Farmer in the Sky

“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.

  16. Line Up

  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 Schultzes’, 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; we’ll get it free—a spot of cumshaw coming 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 Io and Europa are just a hair brighter than Jupiter. Besides that, they break up the pattern of Jupiter’s bands and that lets you se
e 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 blankets!”

  “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, now!”

  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 do
wn again and ran to the barn. 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 Schultzes’?”

  “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.