Farmer in the Sky Page 11

  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 feel 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 Earthside, 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 well 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 up 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!”

&nb
sp; 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, he’ll 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 the 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.