Farmer in the Sky

by Robert A. Heinlein

  As a matter of fact, cultivating a farm by stoop labor wasn’t too bad, not on Ganymede. Low gravity was a big help; you didn’t wear yourself out just dragging your own carcass around. I grossed a hundred and forty-two mass pounds, what with the way Mama Schultz stuffed me; that meant I weighed less than fifty pounds, field boots and all. A wheelbarrow was similarly light when loaded.

  But the real advantage that made the work easy was something you might not guess.

  No weeds.

  No weeds at all; we had very carefully not imported any. Once the land was built, making a crop was darn near a case of poking a seed into the ground and then stepping back quick before the stalk shot up and hit you in the eye.

  Not that we didn’t work. There is plenty of work around a farm even with no weeds to worry about. And a light wheelbarrow load simply meant that we piled three times as much on. But we had fun, too; I never met a family that laughed so much.

  I brought my squeeze box out from town and used to play it after supper. We would all sing, with Papa Schultz booming away on his own and leaving it up to the rest of us to find the key he was singing in. We had fun.

  It turned out that Gretchen was an awful tease when she got over being shy. But I could always get her goat by pretending that her head was on fire and either warming my hands over her hair or threatening to pour water on her before she burned the place down.

  The day finally came when it was my turn to have the colony’s crushers work on my land and I was almost sorry to see it arrive; I had had such a nice time at the Schultzes’. But by then I could caponize a rooster or plant a row of corn; I still had a lot to learn, but there wasn’t any good reason why I shouldn’t start making my own farm.

  Dad and I had had to prepare our farm for the crusher by dynamiting the biggest boulders. A crusher will choke on anything much bigger than a barrel but it will handle up to that size very nicely. Dynamite is cheap, thank goodness, and we used plenty of it. The raw material is nitroglycerine which we didn’t have to import from Earth, the glycerine being refined from animal fats and the nitric acid being a synthetic byproduct of the atmosphere project.

  Dad spent two weekends with me, making medium-sized ones out of big ones, then decided it was safe to trust me to set powder by myself and I finished the job. There was a little stream of melted snow water coming down from the hills at the far side of our property; we blew out a new bed for it to lead it close to the place where the house would go. We left it dry for the time being, with a natural rock dam to blow up later. One fair-sized hill we moved entirely and blew it into a gully on the lake side of the land. Big charges that took and I almost got fitted for a halo through underestimating how far some of the stuff would throw.

  It was easy work and lots of fun. I had a vibro-drill, borrowed from the engineer’s office; you could sink a charge hole with it twenty feet into rock as easily as you could sink a hot knife into butter. Then drop in the powder, fill the rest of the hole with rock dust, light the fuse, and run like the dickens!

  But the most fun was blowing up that rock that looked like a grinning skull. I fixed it properly, it and its leer!

  We had a visitor while we were dynamiting the land. Dad and I had just knocked off for lunch one day when Saunders, “The One-Man Lobby”—that’s George’s name for him—showed up. We invited him to share what we had; he had brought nothing but his appetite.

  He complained about this and that. Dad tried to change the subject by asking him how he was getting along with his blasting. Saunders said it was slow work. Dad said, “You have the crusher the day after us, don’t you?”

  Saunders admitted it and said he wanted to borrow some powder; he was running short of time. Dad let him have it, though it meant another trip out from town, after work, for him the next day. Saunders went on, “I’ve been looking this situation over, Mr. Lermer. We’re tackling it all wrong.”

  George said, “So?”

  Saunders said, “Yes, indeedy! Now in the first place this blasting ought not to be done by the homesteader; it should be done by trained crews, sent out by the government. It’s really part of the contract anyway; we’re supposed to receive processed land.”

  Dad said mildly that, while that might be a nice idea, he didn’t know where they would find enough trained crews to do the work for fifteen hundred new farms.

  “Let the government hire them!” Mr. Saunders answered. “Bring them in from Earth for that purpose. Now, see here, Mr. Lermer, you are in the chief engineer’s office. You ought to put in a word for the rest of us.”

  George picked up the vibro and got ready to set a charge. Presently he answered, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong party. I’m in an entirely different department.”

  I guess Mr. Saunders saw he was off on the wrong tack for he went on, “In the second place, I have been looking into the matter of the soil, or what they call ‘soil’—again they are off on the wrong foot.” He kicked a rock. “This stuff isn’t good for anything. You can’t grow anything in stuff like that.”

  “Naturally not,” agreed Dad. “You have to make soil first.”

  “That’s just what I’m getting at,” Saunders went on. “You have to have soil—good, black, rich soil. So they tell us to breed it, a square foot at a time. Plough garbage into it, raise earthworms—I don’t know how many tomfool stunts.”

  “Do you know of a better way?”

  “You bet you I do! That’s just what I’m getting at. Here we are, piddling along, doing things the way a bunch of bureaucrats who never made a crop tell us to, all for a few inches of second-rate soil—when there are millions of cubic feet of the richest sort of black soil going begging.”

  Dad looked up sharply. “Where?”

  “In the Mississippi Delta, that’s where! Black soil goes down there for hundreds of feet.”

  We both looked at him, but he was quite serious about it. “Now here’s what you’ve got to have—level the ground off, yes. But after that spread real Earth soil over the rock to a depth of at least two feet; then it will be worthwhile to farm. As it is, we are just wasting our time.”

  Dad waited a bit before answering, “Have you figured out what this would cost?”

  Mr. Saunders brushed that aside. “That’s not the point; the point is, that’s what we’ve got to have. The government wants us to settle here, doesn’t it? Well, then, if we all stick together and insist on it, we’ll get it.” He jerked his chin triumphantly.

  George started to say something, then stopped. He patted rock dust in on top of his charge, then straightened up and wiped the sweat off his beard. “Listen, citizen,” he said, “can’t you see that we are busy? I’m about to light this fuse; I suggest that you back away out of danger.”

  “Huh?” said Saunders. “How big a charge is it? How far?”

  If he had kept his eyes open, he would have seen how big a charge it was and known how far to give back. Dad said, “Oh, say a mile and a half—or even two miles. And keep backing.”

  Saunders looked at him, snorted disgustedly, and stalked away. We backed out of range and let her blow. While we were setting the next charge I could see George’s lips moving. After a while he said, “Figuring gumbo mud conservatively at a hundred pounds per cubic foot it would take one full load of the Mayflower to give Mr. Saunders alone the kind of a farm he would like to have handed to him. At that rate it would take just an even thousand G-years—five hundred Earth years—for the Mayflower to truck in top-soil for farms for our entire party.”

  “You forgot the Covered Wagon,” I said brightly.

  George grinned. “Oh, yes! When the Covered Wagon is commissioned and in service we could cut it down to two hundred and fifty years—provided no new immigrants came in and there was a ban on having babies!” He frowned and added, “Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?” I didn’t know the answer, so he said, “Come on, Bill, let’s get on with our blasting. I’m afraid we’ll just have to
piddle along in our inefficient way, even if it doesn’t suit our friend Saunders.”

  The morning the crusher was scheduled to show up I was waiting for it at the end of the road. It came breezing down the road at twenty miles an hour, filling it from side to side. When it came to the wall of lava, it stopped. I waved to the operator; he waved back, then the machine grunted a couple of times, inched forward, and took a bite out of the lava.

  Lava didn’t bother it; it treated it like peanut brittle. A vibro-cutter built into its under carriage would slice under the flow like a housewife separating biscuit from a pan, the big steel spade on the front of the thing would pry under and crack the bite off, and the conveyor would carry the chunk up into the jaws.

  The driver had a choice of dropping the chewed up material under the rear rollers or throwing it off to the side. Just now he was throwing it away, leaving the clean slice made by the vibro-cutter as a road bed—a good road, a little dusty but a few rains would fix that.

  It was terrifically noisy but the driver didn’t seem to mind. He seemed to enjoy it; there was a good breeze taking the dust away from him and he had his anti-silicosis mask pushed up on his forehead, showing the grin on his face.

  By noon he was down to our place and had turned in. We had a bite to eat together, then he started in levelling a farm for me—five acres, the rest would have to wait. At that I was lucky for I was to get land to work months ahead of the original schedule. The second trip of the Mayflower had brought in three more crushers and very few immigrants, just enough to replace those who had given up and gone back out of our party, that being the compromise the town council had worked out with the Colonial Commission.

  The racket was still worse when the crusher bit into hard rock, instead of lava, but it was music to me and I didn’t get tired of watching. Every bite was a piece of land to me. At suppertime the second-shift driver showed up with Dad. We watched together for a while, then Dad went back to town. I stayed. About midnight I went over into a stretch that was not to be processed now, found a big rock to keep the Sun out of my eyes and lay down for a quick nap.

  Then the relief driver was shaking me and saying, “Wake up, kid—you got a farm.”

  I stood up and rubbed my eyes and looked around. Five acres, with just enough contour for drainage and a low hummock in the middle where the house would sit. I had a farm.

  The next logical thing to do would have been to get the house up, but, under the schedule, I rated the use of a cud-chewer for the following week. A cud-chewer is a baby rock crusher. It uses a power pack instead of an antenna, it is almost fool proof and anybody can run one, and it finishes up what the crusher starts. It is small and low-powered compared with a crusher. The colony had about forty of them.

  The crusher left loose rubble several feet deep in pieces as big as my fist. The cud-chewer had a fork spade on the front of it, several sizes of spade forks, in fact. The coarse fork went down into the loose rocks about eighteen inches and picked up the big ones. These drifted back into the hopper as the machine moved forward and were busted into stuff about the size of walnuts.

  When you had been over the ground once with the coarse fork, you unshipped it and put on the medium fork and reset the chewing rollers. This time you went down only ten inches and the result was gravel. Then you did it again for medium-fine and then fine and when you were done the upper six inches or so was rock flour, fine as the best loam—still dead, but ready to be bred into life.

  Round and round and round, moving forward an inch at a time. To get real use out of your time allotment the cud-chewer had to be moving twenty-four hours a day until they took it away from you. I stayed at it all through the first day, eating my lunch in the saddle. Dad spelled me after supper and Hank came out from town and we alternated through the night—light phase it was, actually, it being Monday night.

  Papa Schultz found me asleep with my head on the controls late next afternoon and sent me back to his house to get some real sleep. Thereafter one of the Schultzes always showed up when I had been at it alone for four or five hours. Without the Schultzes I don’t know how Dad and I would have gotten through the dark phase of that week.

  But they did help and by the time I had to pass the cud-chewer along I had nearly three and a half acres ready to be seeded with pay dirt.

  Winter was coming on and I had my heart set on getting my house up and living in it during the winter month, but to do so I really had to hump. I had to get some sort of a holding crop in or the spring thaw would wash my top soil away. The short Ganymede year is a good idea and I’m glad they run it that way; Earth’s winters are longer than necessary. But it keeps you on the jump.

  Papa Schultz advised grass; the mutated grass would grow in sterile soil much like growing things in hydroponic solutions. The mat of rootlets would hold my soil even if the winter killed it and the roots would furnish something through which the infection could spread from the “pay dirt.”

  Pay dirt is fundamentally just good black soil from Earth, crawling with bacteria and fungi and microscopic worms—everything you need but the big fishing worms; you have to add those. However, it wouldn’t do simply to ship Earth dirt to Ganymede by the car load. In any shovelful of loam there are hundreds of things, plant and animal, you need for growing soil—but there are hundreds of other things you don’t want. Tetanus germs. Plant disease viruses. Cut worms. Spores. Weed seeds. Most of them are too small to be seen with the naked eye and some of them can’t even be filtered out.

  So to make pay dirt the laboratory people back on Earth would make pure cultures of everything they wanted to keep in the way of bacteria, raise the little worms under laboratory conditions, do the same for fungi and everything else they wanted to save—and take the soil itself and kill it deader than Luna, irradiate it, bake it, test it for utter sterility. Then they would take what they had saved in the way of life forms and put it back into the dead soil. That was “pay dirt,” the original pay dirt. Once on Ganymede the original stuff would be cut six ways, encouraged to grow, then cut again. A hundred-weight of pay dirt supplied to a ’steader might contain a pound of Terra’s own soil.

  Every possible effort was made to “limit the invasion,” as the ecologists say, to what was wanted. One thing that I may not have mentioned about the trip out was the fact that our clothes and our baggage were sterilized during the trip and that we ourselves were required to take a special scrub before we put our clothes back on. It was the only good bath I got the whole two months, but it left me smelling like a hospital.

  The colony’s tractor trucks delivered the pay dirt I was entitled to in order to seed my farm; I left the Schultz place early that morning to meet them. There is difference of opinion as to the best way to plant pay dirt; some ’steaders spread it all over and take a chance on it dying; some build up little pockets six or eight feet apart, checker board style…safe but slow. I was studying the matter, my mind not made up, when I saw something moving down the road.

  It was a line of men, pushing wheelbarrows, six of them. They got closer and I could see that it was all the male Schultzes. I went out to meet them.

  Every one of those wheelbarrows was loaded with garbage and all for me!

  Papa Schultz had been saving it as a surprise for me. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I blurted out, “Gee, Papa Schultz, I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back!”

  He looked fierce and said, “Who is speaking of paying back when we have compost running out of our ears yet?” Then he had the boys dump their loads down on top of my pay dirt, took a fork and began mixing it as gently as Mama Schultz folding in beaten egg white.

  He took charge and I didn’t have to worry about the best way to use it. In his opinion—and you can’t bet that I didn’t buck it!—what we had was good for about an acre and his method was to spread it through the soil. But he did not select one compact acre; he laid out strips, seven of them, a couple of hundred yards long each and stretching across my chewed soil
thirty-five or forty feet apart. Each of us took a wheelbarrow—their six and my one—and distributed the mix along each line.

  When that was done and cairns had been set to show where the strips ran, we raked the stuff into the rock dust five or six feet on each side of each line. Around noon Mama and Gretchen showed up, loaded down, and we stopped and had a picnic.

  After lunch Yo had to go back to town but he had almost finished his strip. Papa had finished his and proceeded to help Hugo and Peter who were too small to swing a good rake. I dug in and finished mine soon enough to be able to finish what Yo had left. Dad showed up at the end of the day, expecting to help me all evening—it was light phase and you could work as late as you could stand up under it—but there was nothing left to do. And he didn’t know how to thank them either.

  I like to think that we would have gotten the farm made anyhow, without the Schultzes, and maybe we would have—but I’m sure not sure. Pioneers need good neighbors.

  The following week I spent working artificial nitrates from the colony’s power pile into the spaces between the strips—not as good as pay dirt from Earth, but not as expensive, either.

  Then I tackled sowing the grass, by hand, just like in the Bible, and then raking it gently in. That old pest Saunders showed up. He still did so every now and then, but never when Dad was around. I guess he was lonely. His family was still in town and he was camping out in a ten-foot rock shed he had built. He wasn’t really making a farm, not properly; I couldn’t figure out what he was up to. It didn’t make sense.

  I said, “Howdy,” and went on with my work.

  He watched me, looking sour, and finally said, “You still bent on breaking your heart on this stuff, aren’t you, youngster?”

  I told him I hadn’t noticed any wear and tear on my pump, and anyhow, wasn’t he making a farm, too?

  He snorted. “Not likely!”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Buying my ticket, that’s what.”