who dreamed that convincingly of women many times before. It was difficult when they awoke. Paul had seen a guy in a cage once that had had that happen to him. Very disconcerting, unbearable in fact, when you woke up after a year or two of love and affection and couldn't find her again.
The leader and the doctor made a triangle of glances between each other and the gun, but Paul forestalled any ideas with a backward step, coupled with a deft extraction of what men do not like to look in the muzzle of.
The leader opened his hands. "Get him some books." He smiled rather gently at Paul. "Will you have children?"
"A lot of them, I hope." He wondered if he should take the man to see her tracks, but it was a windy day. They might not find any and the men might take him off guard. He had no intention of calling her down; he was afraid to, somehow.
The doctor set down a double armload of books. On top, with a crooked smile he laid a thick treatise: WELTY'S CARE OF THE EXPECTANT MOTHER-AND CHILD CARE--ONE VOLUME EDITION.
But he began telling Paul about Earth, the great railyachts and gay cities, the chic girls and cool drinks, plumbing, radiant heat, libraries, dancing, Feelies, Tellies, everyone lived well since the thirty-hour work week.