Farmer in the Sky Read online

  We were miserable by the time we got out and Peggy had a nose bleed. There weren’t any elevators; we had to climb down a rope ladder. And it was cold!

  It was snowing; the wind was howling around us and shaking the ladder—the smallest lads they had to lower with a line. There was about eight inches of snow on the ground except where the splash of the Jitterbug’s jet had melted it. I could hardly see, the wind was whipping the snow into my face so, but a man grabbed me by the shoulder, swung me around, and shouted, “Keep moving! Keep moving! Over that way.”

  I headed the way he pointed. There was another man at the edge of the blast clearing, singing the same song, and there was a path through the snow, trampled to slush. I could see some other people disappearing in the snow ahead and I took out after them, dogtrotting to keep warm.

  It must nave been half a mile to the shelter and cold all the way. We weren’t dressed for it. I was chilled through and my feet were soaking wet by the time we got inside.

  The shelter was a big hangarlike building and it was not much warmer, the door was open so much, but it was out of the weather and it felt good to be inside. It was jammed with people, some of them in ship suits and some of them Ganymedeans—you couldn’t miss the colonial men; they were bearded and some of them wore their hair long as well. I decided that was one style I was not going to copy; I’d be smooth shaven, like George.

  I went scouting around, trying to find George & Co. I finally did. He had found a bale of something for Molly to sit on and she was holding Peggy on her lap. Peg’s nose had stopped bleeding. I was glad to see, but there were dried tears and blood and dirt on her face. She was a sight.

  George was looking gloomy, the way he did the first few days without his pipe. I came up and said, “Hi, folks!”

  George looked around and smiled and said, “Well, Bill, fancy meeting you here! How is it going?”

  “Now that you ask me,” I answered, “it looks like a shambles.”

  He looked gloomy again and said, “Oh, I suppose they will get things straightened out presently.”

  We didn’t get a chance to discuss it. A colonist with snow on his boots and hair on his face stopped near us, put his little fingers to his lips, and whistled. “Pipe down!” he shouted. “I want twelve able-bodied men and boys for the baggage party.” He looked around and started pointing. “You—and you—and you—”

  George was the ninth “You”; I was the tenth.

  Molly started to protest. I think George might have balked if she had not. Instead he said, “No, Molly, I guess it has to be done. Come on, Bill.”

  So we went back out into the cold.

  There was a tractor truck outside and we were loaded in it standing up, then we lumbered back to the rocket site. Dad saw to it that I was sent up into the Jitterbug to get me out of the weather and I was treated to another dose of Captain Hattie’s tongue; we couldn’t work fast enough to suit her. But we got our baggage lowered finally; it was in the truck by the time I was down out of the ship. The trip back was cold, too.

  Molly and Peggy were not where we had left them. The big room was almost empty and we were told to go on into another building through a connecting door. George was upset, I could see, from finding Molly gone.

  In the next building there were big signs with arrows: MEN & BOYS—TO THE RIGHT and WOMEN & GIRLS—TO THE LEFT. George promptly turned to the left. He got about ten yards and was stopped by a stern-faced woman dressed like a colonial, in a coverall. “Back the other way,” she said firmly. “This is the way to the ladies’ dormitory.”

  “Yes, I know,” agreed Dad, “but I want to find my wife.”

  “You can look for her at supper.”

  “I want to see her now.”

  “I haven’t any facilities for seeking out any one person at this time. You’ll have to wait.”

  “But—” There were several women crowding past us and going on inside. Dad spotted one from our deck in the Mayflower. “Mrs. Archibald!”

  She turned around. “Oh—Mr. Lermer. How do you do?”

  “Mrs. Archibald,” Dad said intently, “could you find Molly and let her know that I’m waiting here?”

  “Why, I’d be glad to try, Mr. Lermer.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Archibald, a thousand thanks!”

  “Not at all.” She went away and we waited, ignoring the stern-faced guard. Presently Molly showed up without Peggy. You would have thought Dad hadn’t seen her for a month.

  “I didn’t know what to do, dear,” she said. “They said we had to come and it seemed better to get Peggy settled down. I knew you would find us.”

  “Where is Peggy now?”

  “I put her to bed.”

  We went back to the main hall. There was a desk there with a man behind it; over his head was a sign: IMMIGRATION SERVICE—INFORMATION. There was quite a line up at it; we took our place in the queue.

  “How is Peggy?” Dad asked.

  “I’m afraid she is catching a cold.”

  “I hope—” Dad said. “Ah, I HOPE—Atchoo!”

  “And so are you,” Molly said accusingly.

  “I don’t catch cold,” Dad said, wiping his eyes. “That was just a reflex.”

  “Hmm—” said Molly.

  The line up took us past a low balcony. Two boys, my age or older, were leaning on the rail and looking us over. They were colonials and one was trying to grow a beard, but it was pretty crummy.

  One turned to the other and said, “Rafe, will you look at what they are sending us these days?”

  The other said, “It’s sad.”

  The first one pointed a thumb at me and went on, “Take that one, now—the artistic type, no doubt.”

  The second one stared at me thoughtfully. “Is it alive?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?” the first one answered.

  I turned my back on them, whereupon they both laughed. I hate self-panickers.

  10. The Promised Land

  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 ultramicrofilmed 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! George! Don’t be upset. Well 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, honeydew 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 consommé, cheese soufflÈ, 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 kids 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 soilless 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.