Mr. Saunders was ahead of us in line. He was crabbing about the weather. He said it was an outrage to expose people the way we had been. He had been with us on the working party, but he had not worked much.
The man at the desk shrugged. “The Colonial Commission set your arrival date; we had nothing to say about it. You can't expect us to postpone winter to suit your convenience.”
“Somebody's going to hear about this!”
“By all means.” The man at the desk handed him a form, “Next, please!” He looked at Dad and said, “What may I do for you, citizen?”
Dad explained quietly that he wanted to have his family with him. The man shook his head. “Sorry. Next case, please.”
Dad didn't give up his place. “You can't separate a man and wife. We aren't slaves, nor criminals, nor animals. The Immigration Service surely has some responsibilities toward us.”
The man looked bored. “This is the largest shipload we've ever had to handle. We've made the best arrangements we could. This is a frontier town, not the Astor.”
“All I'm asking for is a minimum family space, as described in the Commission's literature about Ganymede.”
“Citizen, those descriptions are written back on Earth. Be patient and you will be taken care of.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No, not tomorrow. A few days—or a few weeks.”
Dad exploded. “Weeks, indeed! Confound it, I'll build an igloo out on the field before I'll put up with this.”
“That's your privilege.” The man handed Dad a sheet of paper. “If you wish to lodge a complaint, write it out on this.”
Dad took it and I glanced at it. It was a printed form—and it was addressed to the Colonial Commission back on Earth! The man went on, “Turn it in to me any time this phase and it will be ultramicro-filmed in time to go back with the mail in the Mayflower.”
Dad looked at it, snorted, crumpled it up, and stomped away. Molly followed him and said, “George! Georgel Don't be upset. We'll live through it.”
Dad grinned sheepishly. “Sure we will, honey. It's the beauty of the system that gets me. Refer all complaints to the head office—half a billion miles away!”
The next day George's reflexes were making his nose run. Peggy was worse and Molly was worried about her and Dad was desperate. He went off somewhere to raise a stink about the way things were being handled.
Frankly, I didn't have it too bad. Sleeping in a dormitory is no hardship to me; I could sleep through the crack of doom. And the food was everything they had promised.
Listen to this: For breakfast we had corn cakes with syrup and real butter, little sausages, real ham, strawberries with cream so thick I didn't know what it was, tea, all the milk you could drink, tomato juice, honey-dew melon, eggs—as many eggs as you wanted.
There was an open sugar bowl, too, but the salt shaker had a little sign on it; DON'T WASTE THE SALT.
There wasn't any coffee, which I wouldn't have noticed if George had not asked for it. There were other things missing, too, although I certainly didn't notice it at the time. No tree fruits, for example—no apples, no pears, no oranges. But who cares when you can get strawberries and watermelon and pineapples and such? There were no tree nuts, too, but there were peanuts to burn.
Anything made out of wheat flour was a luxury, but you don't miss it at first.
Lunch was choice of corn chowder or jellied consomme, cheese souffle, fried chicken, corned beef and cabbage, hominy grits with syrup, egg plant au gratin, little pearl onions scalloped with cucumbers, baked stuffed tomatoes, sweet potato surprise, German-fried Irish potatoes, tossed endive, coleslaw with sour cream, pineapple and cottage cheese with lettuce. Then there was peppermint ice cream, angel berry pie, frozen egg nog, raspberry ice, and three kinds of pudding—but I didn't do too well on the desserts. I had tried to try everything, taking a little of this and a dab of that, and by the time desserts came along I was short on space. I guess I ate too much.
The cooking wasn't fancy, about like Scout camp, but the food was so good you couldn't ruin it. The service reminded me of camp, too—queueing up for servings, no table cloths, no napkins. And the dishes had to be washed; you couldn't throw them away or burn them—they were imported from Earth and worth their weight in uranium.
The first day they took the first fifty kids in the chow line and the last fifty lads to leave the mess hall and made them wash dishes. The next day they changed pace on us and took the middle group. I got stuck both times.
The first supper was mushroom soup, baked ham, roast turkey, hot corn bread with butter, jellied cold meats, creamed asparagus, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, spinach with hard boiled egg and grated cheese, corn pudding, creamed peas and carrots, smothered lettuce and three kinds of salad. Then there was frozen custard and raisin pudding with hard sauce and Malaga and Thompson grapes and more strawberries with powdered sugar.
Besides that you could drop around to the kitchen and get a snack any time you felt like it.
I didn't go outside much the first three days. It snowed and although we were in Sun phase when we got there it was so murky that you couldn't see the Sun, much less Jupiter. Besides, we were in eclipse part of the time. It was as cold as Billy-be-switched and we still didn't have any cold weather clothes.
I was sent along with the commissary tractor once to get supplies over in town. Not that I saw much of the town—and not that Leda is much of a town, anyhow, to a person who has lived in Diego Borough—but I did see the hydroponics farms. There were three of them, big multiple sheds, named for what they grew in them, “Oahu,” “Imperial Valley,” and “Iowa.” Nothing special about them, just the usual sort of soiless gardening. I didn't hang around because the flicker lighting they use to force the plants makes my eyes burn.
But I was interested in the tropical plants they grew in “Oahu”—I had never seen a lot of them before. I noticed that most of the plants were marked “M-G” while a few were tagged “N. T.” I asked one of the gardeners; he said that “M-G” meant “mutation-Ganymede” and the other meant “normal terrestrial.”
I found out later that almost everything grown on Ganymede was a special mutation adapted to Ganymede conditions.
Beyond there was another of the big multiple sheds named “Texas”; it had real cows in it and was very interesting. Did you know a cow moves its lower jaw from side to side? And no matter what you've heard, there is not one teat that is especially for cream.
I hated to leave, but “Texas” shed smelled too much like a space ship. It was only a short dash through the snow to the Exchange where all of Leda's retail buying and selling takes place—big and little shops all under one roof.
I looked around, thinking I might take a present back to Peggy, seeing that she was sick. I got the shock of my life. The prices!
If I had had to buy in the Exchange the measly fifty-eight pounds of stuff they had let me bring with me, it would have cost—I'm telling the truth!—several thousand credits. Everything that was imported from Earth cost that kind of money. A tube of beard cream was two hundred and eighty credits.
There were items for sale made on Ganymede, hand work mostly, and they were expensive, too, though not nearly as expensive as the stuff brought up from Earth.
I crept out of that place in a hurry. As nearly as I could figure the only thing cheap on Ganymede was food.
The driver of the commissary tractor wanted to know where I had been when there was loading to do? “I should have left you behind to walk back,” he groused. I didn't have a good answer so I didn't say anything.
They shut off winter soon after that. The heat trap was turned on full force, the skies cleared and it was lovely. The first view I got of the Ganymede sky was a little after dawn next Sun phase. The heat trap made the sky a pale green but Jupiter shone right through it, ruddy orange, and big. Big and beautiful—I've never gotten tired of looking at Jupiter!
A harvest moon looks big, doesn't it? Well, Jupiter from Ganymede is sixteen or seventeen times as wide as the Moon looks and it covers better than two hundred and fifty times as much sky. It hangs there in the sky, never rising, never setting, and you wonder what holds it up.
I saw it first in half-moon phase and I didn't see how it could be any more beautiful than it was. But the Sun crept across the sky and a day later Jupiter was a crescent and better than ever. At the middle of Sun phase we went into eclipse, of course, and Jupiter was a great red, glowing ring in the sky, brightest where the Sun had just passed behind it.
But the best of all is during dark phase.
Maybe I ought to explain how the phases work; I know I didn't understand it until I came to Ganymede. Ganymede is such a small planet and so close to its primary that it is tide-locked, just the way the Moon is; it keeps one face always toward Jupiter and therefore Jupiter does not move in the sky. The sun moves, the other Jovian moons move, the stars move—but not good old Jove; it just hangs there.
Ganymede takes just over an Earth week to revolve around Jupiter, so we have three and a half days of sunlight and then three and a half days of darkness. By Ganymede time the period of rotation is exactly one week; twenty-four Ganymede hours is one seventh of the period. This arrangement makes a Ganymede minute about a standard second longer than an Earth minute, but who cares? Except scientists, of course, and they have clocks that keep both sorts of time.
So here is the way a week goes on Ganymede: the Sun rises at Sunday midnight every week; when you get up Monday morning it's a little above the eastern horizon and Jupiter is in half-moon phase. The Sun keeps climbing higher and about suppertime on Tuesday it slides behind Jupiter and Ganymede is in eclipse; eclipse can last an hour or so up to a maximum of about three hours and a half. The stars come out and Jupiter shows that beautiful red ring effect because of its thick atmosphere. Then it's light again by bedtime Tuesday.
At noon on Thursday the Sun goes down and we start the dark phase; that's best of all. Jupiter's colors really show and the other moons are easier to see. They can be almost anywhere and in almost any combination.
Jupiter and its satellites is sort of a miniature solar system; from Ganymede you have a front seat for the show. There is always something new in the sky. Besides the eleven “historical” satellites ranging in size from Ganymede down to Jay-ten or Nicholson-Alpha, which is a ball of rock and ice only fifteen miles thick, there are maybe a dozen more a few miles or less in diameter but big enough to be called moons and heaven knows how many smaller than that. Sometimes these little ones come close enough to Ganymede to show discs; they mostly have very eccentric orbits. Any time there will be several that are conspicuous lights in the sky, like the planets are from Earth.
Io, and Europa, and Callisto are always discs. When Europa passes between Jupiter and Ganymede it is as big in the sky as the Moon is from Earth. It actually is as big as the Moon and at that time it is only about a quarter of a million miles away.
Then it swings around to the far side and is very much smaller—more than a million miles away and less than a quarter as wide. Io goes through the same sorts of changes, but it never gets as big.
When Io and Europa pass between Ganymede and Jupiter you can see them move with your naked eye, chasing their shadows or running ahead of them, depending on the phase. Io and Europa, being inside Ganymede's orbit, never get very far away from Jupiter, Io sticks within a couple of diameters of the big boy; Europa can get about sixty degrees away from it. Callisto is further out than Ganymede and goes all around the sky.
It's a show you never get tired of. Earth's sky is dull.
By six o'clock Saturday morning Jupiter would be in full phase and it was worthwhile to get up to see it. Not only was it the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, but there was always the reverse eclipse, too, and you could see Ganymede's shadow, a little round black dot, crawling across old Jupiter's face. It gave you an idea of just how colossally big Jupiter was— there was the shadow of your whole planet on it and it wasn't anything more than a big freckle.
Jupiter is ninety thousand miles across the equator, eighty-four thousand from pole to pole. Ganymede is only a little better than three thousand.
For the next couple of days after full phase Jupiter would wane and at Sunday midnight it would be in half phase again, the Sun would rise and a new light phase would start. One thing I expected but didn't find was dim sunlight. Jupiter is a long way out; it gets only one twenty-seventh the sunlight that Earth does. I expected that we would always be in a sort of twilight.
It didn't work out that way. It seemed to me that the sunlight was just as bright as on Earth.
George says that this is an optical illusion and that it has to do with the way the human eye works, because the iris of the eye simply shuts out light it doesn't need. Bright desert sunlight back on Earth is maybe ten thousand foot-candles; the same thing on Ganymede is only four hundred foot-candles. But really good bright artificial light is only twenty-five foot candles and a “well-lighted” room is seldom that bright.
If you've got only a two-gallon bucket does it make any difference whether you fill it from the ocean or from a small pond? Sunlight on Ganymede was still more than the eye could accept, so it looked just as bright as sunlight on Earth.
I did notice, however, that it was almost impossible to get a sunburn.
George got us a place to live when we had been there about a week, which was a lot better than most of the other immigrants did, but it didn't suit him and it didn't suit Molly and it didn't really suit me.
The trouble was he had to take a job as a staff engineer with the colonial government to get quarters for us—and that meant he would be too tied down to prove a piece of land for homestead. But it did carry private family quarters with it, if you could call two rooms twelve feet square a home.
It was like this: the colony was made up of homesteaders and townies. The townies worked for the government and lived in government-owned buildings —except for a very few who were in private trade. The townies included the Colonial Commission representative, Captain Hattie the pilot, the hydroponics engineers, the hospital staff, the engineers who ran the power plant and the heat trap, the staff of the local office of Project Jove, and everybody else who worked at anything but land farming. But most of the colonials were homesteaders and that's what George had meant us to be. Like most everybody, we had come out there on the promise of free land and a chance to raise our own food.
There was free land, all right, a whole planet of it. Putting up a house and proving a farm was another matter.
Here is the way it was supposed to work: A colonist comes out from Earth with his family and lands at Leda. The Colonial Commission gives him an apartment in town on arrival, helps him pick out a piece of land to improve and helps him get a house up on it. The Commission will feed him and his family for one Earth year—that is, two Ganymede years—while he gets a couple of acres under cultivation. Then he has ten G-years in which to pay back the Commission by processing at least twenty acres for the Commission— and he is allowed to process as much land for himself as for the Commission during the time he is paying what he owes. At the end of five Earth years he owns a tidy little farm, free and clear. After that, he can spread out and acquire more land, get into trade, anything he likes. He has his toehold and has paid off his debt.
The Colonial Commission had a big expensive investment in having started the atmosphere project and made the planet fit to live on in the first place. The land processed by the colonists was its return on the investment; the day would come when the Colonial Commission would own thousands of acres of prime farmland on Ganymede which it could then sell Earthside to later settlers ... if you wanted to emigrate from Earth you would have to pay for the privilege and pay high. People like us would not be able to afford it.
By that time, although Ganymede would be closed to free immigration, Callisto would have an atmosphere and pioneers could move in there and do it all over again. It was what the bankers call “Self-liquidating,” with the original investment coming from Earth.
But here is the way it actually did work out: when we landed there were only about thirty thousand people on Ganymede and they were geared to accept about five hundred immigrants an Earth year, which was about all the old-type ships could bring out. Remember, those power-pile ships took over five years for the round trip; it took a fleet of them to bring in that many a year.
Then the Star Rover II was renamed the Mayflower and turned over to the Colonial Commission, whereupon six thousand people were dumped on them all at once. We were about as welcome as unexpected overnight guests when there is sickness in the family.
The colonists had known, for a full Earth year, that we were coming, but they had not been able to protest. While Earth Sender can punch a message through to Ganymede anytime except when the Sun is spang in the way, at that time the best radio the colony could boast had to relay via Mars to reach Earth—and then only when Mars was at its closest approach to Jupiter— which it wasn't.
I've got to admit that they did what they could for us. There was plenty to eat and they had managed to fix up places for us to sleep. The Immigrants' Receiving Station had formerly been split up into family apartments; they had torn out the partitions and used the partitions to build bunks for the big dormitories we were stacked in. They had moved their town hall and made it over into a mess hall and kitchen for us. We were in out of the weather and well fed, even if we were about as crowded as we had been in the Mayflower.
You may ask why, with a year to get ready, they had not built new buildings for us? Well, we asked the same thing, only we weren't asking, we were demanding, and we were sore about it!
They hadn't built new buildings because they could not. Before the Earthmen moved in, Ganymede was bare rock and ice. Sure, everybody knows that—but does everybody know what that means? I'm sure I didn't.
No lumber. No sheet metal. No insulation. No wires, No glass. No pipe. The settlers in North America built log cabins—no logs.
The big hydroponics sheds, the Receiving Station and a few other public buildings had been built with materials lifted a half a billion miles from Earth. The rest of Leda and every homesteader's farm house had been built the hard way, from country rock. They had done their best for us, with what they had.
Only we didn't appreciate it.
Of course we should not have complained. After all, as George pointed out, the first California settlers starved, nobody knows what happened to the Roanoke Colony, and the first two expeditions to Venus died to the last man. We were safe.
Anyhow, even if we had to put up with barracks for a while, there was all that free land, waiting for us.
On close inspection, it looked as if it would have to wait quite a while. That was why George had given in and taken a staff engineering job. The closest land to town open to homesteading was nine miles away. To find enough land for six thousand people meant that most of them would have to go about eighteen to twenty miles away.
“What's twenty miles? A few minutes by tube, an up-and-down hop for a copter—brother, have you ever walked twenty miles? And then walked back again?
It wasn't impossible to settle six thousand people that far from town; it was just difficult—and slow. The pioneer explorer used to set out with his gun and an axe; the settler followed by hitching his oxen to a wagonload of furniture and farm tools. Twenty miles meant nothing to them.
They weren't on Ganymede.
The colony had two tractor trucks; another had come in the Mayflower. That's all the transportation there was on the whole planet—not just to settle six thousand people but for the daily needs of thirty thousand people who were there ahead of us.
They explained it all to us at a big meeting of heads of families. I wasn't supposed to be there but it was held outdoors and there was nothing to stop me. The chief ecologist and the chief engineer of the planet were there and the chairman of the colony council presided. Here was the proposition:
What Ganymede really needed was not more farmers, but manufacturing. They needed prospectors and mines and mills and machine shops. They needed all the things you can make out of metal and which they simply could not afford to import from Earth. That's what they wanted us to work on and they would feed any of us who accepted, not just for a year, but indefinitely.
As for any who insisted on homesteading—well, the land was there; help ourselves. There wasn't enough processing machinery to go around, so it might be two or three years before any particular immigrant got a chance to process his first acre of ground.
Somebody stood up near the front of the crowd and yelled, “We've been swindled!”
It took Mr. Tolley, the chairman, quite a while to calm them down. When they let him talk again, he said, “Maybe you have been swindled, maybe you haven't. That's a matter of opinion. I'm quite willing to concede that conditions here are not the way they were represented to you when you left Earth. In fact—”
Somebody yelled. “That's mighty nice of you!” only the tone was sarcastic.
Mr. Tolley looked vexed. “You folks can either keep order, or I'll adjourn this meeting.”
They shut up again and he went on. Most of the present homesteaders had processed more land than they could cultivate. They could use hired hands to raise more crops. There was a job waiting for every man, a job that would keep him busy and teach him Ganymede farming—and feed his wife and family-while he was waiting his turn to homestead.
You could feel a chill rolling over the crowd when the meaning of Mr. Tolley's words sunk in. They felt the way Jacob did when he had labored seven years and then was told he would have to labor another seven years to get the girl he really wanted. I felt it myself, even though George had already decided on the staff job.
A man spoke up. “Mr. Chairman!”
“Yes? Your name, please.”
“Name of Saunders. I don't know how the rest of them feel, but I'm a farmer. Always have been. But I said 'farmer,' not sharecropper. I didn't come here to hire out to no boss. You can take your job and do what you see fit with it. I stand on my rights!”
There was scattered applause and the crowd began to perk up. Mr. Tolley looked at him and said, “That's your privilege, Mr. Saunders.”
“Huh? Well, I'm glad you feel that way, Mr. Chairman. Now let's cut out the nonsense. I want to know two things: what piece of land am I going to get and when do I lay hands on some machinery to start putting it into condition?”
Mr. Tolley said, “You can consult the land office about your first question. As to the second, you heard the chief engineer say that he estimates the average wait for processing machinery will be around twenty-one months.”
“That's too long.”
“So it is, Mr. Saunders.”
“Well, what do you propose to do about it?” Mr. Tolley shrugged and spread his hands. “I'm not a magician. We've asked the Colonial Commission by urgent message going back on the Mayflower not to send us any more colonists on the next trip, but to send us machinery. If they agree, there may be some relief from the situation by next winter. But you have seen—all of you have already seen—that the Colonial Commission makes decisions without consulting us. The first trip of the Mayflower should have been all cargo; you folks should have waited.”
Saunders thought about it. “Next winter, eh? That's five months away. I guess I can wait—I'm a reasonable man. But no sharecropping; that's outl”
“I didn't say you could start homesteading in five months, Mr. Saunders. It may be twenty-one months or longer.”
“No, indeedy!”
“Suit yourself. But you are confronted with a fact, not a theory. If you do have to wait and you won't work for another farmer, how do you propose to feed yourself and your family in the mean time?”
Mr. Saunders looked around and grinned, “Why, in that case, Mr. Chairman, I guess the government will just have to feed us until the government can come through on its end of the deal. I know my rights.”
Mr. Tolley looked at him as if he had just bitten into an apple and found Saunders inside. “We won't let your children starve,” he said slowly, “but as for you, you can go chew rocks. If you won't work, you won't eat.”
Saunders tried to bluster. “You can't get away with it! I'll sue the government and I'll sue you as the responsible government official You can't—”
“Shut up!” Mr. Tolley went on more quietly, speaking to all of us. “We might as well get this point straight. You people have been enticed into coming out here by rosy promises and you are understandably disappointed. But your contract is with the Colonial Commission back on Earth. But you have no contract with the common council of Ganymede, of which I am chairman, and the citizens of Ganymede owe you nothing. We are trying to take care of you out of common decency.
“If you don't like what we offer you, don't start throwing your weight around with me; I won't stand for it. Take it up with the representative of the Immigration Service. That's what he is here for. Meeting's adjourned!”
But the immigration representative wasn't there; he had stayed away from the meeting.
We had been swindled all right. It was equally clear that there was no help for it. Some of the immigrants did see the Colonial Commission representative, but they got no comfort out of him. He had resigned, he said, fed up with trying to carry out impossible instructions five hundred million miles from the home office. He was going home as soon as his relief arrived.
That set them off again; if he could go home so could they. The Mayflower was still in orbit over us, taking on cargo. A lot of people demanded to go back in her.
Captain Harkness said no, he had no authority to let them deadhead half way across the system. So they landed back on the Commission representative, squawking louder than ever.
Mr. Tolley and the council finally settled it. Ganymede wanted no soreheads, no weak sisters. If the Commission refused to ship back those who claimed they were gypped and didn't want to stay, then the next shipload wouldn't even be allowed to land. The representative gave in and wrote Captain Harkness out a warrant for their passage.
We held a family powwow over the matter, in Peggy's room in the hospital—it had to be there because the doctors were keeping her in a room pressurized to Earth normal
Did we stay, or did we go back? Dad was stuck in a rut. Back Earthside he at least had been working for himself; here he was just an employee. If he quit bis job and elected to homestead, it meant working two or three G-years as a field hand before we could expect to start homesteading.
But the real rub was Peggy. In spite of having passed her physical examination Earthside she hadn't adjusted to Ganymede's low pressure. “We might as well face it,” George said to Molly. “We've got to get Peg back to the conditions she's used to.”
Molly looked at him; his face was as long as my arm. “George, you don't want to go back, do you?”
“That's not the point, Molly. The welfare of the kids comes first.” He turned to me and added, “You're not bound by this, Bill. You are big enough to make up your own mind. If you want to stay, I am sure it can be arranged.”
I didn't answer right away. I had come into the family get-together pretty disgusted myself, not only because of the run-around we had gotten, but also because of a run-in I had had with a couple of the Colonial kids. But you know what it was that swung me around? That pressurized room. I had gotten used to low pressure and I liked it. Peggy's room, pressurized to Earth normal, felt like swimming in warm soup. I could hardly breath. “I don't think I want to go back,” I said.
Peggy had been sitting up in bed, following the talk with big eyes, like a little lemur. Now she said, “I don't want to go back, eitherl”
Molly patted her hand and did not answer her, “George,” she said, “I've given this a lot of thought You don't want to go back, I know. Neither does Bill But we don't all have to go back. We can—”
“That's out, Molly,” Dad answered firmly. “I didn't marry you to split up. If you have to go back, I go back.”
“I didn't mean that. Peggy can go back with the O'Farrells and my sister will meet her and take care of her at the other end. She wanted me to leave Peggy with her when she found I was determined to go. It will work out all right.” She didn't look at Peggy as she said it.
“But, Molly!” Dad said.
“No George,” she answered, “I've thought this all out. My first duty is to you. It's not as if Peggy wouldn't be well taken care of; Phoebe will be a mother to her and—”
By now Peggy had caught her breath. “I don't want to go live with Aunt Phoebe!” she yelled and started to bawl.
George said, “It won't work, Molly.”
Molly said, “George, not five minutes ago you were talking about leaving Bill behind, on his own.”
“But Bill is practically a man!”
“He's not too old to be lonesome. And I'm not talking about leaving Peggy alone; Phoebe will give her loving care. No, George, if the womenfolk ran home at the first sign of trouble there never would be any pioneers. Peggy has to go back, but I stay.”
Peggy stopped her blubbering long enough to say, “I won't go back! I'm a pioneer, too—ain't I, Bill?”
I said, “Sure kid, sure!” and went over and patted her hand. She grabbed onto mine.
I don't know what made me say what I did then. Goodness knows the brat had never been anything but a headache, with her endless questions and her insistence that she be allowed to do anything I did. But I heard myself saying, “Don't worry, Peggy. If you go. back, I'll go with you.”
Dad looked at me sharply, then turned to Peggy. “Bill spoke hastily, Baby. You mustn't hold him to that.”
Peggy said, “You did so mean it, didn't you, Bill?”
I was regretting it already. But I said, “Sure, Peggy.”
Peggy turned back to Dad. “See? But it doesn't matter; we're not going back, not any of us. Please Daddy —I'll get well, I promise you I will. I'm getting better every day.”
Sure, she was—in a pressurized room. I sat there, sweating, and wishing I had kept my big mouth shut. Molly said, “It defeats me, George. What do you think?”
“Mmmm—”
“Well?”
“Uh, I was thinking we could pressurize one room in our quarters. I could rig some sort of an impeller in the machine shop.”
Peggy was suddenly all over her tears. “You mean I can get out of the hospital?”
“That's the idea, Sugar, if Daddy can work it.”
Molly looked dubious. “That's no answer to our problems, George.”
“Maybe not.” Dad stood up and squared his shoulders. “But I have decided one thing; we all go, or we'll all stay. The Lermers stand together. That's settled.”
Homesteading wasn't the only thing we had been mistaken about. There was Scouting on Ganymede even if the news hadn't gotten back to Earth. There hadn't been any meetings of the Mayflower troops after we landed; everybody had been just too busy to think about it. Organized Scouting is fun, but sometimes there just isn't time for it.
There hadn't been any meetings of the Leda Troop, either. They used to meet in their town hall; now we had their town hall as a mess hall, leaving them out in the cold. I guess that didn't tend to make them fee! chummy towards us.
I ran into this boy over in the Exchange. Just as he was passing me I noticed a little embroidered patch on his chest. It was a homemade job and not very good, but I spotted it. “Hey!” I said.
He stopped. “ 'Hey' yourself! Were you yelling at me?”
“Uh, yes. You're a Scout, aren't you?”
“Certainly.”
“So am I. My name's Bill Lermer. Shake.” I slipped him the Scout grip.
He returned it. “Mine's Sergei Roskov.” He looked me over. “You're one of the Johnny-Come-Latelies, aren't you?”
“I came over in the Mayflower” I admitted.
“That's what I meant. No offense— I was born Earth-side, myself. So you used to be a Scout, back home. That's good. Come around to meeting and we'll sign you up again.”
“I'm still a Scout,” I objected.
“Huh? Oh, I get you—'Once a Scout, always a Scout.' Well, come around and we'll make it official.”
That was a very good time for me to keep my lip zipped. But not me—oh, no! When comes the Tromp of Doom, I'll still be talking instead of listening. I said, “It's as official as it can be. I'm senior patrol leader, Baden-Powell Troop.”
“Huh? You're kind of far away from your troop, aren't you?”
So I told him all about it. He listened until I was through, then said quietly, “And you laddie bucks had the nerve to call yourselves the 'Boy Scouts of Ganymede.' Anything else you would like to grab? You already have our meeting hall; maybe you'd like to sleep in our beds?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.” He seemed to be thinking it over. “Just a friendly warning, Bill——”
“Huh?”
“There is only one senior patrol leader around here–and you're looking right at him. Don't make any mistake about it. But come on around to meeting anyhow,” he added. “You'll be welcome. We're always glad to sign up a new tenderfoot.”
I went back to the Receiving Station and looked up Hank Jones and told him all about it. He looked at me admiringly. “William, old son,” he said, “I've got to hand it to you. It takes real talent to louse things up that thoroughly. It's not easy.”
“You think I've messed things up?”
“I hope not. Well, let's look up Doc Archibald and see what can be done.”
Our troop master was holding clinic; we waited until the patients were out of the way, then went in. He said, “Are you two sick, or just looking for a ticket to gold brick?”
“Doc,” I said, “we were wrong. There are so Scouts on Ganymede.”
“So I know,” he answered.
I said, “Huh?”
“Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Bruhn and I have been negotiating with the senior Scout officials here to determine just how our troops will be taken into the parent organization. It's a bit complicated as there are actually more Mayflower Scouts than there are in the local troop. But they have jurisdiction, of course.”
I said, “Oh.”
“Well have a joint meeting in a few days, after we get the rules ironed out.”
I thought it over and decided I had better tell him what had happened, so I did.
He listened, not saying anything. Finally I said, “Hank seems to think I've messed things up. What do you think, Doc?”
“Mmmm—” he said. “Well, I hope he's wrong. But I think I may say you haven't helped the situation any.”
I didn't know what to say. “Don't look so tragic about it,” he urged. “You'll get well. Now run along and forget it. It may not make any difference.”
But it did make a difference. Doc and the others had been pitching for our troops to be recognized as properly constituted troops, with all ratings acknowledged. But after Sergei spread the word around, the regular Ganymede Scouts all squawked that we were nothing but a bunch of tenderfeet, no matter what we had been back on Earth. The place for us to start was the bottom; if we were any good, we could prove it— by tests.
It was compromised; George says things like that are always compromised. Ratings were confirmed on probation, with one G-year to make up any tests that were different. Our troops were kept intact But there was one major change:
All patrol leaders had to be from the original Ganymede Scouts; they were transferred from the Leda troop. I had to admit the justice of it. How could I be a patrol leader on Ganymede when I was still so green that I didn't know northwest from next week? But it didn't set well with the other fellows who had been patrol leaders when the word got around that I was responsible for the flies in the soup.
Hank talked it over with me. “Billy my boy,” he told me, “I suppose you realize that you are about as popular as ants at a picnic?”
“Who cares?” I objected.
“You care. Now is the time for all good men to perform an auto da fé”
“What in great blazing moons is an auto da fé?”
“In this case it means for you to transfer to the Leda Troop.”
“Have you gone crazy? You know what those guys think of us, especially me. I'd be lucky to get away with my life.”
“Which just goes to show how little you know about human nature. Sure, it would be a little rough for a while, but it's the quickest way to gain back some respect.”
“Hank, you really are nuts. In that troop I really would be a tenderfoot—and how!”
“That's just the point,” Hank went on quietly, “We're all tenderfeet—only here in our own troop it doesn't show. If we stay here, we'll keep on being tenderfeet for a long time. But if we transfer, we'll be with a bunch who really know their way around—and some of it will rub off on us.”
“Did you say 'we'?”
“I said 'we'.”
“I catch on. You want to transfer, so you worked tip this gag about how I ought to do so, so you would have company. A fine chum you are!”
He just grinned, completely unembarrassed. “Good old Bill! Hit him in the head eight or nine times and he can latch on to any idea. It won't be so bad, Bill. In precisely four months and nine days we won't be tenderfeet; we'll be old timers.”
“Why the exact date?”
“Because that is the due date of the Mayflower on her next trip—as soon as they arrive they'll be the Johnny-Come-Latelies.”
“Oh!”
Anyhow, we did it—and it was rough at first, especially on me . . . like the night they insisted that I tell them how to be a hero. Some twerp had gotten hold of the meteorite story. But the hazing wasn't too bad and Sergei put a stop to it whenever he caught them at it. After a while they got tired of it.
Sergei was so confounded noble about the whole thing that I wanted to kick him.
The only two merit badges to amount to anything that stood in the way of my getting off probation and back up to my old rating of Eagle Scout were agronomy and planetary ecology, Ganymede style. They were both tough subjects but well worth studying. On Ganymede you had to know them to stay alive, so I dug in.
Ecology is the most involved subject I ever tackled. I told George so and he said possibly politics was worse—and on second thought maybe politics was just one aspect of ecology. The dictionary says ecology is “the science of the interrelations of living organisms and their environment.” That doesn't get you much, does it? It's like defining a hurricane as a movement of air.
The trouble with ecology is that you never know where to start because everything affects everything else. An unseasonal freeze in Texas can affect the price of breakfast in Alaska and that can affect the salmon catch and that can affect something else. Or take the old history book case: the English colonies took England's young bachelors and that meant old maids at home and old maids keep cats and the cats catch field mice and the field mice destroy the bumble bee nests and bumble bees are necessary to clover and cattle eat clover and cattle furnish the roast beef of old England to feed the soldiers to protect the colonies that the bachelors emigrated to, which caused the old maids.
Not very scientific, is it? I mean you have too many variables and you can't put figures to them. George says that if you can't take a measurement and write it down in figures you don't know enough about a thing to call what you are doing with it “science” and, as for him, hell stick to straight engineering, thank you.
But there were some clear cut things about applied ecology on Ganymede which you could get your teeth into. Insects, for instance—on Ganymede, under no circumstances do you step on an insect. There were no insects on Ganymede when men first landed there. Any insects there now are there because the bionomics board planned it that way and the chief ecologist okayed the invasion. He wants that insect to stay right where it is, doing whatever it is that insects do; he wants it to wax and grow fat and raise lots of little insects.
Of course a Scout doesn't go out of his way to step on anything but black widow spiders and the like, anyhow—but it really brings it up to the top of your mind to know that stepping on an insect carries with it a stiff fine if you are caught, as well as a very pointed lecture telling you that the colony can get along very nicely without you but the insects are necessary.
Or take earthworms. I know they are worth their weight in uranium because I was buying them before I was through. A farmer can't get along without earthworms.
Introducing insects to a planet isn't as easy as it sounds. Noah had less trouble with his animals, two by two, because when the waters went away he still had a planet that was suited to his load. Ganymede isn't Earth. Take bees—we brought bees in the Mayflower but we didn't turn them loose; they were all in the shed called “Oahu” and likely to stay there for a smart spell. Bees need clover, or a reasonable facsimile. Clover would grow on Ganymede but our real use for clover was to fix nitrogen in the soil and thereby refresh a worn out field. We weren't planting clover yet because there wasn't any nitrogen in the air to fix—or not much.
But I am ahead of my story. This takes us into the engineering side of ecology. Ganymede was bare rock and ice before we came along, cold as could be, and no atmosphere to speak of—just traces of ammonia and methane. So the first thing to do was to give it an atmosphere men could breathe.
The material was there—ice. Apply enough power, bust up the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen goes up—naturally—and the oxygen sits on the surface where you can breathe it. That went on for more than fifty years.
Any idea how much power it takes to give a planet the size of Ganymede three pressure-pounds of oxygen all over its surface?
Three pressure-pounds per square inch means nine mass pounds, because Ganymede has only one third the surface gravitation of Earth. That means you have to start with nine pounds of ice for every square inch of Ganymede—and that ice is cold to start with, better than two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit
First you warm it to die freezing point, then you melt it, then you dissociate the water molecule into oxygen and hydrogen—not in the ordinary laboratory way by electrolysis, but by extreme heat in a mass converter. The result is three pressure pounds of oxygen and hydrogen mix for that square inch. It's not an explosive mixture, because the hydrogen, being light, sits on top and the boundary layer is too near to being a vacuum to maintain burning.
But to carry out this breakdown takes power and plenty of it—65,000 Btus for each square inch of surface, or for each nine pounds of ice, whichever way you like it. That adds up; Ganymede may be a small planet but it has 135,000,000,000,000,000 square inches of surface. Multiply that by 65,000 Btus for each square inch, then convert British thermal units to ergs and you get:
92,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs.
Ninety-two-and-a-half million billon quadrillion ergs! That figure is such a beauty that I wrote it down in my diary and showed it to George.
He wasn't impressed. George said that all figures were the same size and nobody but a dimwit is impressed by strings of zeroes. He made me work out what the figure meant in terms of mass-energy, by the good old E = MC2 formula, since mass-energy converters were used to give Ganymede its atmosphere.
By Einstein's law, one gram mass equals 9x1020 ergs, so that fancy long figure works out to be 1.03x1011 grams of energy, or 113,200 tons. It was ice, mostly, that they converted into energy, some of the same ice that was being turned into atmosphere—though probably some country rock crept in along with the ice. A mass converter will eat anything.
Let's say it was all ice; that amounts to a cube of ice a hundred and sixty feet on an edge. That was a number I felt I could understand.
I showed my answer to George and he still was not impressed. He said I ought to be able to understand one figure just as easily as the other, that both meant the same thing, and both figures were the same size.
Don't get the idea that Ganymede's atmosphere was made from a cube of ice 160 feet on a side; that was just the mass which had to be converted to energy to turn the trick. The mass of ice which was changed to oxygen and hydrogen would, if converted back into ice, cover the entire planet more than twenty feet deep —like the ice cap that used to cover Greenland.
George says all that proves is that there was a lot of ice on Ganymede to start with and that if we hadn't had mass converters we could never have colonized it. Sometimes I think engineers get so matter of fact that they miss a lot of the juice in life.
With three pressure-pounds of oxygen on Ganymede and the heat trap in place and the place warmed up so that blood wouldn't freeze in your veins colonists could move in and move around without wearing space suits and without living in pressure chambers. The atmosphere project didn't stop, however. In the first place, since Ganymede has a low escape speed, only 1.8 miles per second compared with Earth's 7 m/s, the new atmosphere would gradually bleed off to outer space, especially the hydrogen, and would be lost— in a million years or so. In the second place, nitrogen was needed.
We don't need nitrogen to breathe and ordinarily we don't think much about it. But it takes nitrogen to make protein—muscle. Most plants take it out of the ground; some plants, like clover and alfalfa and beans, take it out of the air as well and put it back into the ground. Ganymede's soil was rich in nitrogen; the original scanty atmosphere was partly ammonia—but the day would come when we would have to put the nitrogen back in that we were taking out. So the atmosphere project was now turned to making nitrogen.
This wasn't as simple as breaking up water; it called for converting stable isotope oxygen-16 into stable isotope nitrogen-14, an energy consuming reaction probably impossible in nature—or so the book said—and long considered theoretically impossible. I hadn't had any nucleonics beyond high school physics, so I skipped the equations. The real point was, it could be done, in the proper sort of a mass-energy converter, and Ganymede would have nitrogen in her atmosphere by the time her fields were exhausted and had to be replenished.
Carbon dioxide was no problem; there was dry ice as well as water ice on Ganymede and it had evaporated into the atmosphere long before the first homesteader staked out a claim.
Not that you can start farming with oxygen, carbon dioxide, and a stretch of land. That land was dead. Dead as Christopher Columbus. Bare rock, sterile, no life of any sort—and there never had been any life in it. It's a far piece from dead rock to rich, warm, black soil crawling with bacteria and earthworms, the sort of soil you have to have to make a crop.
It was the job of the homesteaders to make the soil.
See how involved it gets? Clover, bees, nitrogen, escape speed, power, plant-animal balance, gas laws, compound interest laws, meteorology—a mathematical ecologist has to think of everything and think of it ahead of time. Ecology is explosive; what seems like a minor and harmless invasion can change the whole balance. Everybody has heard of the English sparrow. There was the Australian jack rabbit, too, that darn near ate a continent out of house and home. And the Caribbean mongoose that killed the chickens it was supposed to protect. And the African snail that almost ruined the Pacific west coast before they found a parasite to kill it.
You take a harmless, useful insect, plant, or animal to Ganymede and neglect to bring along its natural enemies and after a couple of seasons you'll wish you had imported bubonic plague instead.
But that was the chief ecologist's worry; a farmer's job was engineering agronomy—making the soil and then growing things in it.
That meant taking whatever you came to—granite boulders melted out of the ice, frozen lava flows, pumice, sand, ancient hardrock—and busting it up into little pieces, grinding the top layers to sand, pulverizing the top few inches to flour, and finally infecting the topmost part with a bit of Mother Earth herself–then nursing what you had to keep it alive and make it spread. It wasn't easy.
But it was interesting. I forgot all about my original notion of boning up on the subject just to pass a merit badge test. I asked around and found out where I could see the various stages going on and went out and had a look for myself. I spent most of one light phase just looking.
When I got back to town I found that George had been looking for me. “Where in blazes have you been?” he wanted to know.
“Oh, just out and around,” I told him, “seeing how the 'steaders do things.”
He wanted to know where I had slept and how I had managed to eat? “Bill, it's all very well to study for your merit badges but that's no reason to turn into a tramp,” he objected. “I guess I have neglected you lately—I'm sorry.” He stopped and thought for a moment, then went on, “I think you had better enter school here. It's true they haven't much for you, but it would be better than running around at loose ends.”
“George?”
“Yes, that's probably the best-huh?”
“Have you completely given up the idea of home-steading?”
Dad looked worried. “That's a hard question, Bill. I still want us to, but with Peggy sick—it's difficult to say. But our name is still in the hat. I'll have to make up my mind before the drawing.”
“Dad, I'll prove it.”
“Eh?”
“You keep your job and take care of Peggy and Molly. I'll make us a farm.”
The drawing of our division took place three weeks later; the next day George and I walked out to see what we had gotten. It was west of town out through Kneiper's Ridge, new country to me; I had done my exploring east of town, over toward the power plant, where most of the proved land was located.
We passed a number of farms and some of them looked good, several acres in cultivation, green and lush, and many more acres already chewed level. It put me in mind of Illinois, but there was something missing. I finally figured out what it was—no trees.
Even without trees it was beautiful country. On the right, north of us, were the foothills of the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Snow-covered peaks thrust up beyond them, twenty or thirty miles away. On the left, curving in from the south and closer than it came to Leda, was Laguna Serenidad. We were a couple of hundred feet higher than the lake. It was a clear day and I tried to see the far shore, but I couldn't be sure.
It was a mighty cheerful scene. Dad felt it, too. He strode along, whistling “Beulah Land” off key. I get my musical talent from Anne.
He broke off and said, “Bill, I envy you.”
I said, “We'll all be together yet, George. I'm the advance guard.” I thought a bit and said, “George, do you know what the first thing I raise is going to be–after I get some food crops in?”
“What?”
“I'm going to import some seed and raise you some tobacco.”
“Oh, no, Son!”
“Why not?” I knew he was touched by it, because he called me 'Son'. “I could do it, as well as not.”
“It's a kind thought, but we'll have to stick to the main chance. By the time we can afford that, I will have forgotten how to light a pipe. Honest, I don't miss it.”
We slogged along a bit further, not saying anything but feeling close together and good. Presently the road played out. Dad stopped and took his sketch map out of his pouch. “This must be about it.”
The sketch showed where the road stopped, with just a dotted line to show where it would be, some day. Our farm was outlined on it, with the nearest comer about half a mile further along where the road ought to be and wasn't. By the map, the edge of our property—or what would be ours if we proved it—ran along the north side of the road about a quarter of a mile and from there back toward the foothills. It was marked “Plot 117-H-2” and had the chief engineer's stamp on it.
Dad was staring at where the road ended. There was a lava flow right across it, high as my head and rough as a hard winter in Maine. “Bill,” he said, “How good an Indian are you?”
“Fair, I guess.”
“We'll have to try to pace it off and hold a straight line due west.”
But it was almost impossible to do it. We struggled and slipped on the lava and made detours. Lava looks soft and it isn't. Dad slipped and skinned his shin and I discovered that I had lost track of how many paces we had come. But presently we were across the flow and in a boulder field. It was loose rubble, from pieces the size of a house down to stuff no bigger than your fist—stuff dropped by the ice when it melted and formed Laguna Serenidad.
George says that Ganymede must have had a boisterous youth, covered with steam and volcanoes.
The boulder field was somewhat easier going but it was even harder to hold a straight line. After a bit Dad stopped. “Bill,” he said, “do you know where we are?”
“No,” I admitted, “but we aren't really lost. If we head back east we are bound to come to proved ground.”
“Perhaps we had better.”
“Wait a minute.” There was a particularly big boulder ahead of us. I picked a way and managed to scramble to the top with nothing worse than a cut on my hand. I stood up. “I can see the road,” I told Dad. “We're north of where we ought to be. And I think maybe we've come too far.” I marked a spot with my eye and came down.
We worked south the amount I thought was right and then headed east again. After a bit I said, “I guess we missed it, George. I'm not much of an In-
He said, “So? What's this?” He was a little ahead of me and had stopped.
It was a cairn with a flat rock on top. Painted on it was: “117-H-2, SE corner.”
We had been on our farm for the past half hour; the big boulder I had climbed up on was on it.
We sat down on a fairly flat rock and looked around. Neither of us said anything for a while; we were both thinking the same thing: if this was a farm, I was my own great uncle.
After a bit Dad muttered something. I said, “What did you say?”
“Golgotha,” he said out loud. “Golgotha, the place of skulls.” He was staring straight ahead.
I looked where he was looking; there was a boulder sitting on top of another and the way the sun caught it, it did look like a skull. It leered at us.
It was so darn quiet you could hear your hair grow. The place was depressing me. I would have given anything to hear something or see something move. Anything—just a lizard darting out from behind a rock, and I could have kissed it.
But there were no lizards here and never had been.
Presently Dad said, “Bill, are you sure you want to tackle this?”
“Sure I'm sure.”
“You don't have to, you know. If you want to go back to Earth and go to M.I.T., I could arrange it for the next trip.”
Maybe he was thinking that if I went back, I could take Peggy with, me and she would be willing to go. Maybe I should have said something about it. But didn't; I said, “Are you going back?”
“No.”
“Neither am I.” At the moment is was mostly stubbornness. I had to admit that our “farm” wasn't flowing with milk and honey; in fact it looked grim. Nobody but a crazy hermit would want to settle down in such a spot.
“Think it over, Bill.”
“I've thought it over.”
We sat there a while longer, not saying anything, just thinking long thoughts. Suddenly we were almost startled out of our boots by somebody yodelling at us. A moment before I had been wishing to hear just anything, but when it came it was like unexpectedly encountering a clammy hand in the dark.
We both jumped and Dad said, “What in the—?” I looked around. There was a large man coming toward us. In spite of his size he skipped through the rocks like a mountain goat, almost floating in the low gravity. As he got closer I knew I had seen him before; he was on the Court of Honor, a Mr. Schultz.
Dad waved to him and pretty soon he reached us. He stood half a head taller than Dad and would have made the pair of us, he was so big. His chest was as thick as my shoulders were broad and his belly was thicker than that. He had bushy, curly red hair and his beard spread out over his chest like a tangle of copper springs. “Greetings, citizens,” he boomed at us, “my name is Johann Schultz.”
Dad introduced us and he shook hands and I almost lost mine in his. He fixed his eyes on me and said, “I've seen you before, Bill.”
I said I guessed he had, at Scout meetings. He nodded and added, “A patrol leader, no?”
I admitted that I used to be. He said, “And soon again,” as if the matter were all settled. He turned to Dad. “One of the kinder saw you going past on the road, so Mama sent me to find you and bring you back to the house for tea and some of her good coffee cake.”
Dad said that was very kind but that we didn't want to impose. Mr. Schultz didn't seem to hear him. Dad explained what we were there for and showed him the map and pointed out the cairn. Mr. Schultz nodded four or five times and said, “So we are to be neighbors. Good, good!” He added to Dad “My neighbors call me John, or sometimes 'Johnny'.” Dad said his name was George and from then on they were old friends.
Mr. Schultz stood by the cairn and sighted off to the west and then north to the mountains. Then he scrambled up on a big boulder where he could see better and looked again. We went up after him.
He pointed to a rise west of us. “You put your house so, not too far from the road, but not on it. And first you work this piece in here and next season you work back further toward the hills.” He looked at me and added. “No?”
I said I guessed so. He said, “It is good land, Bill. You will make a fine farm.” He reached down and picked up a piece of rock and rubbed it between his fingers. “Good land,” he repeated.
He laid it down carefully, straightened up, and said, “Mama will be waiting for us.”
Mama was waiting for us, all right, and her idea of a piece of coffee cake was roughly what they used to welcome back the Prodigal Son. But before we got into the house we had to stop and admire the Tree.
It was a real tree, an apple tree, growing in a fine bluegrass lawn out in front of his house. Furthermore it was bearing fruit on two of its limbs. I stopped and stared at it.
“A beauty, eh, Bill?” Mr. Schultz said, and I agreed. “Yes,” he went on, “it's the most beautiful tree on Ganymede—you know why? Because it's the only tree on Ganymede.” He laughed uproariously and dug me in the ribs as if he had said something funny. My ribs were sore for a week.
He explained to Dad all the things he had had to do to persuade it to grow and how deep down he had had to go to prepare for it and how he had had to channel out to drain it. Dad asked why it was bearing only on one side. “Next year we pollenate the other side,” he answered, “and then we have Stark's Delicious. And Rome Beauties. This year, Rhode Island Greenings and Winesaps.” He reached up and picked one. “A Winesap for you, Bill.”
I said thanks and bit into it. I don't know when I've tasted anything so good.
We went inside and met Mama Schultz and four or five other Schultzes of assorted sizes, from a baby crawling around in the sand on the floor up to a girl as old as I was and nearly as big. Her name was Gretchen and her hair was red like her father's, only it was straight and she wore it in long braids. The boys were mostly blond, including the ones I met later.
The house was mainly a big living room, with a big table down the middle of it. It was a solid slab of rock, maybe four feet wide and twelve or thirteen feet long, supported by three rock pillars. A good thing it was rock, the way Mama Schultz loaded it down.
There were rock slab benches down the long sides and two real chairs, one at each end, made out of oil drums and padded with stuffed leather cushions.
Mama Schultz wiped her face and hands on her apron and shook hands and insisted that Dad sit down in her chair; she wouldn't be sitting down much, she explained. Then she turned back to her cooking while Gretchen poured tea for us.
The end of the room was the kitchen and was centered around a big stone fireplace. It had all the earmarks of being a practical fireplace—and it was, as I found out later, though of course nothing had ever been burned in it. It was really just a ventilation hole. But Papa Schultz had wanted a fireplace so he had a fireplace. Mama Schultz's oven was set in the side of it.
It was faced with what appeared to be Dutch tile, though I couldn't believe it. I mean, who is going to import anything as useless as Ornamental tile all the way from Earth? Papa Schultz saw me looking at them and said, “My little girl Kathy paints good, huh?” One of the medium-sized girls blushed and giggled and left the room.
I had the apple down to a very skinny core and was wondering what to do with it in that spotless room when Papa Schultz stuck out his hand. “Give it to me, Bill.”
I did. He took out his knife and very gently separated out the seeds. One of the kids left the room and fetched him a tiny paper envelope in which he placed the seeds and then sealed it. He handed it to me. “There, Bill,” he said. “I have only one apple tree, but you have eight!”
I was sort of surprised, but I thanked him. He went on, “That place just this side of where you will build your house—if you will fill that gully from the bottom, layer by layer, building your soil as you go, with only a very little 'pay dirt' you will have a place that will support a whole row of trees. When your seedlings are big, we’ll bud from my tree.”
I put them very carefully in my pouch.
Some of the boys drifted in and washed up and soon we were all sitting around the table and digging into fried chicken and mashed potatoes and tomato preserves and things. Mama Schultz sat beside me and kept pressing food on me and insisting that I wasn't eating enough to keep body and soul together which wasn't true.
Afterwards I got acquainted with the kids while George and Papa Schultz talked. Four of the boys I knew; they were Scouts. The fifth boy, Johann Junior —they called him “Yo”—was older than I, almost twenty, and worked in town for the chief engineer. The others were Hugo and Peter, both Cubs, then Sam, and then Vic, who was an Explorer Scout, same as I was. The girls were the baby, Kathy and Anna, who seemed to be twins but weren't, and Gretchen. They all talked at once.
Presently Dad called me over. “Bill, you know we don't rate a chance at a rock crusher for several months.”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat mystified.
“What are your plans in the meantime?”
“Uh, well, I don't know exactly. Study up on what I'll have to do.”
“Mmrn . . . Mr. Schultz has very kindly offered to take you on as a farm hand in the meantime. What do you think of the idea?”
Papa Schultz needed a field hand about as much as I need four ears, but that didn't keep me from moving in. In that family everybody worked but the baby and you could count on it that she would be washing dishes as soon as she was up off the floor. Everybody worked all the time and seemed to enjoy it. When the kids weren't working they were doing lessons and the boys were punished when they weren't up on their lessons by being required to stay in from the fields.
Mama would listen to them recite while she cooked. Sometimes she listened to lessons in things I'm pretty sure she never had studied herself, but Papa Schultz checked up on them, too, so it didn't matter.
Me, I learned about pigs. And cows. And chickens. And how you breed pay dirt to make more pay dirt. “Pay dirt” is the stuff that is actually imported from Earth, concentrated soil cultures with the bacteria and so forth in it you have to have to get a field alive.
There was an awful lot to learn. Take cows, now–half the people you meet can't tell their left hands from their right so who would think that a cow would care about such things? But they do, as I found out when I tried to milk one from the left.
Everything was stoop labor around the place, as primitive as a Chinese farm. The standard means of transportation was a wheelbarrow.
I learned not to sneer at a wheelbarrow after I priced one at the Exchange.
The total lack of power machinery wasn't through lack of power; the antenna on the farm house roof could pick up as much power as necessary—but there wasn't any machinery. The only power machinery in the colony belonged to the whole colony and was the sort of thing the colony absolutely couldn't get along without, like rock chewers and the equipment for the heat trap and the power plant itself.
George explained it this way: every load that was sent up from Earth was a compromise between people and cargo. The colonists were always yapping for more machinery and fewer immigrants; the Colonial Commission always insisted on sending as many people as possible and holding the imports down to a minimum.
“The Commission is right, of course,” he went on. “If we have people, we'll get machinery—we'll make it ourselves. By the time you have a family of your own, Bill, immigrants will arrive here bare-handed, no cargo at all, and we'll be able to outfit a man with everything from plastic dishes for his cupboard to power cultivators for his fields.”
I said, “If they wait until I have a family, they'll have a long wait. I figure a bachelor travels faster and further.”
Dad just grinned, as if he knew something I didn't know and wouldn't tell. I had walked into town to have dinner with him and Molly and the kid. I hadn't seen much of them since I went to work for Papa Schultz. Molly was teaching school, Peggy couldn't come out to the farm, of course, and Dad was very busy and very excited over a strike of aluminum oxides twenty miles east of town. He was in the project up to his ears and talking about having sheet aluminum on sale in another G-year.
As a matter or fact, cultivating a farm by stoop labor wasn't too bad, not on Ganymede. Low gravity was a big help; you didn't wear yourself out just dragging your own carcass around. I grossed a hundred and forty-two mass pounds, what with the way Mama Schultz stuffed me; that meant I weighed less than fifty pounds, field boots and all A wheelbarrow was similarly light when loaded.
But the real advantage that made the work easy was something you might not guess.
No weeds.
No weeds at all; we had very carefully not imported any. Once the land was built, making a crop was darn near a case of poking a seed into the ground and then stepping back quick before the stalk shot up and hit you in the eye.
Not that we didn't work. There is plenty of work around a farm even with no weeds to worry about. And a light wheelbarrow load simply meant that we piled three times as much on. But we had fun, too; I never met a family that laughed so much.
I brought my squeeze box out from town and used to play it after supper. We would all sing, with Papa Schultz booming away on his own and leaving it up to the rest of us to find the key he was singing in. We had fun.
It turned out that Gretchen was an awful tease when she got over being shy. But I could always get her goat by pretending that her head was on fire and either warming my hands over her hair or threatening to pour water on her before she burned the place down.
The day finally came when it was my turn to have the colony's crushers work on my land and I was almost sorry to see it arrive; I had had such a nice time at the Schultz's. But by then I could caponize a rooster or plant a row of corn; I still had a lot to learn, but there wasn't any good reason why I shouldn't start making my own farm.
Dad and I had had to prepare our farm for the crusher by dynamiting the biggest boulders. A crusher will choke on anything much bigger than a barrel but it will handle up to that size very nicely. Dynamite is cheap, thank goodness, and we used plenty of it. The raw material is nitroglycerine which we didn't have to import from Earth, the glycerine being refined from animal fats and the nitric acid being a synthetic byproduct of the atmosphere project.
Dad spent two weekends with me, making medium-sized ones out of big ones, then decided it was safe to trust me to set powder by myself and I finished the job. There was a little stream of melted snow water coming down from the hills at the far side of our property; we blew out a new bed for it to lead it close to the place where the house would go. We left it dry for the time being, with a natural rock dam to blow up later. One fair-sized hill we moved entirely and blew it into a gully on the lake side of the land. Big charges that took and I almost got fitted for a halo through underestimating how far some of the stuff would throw.
It was easy work and lots of fun. I had a vibro-drill, borrowed from the engineer's office; you could sink a charge hole with it twenty feet into rock as easily as you could sink a hot knife into butter. Then drop in the powder, fill the rest of the hole with rock dust, light the fuse, and run like the dickens!
But the most fun was blowing up that rock that looked like a grinning skull. I fixed it properly, it and its leer!
We had a visitor while we were dynamiting the land. Dad and I had just knocked off for lunch one day when Saunders, “The One-Man Lobby”—that's George's name for him—showed up. We invited him to share what we had; he had brought nothing but his appetite.
He complained about this and that. Dad tried to change the subject by asking him how he was getting along with his blasting. Saunders said it was slow work. Dad said, “You have the crusher the day after us, don't you?”
Saunders admitted it and said he wanted to borrow some powder; he was running short of time. Dad let him have it, though it meant another trip out from town, after work, for him the next day. Saunders went on, “I've been looking this situation over, Mr. Lermer. We're tackling it all wrong.”
George said, “So?”
Saunders said, “Yes, indeedy! Now in the first place this blasting ought not to be done by the homesteader; it should be done by trained crews, sent out by the government. It's really part of the contract anyway; we're supposed to receive processed land.”
Dad said mildly that, while that might be a nice idea, he didn't know where they would find enough trained crews to do the work for fifteen hundred new farms.
“Let the government hire them!” Mr. Saunders answered. “Bring them in from Earth for that purpose. Now, see here, Mr. Lermer, you are in the chief engineer's office. You ought to put in a word for the rest of us.”
George picked up the vibro and got ready to set a charge. Presently he answered, “I'm afraid you've come to the wrong party. I'm in an entirely different department.”
I guess Mr. Saunders saw he was off on the wrong tack for he went on, “In the second place, I have been looking into the matter of the soil, or what they call 'soil'—again they are off on the wrong foot.” He kicked a rock. “This stuff isn't good for anything. You can't grow anything in stuff like that.”
“Naturally not,” agreed Dad. “You have to make soil first.”
“That's just what I'm getting at,” Saunders went on. “You have to have soil—good, black, rich soil. So they tell us to breed it, a square foot at a time. Plough garbage into it, raise earthworms—I don't know how many tomfool stunts.”
“Do you know of a better way?”
“You bet you I do! That's just what I'm getting at. Here we are, piddling along, doing things the way a bunch of bureaucrats who never made a crop tell us to, all for a few inches of second-rate soil—when there are millions of cubic feet of the richest sort of black soil going begging.”
Dad looked up sharply. “Where?”
“In the Mississippi Delta, that's where! Black soil goes down there for hundreds of feet.”
We both looked at him, but he was quite serious about it. “Now here's what you've got to have—Level the ground off, yes. But after that spread real Earth soil over the rock to a depth of at least two feet; then it will be worth while to farm. As it is, we are just wasting our time.”
Dad waited a bit before answering, “Have you figured out what this would cost?”
Mr. Saunders brushed that aside. “That's not the point; the point is, that's what we've got to have. The government wants us to settle here, doesn't it? Well, then, if we all stick together and insist on it, we'll get it.” He jerked his chin triumphantly.
George started to say something, then stopped. He patted rock dust in on top of his charge, then straightened up and wiped the sweat off his beard. “Listen, citizen,” he said, “can't you see that we are busy? I'm about to light this fuse; I suggest that you back away out of danger.”
“Huh?” said Saunders. “How big a charge is it? How far?”
If he had kept his eyes open, he would have seen how big a charge it was and known how far to give back. Dad said, “Oh, say a mile and a half—or even two miles. And keep backing.”
Saunders looked at him, snorted disgustedly, and stalked away. We backed out of range and let her blow.
While we were setting the next charge I could see George's lips moving. After a while he said, “Figuring gumbo mud conservatively at a hundred pounds per cubic foot it would take one full load of the Mayflower to give Mr. Saunders alone the kind of a farm he would like to have handed to him. At that rate it would take just an even thousand G-years—five hundred Earth years—for the Mayflower to truck in top-soil for farms for our entire party.”
“You forgot the Covered Wagon,” I said brightly.
George grinned. “Oh, yes! When the Covered Wagon is commissioned and in service we could cut it down to two hundred and fifty years—provided no new immigrants came in and there was a ban on having babies!” He frowned and added, “Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?” I didn't know the answer, so he said, “Come on, Bill, let's get on with our blasting. I'm afraid we'll just have to piddle along in our inefficient way, even if it doesn't suit our friend Saunders.”
The morning the crusher was scheduled to show up I was waiting for it at the end of the road. It came breezing down the road at twenty miles an hour, filling it from side to side. When it came to the wall of lava, it stopped. I waved to the operator; he waved back, then the machine grunted a couple of times, inched forward, and took a bite out of the lava.
Lava didn't bother it; it treated it like peanut brittle. A vibro-cutter built into its under carriage would slice under the flow like a housewife separating biscuit from a pan, the big steel spade on the front of the thing would pry under and crack the bite off, and the conveyor would carry the chunk up into the jaws.
The driver had a choice of dropping the chewed up material under the rear rollers or throwing it off to the side. Just now he was throwing it away, leaving the clean slice made by the vibro-cutter as a road bed —a good road, a little dusty but a few rains would fix that.
It was terrifically noisy but the driver didn't seem to mind. He seemed to enjoy it; there was a good breeze taking the dust away from him and he had his anti-silicosis mask pushed up on his forehead, showing the grin on his face.
By noon he was down to our place and had turned in. We had a bite to eat together, then he started in levelling a farm for me—five acres, the rest would have to wait. At that I was lucky for I was to get land to work months ahead of the original schedule. The second trip of the Mayflower had brought in three more crushers and very few immigrants, just enough to replace those who had given up and gone back out of our party, that being the compromise the town council had worked out with the Colonial Commission.
The racket was still worse when the crusher bit into hard rock, instead of lava, but it was music to me and I didn't get tired of watching. Every bite was a piece of land to me. At suppertime the second-shift driver showed up with Dad. We watched together for a while, then Dad went back to town. I stayed. About midnight I went over into a stretch that was not to be processed now, found a big rock to keep the Sun out of my eyes and lay down for a quick nap.
Then the relief driver was shaking me and saying, “Wake up, kid—you got a farm.”
I stood up and rubbed my eyes and looked around. Five acres, with just enough contour for drainage and a low hummock in the middle where the house would sit. I had a farm.
The next logical thing to do would have been to get the house up, but, under the schedule, I rated the use of a cud-chewer for the following week. A cud-chewer is a baby rock crusher. It uses a power pack instead of an antenna, it is almost fool proof and anybody can run one, and it finishes up what the crusher starts. It is small and low-powered compared with a crusher. The colony had about forty of them.
The crusher left loose rubble several feet deep in pieces as big as my fist. The cud-chewer had a fork spade on the front of it, several sizes of spade forks, in fact. The coarse fork went down into the loose rocks about eighteen inches and picked up the big ones. These drifted back into the hopper as the machine moved forward and were busted into stuff about the size of walnuts.
When you had been over the ground once with the coarse fork, you unshipped it and put on the medium fork and reset the chewing rollers. This time you went down only ten inches and the result was gravel. Then you did it again for medium-fine and then fine and when you were done the upper six inches or so was rock flour, fine as the best loam—still dead, but ready to be bred into life.
Round and round and round, moving forward an inch at a time. To get real use out of your time allotment the cud-chewer had to be moving twenty-four hours a day until they took it away from you. I stayed at it all through the first day, eating my lunch in the saddle. Dad spelled me after supper and Hank came out from town and we alternated through the night-light phase it was, actually, it being Monday night.
Papa Schultz found me asleep with my head on the controls late next afternoon and sent me back to his house to get some real sleep. Thereafter one of the Schultzes always showed up when I had been at it alone for four or five hours. Without the Schultzes I don't know how Dad and I would have gotten through the dark phase of that week.
But they did help and by the time I had to pass the cud-chewer along I had nearly three and a half acres ready to be seeded with pay dirt.
Winter was coming on and I had my heart set on getting my house up and living in it during the winter month, but to do so I really had to hump. I had to get some sort of a holding crop in or the spring thaw would wash my top soil away. The short Ganymede year is a good idea and I'm glad they run it that way; Earth's winters are longer than necessary. But it keeps you on the jump.
Papa Schultz advised grass; the mutated grass would grow in sterile soil much like growing things in hydroponic solutions. The mat of rootlets would hold my soil even if the winter killed it and the roots would furnish something through which the infection could spread from the “pay dirt.”
Pay dirt is fundamentally just good black soil from Earth, crawling with bacteria and fungi and microscopic worms—everything you need but the big fishing worms; you have to add those. However, it wouldn't do simply to ship Earth dirt to Ganymede by the car load. In any shovelful of loam there are hundreds of things, plant and animal, you need for growing soil—but there are hundreds of other things you don't want. Tetanus germs. Plant disease viruses. Cut worms. Spores. Weed seeds. Most of them are too small to be seen with the naked eye and some of them can't even be filtered out
So to make pay dirt the laboratory people back on Earth would make pure cultures of everything they wanted to keep in the way of bacteria, raise the little worms under laboratory conditions, do the same for fungi and everything else they wanted to save—and take the soil itself and kill it deader than Luna, irradiate it, bake it, test it for utter sterility. Then they would take what they had saved in the way of life forms and put it back into the dead soil That was “pay dirt,” the original pay dirt. Once on Ganymede the original stuff would be cut six ways, encouraged to grow, then cut again. A hundred weight of pay dirt supplied to a ‘steader might contain a pound of Terra's own soil.
Every possible effort was made to “limit the invasion,” as the ecologists say, to what was wanted. One thing that I may not have mentioned about the trip out was the fact that our clothes and our baggage were sterilized during the trip and that we ourselves were required to take a special scrub before we put our clothes back on. It was the only good bath I got the whole two months, but it left me smelling like a hospital.
The colony's tractor trucks delivered the pay dirt I was entitled to in order to seed my farm; I left the Schultz place early that morning to meet them. There is difference of opinion as to the best way to plant pay dirt; some 'steaders spread it all over and take a chance on it dying; some build up little pockets six or eight feet apart, checker board style . . . safe but slow. I was studying the matter, my mind not made up, when I saw something moving down the road.
It was a line of men, pushing wheelbarrows, six of them. They got closer and I could see that it was all the male Schultzes. I went out to meet them.
Every one of those wheelbarrows was loaded with garbage and all for me!
Papa Schultz had been saving it as a surprise for me. I didn't know what to say. Finally I blurted out, “Gee, Papa Schultz, I don't know when I'll be able to pay you back!”
He looked fierce and said, “Who is speaking of paying back when we have compost running out of our ears yet?” Then he had the boys dump their loads down on top of my pay dirt, took a fork and began mixing it as gently as Mama Schultz folding in beaten egg white.
He took charge and I didn't have to worry about the best way to use it. In his opinion—and you can't bet that I didn't buck itl—what we had was good for about an acre and his method was to spread it through the soil. But he did not select one compact acre; he laid out strips, seven of them, a couple of hundred yards long each and stretching across my chewed soil thirty-five or forty feet apart. Each of us took a wheelbarrow—their six and my one—and distributed the mix along each line.
When that was done and cairns had been set to show where the strips ran, we raked the stuff into the rock dust five or six feet on each side of each line. Around noon Mama and Gretchen showed up, loaded down, and we stopped and had a picnic.
After lunch Yo had to go back to town but he had almost finished his strip. Papa had finished his and proceeded to help Hugo and Peter who were too small to swing a good rake. I dug in and finished mine soon enough to be able to finish what Yo had left. Dad showed up at the end of the day, expecting to help me all evening—it was light phase and you could work as late as you could stand up under it— but there was nothing left to do. And he didn't know how to thank them either.
I like to think that we would have gotten the farm made anyhow, without the Schultzes, and maybe we would have—but I'm sure not sure. Pioneers need good neighbors.
The following week I spent working artificial nitrates from the colony's power pile into the spaces between the strips—not as good as pay dirt from Earth, but not as expensive, either.
Then I tackled sowing the grass, by hand, just like in the Bible, and then raking it gently in. That old pest Saunders showed up. He still did so every now and then, but never when Dad was around. I guess he was lonely. His family was still in town and he was camping out in a ten-foot rock shed he had built. He wasn't really making a farm, not properly; I couldn't figure out what he was up to. It didn't make sense.
I said, “Howdy,” and went on with my work.
He watched me, looking sour, and finally said, “You still bent on breaking your heart on this stuff, aren't you, youngster?”
I told him I hadn't noticed any wear and tear on my pump, and anyhow, wasn't he making a farm, too?
He snorted. “Not likely!”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Buying my ticket, that's what.”
“Huh?”
“The only thing you can sell around this place is improved land. I'm beating them at their own game, that's what. I'll get that land in shape to unload it on some other sucker and then me and mine are heading straight back for that ever-lovin' Earth. And that's just what you'll be doing if you aren't an utter fool. You'll never make a farm here. It can't be done.”
I was getting very tired of him but I'm short on the sort of point-blank guts it takes to be flatly rude. “Oh, I don't know,” I said. “Look at Mr. Schultz—he's got a good farm.”
Saunders snorted again. “You mean 'Johnny Apple-seed?”
“I mean Mr. Johann Schultz.”
“Sure, sure—Johnny Appleseed. That's what everybody calls him in town. He's nuts. You know what he did? He gave me a handful of apple seeds and acted like he had handed me the riches of Solomon.”
I stopped raking. “Well, hadn't he?”
Saunders spat on the ground between us. “He's a clown.”
I lifted up the head of the rake. I said, “Mr. Saunders, you are standing on my land, my property. I'll give you just two shakes to get off it and never set foot on it again!”
He backed away and said, “Hey! You stop that! Watch what you are doing with that rake!”
I said, “Git!”
He got.
The house was a problem. Ganymede has little quakes all the time. It has to do with “isostasy” which doesn't mean a thing but “equal-pressure” when you get right down to it, but it's the science of how the mountains balance the seas and the gravitation of a planet all comes out even.
It has to do with tidal strains, too, which is odd, since Ganymede doesn't have any tides; the Sun is too far away to matter and Ganymede always keeps the same face toward Jupiter. Oh, you can detect a little tide on Laguna Serenidad when Europa is closest to Ganymede and even a trifle from Callisto and lo, but what I mean is it doesn't have tides—not like the Pacific Ocean.
What it does have is a frozen tidal strain. The way Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, explains it is that Ganymede was closer to Jupiter when it cooled off and lost its rotation, so that there is a tidal bulge in the planet itself—sort of a fossil tidal bulge. The Moon has one, you know.
Then we came along and melted off the ice cap and gave Ganymede an atmosphere. That rearranged the pressures everywhere and the isostatic balance is readjusting. Result: little quakes all the time.
I'm a California boy; I wanted a quakeproof house. Schultzes had a quakeproof house and it seemed like a good idea, even though there had never been a quake heavy enough to knock a man down, much less knock a house down. On the other hand most of the colonists didn't bother; it is hard to make a rock house really quakeproof.
Worse than that, it's expensive. The basic list of equipment that a 'steader is promised in his emigration contract reads all right, a hoe, a spade, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a hand cultivator, a bucket, and so forth down the list—but when you start to farming you find that is only the beginning and you've got to go to the Exchange and buy a lot of other stuff. I was already in debt a proved acre and a half, nearly, before the house ever went up.
As usual we compromised. One room had to be quake proof because it had to be air tight—Peggy's room. She was getting better all the time, but she still couldn't take low pressure for any length of time. If the family was going to move out to the farm, her bedroom had to be sealed, it had to have an air lock on it, and we had to have an impeller. All that runs into money.
Before I was through I had to pledge two more acres. Dad tried to sign for it but they told him bluntly that while a 'steader's credit was good, his wasn't. That settled the matter. We planned on one reinforced room and hoped to build on to it later. In the mean time the house would be a living room, ten by twelve, where I would sleep, a separate bedroom too small to swing a cat for George and Molly, and Peggy's room. All but Peggy's room would be dry wall rock with a patent roof.
Pretty small, eh? Well, what's wrong with that? Abe Lincoln started with less.
I started in cutting the stone as soon as the seed was in. A vibro-saw is like a vibro-drill, except that it cuts a hair line instead of drilling a hole. When the power is on you have to be durned careful not to get your fingers or anything into the field, but it makes easy work of stone cutting. By the contract you got the use of one for forty-eight hours free and another forty-eight hours, if you wanted it, at a reduced rate. I got my work lined up and managed to squeeze it into the two free days. I didn't want to run up any more debt, because there was another thing I was hankering for, come not later than the second spring away—flicker flood lights. Papa Schultz had them for his fields and they just about doubled his crops. Earth plants aren't used to three and half days of darkness, but, if you can tickle them during the dark phase with flicker lights, the old photosynthesis really gets in and humps itself.
But that would have to wait.
The patrol got the house up—the patrol I was in, I mean, the Auslanders. It was a surprise to me and yet it wasn't, because everybody has a house raising; you can't do it alone. I had already taken part in six myself—not just big-heartedness, don't get me wrong. I had to learn how it was done.
But the patrol showed up before I had even passed the word around that I was ready to hold a house raising. They came swinging down our road; Sergei marched them up to where the house was to be, halted them, and said to me, “Bill, are your Scout dues paid up?” He sounded fierce. I said, “You know they are.”
“Then you can help. But don't get in our way.” Suddenly he grinned and I knew I had been framed. He turned to the patrol and shouted, “House raising drill! Fall out and fall to.”
Suddenly it looked like one of those TV comedies where everything has been speeded up. I never saw anybody work the way they did. Let me tell you it doesn't take Scout uniforms to make Scouts. None of us ever had uniforms; we couldn't afford special clothes just for Scouting.
Besides the Auslanders there was Vic Schultz and Hank Jones, both from the Hard Rock patrol and Doug Okajima, who wasn't even of our troop but still with the Baden-Powell. It did my heart good. I hadn't seen much of the fellows lately; during light phase I always worked too late to get in to meetings; during dark phase a cold nine miles into town after supper is something to think twice about.
I felt sheepish to realize that while I might have forgotten them, they hadn't forgotten me, and I resolved to get to meetings, no matter how tired I was. And take the tests for those two merit badges, too—the very first chance I got.
That reminded me of another item of unfinished business, too—Noisy Edwards. But you can't take a day off just to hunt somebody up and poke him in the snoot, not when you are making a farm. Besides it wouldn't hurt anything for me to put on another ten pounds; I didn't want it to be a repetition of the last time.
Dad snowed up almost immediately with two men from his office and he took charge of bracing and sealing Peggy's room. The fact that he showed up at all let me know that he was in on it—which he admitted. It had been Sergei's idea and that was why Dad had put me off when I said it was about time to invite the neighbors in.
I got Dad aside. “Look, George,” I said, “how in nation are we going to feed 'em?”
“Don't worry about it,” he said.
“But I do worry about it!” Everybody knows it's the obligation of the 'steader whose house is being raised to provide the victuals and I had been taken by surprise.
“I said not to,” he repeated. And presently I knew why; Molly showed up with Mama Schultz, Gretchen, Sergei's sister Marushka, and two girls who were friends of Peggy—and what they were carrying they couldn't have carried on Earth. It was a number one picnic and Sergei had trouble getting them back to work after lunch.
Theoretically, Molly had done the cooking over at the Schultz's but I know Mama Schultz—anyhow, let's face it, Molly wasn't much of a cook.
Molly had a note for me from Peggy. It read: “Dearest Billy, Please come into town tonight and tell me all about it. Pretty please!” I told Molly I would.
By eighteen o'clock that afternoon the roof was on and we had a house. The door wasn't hung; it was still down at the 'Change. And the power unit wasn't in and might not be for a week. But we had a house that would keep off the rain, and a pint-sized cow barn as well, even if I didn't own a cow.
According to my diary we moved into the house on the first day of spring.
Gretchen came over and helped me get ready for them. I suggested that we ask Marushka as well, since there would be lots of work to do. Gretchen said, “Suit yourself!” and seemed annoyed, so I didn't. Women are funny. Anyhow Gretchen is a right good worker.
I had been sleeping in the house ever since the raising and even before the technicians from the engineer's office had come and installed the antenna on the roof and rigged the lights and heat—but that was done before winter was started and I passed a comfortable month, fixing up the inside of the place and getting in a crop of ice for the summer. I stored the ice, several tons of it, in the gully at the side of the house, where I meant to plant apple trees just as soon as I could get fixed for it. The ice would keep there until I could build a proper cold cellar.
The first few months after the folks moved out are the happiest I can remember. We were together again and it was good. Dad still spent most of each dark phase in town, working on a part time basis, but that was quite as much because he was interested in the manufacturing project as it was to help pay off our debts. During light phase we worked almost around the clock, side by side or at least within earshot.
Molly seemed to like being a housewife. I taught her how to cook and she caught on real fast. Ganymede cooking is an art. Most things have to be cooked under pressure, even baked things, for water boils at just a little over a hundred and forty degrees. You can stir boiling water with your finger if you don't leave it in too long. Then Molly started learning from Mama Schultz but I didn't mind that; Mama Schultz was an artist. Molly got to be a really good cook.
Peg had to live in her room, of course, but we had hopes that she would be out soon. We had the pressure down to eight pounds, half oxygen and half nitrogen, and we usually all ate in her room. I still hated the thick stuff but it was worth while putting up with it so that the family could eat together. After a while I got so that I could change pressure without even an earache.
Peggy could come outside, too. We had brought her from town in a bubble stretcher—another thing bought on credit!—and Dad had fitted it with the gas apparatus from an old space suit he had salvaged from the Project Jove people. Peggy could get into the stretcher and shut herself in and we could bleed off the pressure in her room and take her outside where she could get some sunshine and look at the mountains and the lake and watch Dad and me work in the fields. The clear plastic of the bubble did not stop ultraviolet and it was good for her.
She was a skinny little runt and it was no trouble to move her around, even in the stretcher. Light phase, she spent a lot of time outdoors.
We had started with a broody hen and fifteen fertile eggs, and a pair of rabbits. Pretty soon we had meat of our own. We always let Peggy think that the fryers we ate came from the Schultzes and I don't think she ever caught on. At first I used to go to the Schultz farm every day for fresh milk for Peggy, but I got a chance, midsummer, to get a fresh two-year-old cow on tick at a reasonable price. Peggy named her Mabel and was much irked that she couldn't get at her to pet her.
We were on the move all the time. I still hadn't managed to take my merit badge tests and I hadn't done much better about getting in to Scout meetings. There was just too much to do. Building a pond, for example—Laguna Serenidad was being infected with plankton and algae but there weren't fish in it yet and it would be a long time, even after the fish were stocked, before fishing would be allowed. So we did fish-pond gardening, Chinese style, after I got the pond built.
And there were always crops to work on. My cover grass had taken hold all right and shortly after we moved in the soil seemed ready to take angle worms. Dad was about to send a sample into town for analysis when Papa Schultz stopped by. Hearing what we were about he took up a handful of the worked soil, crumbled it, smelled it, tasted it, and told me to go ahead and plant my worms. I did and they did all right; we encountered them from time to time in working the fields thereafter.
You could see the stripes on the fields which had been planted with pay dirt by the way the grass came up. You could see that the infection was spreading, too, but not much. I had a lot of hard work ahead before the stripes would meet and blend together and then we could think about renting a cud-chewer and finishing off the other acre and a half, using our own field loam and our own compost heap to infect the new soil. After that we could see about crushing some more acres, but that was a long way away.
We put in carrots and lettuce and beets and cabbage and brussels sprouts and potatoes and broccoli. We planted corn between the rows. I would like to have put in an acre of wheat but it didn't make sense when we had so little land. There was one special little patch close to the house where we put in tomatoes and Hubbard squash and some peas and beans. Those were “bee” plants and Molly would come out and pollenate them by hand, a very tedious business. We hoped to have a hive of bees some day and the entomologists on the bionomics staff were practically busting their hearts trying to breed a strain of bees which would prosper out doors. You see, among other things, while our gravity was only a third Earth-normal, our air pressure was only a little better than a fifth Earth-normal and the bees resented it; it made flying hard work for them. Or maybe bees are just naturally conservative.
I guess I was happy, or too tired and too busy to be unhappy, right up to the following winter.
At first winter seemed like a good rest. Aside from getting the ice crop in and taking care of the cow and the rabbits and the chickens there wasn't too much to do. I was tired out and cranky and didn't know it; Molly, I think, was just quietly, patiently exhausted. She wasn't used to farm life and she wasn't handy at it, the way Mama Schultz was.
Besides that, she wanted inside plumbing and it just wasn't in the cards for her to have it any time soon. I carried water for her, of course, usually having to crack ice in the stream to get it, but that didn't cover everything, not with snow on the ground. Not that she complained.
Dad didn't complain, either, but there were deep lines forming from his nose down to his mouth which his beard didn't cover entirely. But it was mostly Peggy.
When we first moved her out to the farm she perked up a lot. We gradually reduced the pressure in her room and she kept insisting that she was fine and teasing for a chance to go out without the bubble stretcher. We even tried it once, on Dr. Archibald's advice, and she didn't have a nose bleed but she was willing to get back in after about ten minutes.
The fact was she wasn't adjusting. It wasn't just the pressure; something else was wrong. She didn't belong here and she wouldn't grow here. Have you ever had a plant that refused to be happy where you planted it? It was like that.
She belonged back on Earth.
I suppose we weren't bad off, but there is a whale of a difference between being a rich farmer, like Papa Schultz, with heaps of cow manure in your barn yard and hams hanging in your cold cellar and every modern convenience you could want, even running water in your house, and being poor farmers, like us, scratching for a toe hold in new soil and in debt to the Commission. It told on us and that winter we had time to brood about it.
We were all gathered in Peggy's room after lunch one Thursday. Dark phase had just started and Dad was due to go back into town; we always gave him a send off. Molly was darning and Peg and George were playing cribbage. I got out my squeeze box and started knocking out some tunes. I guess we all felt cheerful enough for a while. I don't know how I happened to drift into it, but after a bit I found I was playing The Green Hills of Earth. I hadn't played it in a long time.
I brayed through that fortissimo part about “Out ride the sons of Terra; Far drives the thundering jet—” and was thinking to myself that jets didn't thunder any more. I was still thinking about it when I went on into the last chorus, the one you play very softly: “We pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth—”
I looked up and there were tears running down Molly's cheeks.
I could have kicked myself. I put my accordion down with a squawk, not even finishing, and got up. Dad said, “What's the matter, Bill?”
,I muttered something about having to go take a look at Mabel.
I went out into the living room and put on my heavy clothes and actually did go outside, though I didn't go near the barn. It had been snowing and it was already almost pitch dark, though the Sun hadn't been down more than a couple of hours. The snow had stopped but there were clouds overhead and you couldn't see Jupiter.
The clouds had broken due west and let the sunset glow come through a bit. After my eyes adjusted, by that tiny amount of light I could see around me—the mountains, snow to their bases, disappearing in the clouds, the lake, just a sheet of snow-covered ice, and the boulders beyond our fields, making weird shapes in the snow. It was a scene to match the way I felt; it looked like the place where you might be sent for having lived a long and sinful life.
I tried to figure out what I was doing in such a place.
The clouds in the west shifted a little and I saw a single bright green star, low down toward the horizon, just above where the Sun had set.
It was Earth.
I don't know how long I stood there. Presently somebody put a hand on my shoulder and I jumped. It was Dad, all bundled up for a nine-mile tramp through the dark and the snow.
“What's the matter, Son?” he said.
I started to speak, but I was all choked up and couldn't. Finally I managed to say, “Dad, why did we come here?”
“Mmmm . . . you wanted to come. Remember?”
“I know,” I admitted.
“Still, the real reason, the basic reason, for coming here was to keep your grandchildren from starving. Earth is overcrowded, Bill.”
I looked back at Earth again. Finally I said, “Dad, I've made a discovery. There's more to life than three square meals a day. Sure, we can make crops here— this land would grow hair on a billiard ball. But I don't think you had better plan on any grandchildren here; it would be no favor to them. I know when I've made a mistake.”
“You're wrong, Bill, Your kids will like this place, just the way Eskimos like where they live.”
“I doubt it like the mischief.”
“Remember, the ancestors of Eskimos weren't Eskimos; they were immigrants, too. If you send your kids back to Earth, for school, say, they'll be homesick for Ganymede. They'll hate Earth. They'll weigh too much, they won't like the air, they won't like the climate, they won't like the people.”
“Hmm—look, George, do you like it here? Are you glad we came?”
Dad was silent for a long time. At last he said, “I'm worried about Peggy, Bill.”
“Yeah, I know. But how about yourself—and Molly?”
“I'm not worried about Molly. Women have their ups and downs. You'll learn to expect that.” He shook himself and said, “I'm late. You go on inside and have Molly fix you a cup of tea. Then take a look at the rabbits. I think the doe is about to drop again; we don't want to lose the young 'uns.” He hunched his shoulders and set off down toward the road. I watched him out of sight and then went back inside.
Then suddenly it was spring and everything was all right.
Even winter seemed like a good idea when it was gone. We had to have winter; the freezing and thawing was necessary to develop the ground, not to mention the fact that many crops won't come to fruit without cold weather. Anyway, anybody can live through four weeks of bad weather.
Dad laid off his job when spring came and we pitched in together and got our fields planted. I rented a power barrow and worked across my strips to spread the living soil. Then there was the back-breaking job of preparing the gully for the apple trees. I had started the seeds soon after Papa Schultz had given them to me, forcing them indoors, first at the Schultz's, then at our place. Six of them had germinated and now they were nearly two feet tall.
I wanted to try them outdoors. Maybe I would have to take them in again next winter, but it was worth a try.
Dad was interested in the venture, too, not just for fruit trees, but for lumber. Wood seems like an obsolete material, but try getting along without it.
I think George had visions of the Big Rock Candy Mountains covered with tall straight pines . . . someday, someday.
So we went deep and built it to drain and built it wide and used a lot of our winter compost and some of our precious topsoil. There was room enough for twenty trees when we got through, where we planted our six little babies. Papa Schultz came over and pronounced a benediction over them.
Then he went inside to say hello to Peggy, almost filling her little room. George used to say that when Papa inhaled the pressure in the room dropped.
A bit later Papa and Dad were talking in the living room; Dad stopped me as I was passing through. “Bill,” he asked, “how would you like to have a window about here?” He indicated a blank wall.
I stared. “Huh? How would we keep the place warm?”
“I mean a real window, with glass.”
“Oh.” I thought about it. I had never lived in a place with windows in my life; we had always been apartment dwellers. I had seen windows, of course, in country houses back Earthside, but there wasn't a window on Ganymede and it hadn't occurred to me that there ever would be.
“Papa Schultz plans to put one in his house. I thought it might be nice to sit inside and look out over the lake, light phase evenings,” Dad went on.
“To make a home you need windows and fireplaces,” Papa said placidly. “Now that we glass make, I mean to have a view.”
Dad nodded. “For three hundred years the race had glazed windows. Then they shut themselves up in little air-conditioned boxes and stared at silly television pictures instead. One might as well be on Luna.”
It was a startling idea, but it seemed like a good one. I knew they were making glass in town. George says that glassmaking is one of the oldest manufacturing arts, if not the oldest, and certainly one of the simplest. But I had thought about it for bottles and dishes, not for window glass. They already had glass buckets on sale at the 'Change, for about a tenth the cost of the imported article.
A view window—it was a nice idea. We could put one on the south and see the lake and another on the north and see the mountains. Why, I could even put in a skylight and lie on my bunk and see old Jupiter.
Stow it, William, I said to myself; you'll be building a whole house out of glass next. After Papa Schultz left I spoke to George about it. “Look,” I said, “about this view window idea. It's a good notion, especially for Peggy's room, but the question is: can we afford it?”
“I think we can,” he answered.
“I mean can we afford it without your going back to work in town? You've been working yourself to death —and there's no need to. The farm can support us now.”
He nodded. “I had been meaning to speak about that. I've about decided to give up the town work, Bill—except for a class I'll teach on Saturdays.”
“Do you have to do that?”
“Happens that I like to teach engineering, Bill And don't worry about the price of the glass; well get it free—a spot of cumshaw coining to your old man for designing the glass works. “The kine who tread the grain,'“ he quoted. “Now you and I had better get busy; there is a rain scheduled for fifteen o'clock.'
It was maybe three weeks later that the moons lined up. This is an event that almost never happens, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa, all perfectly lined up and all on the same side of Jupiter. They come close to lining up every seven hundred and two days, but they don't quite make it ordinarily. You see, their periods are all different, from less than two days for Io to more than two weeks for Callisto and the fractions don't work out evenly. Besides that they have different eccentricities to their orbits and their orbits aren't exactly in the same plane.
As you can see, a real line up hardly ever happens.
Besides that, this line up was a line up with the Sun, too; it would occur at Jupiter full phase. Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, announced that it had been calculated that such a perfect line up would not occur again for more than two hundred thousand years. You can bet we were all waiting to see it. The Project Jove scientists were excited about it, too, and special arrangements had been made to observe it.
Having it occur at Jupiter full phase meant not only that a sixth heavenly body—the Sun—would be in the line up, but that we would be able to see it. The shadows of Ganymede and Callisto would be centered on Jupiter just as Io and Europa reached mid transit.
Full phase is at six o'clock Saturday morning; we all got up about four-thirty and were outside by five. George and I carried Peggy out in her bubble stretcher. We were just in time.
It was a fine, clear summer night, light as could be, with old Jupiter blazing overhead like a balloon on fire. Io had just barely kissed the eastern edge of Jupiter—”first contact” they call it. Europa was already a bit inside the eastern edge and I had to look sharp to see it. When a moon is not in full phase it is no trouble to pick it out while it's making its transit, but at full phase it tends to blend into the background. However, both Ioand Europa are just a hair brighter than Jupiter. Besides that, they break up the pattern of Jupiter's bands and that lets you see them, too.
Well inside, but still in the eastern half—say about half way to Jupiter's center point—were the shadows of Ganymede and Callisto. I could not have told them apart, if I hadn't known that the one further east had to be Ganymede's. They were just little round black dots; three thousand miles or so isn't anything when it's plastered against Jupiter's eighty-nine thousand mile width.
Io looked a bit bigger than the shadows; Europa looked more than half again as big, about the way the Moon looks from Earth.
We felt a slight quake but it wasn't even enough to make us nervous; we were used to quakes. Besides that, about then Io”kissed” Europa. From then on, throughout the rest of the show, Io gradually slid underneath, or behind, Europa.
They crawled across the face of Jupiter; the moons fairly fast, the shadows in a slow creep. When we had been outside a little less than half an hour the two shadows kissed and started to merge. Io had slid halfway under Europa and looked like a big tumor on its side. They were almost halfway to center and the shadows were even closer.
Just before six o'clock Europa—you could no longer see Io; Europa covered it—as I was saying, Europa kissed the shadow, which by now was round, just one shadow.
Four or five minutes later the shadow had crawled up on top of Europa; they were all lined up—and I knew I was seeing the most extraordinary sight I would ever see in my life, Sun, Jupiter, and the four biggest moons all perfectly lined up.
I let out a deep breath: I don't know how long I had been holding it. “Gee whiz!” was all I could think of to say.
“I agree in general with your sentiments, Bill,” Dad answered. “Molly, hadn't we better get Peggy inside? I'm afraid she is getting cold.”
“Yes,” agreed Molly. “I know I am, for one.”
“I'm going down to the lake now,” I said. The biggest tide of record was expected, of course. While the lake was too small to show much tide, I had made a mark the day before and I hoped to be able to measure it.
“Don't get lost in the dark,” Dad called out. I didn't answer him. A silly remark doesn't require an answer.
I had gotten past the road and maybe a quarter of a mile beyond when it hit.
It knocked me flat on my face, the heaviest shake I had ever felt in my life. I've felt heavy quakes in California; they weren't a patch on this one. I lay face down for a long moment, digging into the rock with my finger nails and trying to get it to hold still.
The seasick roll kept up and kept up and kept up, and with it the noise—a deep bass rumble, deeper than thunder and more terrifying.
A rock rolled up against me and nipped my side. I got to my feet and managed to stay there. The ground was still swaying and the rumble kept on. I headed for the house, running—like dancing over shifting ice. I fell down twice and got up again.
The front end of the house was all caved in. The roof slanted down at a crazy angle. “George!” I yelled. “Molly! Where are you?”
George heard me and straightened up. He was on the other side of the house and now I saw him over the collapsed roof. He didn't say anything. I rushed around to where he stood. “Are you all right?” I demanded.
“Help me get Molly out—” he gasped.
I found out later that George had gone inside with Molly and Peggy, had helped get Peg out of the stretcher and back into her room, and then had gone outside, leaving Molly to get breakfast. The quake had hit while he was returning from the barn. But we didn't have time then to talk it over; we dug—moving slabs with our bare hands that had taken four Scouts, working together, to lay. George kept crying, “Molly! Molly! Where are you?”
She was lying on the floor beside the stone work bench that was penned in by the roof. We heaved it off her; George scrambled over the rubble and reached her. “Molly! Molly darling!”
She opened her eyes. “George!”
“Are you all right?”
“What happened?”
“Quake. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
She sat up, made a face as if something hurt her, and said, “I think I— George! Where s Peggy? Get Peggy!”
Peggy's room was still upright; the reinforcements had held while the rest of the house had gone down around it. George insisted on moving Molly out into the open first, then we tackled the slabs that kept us from getting at the air lock to Peggy's room.
The outer door of the air lock was burst out of its gaskets and stood open, the wrong way. It was black inside the lock; Jupiter light didn't reach inside. I couldn't see what I was doing but when I pushed on the inner door it wouldn't give. “Can't budge it,” I told Dad. “Get a light.”
“Probably still held by air pressure. Call out to Peggy to get in the stretcher and we'll bleed it.”
“I need a light,” I repeated.
“I haven't got a light.”
“Didn't you have one with you?” I had had one; we always carried torches, outdoors in dark phase, but I had dropped mine when the quake hit. I didn't know where it was.
Dad thought about it, then climbed over the slabs. He was back in a moment. “I found it between here and the barn. I must have dropped it.” He shined it on the inner door and we looked over the situation.
“It looks bad,” Dad said softly. “Explosive decompression.” There was a gap you could poke your fingers through between the top of the door and the frame; the door wasn't pressure held, it was jammed.
Dad called out, “Peggy! Oh, Peggy, darling—can you hear me?”
No answer. “Take the light, Bill—and stand aside.” He reared back and then hit the door hard with his shoulder. It gave a bit but didn't open. He hit it again and it flew open, spilling him on his hands and knees. He scrambled up as I shined the light in past him.
Peggy lay half in and half out of bed, as if she had been trying to get up when she passed out. Her head hung down and a trickle of blood was dripping from her mouth on to the floor.
Molly had come in right behind us; she and Dad got Peggy into the stretcher and Dad brought the pressure up. She was alive; she gasped and choked and sprayed blood over us while we were trying to help her. Then she cried. She seemed to quiet down and go to sleep —or maybe fainted again—after we got her into the bubble.
Molly was crying but not making any fuss about it. Dad straightened up, wiped his face and said, “Grab on, Bill. We've got to get her into town.”
I said, “Yes,” and picked up one end. With Molly holding the light and us carrying, we picked our way over the heap of rock that used to be our house and got out into the open. We put the stretcher down for a moment and I looked around.
I glanced up at Jupiter; the shadows were still on his face and Io and Europa had not yet reached the western edge. The whole thing had taken less than an hour. But that wasn't what held my attention; the sky looked funny.
The stars were too bright and there were too many of them. “George,” I said, “what's happened to the sky?”
“No time now——” he started to say. Then he stopped and said very slowly, “Great Scott!”
“What?” asked Molly. “What's the matter?”
“Back to the house, all of you! We've got to dig out all the clothes we can get at. And blanketsl”
“What? Why?”
“The heat trap! The heat trap is gone—the quake must have gotten the power house.”
So we dug again, until we found what we had to have. It didn't take long; we knew where things had to be. It was just a case of getting the rocks off. The blankets were for the stretcher; Dad wrapped them around like a cocoon and tied them in place. “Okay, Bill,” he said. “Quick march, nowl”
It was then that I heard Mabel bawl. I stopped and looked at Dad. He stopped too, with an agony of indecision on his face. “Oh, damn!” he said, the first time I had ever heard him really swear. “We can't just leave her to freeze; she's a member of the family. Come, Bill.”
We put the stretcher down again and ran to the bam. It was a junk heap but we could tell by Mabel's complaints where she was. We dragged the roof off her and she got to her feet. She didn't seem to be hurt but I guess she had been knocked silly. She looked at us indignantly.
We had a time of it getting her over the slabs, with Dad pulling and me pushing. Dad handed the halter to Molly. “How about the chickens?” I asked, “And the rabbits?” Some of them had been crushed; the rest were loose around the place. I felt one—a rabbit —scurry between my feet
“No time!” snapped Dad. “We can't take them; all we could do for them would be to cut their throats. Come!”
We headed for the road.
Molly led the way, leading and dragging Mabel and carrying the light. We needed the light. The night, too bright and too clear a few minutes before, was now suddenly overcast. Shortly we couldn't see Jupiter at all, and then you couldn't count your fingers in front of your face.
The road was wet underfoot, not rain, but sudden dew; it was getting steadily colder.
Then it did rain, steadily and coldly. Presently it changed to wet snow. Molly dropped back. “George,” she wanted to know, “have we come as far as the turn off to the Schultz's?”
“That's no good,” he answered. “We've got to get the baby into the hospital.”
That isn't what I meant. Oughtn't I to warn them?”
They'll be all right. Their house is sound.”
“But the cold?”
“Oh.” He saw what she meant and so did I, when I thought about it. With the heat trap gone and the power house gone, every house in the colony was going to be like an ice box. What good is a power receiver on your roof with no power to receive? It was going to get colder and colder and colder ....
And then it would get colder again. And colder....
“Keep moving,” Dad said suddenly. “We'll figure it out when we get there.”
But we didn't figure it out, because we never found the turn off. The snow was driving into our faces by then and we must have walked on past it. It was a dry snow now, little sharp needles that burned when they hit.
Without saying anything about it, I had started counting paces when we left the walls of lava that marked the place where the new road led to our place and out to the new farms beyond. As near as I could make it we had come about five miles when Molly stopped. “What's the matter?” yelled Dad.
“Dear,” she said, “I can't find the road. I think I've lost it.”
I kicked the snow away underfoot. It was made ground, all right—soft. Dad took the torch and looked at his watch. “We must have come about six miles,” he announced.
“Five,” I corrected him. “Or five and a half at the outside,” I told him I had been counting.
He considered it. “We've come just about to that stretch where the road is flush with the field,” he said. “It can't be more than a half mile or a mile to the cut through Kneiper's Ridge. After that we can't lose it. Bill, take the light and cast off to the right for a hundred paces, then back to the left. If that doesn't do it, well go further. And for heaven's sakes retrace your steps—it's the only way you'll find us in this storm.”
I took the light and set out. To the right was no good, though I went a hundred and fifty paces instead of a hundred, I got back to them, and reported, and started out again. Dad just grunted; he was busy with something about the stretcher.
On the twenty-third step to the left I found the road —by stepping down about a foot, falling flat on my face, and nearly losing the light. I picked myself up and went back.
“Good!” said Dad. “Slip your neck through this.”
“This” was a sort of yoke he had devised by retying the blankets around the stretcher so as to get some free line. With my neck through it I could carry the weight on my shoulders and just steady my end with my hands. Not that it was heavy, but our hands were getting stiff with cold. “Good enough!” I said, “But, look, George—let Molly take your end.”
“Nonsense!”
“It isn't nonsense. Molly can do it—can't you, Molly? And you know this road better than we do; you've tramped it enough times in the dark.”
“Bill is right, dear,” Molly said at once. “Here—take Mabel.”
Dad gave in, took the light and the halter. Mabel didn't want to go any further; she wanted to sit down, I guess. Dad kicked her in the rear and jerked on her neck. Her feelings were hurt; she wasn't used to that sort of treatment—particularly not from Dad. But there was no time to humor her; it was getting colder.
We went on. I don't know how Dad kept to the road but he did. We had been at it another hour, I suppose, and had left Kneiper's slot well behind, when Molly stumbled, then her knees just seemed to cave in and she knelt down in the snow.
I stopped and sat down, too; I needed the rest. I just wanted to stay there and let it snow.
Dad came back and put his arms around her and comforted her and told her to lead Mabel now; she couldn't get lost on this stretch. She insisted that she could still carry. Dad ignored her, just lifted the yoke business off her shoulders. Then he came back and peeled a bit of blanket off the bubble and shined the torch inside. He put it back into place. Molly said, “How is she?'
Dad said, “She's still breathing. She opened her eyes when the light hit them. Let's go.” He got the yoke on and Molly took the light and the halter.
Molly couldn't have seen what I saw; the plastic of the bubble was frosted over on the inside. Dad hadn't seen Peggy breathe; he hadn't seen anything.
I thought about it for a long while and wondered how you would classify that sort of a lie. Dad wasn't a liar, that was certain—and yet it seemed to me that such a lie, right then, was better than the truth. It was complicated.
Pretty soon I forgot it; I was too busy putting one foot in front of the other and counting the steps. I couldn't feel my feet any longer.
Dad stopped and I bumped into the end of the stretcher. “Listen!” he said.
I listened and heard a dull rumble. “Quake?”
“No. Keep quiet.” Then he added, “It's down the road. Off the road, everybody! Off to the right.”
The rumble got louder and presently I made out a light through the snow, back the way we had come. Dad saw it, too, and stepped out on the road and started waving our torch.
The rumble stopped almost on top of him; it was a rock crusher and it was loaded down with people, people clinging to it all over and even riding the spade. The driver yelled, “Climb on! And hurry!”
Then he saw the cow and added, “No live stock.”
“We've got a stretcher with my little girl in it,” Dad shouted back to him. “We need help.”
There was a short commotion, while the driver ordered a couple of men down to help us. In the mix up Dad disappeared. One moment Molly was holding Mabel's halter, then Dad was gone and so was the cow.
We got the stretcher up onto the spade and some of the men braced it with their backs. I was wondering what to do about Dad and thinking maybe I ought to jump off and look for him, when he appeared out of the darkness and scrambled up beside me. “Where's Molly?” he asked.
“Up on top. But where is Mabel? What did you do with her?”
“Mabel is all right.” He folded his knife and put it in his pocket. I didn't ask any more questions.
We passed several more people after that, but the driver wouldn't stop. We were fairly close into town and he insisted that they could make it on their own. His emergency power pack was running low, he said; he had come all the way from the bend in the lake, ten miles beyond our place.
Besides, I don't know where he would have put them. We were about three deep and Dad had to keep warning people not to lean on the bubble of the stretcher.
Then the power pack did quit and the driver shouted, “Everybody off! Get on in on your own.” But by now we were actually in town, the outskirts, and it would have been no trouble if it hadn't been blowing a blizzard. The driver insisted on helping Dad with the stretcher. He was a good Joe and turned out to be—when I saw him in the light—the same man who had crushed our acreage.
At long, long last we were inside the hospital and Peggy was turned over to the hospital people and put in a pressurized room. More than that, she was alive. In bad shape, but alive.
Molly stayed with her. I would like to have stayed, too—it was fairly warm in the hospital; it had its own emergency power pack. But they wouldn't let me.
Dad told Molly that he was reporting to the chief engineer for duty. I was told to go to the Immigration Receiving Station. I did so and it was just like the day we landed, only worse—and colder. I found myself right back in the very room which was the first I had ever been in on Ganymede.
The place was packed and getting more packed every minute as more refugees kept pouring in from the surrounding country. It was cold, though not so bitterly cold as outside. The lights were off, of course; light and heat all came from the power plant for everything. Hand lights had been set up here and there and you could sort of grope your way around. There were the usual complaints, too, though maybe not as bad as you hear from immigrants. I paid no attention to any of them; I was happy in a dead beat sort of way just to be inside and fairly warm and feel the blood start to go back into my feet.
We stayed there for thirty-seven hours. It was twenty-four hours before we got anything to eat.
Here was the way it went: the metal buildings, such as the Receiving Station, stood up. Very few of the stone buildings had, which we knew by then from the reports of all of us. The Power Station was out, and with it, the heat trap. They wouldn't tell us anything about it except to say that it was being fixed.
In the mean time we were packed in tight as they could put us, keeping the place warm mainly by the heat from our bodies, sheep style. There were, they say, several power packs being used to heat the place, too, one being turned on every time the temperature in the room dropped below freezing. If so, I never got close to one and I don't think it ever did get up to freezing where I was.
I would sit down and grab my knees and fall into a dopey sleep. Then a nightmare would wake me up and I'd get up and pound myself and walk around. After a while I'd sit down on the floor and freeze my fanny again.
I seem to remember encountering Noisy Edwards in the crowd and waving my finger under his nose and telling him I had an appointment to knock his block off. I seem to remember him staring back at me as if he couldn't place me. But I don't know; I may have dreamed it. I thought I ran across Hank, too, and had a long talk with him, but Hank told me afterwards that he never laid eyes on me the whole time.
After a long time—it seemed a week but the records show it was eight o'clock Sunday morning—they passed us out some lukewarm soup. It was wonderful. After that I wanted to leave the building to go to the hospital. I wanted to find Molly and see how Peggy was doing.
They wouldn't let me. It was seventy below outside and still dropping.
About twenty-two o'clock the lights came on and the worst was over.
We had a decent meal soon after that, sandwiches and soup, and when the Sun came up at midnight they announced that anybody could go outside who cared to risk it. I waited until noon Monday. By then it was up to twenty below and I made a dash for it to the hospital.
Peggy was doing as well as could be expected. Molly had stayed with her and had spent the time in bed with her, huddling up to her to keep her warm. While the hospital had emergency heat, it didn't have the capacity to cope with any such disaster as had struck us; it was darn near as cold as the Receiving Station. But Peggy had come through it, sleeping most of the time. She even perked up enough to smile and say hello.
Molly's left arm was in a sling and splinted. I asked how that happened—and then I felt foolish. It had happened in the quake itself but I hadn't known it and George still didn t know about it; none of the engineers were back.
It didn't seem possible that she could have done what she did, until I recalled that she carried the stretcher only after Dad had rigged the rope yokes. Molly is all right.
They chased me out and I high-tailed it back to the Receiving Station and ran into Sergei almost at once. He hailed me and I went over to him. He had a pencil and a list and a number of the older fellows were gathered around him. “What's up?” I said.
“Just the guy I'm looking for,” he said. “I had you down for dead. Disaster party—are you in?”
I was in, all right. The parties were made up of older Scouts, sixteen and up, and the younger men, We were sent out on the town's tractors, one to each road, and we worked in teams of two. I spotted Hank Jones as we were loading and they let us make up a team.
It was grim work. For equipment we had shovels and lists—lists of who lived on which farm. Sometimes a name would have a notation “known to be alive,” but more often not. A team would be dropped off with the lists for three or four farms and the tractor would go on, to pick them up on the return trip.
Our job was to settle the doubt about those other names and—theoretically—to rescue anyone still alive.
We didn't find anyone alive.
The lucky ones had been killed in the quake; the unlucky ones had waited too long and didn't make it into town. Some we found on the road; they had tried to make it but had started too late. The worst of all were those whose houses hadn't fallen and had tried to stick it out. Hank and I found one couple just sitting, arms around each other. They were hard as rock.
When we found one, we would try to identify it on the list, then cover it up with snow, several feet deep, so it would keep for a while after it started to thaw.
When we settled with the people at a farm, we rummaged around and found all the livestock we could and carried or dragged their carcasses down to the road, to be toted into town on the tractor and slapped into deep freeze. It seemed a dirty job to do, robbing the dead, but, as Hank pointed out, we would all be getting a little hungry by and by.
Hank bothered me a little; he was merry about the whole thing. I guess it was better to laugh about it, in the long run, and after a while he had me doing it. It was just too big to soak up all at once and you didn't dare let it get you.
But I should have caught on when we came to his own place. “We can skip it,” he said, and checked off the list.
“Hadn't we better check for livestock?” I said.
“Nope. We're running short of time. Let's move on to the Millers' place.”
“Did they get out?”
“I don't know. I didn't see any of them in town.”
The Millers hadn't gotten out; we barely had time to take care of them before the tractor picked us up. It was a week later that I found out that both of Hank's parents had been killed in the quake. He had taken time to drag them out and put them into their ice cellar before he had headed for town.
Like myself, Hank had been outside when it hit, still looking at the line up. The fact that the big shock had occurred right after the line up had kept a lot of people from being killed in their beds—but they say that the line up caused the quake, triggered it, that is, with tidal strains, so I guess it sort of evens up. Of course, the line up didn't actually make the quake; it had been building up to it ever since the beginning of the atmosphere project. Gravity's books have got to balance.
The colony had had thirty-seven thousand people when the quake hit. The census when we finished it showed less than thirteen thousand. Besides that we had lost every crop, all or almost all the livestock. As Hank said, we'd all be a little hungry by and by.
They dumped us back at the Receiving Station and a second group of parties got ready to leave. I looked for a quiet spot to try to get some sleep.
I was just dozing off, it seemed to me, when somebody shook me. It was Dad. “Are you all right, Bill?”
I rubbed my eyes. “I'm okay. Have you seen Molly and Peggy?”
“Just left them. I'm off duty for a few hours. Bill, have you seen anything of the Schultzes?”
I sat up, wide awake. “No. Have you?”
“No.”
I told him what I had been doing and he nodded. “Go back to sleep, Bill. I'll see if there has been a report on them.”
I didn't go to sleep. He was back after a bit to say that he hadn't been able to find out anything one way or another. “I'm worried, Bill.”
“So am I.”
“I'm going out and check up.”
“Let's go.”
Dad shook his head. “No need for us both. You get some sleep.” I went along, just the same.
We were lucky. A disaster party was just heading down our road and we hitched a ride. Our own farm and the Schultz's place were among those to be covered on this trip; Dad told the driver that we would check both places and report when we got back to town. That was all right with him.
They dropped us at the turn off and we trudged up toward the Schultz's house. I began to get the horrors as we went. It's one thing to pile snow over comparative strangers; it's another thing entirely to expect to find Mama Schultz or Gretchen with their faces blue and stiff.
I didn't visualize Papa as dead; people like Papa Schultz don't die–they just go on forever. Or it feels like that.
But I still wasn't prepared for what we did find.
We had just come around a little hummock that conceals their house from the road. George stopped and said, “Well, the house is still standing. His quake-proofing held.”
I looked at it, then I stared—and then I yelled. “Hey, George! The Tree is gone!”
The house was there, but the apple tree—”the most beautiful tree on Ganymede”—was missing. Just gone. I began to run.
We were almost to the house when the door opened. There stood Papa Schultz.
They were all safe, every one of them. What remained of the tree was ashes in the fireplace. Papa had cut it down as soon as the power went off and the temperature started to drop—and then had fed it, little by little, into the flames.
Papa, telling us about it, gestured at the blackened firebox. “Johann's folly, they called it. I guess they will not think old Appleseed Johnny quite so foolish now, eh?” He roared and slapped Dad on the shoulders.
“But your tree,” I said stupidly.
“I will plant another, many others.” He stopped and was suddenly serious. “But your trees, William, your brave little baby trees—they are dead, not?”
I said I hadn't seen them yet. He nodded solemnly. “They are dead of the cold. Hugo!”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Fetch me an apple.” Hugo did so and Papa presented it to me. “You will plant again.” I nodded and stuck it in my pocket.
They were glad to hear that we were all right, though Mama clucked over Molly's broken arm. Yo had fought his way over to our place during the first part of the storm, found that we were gone and returned, two frost bitten ears for his efforts. He was in town now to look for us.
But they were all right, every one of them. Even their livestock they had saved—cows, pigs, chickens, people, all huddled together throughout the cold and kept from freezing by the fire from their tree.
The animals were back in the barn, now that power was on again, but the place still showed that they had been there—and smelled of it, too. I think Mama was more upset by the shambles of her immaculate living room than she was by the magnitude of the disaster. I don't think she realized that most of her neighbors were dead. It hadn't hit her yet.
Dad turned down Papa Schultz's offer to come with us to look over our farm. Then Papa said he would see us on the tractor truck, as he intended to go into town and find out what he could do. We had mugs of Mama's strong tea and some corn bread and left.
I was thinking about the Schultzes and how good it was to find them alive, as we trudged over to our place. I told Dad that it was a miracle.
He shook his head. “Not a miracle. They are survivor types.”
“What type is a survivor type?” I asked.
He took a long time to answer that one. Finally he said, “Survivors survive. I guess that is the only way to tell the survivor type for certain.”
I said. “We're survivor types, too, in that case.”
“Could be,” he admitted. “At least we've come through this one.”
When I had left, the house was down. In the mean time I had seen dozens of houses down, yet it was a shock to me when we topped the rise and I saw that it really was down. I suppose I expected that after a while I would wake up safe and warm in bed and everything would be all right.
The fields were there, that was all that you could say for it. I scraped the snow off a stretch I knew was beginning to crop. The plants were dead of course and the ground was hard. I was fairly sure that even the earth worms were dead; they had had nothing to warn them to burrow below the frost line.
My little saplings were dead, of course.
We found two of the rabbits, huddled together and stiff, under a drift against what was left of the barn. We didn't find any of the chickens except one, the first old hen we ever had. She had been setting and her nest wasn't crushed and had been covered by a piece of the fallen roof of the barn. She was still on it, hadn't moved and the eggs under her were frozen. I think that was what got me.
I was just a chap who used to have a farm.
Dad had been poking around the house. He came back to the barn and spoke to me. “Well, Bill?”
I stood up. “George, I've had it.”
“Then let's go back to town. The truck will be along shortly.”
“I mean I've really had it!”
“Yes, I know.”
I took a look in Peggy's room first, but Dad's salvage had been thorough. My accordion was in there, however, with snow from the broken door drifted over the case. I brushed it off and picked it up. “Leave it,” Dad said. “It's safe here and you've no place to put it.”
“I don't expect to be back,” I said.
“Very well.”
We made a bundle of what Dad had gotten together, added the accordion, the two rabbits and the hen, and carried it all down to the road. The tractor showed up presently, we got aboard and Dad chucked the rabbits and chicken on the pile of such that they had salvaged. Papa Schultz was waiting at his turnoff.
Dad and I tried to spot Mabel by the road on the trip back, but we didn't find her. Probably she had been picked up by an earlier trip, seeing that she was close to town. I was just as well pleased. All right, she had to be salvaged—but I didn't want the job. I'm not a cannibal.
I managed to get some sleep and a bite to eat and was sent out on another disaster party. The colony began to settle down into some sort of routine. Those whose houses had stood up moved back into them and the rest of us were taken care of in the Receiving Station, much as we had been when our party landed. Food was short, of course, and Ganymede had rationing for the first time since the first colonials really got started.
Not that we were going to starve. In the first place there weren't too many of us to feed and there had been quite a lot of food on hand. The real pinch would come later. It was decided to set winter back by three months, that is, start all over again with spring—which messed up the calendar from then on. But it would give us a new crop as quickly as possible to make up for the one that we had lost.
Dad stayed on duty with the engineer's office. Plans called for setting up two more power plants, spaced around the equator, and each of them capable of holding the heat trap alone. The disaster wasn't going to be allowed to happen again. Of course the installations would have to come from Earth, but we had been lucky on one score; Mars was in a position to relay for us. The report had gone into Earth at once and, instead of another load of immigrants, we were to get what we needed on the next trip.
Not that I cared. I had stayed in town, too, although the Schultzes had invited me to stay with them. I was earning my keep helping to rebuild and quakeproof the houses of the survivors. It had been agreed that we would all go back, George, Molly, Peggy, and me, on the first trip, if we could get space. It had been unanimous except that Peggy hadn't been consulted; it just had to be.
We weren't the only ones who were going back. The Colonial Commission had put up a squawk of course, but under the circumstances they had to give in. After it had been made official and the lists were opened Dad and I went over to the Commission agent's office to put in our applications. We were about the last to apply; Dad had been out of town on duty and I had waited until he got back.
The office was closed with a “Back in a half hour” sign stuck on the door. We waited. There were bulletin boards outside the office; on them were posted the names of those who had applied for repatriation. I started reading them to kill time and so did Dad.
I found Saunders' name there and pointed it out to George. He grunted and said, “No loss.” Noisy Edwards' name was there, too; maybe I had seen him in the Receiving Station, although I hadn't seen him since. It occurred to me that I could probably corner him in the ship and pay him back his lumps, but I wasn't really interested in the project. I read on down.
I expected to find Hank Jones' name there, but I couldn't find it. I started reading the list carefully, paying attention to every name I recognized. I began to see a pattern.
Presently the agent got back and opened the door. Dad touched my arm. “Come on, Bill.”
I said, “Wait a minute, George. You read all the names?”
“Yes, I did.”
“I've been thinking. You know, George, I don't like being classed with these lugs.”
He chewed his lip. “I know exactly what you mean.”
I took the plunge. “You can do as you like, George, but I'm not going home, if I ever do, until I've licked this joint.”
Dad looked as unhappy as he could look. He was silent for a long time, then he said, “I've got to take Peggy back, Bill. She won't go unless Molly and I go along. And she's got to go.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You understand how it is, Bill?”
“Yes, Dad, I understand.” He went on in to make out his application, whistling a little tune he used to whistle just after Anne died. I don't think he knew he was whistling it.
I waited for him and after a bit we went away together.
I moved back out to the farm the next day. Not to the Schultzes—to the farm. I slept in Peggy's room and got busy fixing the place up and getting ready to plant my emergency allowance of seed.
Then, about two weeks before they were to leave in the Covered Wagon, Peggy died, and there wasn't any reason for any of us to go back to Earth.
Yo Schultz had been in town and Dad sent word back by him. Yo came over and woke me up and told me about it. I thanked him.
He wanted to know if I wanted to come back to the house with him. I said, no, thanks, that I would rather be alone. He made me promise to come over the next day and went away.
I lay back down on Peggy's bed.
She was dead and there was nothing more I could do about it She was dead and it was all my fault . . . if I hadn't encouraged her, they would have been able to get her to go back before it was too late. She would be back Earthside, going to school and growing up healthy and happy—right back in California, not here in this damned place where she couldn't live, where human beings were never meant to live.
I bit the pillow and blubbered. I said, “Oh, Anne, Anne! Take care of her, Anne—She's so little; she won't know what to do.”
And then I stopped bawling and listened, half way expecting Anne to answer me and tell me she would,
But I couldn't hear anything, not at first . . . and what I did hear was only, “Stand tall, Billy,” . .. very faint and far away, “Stand tall, son.”
After a while I got up and washed my face and started hoofing it back into town.
We all lived in Peggy's room until Dad and I had the seeds in, then we built on to it, quake proof this time and with a big view window facing the lake and another facing the mountains. We knocked a window in Peggy's room, too; it made it seem like a different place.
We built on still another room presently, as it seemed as if we might be needing it. All the rooms had windows and the living room had a fireplace.
Dad and I were terribly busy the second season after the quake. Enough seed could be had by then and we farmed the empty farm across the road from us. Then some newcomers, the Ellises, moved in and paid us for the crop. It was just what they call a “book transaction,” but it reduced our debt with the Commission.
Two G-years after the line up you would never have known that anything had happened. There wasn't a wrecked building in the community, there were better than forty-five thousand people, and the town was booming. New people were coming in so fast that you could even sell some produce to the Commission in lieu of land.
We weren't doing so badly, ourselves. We had a hive of bees. We had Mabel II, and Margie and Mamie, and I was sending the spare milk into town by the city transport truck that passed down our road once a day. I had broken Marge and Mamie to the yoke and used them for ploughing as well—we had crushed five more acres—and we were even talking about getting a horse.
Some people had horses already, the Schultzes for instance. The council had wrangled about it before okaying the “invasion,” with conservatives holding out for tractors. But we weren't equipped to manufacture tractors yet and the policy was to make the planet self-sufficient—the hay burners won out. Horses can manufacture more horses and that is one trick that tractors have never learned.
Furthermore, though I would have turned my nose up at the idea when I was a ground hog back in Diego Borough, horse steak is very tasty.
It turned out we did need the extra room. Twins— both boys. New babies don't look as if they were worth keeping, but they get over it—slowly. I bought a crib as a present for them, made right here on Ganymede, out of glass fabric stuck together with synthetic resin. It was getting possible to buy quite a number of home products.
I told Molly I would initiate the brats into the Cubs when they were old enough. I was getting in to meetings oftener now, for I had a patrol again—the Daniel Boone patrol, mostly new kids. I still hadn't taken my own tests but you can't do everything at once. Once I was scheduled to take them and a litter of pigs picked that day to arrive. But I planned to take them; I wanted to be an Eagle Scout again, even if I was getting a little old to worry about badges in themselves.
It may sound as if the survivors didn't give a hoot about those who had died in the disaster. But that isn't the truth. It was just that you work from day to day and that keeps your mind busy. In any case, we weren't the first colony to be two-thirds wiped out— and we wouldn't be the last. You can grieve only so much; after that it's self pity. So George says.
George still wanted me to go back to Earth to finish my education and I had been toying with the idea myself. I was beginning to realize that there were a few things I hadn't learned. The idea was attractive; it would not be like going back right after the quake, tail between my legs. I'd be a property owner, paying my own way. The fare was considerable—five acres—and would about clean me out, my half, and put a load on George and Molly. But they were both for it.
Besides, Dad owned blocked assets back Earthside which would pay my way through school. They were no use to him otherwise; the only thing the Commission will accept as pay for imports is proved land. There was even a possibility, if the council won a suit pending back Earthside, that his blocked assets could be used for my fare as well and not cost us a square foot of improved soil. All in all, it was nothing to turn down idly.
We were talking about me leaving on the New Ark when another matter came up—the planetary survey.
Ganymede had to have settlements other than Leda; that was evident even when we landed. The Commission planned to set up two more ports-of-entry near the two new power stations and let the place grow from three centers. The present colonists were to build the new towns—receiving stations, hydroponics sheds, infirmaries, and so forth—and be paid for it in imports. Immigration would be stepped up accordingly, something that the Commission was very anxious to do, now that they had the ships to dump them in on us in quantity.
The old Jitterbug was about to take pioneer parties out to select sites and make plans—and both Hank and Sergei were going.
I wanted to go so bad I could taste it In the whole time I had been here I had never gotten fifty miles from Leda. Suppose somebody asked me what it was like on Ganymede when I got back on Earth? Truthfully, I wouldn't be able to tell them; I hadn't been any place.
I had had a chance, once, to make a trip to Barnard's Moon, as a temporary employee of Project Jove—and that hadn't worked out either. The twins. I stayed back and took care of the farm.
I talked it over with Dad.
“I hate to see you delay it any longer,” he said seriously. I pointed out that it would be only two months.
“Hmmm—” he said. “Have you taken your merit badge tests yet?”
He knew I hadn't; I changed the subject by pointing out that Sergei and Hank were going.
“But they are both older than you are,” he answered.
“Not by very much!”
“But I think they are each over the age limit they were looking for—and you are just under.”
“Look, George,” I protested, “rules were made to be broken. I've heard you say that There must be some spot I can fill—cook, maybe.”
And that's just the job I got—cook.
I always have been a pretty fair cook—not in Mama Schultz's class, but good. The party had nothing to complain about on that score.
Captain Hattie put us down at a selected spot nine degrees north of the equator and longitude 113 west—that is to say, just out of sight of Jupiter on the far side and about thirty-one hundred miles from Leda. Mr. Hooker says that the average temperature of Ganymede will rise about nine degrees over the next century as more and more of the ancient ice melts—at which time Leda will be semi-tropical and the planet will be habitable half way to the poles. In the meantime colonies would be planted only at or near the equator.
I was sorry we had Captain Hattie as pilot; she is such an insufferable old scold. She thinks rocket pilots are a special race apart—supermen. At least she acts like it. Recently the Commission had forced her to take a relief pilot; there was just too much for one pilot to do. They had tried to force a check pilot on her, too—an indirect way to lead up to retiring her, but she was too tough for them. She threatened to take the Jitterbug up and crash it ... and they didn't dare call her bluff. At that time they were absolutely dependent on the Jitterbug.
Originally the Jitterbug's only purpose was for supply and passengers between Leda and the Project Jove station on Barnard's Moon—but that was back in the days when ships from Earth actually landed at Leda. Then the Mayflower came along and the Jitterbug was pressed into service as a shuttle. There was talk of another shuttle rocket but we didn't have it yet, which is why Captain Hattie had them where it hurt. The Commission had visions of a loaded ship circling Ganymede, just going round and round and round again, with no way to get down, like a kitten stuck up in a tree.
I’ll say this for Hattie; she could handle her ship. I think she had nerve ends out in the skin of it. In clear weather she could even make a glide landing, in spite of our thin air. But I think she preferred to shake up her passengers with a jet landing.
She put us down, the Jitterbug took on more water mass, and away it bounced. She had three more parties to land. All in all the Jitterbug was servicing eight other pioneer parties. It would be back to pick us up in about three weeks.
The leader of our party was Paul du Maurier, who was the new assistant Scoutmaster of the Auslander troop and the chap who had gotten me taken on as cookie. He was younger than some of those working for him; furthermore, he shaved, which made him stand out like a white leghorn in a hog pen and made him look even younger. That is, he did shave, but he started letting his beard grow on this trip. “Better trim that grass,” I advised him.
He said, “Don't you like my beard, Doctor Slop?” —that was a nickname he had awarded me for “Omnibus stew,” my own invention. He didn't mean any harm by it.
I said, “Well, it covers your face, which is some help—but you might be mistaken for one of us colonial roughnecks. That wouldn't do for one of you high-toned Commission boys.”
He smiled mysteriously and said, “Maybe that's what I want.”
I said, “Maybe. But they'll lock you up in a zoo if you wear it back to Earth.” He was due to go back for Earthside duty by the same trip I expected to make, via the Covered Wagon, two weeks after the end of the survey.
He smiled again and said, “Ah, yes, so they would,” and changed the subject. Paul was one of the most thoroughly good guys I have ever met and smart as a whip as well. He was a graduate of South Africa University with P. G. on top of that at the System Institute on Venus—an ecologist, specializing in planetary engineering.
He handled that gang of rugged individualists without raising his voice. There is something about a real leader that makes it unnecessary for him to get tough.
But back to the survey—I didn't see much of it as I was up to my elbows in pots and pans, but I knew what was going on. The valley we were in had been picked from photographs taken from the Jitterbug; it was now up to Paul to decide whether or not it was ideally suited to easy colonization. It had the advantage of being in direct line-of-sight with power station number two, but that was not essential. Line-of-sight power relays could be placed anywhere on the mountains (no name, as yet) just south of us. Most of the new villages would have to have power relayed anyhow. Aside from a safety factor for the heat trap there was no point in setting up extra power stations when the whole planet couldn't use the potential of one mass-conversion plant.
So they got busy—an engineering team working on drainage and probable annual water resources, topographers getting a contour, a chemistry-agronomy team checking on what the various rock formations would make as soil, and a community architect laying out a town and farm and rocket port plot. There were several other specialists, too, like the mineralogist, Mr. Villa, who was doodlebugging the place for ores.
Paul was the “general specialist” who balanced all the data in his mind, fiddled with his slip stick, stared off into the sky, and came up with the over all answer. The over all answer for that valley was “nix”—and we moved on to the next one on the list, packing the stuff on our backs.
That was one of the few chances I got to look around. You see, we had landed at sunrise—about five o'clock Wednesday morning sunrise was, in that longitude—and the object was to get as much done as possible during each light phase. Jupiter light is all right for working in your own fields, but no good for surveying strange territory—and here we didn't even have Jupiter light—just Callisto, every other dark phase, every twelve-and-half days, to be exact. Consequently we worked straight through light phase, on pep pills.
Now a man who is on the pills will eat more than twice as much as a man who is sleeping regularly. You know, the Eskimos have a saying, “Food is sleep.” I had to produce hot meals every four hours, around the clock. I had no time for sightseeing.
We got to camp number two, pitched our tents, I served a scratch meal, and Paul passed out sleeping pills. By then the Sun was down and we really died for about twenty hours. We were comfortable enough —spun glass pads under us and resin sealed glass canvas over us.
I fed them again, Paul passed out more sleepy pills, and back we went to sleep. Paul woke me Monday afternoon. This time I fixed them a light breakfast, then really spread myself to turn them out a feast. Everybody was well rested by now, and not disposed to want to go right back to bed. So I stuffed them.
After that we sat around for a few hours and talked. I got out my squeeze box—brought along by popular demand, that is to say, Paul suggested it—and gave 'em a few tunes. Then we talked some more.
They got to arguing about where life started and somebody brought up the old theory that the Sun had once been much brighter—Jock Montague, it was, the chemist. “Mark my words,” he said, “When we get around to exploring Pluto, you'll find that life was there before us. Life is persistent, like mass-energy.”
“Nuts,” answered Mr. Villa, very politely. “Pluto isn't even a proper planet; it used to be a satellite of Neptune.”
“Well, Neptune, then,” Jock persisted. “Life is all through the universe. Mark my words—when the Jove Project straightens out the bugs and gets going, they'll even find life on the surface of Jupiter.”
“On Jupiter?” Mr. Villa exploded. “Please, Jock! Methane and ammonia and cold as a mother-in-law's kiss. Don't joke with us. Why, there's not even light down under on the surface of Jupiter; it's pitch dark.”
“I said it and I'll say it again,” Montague answered. “Life is persistent. Wherever there is mass and energy with conditions that permit the formation of large and stable molecules, there you will find life. Look at Mars. Look at Venus. Look at Earth—the most dangerous planet of the lot. Look at the Ruined Planet.”
I said, “What do you think about it, Paul?”
The boss smiled gently. “I don't. I haven't enough data.”
“There!” said Mr. Villa. “There speaks a wise man. Tell me, Jock, how did you get to be an authority on this subject?”
“I have the advantage,” Jock answered grandly, “of not knowing too much about the subject. Facts are always a handicap in philosophical debate.”
That ended that phase of it, for Mr. Seymour, the boss agronomist, said, “I'm not so much worried about where life came from as where it is going—here.”
“How?” I wanted to know. “In what way?”
“What are we going to make of this planet? We can make it anything we want. Mars and Venus—they had native cultures. We dare not change them much and we'll never populate them very heavily. These Jovian moons are another matter; it's up to us. They say man is endlessly adaptable. I say on the contrary that man doesn't adapt himself as much as he adapts his environment. Certainly we are doing so here. But how?”
“I thought that was pretty well worked out,” I said. “We set up these new centers, more people come in and we spread out, same as at Leda.”
“Ah, but where does it stop? We have three ships making regular trips now. Shortly there will be a ship in every three weeks, then it will be every week, then every day. Unless we are almighty careful there will be food rationing here, same as on Earth. Bill, do you know how fast the population is increasing, back Earthside?”
I admitted that I didn't
“More than one hundred thousand more persons each day than there were the day before. Figure that up.”
I did. “That would be, uh, maybe fifteen, twenty shiploads a day. Still, I imagine they could build ships to carry them.”
“Yes, but where would we put them? Each day, more than twice as many people landing as there are now on this whole globe. And not just on Monday, but on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday—and the week and the month and the year after that, just to keep Earth's population stable. I tell you, it won't work. The day will come when we will have to stop immigration entirely.” He looked around aggressively, like a man who expects to be contradicted.
He wasn't disappointed. Somebody said, “Oh, Seymour, come off it! Do you think you own this place just because you got here first? You snuck in while the rules were lax.”
“You can't argue with mathematics,” Seymour insisted. “Ganymede has got to be made self-sufficient as soon as possible—and then we've got to slam the door!”
Paul was shaking his head. “It won't be necessary.”
“Huh?” said Seymour. “Why not? Answer me that. You represent the Commission: what fancy answer has the Commission got?”
“None,” Paul told him. “And your figures are right but your conclusions are wrong. Oh, Ganymede has to be made self-sufficient, true enough, but your bogeyman about a dozen or more shiploads of immigrants a day you can forget.”
“Why, if I may be so bold?”
Paul looked around the tent and grinned apologetically. “Can you stand a short dissertation on population dynamics? I'm afraid I don't have Jock's advantage; this is a subject I am supposed to know something about.”
Somebody said, “Stand back. Give him air.”
“Okay,” Paul went on, “you brought it on yourselves. A lot of people have had the idea that colonization is carried on with the end purpose of relieving the pressure of people and hunger back on Earth. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
I said. “Huh?”
“Bear with me. Not only is it physically impossible for a little planet to absorb the increase of a big planet, as Seymour pointed out, but there is another reason why well never get any such flood of people as a hundred thousand people a day—a psychological reason. There are never as many people willing to emigrate (even if you didn't pick them over) as there are new people born. Most people simply will not leave home. Most of them won't even leave their native villages, much less go to a far planet.”
Mr. Villa nodded. “I go along with you on that The willing emigrant is an odd breed of cat. He's scarce.”
“Right,” Paul agreed. “But let's suppose for a moment that a hundred thousand people were willing to emigrate every day and Ganymede and the other colonies could take them. Would that relieve the situation back home—I mean “back Earthside'? The answer is, 'No, it wouldn't'.”
He appeared to have finished. I finally said, “Excuse my blank look, Paul, but why wouldn't it?”
“Studied any bionomics, Bill?”
“Some.”
“Mathematical population bionomics?”
“Well–no.”
“But you do know that in the greatest wars the Earth ever had there were always more people after the war than before, no matter how many were killed. Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation. In other words, if we bled off a hundred thousand people a day, the Earth's population would then grow until the increase was around two hundred thousand a day, or the bionomical maximum for Earth's new ecological dynamic.”
Nobody said anything for a moment; there wasn't anything to say. Presently Sergei spoke up with, “You paint a grim picture, boss. What's the answer?”
Paul said, “There isn't any!”
Sergei said, “I didn't mean it that way. I mean, what is the outcome?”
When Paul did answer it was just one word, one monosyllable, spoken so softly that it would not have been heard if there had not been dead silence. What he said was:
“War.”
There was a shuffle and a stir; it was an unthinkable idea. Seymour said, “Come now, Mr. du Maurier—I may be a pessimist, but I'm not that much of one. Wars are no longer possible.”
Paul said, “So?”
Seymour answered almost belligerently, “Are you trying to suggest that the Space Patrol would let us down? Because that is the only way a war could happen.”
Paul shook his head. “The Patrol won't let us down. But they won't be able to stop it. A police force is all right for stopping individual disturbances; it's fine for nipping things in the bud. But when the disturbances are planet wide, no police force is big enough, or strong enough, or wise enough. They'll try—they'll try bravely. They won't succeed.”
“You really believe that?”
“It's my considered opinion. And not only my opinion, but the opinion of the Commission. Oh, I don't mean the political board; I mean the career scientists.”
“Then what in tarnation is the Commission up to?”
“Building colonies. We think that is worthwhile in itself. The colonies need not be affected by the War. In fact, I don't think they will be, not much. It will be like America was up to the end of the nineteenth century; European troubles passed her by. I rather expect that the War, when it comes, will be of such size and duration that interplanetary travel will cease to be for a considerable period. That is why I said this planet has got to be self-sufficient. It takes a high technical culture to maintain interplanetary travel and Earth may not have it—after a bit.”
I think Paul's ideas were a surprise to everyone present; I know they were to me. Seymour jabbed a finger at him, “If you believe this, then why are you going back to Earth? Tell me that.”
Again Paul spoke softly. “I'm not. I'm going to stay here and become a 'steader.”
Suddenly I knew why he was letting his beard grow.
Seymour answered, “Then you expect it soon.” It was not a question; it was a statement.
“Having gone this far,” Paul said hesitantly, “I'll give you a direct answer. War is not less than forty Earth years away, not more than seventy.”
You could feel a sigh of relief all around the place. Seymour continued to speak for us, “Forty to seventy, you say. But that's no reason to homestead; you probably wouldn't live to see it. Not but what you'd make a good neighbor.”
“I see this War,” Paul insisted. “I know it's coming. Should I leave it up to my hypothetical children and grandchildren to outguess it? No. Here I rest. If I marry, I'll marry here. I'm not raising any kids to be radioactive dust.”
It must have been about here that Hank stuck his head in the tent, for I don't remember anyone answering Paul. Hank had been outside on business of his own; now he opened the flap and called out, “Hey gents! Europa is up!”
We all trooped out to see. We went partly through embarrassment, I think; Paul had been too nakedly honest. But we probably would have gone anyhow. Sure, we saw Europa every day of our lives at home, but not the way we were seeing it now.
Since Europa goes around Jupiter inside Ganymede's orbit, it never gets very far away from Jupiter, if you call 39 degrees “not very far.” Since we were 113 west longitude, Jupiter was 23 degrees below our eastern horizon—which meant that Europa, when it was furthest west of Jupiter, would be a maximum of 16 degrees above the true horizon.
Excuse the arithmetic. Since we had a row of high hills practically sitting on us to the east, what all this means is that, once a week, Europa would rise above the hills, just peeking over, hang there for about a day—then turn around and set in the east, right where it had risen. Up and down like an elevator.
If you've never been off Earth, don't tell me it's impossible. That's how it is—Jupiter and its moons do some funny things.
It was the first time it had happened this trip, so we watched it—a little silver boat, riding the hills like waves, with its horns turned up. There was argument about whether or not it was still rising, or starting to set again, and much comparing of watches. Some claimed to be able to detect motion but they weren't agreed on which way. After a while I got cold and went back in.
But I was glad of the interruption. I had a feeling that Paul had said considerably more than he had intended to and more than he would be happy to recall, come light phase. I blamed it on the sleeping pills. Sleeping pills are all right when necessary, but they tend to make you babble and tell your right name–treacherous things.
By the end of the second light phase it was clear–to Paul, anyhow—that this second valley would do. It wasn't the perfect valley and maybe there was a better one just over the ridge—but life is too short. Paul assigned it a score of 92% by some complicated system thought up by the Commission, which was seven points higher than passing. The perfect valley could wait for the colonials to find it ... which they would, some day.
We named the valley Happy Valley, Just for luck, and named the mountains south of it the Pauline Peaks, over Paul's protests. He said it wasn't official anyway; we said we would see to it that it was made so—and the boss topographer, Abie Finkelstein, marked it so on the map and we all intialed it
We spent the third light phase rounding up the details. We could have gone back then, if there had been any way to get back. There wasn't, so we had to dope through another dark phase. Some of them preferred to go back on a more normal schedule instead; there was a round-the-clock poker game, which I stayed out of, having nothing I could afford to lose and no talent for filling straights. There were more dark phase bull sessions but they never got as grave as the first one and nobody ever again asked Paul what he thought about the future prospects of things.
By the end of the third dark phase I was getting more than a little tired of seeing nothing but the inside of our portable range. I asked Paul for some time off.
Hank had been helping me since the start of the third dark phase. He had been working as a topographical assistant; flash contour pictures were on the program at the start of that dark phase. He was supposed to get an open-lens shot across the valley from an elevation on the south just as a sunburst flash was let off from an elevation to the west.
Hank had a camera of his own, just acquired, and he was shutter happy, always pointing it at things. This time he had tried to get a picture of his own as well as the official picture. He had goofed off, missed the official picture entirely, and to top it off had failed to protect his eyes when the sunburst went off. Which put him on the sick list and I got him as kitchen police.
He was all right shortly, but Finkelstein didn't want him back. So I asked for relief for both of us, so we could take a hike together and do a little exploring. Paul let us go.
There had been high excitement at the end of the second light phase when lichen had been discovered near the west end of the valley. For a while it looked as if native life had been found on Ganymede. It was a false alarm—careful examination showed that it was not only an Earth type, but a type authorized by the bionomics board.
But it did show one thing—life was spreading, taking hold, at a point thirty-one hundred miles from the original invasion. There was much argument as to whether the spores had been air borne, or had been brought in on the clothing of the crew who had set up the power plant. It didn't matter, really.
But Hank and I decided to explore off that way and see if we could find more of it. Besides it was away from the way we had come from camp number one. We didn't tell Paul we were going after lichen because we were afraid he would veto it; the stuff had been found quite some distance from camp. He had warned us not to go too far and to be back by six o'clock Thursday morning, in time to break camp and head back to our landing point, where the Jitterbug was to meet us.
I agreed as I didn't mean to go far in any case. I didn't much care whether we found lichen or not; I wasn't feeling well. But I kept that fact to myself; I wasn't going to be done out of my one and only chance to see some of the country.
We didn't find any more lichen. We did find the crystals.
We were trudging along, me as happy as a kid let out of school despite an ache in my side and Hank taking useless photographs of odd rocks and lava flows. Hank had been saying that he thought he would sell out his place and homestead here in Happy Valley. He said, “You know, Bill, they are going to need a few real Ganymede farmers here to give the greenhorns the straight dope. And who knows more about Ganymede-style farming than I do?”
“Almost everybody,” I assured him.
He ignored it. “This place has really got it,” he went on, gazing around at a stretch of country that looked like Armageddon after a hard battle. “Much better than around Leda.”
I admitted that it had possibilities. “But I don't think it's for me,” I went on. “I don't think I'd care to settle anywhere where you can't see Jupiter.”
“Nonsense!” he answered. “Did you come here to stare at the sights or to make a farm?”
“That's a moot point,” I admitted. “Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes the other. Sometimes I don't have the foggiest idea.”
He wasn't listening. “See that slot up there?”
“Sure. What about it?”
“If we crossed that little glacier, we could get up to it.”
“Why?”
“I think it leads into another valley—which might be even better. Nobody has been up there. I know—I was in the topo gang.”
“I've been trying to help you forget that,” I told him. “But why look at all? There must be a hundred thousand valleys on Ganymede that nobody has looked at. Are you in the real estate business?” It didn't appeal to me. There is something that gets you about virgin soil on Ganymede; I wanted to stay in sight of camp. It was quiet as a library—quieter. On Earth there is always some sound, even in the desert. After a while the stillness and the bare rocks and the ice and the craters get on my nerves.
“Come on! Don't be a sissyl” he answered, and started climbing.
The slot did not lead to another valley; it led into a sort of corridor in the hills. One wall was curiously flat, as if it had been built that way on purpose. We went along it a way, and I was ready to turn back and had stopped to call to Hank, who had climbed the loose rock on the other side to get a picture. As I turned, my eye caught some color and I moved up to see what it was. It was the crystals.
I stared at them and they seemed to stare back. I called, “Hey! Hank! Come here on the bounce!”
“What's up?”
“Come here! Here's something worth taking a picture of.”
He scrambled down and joined me. After a bit he let out his breath and whispered, “Well, I'll be fried on Friday!”
Hank got busy with his camera. I never saw such crystals, not even stalactites in caves. They were six-sided, except a few that were three-sided and some that were twelve-sided. They came anywhere from little squatty fellows no bigger than a button mushroom up to tall, slender stalks, knee high. Later on and further up we found some chest high.
They were not simple prisms; they branched and budded. But the thing that got you was the colors.
They were all colors and they changed color as you looked at them. We finally decided that they didn't have any color at all; it was just refraction of light. At least Hank thought so.
He shot a full cartridge of pictures then said, “Come on. Let's see where they come from.”
I didn't want to. I was shaky from the climb and my right side was giving me fits every step I took. I guess I was dizzy, too; when I looked at the crystals they seemed to writhe around and I would have to blink my eyes to steady them.
But Hank had already started so I followed. The crystals seemed to keep to what would have been the water bed of the canyon, had it been spring. They seemed to need water. We came to a place where there was a drift of ice across the floor of the corridor —ancient ice, with a thin layer of last winter's snow on top of it. The crystals had carved a passage right through it, a natural bridge of ice, and had cleared a space of several feet on each side of where they were growing, as well.
Hank lost his footing as we scrambled through and snatched at one of the crystals. It broke off with a sharp, clear note, like a silver bell.
Hank straightened up and stood looking at his hand. There were parallel cuts across his palm and fingers. He stared at them stupidly.
“That'll teach you,” I said, and then got out a first-lid kit and bandaged it for him. When I had finished I said, “Now let's go back.”
“Shucks,” he said. “What's a few little cuts? Come
I said, “Look, Hank, I want to go back. I don't feel good.”
“What's the matter?”
“Stomach ache.”
“You eat too much; that's your trouble. The exercise will do you good.”
“No, Hank. I've got to go back.”
He stared up the ravine and looked fretful. Finally he said, “Bill, I think I see where the crystals come from, not very far up. You wait here and let me take a look. Then I'll come back and well head for camp. I won't be gone long; honest I won't.”
“Okay,” I agreed. He started up; shortly I followed him. I had had it pounded into my head as a Cub not to get separated in a strange country.
After a bit I heard him shout. I looked up and saw him standing, facing a great dark hole in the cliff. I called out, “What's the matter?”
He answered:
“GREAT JUMPING HOLY SMOKE!!!”–like that.
“What's the matter?” I repeated irritably and hurried along until I was standing beside him.
The crystals continued up the place where we were. They came right to the cave mouth, but did not go in; they formed a solid dense thicket across the threshold. Lying across the floor of the ravine, as if it had been tumbled there by an upheaval like the big quake, was a flat rock, a monolith, Stonehenge size. You could see where it had broken off the cliff, uncovering the hole. The plane of cleavage was as sharp and smooth as anything done by the ancient Egyptians.
But that wasn't what we were looking at; we were looking into the hole.
It was dark inside, but diffused light, reflected off the canyon floor and the far wall, filtered inside. My eyes began to adjust and I could see what Hank was staring at, what he had exploded about.
There were things in there and they weren't natural
I couldn't have told you what sort of things because they were like nothing I had ever seen before in my life, or seen pictures of—or heard of. How can you describe what you've never seen before and have no words for? Shucks, you can't even see a thing properly the first time you see it; your eye doesn't take in the pattern.
But I could see this: they weren't rocks, they weren't plants, they weren't animals. They were made things, man made—well, maybe not “man” made, but not things that just happen, either.
I wanted very badly to get up close to them and see what they were. For the moment, I forgot I was sick.
So did Hank. As usual he said, “Come onl Let's go!”
But I said, “How?”
“Why, we just—” He stopped and took another look. “Well, let's see, we go around— No. Hmm . . . Bill, we will have to bust up some of those crystals and go right through the middle. There's no other way to get in.”
I said, “Isn't one chopped up hand enough for you?”
“I'll bust 'em with a rock. It seems a shame; they are so pretty, but that's what I'll have to do.”
“I don't think you can bust those big ones. Besides that, I'll give you two to one that they are sharp enough to cut through your boots.”
“I'll chance it.” He found a chunk of rock and made an experiment; I was right on both counts. Hank stopped and looked the situation over, whistling softly. “Bill—”
“Yeah?”
“See that little ledge over the opening?”
“What about it?”
“It comes out to the left further than the crystals do. I'm going to pile rock up high enough for us to reach it, then we can go along it and drop down right in front of the cave mouth. The crystals don't come that close.”
I looked it over and decided it would work. “But how do we get back?”
“We can pile up some of that stuff we can see inside and shinny up again. At the very worst I can boost you up on my shoulders and then you can reach down your belt to me, or something.”
If I had my wits about me, maybe I would have protested. But we tried it and it worked—worked right up to the point where I was hanging by my fingers from the ledge over the cave mouth.
I felt a stabbing pain in my side and let go.
I came to with Hank shaking me. “Let me alone!” I growled.
“You knocked yourself out,” he said. “I didn't know you were so clumsy.” I didn't answer. I just gathered my knees up to my stomach and closed my eyes.
Hank shook me again. “Don't you want to see what's in here?”
I kicked at him. “I don't want to see the Queen of Sheba! Can't you see I'm sick?” I closed my eyes again.
I must have passed out. When I woke up, Hank was sitting Turk fashion in front of me, with my torch in his hand. “You've been asleep a long time, fellow,” he said gently. “Feel any better?”
“Not much.”
'Try to pull yourself together and come along with me. You've got to see this, Bill. You won't believe it. This is the greatest discovery since—well, since— Never mind; Columbus was a piker. We're famous, Bill.”
“You may be famous,” I said. “I'm sick.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“All over. My stomach is hard as a rock—a rock with a toothache.”
“Bill,” he said seriously, “have you ever had your appendix out?”
“No.”
“Hmmm . . . maybe you should have had it out.”
“Well, this is a fine time to tell me!”
“Take it easy.”
“Take it easy, my foot!” I got up on one elbow, my head swimming. “Hank, listen to me. You've got to get back to camp and tell them. Have them send a tractor for me.”
“Look, Bill,” he said gently, “you know there isn't anything like a tractor at camp.”
I tried to struggle with the problem but it was too much for me. My brain was fuzzy. “Well, have them bring a stretcher, at least,” I said peevishly and lay down again.
Some time later I felt him fumbling around with my clothes. I tried to push him away, then I felt something very cold on me. I took a wild swing at him; it didn't connect.
“Steady,” he said. “I have found some ice. Don't squirm around or you'll knock off the pack.”
“I don't want it.”
“You've got to have it. You keep that ice pack in place until we get out of here and you may live to be hanged, yet.”
I was too feeble to resist. I lay back down and closed my eyes again. When I opened my eyes again, I was amazed to feel better. Instead of feeling ready to die, I merely felt awful. Hank wasn't around; I called to him. When he didn't answer at once I felt panicky.
Then he came trotting up, waving the torch. “I thought you had gone,” I said.
“No. To tell the truth, I can't get out of here. I can't get back up to the ledge and I can't get over the crystals. I tried it.” He held up one boot; it was in shreds and there was blood on it.
“Hurt yourself?”
“I'll live.”
“I wonder,” I answered. “Nobody knows we are here—and you say we can't get out. Looks like we starve. Not that I give a hoot.”
'Speaking of that,” he said. “I saved you some of our lunch. I'm afraid I didn't leave much; you were asleep a long, long time.”
“Don't mention food!” I retched and grabbed at my side.
“Sorry. But look—I didn't say we couldn't get out”
“But you did.”
“No, I said I couldn't get out.”
“What's the difference?”
“Uh, never mind. But I think we'll get out. It was what you said about getting a tractor——”
“Tractor? Are you out of your head?”
“Skip it,” Bill answered. “There is a sort of tractor thing back there—or more like a scaffolding, maybe.”
“Make up your mind.”
“Call it a wagon. I think I can get it out, at least across the crystals. We could use it as a bridge.”
“Well, roll it out.”
“It doesn't roll. It, uh-well, it walks.”
I tried to get up. “This I got to see.”
“Just move over out of the way of the door.”
I managed to get to my feet, with Hank helping me. “I'm coming along.”
“Want the ice pack changed?”
“Later, maybe.” Hank took me back and showed me. I don't know how to describe the walker wagon–maybe you've seen pictures since. If a centipede were a dinosaur and made of metal to boot, it would be a walker wagon. The body of it was a sort of trough and it was supported by thirty-eight legs, nineteen on a side.
“That,” I said, “is the craziest contraption I ever laid eyes on. You'll never shove it out the door.”
“Wait until you see,” he advised. “And if you think this is crazy, you should see the other things in here.”
“Such as?”
“Bill, you know what I think this place is? I think it's a hangar for a space ship.”
“Huh? Don't be silly; space ships don't have hangars.”
“This one has.”
“You mean you saw a space ship in here?”
“Well, I don't know. It's not like any I ever saw before, but if it's not a space ship, I don't know what it is good for.”
I wanted to go see, but Hank objected. “Another time, Bill; we've got to get back to camp. We're late as it is.”
I didn't put up any fight. My side was paining me again, from the walk. “Okay, what happens next?”
“Like this.” He led me around to the end of the contraption; the trough came nearly down to the floor in back. Hank helped me get inside, told me to lie down, and went up to the other end. 'The guy that built this,” he said, “must have been a hump-backed midget with four arms. Hang on.”
“Do you know what you're doing?” I asked.
“I moved it about six feet before; then I lost my nerve. Abracadabra! Hold onto your hat!” He poked a finger deep into a hole.
The thing began to move, silently, gently, without any fuss. When we came out into the sunshine, Hank pulled his finger out of the hole. I sat up. The thing was two thirds out of the cave and the front end was beyond the crystals.
I sighed. “You made it, Hank, Let's get going. If I had some more ice on my side I think I could walk.”
“Wait a second,” he said. “I want to try something. There are holes here I haven't stuck a finger in yet.”
“Leave well enough alone.”
Instead of answering he tried another hole. The machine backed up suddenly. “Woopsl” he said, jerked his finger out, and jabbed it back where it had been before. He left it there until he regained what we had lost.
He tried other holes more cautiously. At last he found one which caused the machine to rear up its front end slightly and swing it to the left, like a caterpillar. “Now we are in business,” he said happily. “I can steer it.” We started down the canyon.
Hank was not entirely correct in thinking he could guide it. It was more like guiding a horse than a machine—or perhaps more like guiding one of those new groundmobiles with the semi-automatic steering. The walker wagon came to the little natural bridge of ice through which the crystals passed and stopped of itself. Hank tried to get it to go through the opening, which was large enough; it would have none of it. The front end cast around like a dog sniffing, then eased gradually up hill and around the ice.
It stayed level; apparently it could adjust its legs, like the fabulous hillside snee.
When Hank came to the ice flow we had crossed on the way up to the notch, he stopped it and gave me a fresh ice pack. Apparently it did not object to ice in itself, but simply refused to go through holes, for when we started up again, it crossed the little glacier, slowly and cautiously, but steadily.
We headed on toward camp. “This,” Hank announced happily, “is the greatest cross-country, rough-terrain vehicle ever built. I wish I knew what makes it go. If I had the patent on this thing, I'd be rich.”
“It's yours; you found it.”
“It doesn't really belong to me.”
“Hank,” I answered, “you don't really think the owner is going to come back looking for it, do you?”
He got a very odd look. “No, I don't, Bill. Say, Bill, uh, how long ago do you think this thing was put in there?”
“I wouldn't even want to guess.”
There was only one tent at the camp site. As we came up to it, somebody came out and waited for us. It was Sergei.
“Where have you guys been?” he asked. “And where in Kingdom Come did you steal that?
“And what is it?” he added.
We did our best to bring him up to date, and presently he did the same for us. They had searched for us as long as they could, then Paul had been forced to move back to camp number one to keep the date with the Jitterbug. He had left Sergei behind to fetch us when we showed up. “He left a note for you,” Sergei added, digging it out
It read:
“Dear Pen Pals,
“I am sorry to go off and leave you crazy galoots but you know the schedule as well as I do. I would stay behind myself to herd you home, but your pal Sergei insists that it is his privilege. Every time I try to reason with him he crawls further back into his hole, bares his teeth, and growls.
“As soon as you get this, get your chubby little legs to moving in the direction of camp number one. Run, do not walk. We'll hold the Jitterbug, but you know how dear old Aunt Hattie feels about keeping her schedule. She isn't going to like it if you are late.
“When I see you, I intend to beat your ears down around your shoulders.
“Good luck,
“P. du M.
“P.S. to Doctor Slop: I took care of your accordion.”
When we had finished reading it Sergei said, “I want to hear more about what you found—about eight times more. But not now; we've got to tear over to camp number one. Hank, you think Bill can't walk it?”
I answered for myself, an emphatic “no.” The excitement was wearing off and I was feeling worse again.
“Hmm—Hank, do you think that mobile junk yard will carry us over there?”
“I think it will carry us any place.” Hank patted it.
“How fast? The Jitterbug has already grounded.”
“Are you sure?” asked Hank.
“I saw its trail in the sky at least three hours ago.”
“Let's get going!”
I don't remember much about the trip. They stopped once in the pass, and packed me with ice again. The next thing I knew I was awakened by hearing Sergei shout, “There's the Jitterbug! I can see it.”
“Jitterbug, here we come,” answered Hank. I sat up and looked, too.
We were coming down the slope, not five miles from it, when flame burst from its tail and it climbed for the sky.
Hank groaned. I lay back down and closed my eyes.
I woke up again when the contraption stopped. Paul was there, hands on his hips, staring at us. “About time you birds got home,” he announced. “But where did you find that?”
“Paul,” Hank said urgently, “Bill is very sick.”
“Oh, oh!” Paul swung up and into the walker and made no more questions then. A moment later he had my belly bared and was shoving a thumb into that spot between the belly button and the hip bone. “Does that hurt?” he asked.
I was too weak to slug him. He gave me a pill.
I took no further part in events for a while, but what had happened was this: Captain Hattie had waited, at Paul's urgent insistence, for a couple of hours, and then had announced that she had to blast. She had a schedule to keep with the Covered Wagon and she had no intention, she said, of keeping eight thousand people waiting for the benefit of two. Hank and I could play Indian if we liked; we couldn't play hob with her schedule.
There was nothing Paul could do, so he sent the rest back and waited for us.
But I didn't hear this at the time. I was vaguely aware that we were in the walker wagon, travelling, and I woke up twice when I was repacked with ice, but the whole episode is foggy. They travelled east, with Hank driving and Paul navigating—by the seat of his pants. Some long dreamy time later they reached a pioneer camp surveying a site over a hundred miles away—and from there Paul radioed for help.
Whereupon the Jitterbug came and got us. I remember the landing back at Leda—that is, I remember somebody saying, “Hurry, there! We've got a boy with a burst appendix.”
There was considerable excitement over what we had found—and there still is—but I didn't see any of it. I was busy playing games with the Pearly Gates. I guess I have Dr. Archibald to thank for still being here. And Hank. And Sergei. And Paul. And Captain Hattie. And some nameless party, who lived somewhere, a long time ago, whose shape and race I still don't know, but who designed the perfect machine for traveling overland through rough country.
I thanked everybody but him. They all came to see me in the hospital, even Captain Hattie, who growled at me, then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek as she left. I was so surprised I almost bit her.
The Schultzes came, of course, and Mama cried over me and Papa gave me an apple and Gretchen could hardly talk, which isn't like her. And Molly brought the twins down to see me and vice versa.
The Leda daily Planet interviewed me. They wanted to know whether or not we thought the things we found were made by men?
Now that is a hard question to answer and smarter people than myself have worked on it since.
What is a man?
The things Hank and I—and the Project Jove scientists who went later—found in that cave couldn't have been made by men—not men like us. The walker wagon was the simplest thing they found. Most of the things they still haven't found out the use for. Nor have they figured out what the creatures looked like—no pictures.
That seems surprising, but the scientists concluded they didn't have eyes—not eyes like ours, anyhow. So they didn't use pictures.
The very notion of a “picture” seems pretty esoteric when you think it over. The Venetians don't use pictures, nor the Martians. Maybe we are the only race in the universe that thought up that way of recording things.
So they weren't “men”—not like us.
But they were men in the real sense of the word, even though I don't doubt that I would run screaming away if I met one in a dark alley. The important thing, as Mr. Seymour would say, they had—they controlled their environment. They weren't animals, pushed around and forced to accept what nature handed them; they took nature and bent it to their will.
I guess they were men.
The crystals were one of the oddest things about it and I didn't have any opinions on that. Somehow, those crystals were connected with that cave—or space ship hangar, or whatever it was. Yet they couldn't or wouldn't go inside the cave.
Here was another point that the follow-up party from Project Jove recorded: that big unwieldly walker wagon came all the way down that narrow canyon-yet it did not step on a single crystal. Hank must be a pretty good driver. He says he's not that good.
Don't ask me. I don't understand everything that goes on in the universe. It's a big place.
I had lots of time to think before they let me out of the hospital—and lots to think about. I thought about my coming trip to Earth, to go back to school I had missed the Covered Wagon, of course, but that didn't mean anything; I could take the Mayflower three weeks later. But did I want to go? It was a close thing to decide.
One thing I was sure of: I was going to take those merit badge tests as soon as I was out of bed. I had put it off too long. A close brush with the hereafter reminds you that you don't have forever to get things done.
But going back to school? That was another matter. For one thing, as Dad told me, the council had lost its suit with the Commission; Dad couldn't use his Earthside assets.
And there was the matter that Paul had talked about the night he had to let his hair down—the coming war.
Did Paul know what he was talking about? If so, was I letting it scare me out? I honestly didn't think so; Paul had said that it was not less than forty years away. I wouldn't be Earthside more than four or five years—and, besides, how could you get scared of anything that far in the future?
I had been through the Quake and the reconstruction; I didn't really think I'd ever be scared of anything again.
I had a private suspicion that, supposing there was a war, I'd go join up; I wouldn't be running away from it. Silly, maybe.
No, I wasn't afraid of the War, but it was on my mind. Why? I finally doped it out. When Paul called I asked him about it. “See here, Paul—this war you were talking about: when Ganymede reaches the state that Earth has gotten into, does that mean war here, too? Not now—a few centuries from now.”
He smiled rather sadly. “By then we may know enough to keep from getting into that shape. At least we can hope.”
He got a far-away look and added, “A new colony is always a new hope.”
I liked that way of putting it. “A new hope—” Once I heard somebody call a new baby that.
I still didn't have the answer about going back when Dad called on me one Sunday night. I put it up to him about the cost of the fare. “I know the land is technically mine, George—but it's too much of a drain on you two.”
“Contrariwise,” said George, “well get by and that's what savings are for. Molly is for it. We will be sending the twins back for school, you know.”
“Even so, I don't feel right about it. And what real use is there in it, George? I don't need a fancy education. I've been thinking about Callisto: there's a brand new planet not touched yet with great opportunities for a man in on the ground floor. I could get a job with the atmosphere expedition—Paul would put in a word for me—and grow up with the project. I might be chief engineer of the whole planet some day.”
“Not unless you learn more about thermodynamics than you do now, you won't be!”
“Huh?”
“Engineers don't just 'grow up'; they study. They go to school.”
“Don't I study? Ain't I attending two of your classes right now? I can get to be an engineer here; I don't have to drag back half a billion miles for it.”
“Fiddlesticks! It takes discipline to study. You haven't even taken your merit badge tests. You've let your Eagle Scoutship lapse.”
I wanted to explain that taking tests and studying for tests were two different things—that I had studied. But I couldn't seem to phrase it right.
George stood up. “See here, Son, I'm going to put it to you straight. Never mind about being chief engineer of a planet; these days even a farmer needs the best education he can get. Without it he's just a country bumpkin, a stumbling peasant, poking seeds into the ground and hoping a miracle will make them grow. I want you to go back to Earth and get the best that Earth has to offer. I want you to have a degree with prestige behind it—M.I.T., Harvard, the Sorbonne. Some place noted for scholarship. Take the time to do that and then do anything you want to do. Believe me, it will pay.”
I thought about it and answered, “I guess you are right, George.”
Dad stood up. “Well, make up your mind. I'll have to hurry now for the bus, or I'll be hoofing it back to the farm. See you tomorrow.”
“Good night, George.”
I lay awake and thought about it. After a while, Mrs. Dinsmore, the wing nurse, came in, turned out my light, and said goodnight. But I didn't go to sleep.
Dad was right, I knew. I didn't want to be an ignoramus. Furthermore, I had seen the advantage held by men with fancy degrees—first crack at the jobs, fast promotion. Okay, I'd get me one of those sheepskins, then come back and—well, go to Callisto, maybe, or perhaps prove a new parcel of land. I'd go and I'd come back.
Nevertheless I couldn't get to sleep. After a while I glanced at my new watch and saw that it was nearly midnight—dawn in a few minutes. I decided that I wanted to see it It might be the last time I'd be up and around at midnight Sunday for a long, long time.
I scouted the corridor; Old Lady Dinsmore wasn't in sight. I ducked outside.
The Sun was just barely below the horizon; north of me I could see its first rays touching the topmost antenna of the power station, miles away on Pride Peak. It was very still and very beautiful. Overhead old Jupiter was in half phase, bulging and orange and grand. To the west of it Io was just coming out of shadow; it passed from black to cherry red to orange as I watched.
I wondered how I would feel to be back on Earth? How would it feel to weigh three times as much as I did now? I didn't feel heavy; I felt just right.
How would it feel to swim in that thick dirty soup they use for air?
How would it feel to have nobody but ground hogs to talk to? How could I talk to a girl who wasn't a colonial, who had never been off Earth higher than a copter hop? Sissies. Take Gretchen, now—there was a girl who could kill a chicken and have it in the pot while an Earthside girl would still be squealing.
The top of the Sun broke above the horizon and caught the snow on the peaks of the Big Rock Candy Mountains, tinting it rosy against a pale green sky. I began to be able to see the country around me. It was a new, hard, clean place—not like California with its fifty, sixty million people falling over each other. It was my kind' of a place—it was my place.
The deuce with Caltech and Cambridge and those fancy schools! I'd show Dad it didn't take ivied halls to get an education. Yes, and I'd pass those tests and be an Eagle again, first thing.
Hadn't Andrew Johnson, that American President, learned to read while he was working? Even after he was married? Give us time; we'd have as good scientists and scholars here as anywhere.
The long slow dawn went on and the light caught Kneiper's cut west of me, outlining it. I was reminded of the night we had struggled through it in the storm. As Hank put it, there was one good thing about colonial life—it sorted out the men from the boys.
“I have lived and worked with men.” The phrase rang through my head. Rhysling? Kipling, maybe. I had lived and worked with men!
The Sun was beginning to reach the roof tops. It spread across Laguna Serenidad, turning it from black to purple to blue. This was my planet, this was my home and I knew that I would never leave it
Mrs. Dinsmore came bustling out to the door and spotted me. “Why, the very idea!” she scolded. “You get back where you belong!”
I smiled at her. “I am where I belong. And I'm going to stay!”