Farmer in the Sky, Page 2

  “Hmm…” He lit his pipe, making a long business of it. “I see. Or maybe I don’t.” Then he added, “Let’s put it this way, Bill. The partnership stands. Either we both go, or we both stay—unless you decide of your own volition that you will stay to get your degree and join me out there later. Is that fair?”

  “Huh? Oh, yes!”

  “So let’s talk about it later.”

  I said goodnight and ducked into my room quick. William, my boy, I told myself, it’s practically in the bag—if you can just keep from getting soft-hearted and agreeing to a split up. I crawled into bed and opened the book.

  Ganymede was Jupiter-III; I should have remembered that. It was bigger than Mercury, much bigger than the Moon, a respectable planet, even if it was a moon. The surface gravity was one third of Earth-normal; I would weigh about forty-five pounds there. First contacted in 1985—which I knew—and its atmosphere project started in 1998 and had been running ever since.

  There was a stereo in the book of Jupiter as seen from Ganymede—round as an apple, ruddy orange, and squashed on both poles. And big as all outdoors. Beautiful. I fell asleep staring at it.

  Dad and I didn’t get a chance to talk for the next three days as my geography class spent that time in Antarctica. I came back with a frostbitten nose and some swell pix of penguins—and some revised ideas. I had had time to think.

  Dad had fouled up the account book as usual but he had remembered to save the wrappers and it didn’t take me long to straighten things out. After dinner I let him beat me two games, then said, “Look, George—”

  “Yes?”

  “You know what we were talking about?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “It’s this way. I’m under age; I can’t go if you won’t let me. Seems to me you ought to, but if you don’t, I won’t quit school. In any case, you ought to go—you need to go—you know why. I’m asking you to think it over and take me along, but I’m not going to be a baby about it.”

  Dad almost looked embarrassed. “That’s quite a speech, Son. You mean you’re willing to let me go, you stay here and go to school, and not make a fuss about it?”

  “Well, not ‘willing’—but I’d put up with it.”

  “Thanks.” Dad fumbled in his pouch and pulled out a flat photo. “Take a look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Your file copy of your application for emigration. I submitted it two days ago.”

  2. The Green-Eyed Monster

  I wasn’t much good in school for the next few days. Dad cautioned me not to get worked up over it; they hadn’t approved our applications as yet. “You know, Bill, ten times as many people apply as can possibly go.”

  “But most of them want to go to Venus or Mars. Ganymede is too far away; that scares the sissies out.”

  “I wasn’t talking about applications for all the colonies; I meant applications for Ganymede, specifically for this first trip of the Mayflower.”

  “Even so, you can’t scare me. Only about one in ten can qualify. That’s the way it’s always been.”

  Dad agreed. He said that this was the first time in history that some effort was being made to select the best stock for colonization instead of using colonies as dumping grounds for misfits and criminals and failures. Then he added, “But look, Bill, what gives you the notion that you and I can necessarily qualify? Neither one of us is a superman.”

  That rocked me back on my heels. The idea that we might not be good enough hadn’t occurred to me. “George, they couldn’t turn us down!”

  “They could and they might.”

  “But how? They need engineers out there and you’re tops. Me—I’m not a genius but I do all right in school. We’re both healthy and we don’t have any bad mutations; we aren’t color blind or bleeders or anything like that.”

  “No bad mutations that we know of,” Dad answered. “However, I agree that we seem to have done a fair job in picking our grandparents. I wasn’t thinking of anything as obvious as that.”

  “Well, what, then? What could they possibly get us on?”

  He fiddled with his pipe the way he always does when he doesn’t want to answer right away. “Bill, when I pick a steel alloy for a job, it’s not enough to say, ‘Well, it’s a nice shiny piece of metal; let’s use it.’ No, I take into account a list of tests as long as your arm that tells me all about that alloy, what it’s good for and just what I can expect it to do in the particular circumstances I intend to use it. Now if you had to pick people for a tough job of colonizing, what would you look for?”

  “Uh… I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. I’m not a social psychometrician. But to say that they want healthy people with fair educations is like saying that I want steel rather than wood for a job. It doesn’t tell what sort of steel. Or it might not be steel that was needed; it might be titanium alloy. So don’t get your hopes too high.”

  “But—well, look, what can we do about it?”

  “Nothing. If we don’t get picked, then tell yourself that you are a darn good grade of steel and that it’s no fault of yours that they wanted magnesium.”

  It was all very well to look at it that way, but it worried me. I didn’t let it show at school, though. I had already let everybody know that we had put in for Ganymede; if we missed—well, it would be sort of embarrassing.

  My best friend, Duck Miller, was all excited about it and was determined to go, too.

  “But how can you?” I asked. “Do your folks want to go?”

  “I already looked into that,” Duck answered. “All I have to have is a grown person as a sponsor, a guardian. Now if you can tease your old man into signing for me, it’s in the bag.”

  “But what will your father say?”

  “He won’t care. He’s always telling me that when he was my age he was earning his own living. He says a boy should be self reliant. Now how about it? Will you speak to your old man about it—tonight?”

  I said I would and I did. Dad didn’t say anything for a moment, then he asked: “You really want Duck with you?”

  “Sure I do. He’s my best friend.”

  “What does his father say?”

  “He hasn’t asked him yet,” and then I explained how Mr. Miller felt about it.

  “So?” said Dad. “Then let’s wait and see what Mr. Miller says.”

  “Well—look, George, does that mean that you’ll sign for Duck if his father says it’s okay?”

  “I meant what I said, Bill. Let’s wait. The problem may solve itself.”

  I said, “Oh well, maybe Mr. and Mrs. Miller will decide to put in for it, too, after Duck gets them stirred up.”

  Dad just cocked an eyebrow at me. “Mr. Miller has, shall we say, numerous business interests here. I think it would be easier to jack up one corner of Boulder Dam than to get him to give them up.”

  “You’re giving up your business.”

  “Not my business, my professional practice. But I’m not giving up my profession; I’m taking it with me.”

  I saw Duck at school the next day and asked him what his father had said.

  “Forget it,” he told me. “The deal is off.”

  “Huh?”

  “My old man says that nobody but an utter idiot would even think of going out to Ganymede. He says that Earth is the only planet in the system fit to live on and that if the government wasn’t loaded up with a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers we would quit pouring money down a rat hole trying to turn a bunch of bare rocks in the sky into green pastures. He says the whole enterprise is doomed.”

  “You didn’t think so yesterday.”

  “That was before I got the straight dope. You know what? My old man is going to take me into partnership. Just as soon as I’m through college he’s going to start breaking me into the management end. He says he didn’t tell me before because he wanted me to learn self reliance and initiative, but he thought it was time I knew about it. What do you think of that?”

  “W
hy, that’s pretty nice, I suppose. But what’s this about the ‘enterprise being doomed?’”

  “‘Nice,’ he calls it! Well, my old man says that it is an absolute impossibility to keep a permanent colony on Ganymede. It’s a perilous toehold, artificially maintained—those were his exact words—and someday the gadgets will bust and the whole colony will be wiped out, every man jack, and then we will quit trying to go against nature.”

  We didn’t talk any more then as we had to go to class. I told Dad about it that night. “What do you think, George?”

  “Well, there is something in what he says—”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t jump the gun. If everything went sour on Ganymede at once and we didn’t have the means to fix it, it would revert to the state we found it in. But that’s not the whole answer. People have a funny habit of taking as ‘natural’ whatever they are used to—but there hasn’t been any ‘natural’ environment, the way they mean it, since men climbed down out of trees. Bill, how many people are there in California?”

  “Fifty-five, sixty million.”

  “Did you know that the first four colonies here starved to death? ’S truth! How is it that fifty-odd million can live here and not starve? Barring short rations, of course.”

  He answered it himself. “We’ve got four atomic power plants along the coast just to turn sea water into fresh water. We use every drop of the Colorado River and every foot of snow that falls on the Sierras. And we use a million other gadgets. If those gadgets went bad—say a really big earthquake knocked out all four atomic plants—the country would go back to desert. I doubt if we could evacuate that many people before most of them died from thirst. Yet I don’t think Mr. Miller is lying awake nights worrying about it. He regards Southern California as a good ‘natural’ environment.

  “Depend on it, Bill. Wherever Man has mass and energy to work with and enough savvy to know how to manipulate them, he can create any environment he needs.”

  I didn’t see much of Duck after that. About then we got our preliminary notices to take tests for eligibility for the Ganymede colony and that had us pretty busy. Besides, Duck seemed different—or maybe it was me. I had the trip on my mind and he didn’t want to talk about it. Or if he did, he’d make some crack that rubbed me the wrong way.

  Dad wouldn’t let me quit school while it was still uncertain as to whether or not we would qualify, but I was out a lot, taking tests. There was the usual physical examination, of course, with some added wrinkles. A g test, for example—I could take up to eight gravities before I blacked out, the test showed. And a test for low-pressure tolerance and hemorrhaging—they didn’t want people who ran to red noses and varicose veins. There were lots more.

  But we passed them. Then came the psycho tests which were a lot worse because you never knew what was expected of you and half the time you didn’t even know you were being tested. It started off with hypno-analysis, which really puts a fellow at a disadvantage. How do you know what you’ve blabbed while they’ve got you asleep?

  Once I sat around endlessly waiting for a psychiatrist to get around to seeing me. There were a couple of clerks there; when I came in one of them dug my medical and psycho record out of file and laid it on a desk. Then the other one, a red-headed guy with a permanent sneer, said, “Okay, Shorty, sit down on that bench and wait.”

  After quite a while the redhead picked up my folder and started to read it. Presently he snickered and turned to the other clerk and said, “Hey, Ned—get a load of this!”

  The other one read what he was pointing to and seemed to think it was funny, too. I could see they were watching me and I pretended not to pay any attention.

  The second clerk went back to his desk, but presently the redhead went over to him, carrying my folder, and read aloud to him, but in such a low voice that I couldn’t catch many of the words. What I did catch made me squirm.

  When he had finished the redhead looked right at me and laughed. I stood up and said, “What’s so funny?”

  He said, “None of your business, Shorty. Sit down.”

  I walked over and said, “Let me see that.”

  The second clerk stuffed it into a drawer of his desk. The redhead said, “Mamma’s boy wants to see it, Ned. Why don’t you give it to him?”

  “He doesn’t really want to see it,” the other one said.

  “No, I guess not.” The redhead laughed again and added, “And to think he wants to be a big bold colonist.”

  The other one looked at me while chewing a thumbnail and said, “I don’t think that’s so funny. They could take him along to cook.”

  This seemed to convulse the redhead. “I’ll bet he looks cute in an apron.”

  A year earlier I would have poked him, even though he outweighed me and outreached me. That “Mamma’s boy” remark made me forget all about wanting to go to Ganymede; I just wanted to wipe the silly smirk off his face.

  But I didn’t do anything. I don’t know why; maybe it was from riding herd on that wild bunch of galoots, the Yucca Patrol—Mr. Kinski says that anybody who can’t keep order without using his fists can’t be a patrol leader under him.

  Anyhow I just walked around the end of the desk and tried to open the drawer. It was locked. I looked at them; they were both grinning, but I wasn’t. “I had an appointment for thirteen o’clock,” I said. “Since the doctor isn’t here, you can tell him I’ll phone for another appointment.” And I turned on my heel and left.

  I went home and told George about it. He just said he hoped I hadn’t hurt my chances.

  I never did get another appointment. You know what? They weren’t clerks at all; they were psychometricians and there was a camera and a mike on me the whole time.

  Finally George and I got notices saying that we were qualified and had been posted for the Mayflower, “subject to compliance with all requirements.”

  That night I didn’t worry about ration points; I really set us out a feast.

  There was a booklet of the requirements mentioned. “Satisfy all debts”—that didn’t worry me; aside from a half credit I owed Slats Keifer I didn’t have any. “Post an appearance bond”—George would take care of that. “Conclude any action before any court of superior jurisdiction”—I had never been in court except the Court of Honor. There were a flock of other things, but George would handle them.

  I found some fine print that worried me. “George,” I said, “It says here that emigration is limited to families with children.”

  He looked up. “Well, aren’t we such a family? If you don’t mind being classified as a child.”

  “Oh. I suppose so. I thought it meant a married couple and kids.”

  “Don’t give it a thought.”

  Privately I wondered if Dad knew what he was talking about.

  We were busy with inoculations and blood typing and immunizations and I hardly got to school at all. When I wasn’t being stuck or being bled, I was sick with the last thing they had done to me. Finally we had to have our whole medical history tattooed on us—identity number, Rh factor, blood type, coag time, diseases you had had, natural immunities and inoculations. The girls and the women usually had it done in invisible ink that showed up only under infra-red light, or else they put it on the soles of their feet.

  They asked me where I wanted it, the soles of my feet? I said no, I don’t want to be crippled up; I had too much to do. We compromised on putting it where I sit down and then I ate standing up for a couple of days. It seemed a good place, private anyhow. But I had to use a mirror to see it.

  Time was getting short; we were supposed to be at Mojave Space Port on 26 June, just two weeks away. It was high time I was picking out what to take. The allowance was fifty-seven and six-tenths pounds per person and had not been announced until all our body weights had been taken.

  The booklet had said, “Close your terrestrial affairs as if you were dying.” That’s easy to say. But when you die, you can’t take it with you, while here we coul
d—fifty-seven-odd pounds of it.

  The question was: what fifty-seven pounds?

  My silkworms I turned over to the school biology lab and the same for the snakes. Duck wanted my aquarium but I wouldn’t let him; twice he’s had fish and twice he’s let them die. I split them between two fellows in the troop who already had fish. The birds I gave to Mrs. Fishbein on our deck. I didn’t have a cat or a dog; George says ninety floors up is no place to keep junior citizens—that’s what he calls them.

  I was cleaning up the mess when George came in. “Well,” he says, “first time I’ve been able to come into your room without a gas mask.”

  I skipped it; George talks like that. “I still don’t know what to do,” I said, pointing at the heap on my bed.

  “Microfilmed everything you can?”

  “Yes, everything but this picture.” It was a cabinet stereo of Anne, weighing about a pound and nine ounces.

  “Keep that, of course. Face it, Bill, you’ve got to travel light. We’re pioneers.”

  “I don’t know what to throw out.”

  I guess I looked glum for he said, “Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Me, I’ve got to give up this—and that’s tough, believe me.” He held out his pipe.

  “Why?” I asked. “A pipe doesn’t weigh much.”

  “Because they aren’t raising tobacco on Ganymede and they aren’t importing any.”

  “Oh. Look, George, I could just about make it if it weren’t for my accordion. But it licks me.”

  “Hmm… Have you considered listing it as a cultural item?”

  “Huh?”

  “Read the fine print. Approved cultural items are not covered by the personal weight schedule. They are charged to the colony.”

  It had never occurred to me that I might have anything that would qualify. “They wouldn’t let me get away with it, George!”

  “Can’t rule you out for trying. Don’t be a defeatist.”

  So two days later I was up before the cultural and scientific board, trying to prove that I was an asset. I knocked out Turkey in the Straw, Nehru’s Opus 81, and the introduction to Morgenstern’s Dawn of the 22nd Century, as arranged for squeeze boxes. I gave them The Green Hills of Earth for an encore.