Farmer in the Sky Read online

  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 homesteading?”

  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.”

  13. Johnny Appleseed

  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 corner 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 Indian.”

  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 it 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 pollinate 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.”

  “Mmm… Mr. Schultz has very kindly offered to take you on as a farm hand in the meantime. What do you think of the idea?”

  14. Land of My Own

  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 y
ou 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.