But still nobody looked up at the sun. * * * * * Rattled, Carson demanded furiously if Lon had converted other local foliage into _thanar_ leaves, as he'd made his green peas and the other stuff he'd told Cathy about on the beamphone. Lon tensed, and observed to the other colonists that evidently all beamphones played into recorders. The atmosphere became unfriendly. Carson got more rattled still. He began to wave his arms and sputter. Lon Simpson treated him gently. He took him into the house to watch the converter at work. One of the colonists kept its large coil suitably stuffed with assorted foliage. There was a "hand" of cured, early--best quality--_thanar_ leaves in an erratically cut tin can. Duplicates of that hand of best quality _thanar_ were appearing in the small coil as fast as they were removed, and fresh foliage was being heaped into the large coil. "We expect," said Lon happily, "to have a bumper crop of the best grade of _thanar_ this year. It looks like every colonist on the planet will be able to pay off his debt to the Company and have credit left over. We'll be sending a committee back to Earth to collect our credits there and organize an independent cooperative trading company that will bring out decent machinery and be a competitive buying agency for _thanar_. I'm sure the Company will be glad to see us all so prosperous." It was stifling hot by now, but nobody noticed. The colonists were much too interested in seeing Carson go visibly to pieces before them. He was one of those people who seem to have been developed by an all-wise Providence expressly to be underlings for certain types of large corporations. Their single purpose in life is to impress their superiors in the corporation that hires them. But now Carson saw his usefulness ended. Through his failure, in some fashion, the Company's monopoly on _thanar_ leaves and its beautiful system of recruiting labor were ruined. He would be discharged and probably blacklisted. If he had looked up toward the western sky, squinted a little, and gazed directly at the local sun, he would have seen that his private troubles were of no importance at all. But he didn't. He went staggering to his gyrocar and headed back for Cetopolis. It was a tiny town, with plank streets, a beamphone exchange, and its warehouses over by the spaceport. It was merely a crude and rather ugly little settlement on a newly colonized planet. But it had been the center of an admirable system by which the Cetis Gamma Trading Company got magnificently rich and dispensed _thanar_ leaf (a milligram a day kept old age away) throughout all humanity at the very top price the traffic would bear. And the system was shaky now and Carson would be blamed for it. Behind him, the colonists rejoiced as hugely as Carson suffered. But none of them got the proper perspective, because none of them looked at the sun.