Paul was the “general specialist” who balanced all the data in his mind, fiddled with his slip stick, stared off into the sky, and came up with the overall answer. The overall answer for that valley was “nix”—and we moved on to the next one on the list, packing the stuff on our backs.
That was one of the few chances I got to look around. You see, we had landed at sunrise—about five o’clock Wednesday morning sunrise was, in that longitude—and the object was to get as much done as possible during each light phase. Jupiter light is all right for working in your own fields, but no good for surveying strange territory—and here we didn’t even have Jupiter light—just Callisto, every other dark phase, every twelve-and-half days, to be exact. Consequently we worked straight through light phase, on pep pills.
Now a man who is on the pills will eat more than twice as much as a man who is sleeping regularly. You know, the Eskimos have a saying, “Food is sleep.” I had to produce hot meals every four hours, around the clock. I had no time for sightseeing.
We got to camp number two, pitched our tents, I served a scratch meal, and Paul passed out sleeping pills. By then the Sun was down and we really died for about twenty hours. We were comfortable enough—spun glass pads under us and resin sealed glass canvas over us.
I fed them again, Paul passed out more sleepy pills, and back we went to sleep. Paul woke me Monday afternoon. This time I fixed them a light breakfast, then really spread myself to turn them out a feast. Everybody was well rested by now, and not disposed to want to go right back to bed. So I stuffed them.
After that we sat around for a few hours and talked. I got out my squeeze box—brought along by popular demand, that is to say, Paul suggested it—and gave ’em a few tunes. Then we talked some more.
They got to arguing about where life started and somebody brought up the old theory that the Sun had once been much brighter—Jock Montague, it was, the chemist. “Mark my words,” he said, “When we get around to exploring Pluto, you’ll find that life was there before us. Life is persistent, like mass-energy.”
“Nuts,” answered Mr. Villa, very politely. “Pluto isn’t even a proper planet; it used to be a satellite of Neptune.”
“Well, Neptune, then,” Jock persisted. “Life is all through the universe. Mark my words—when the Jove Project straightens out the bugs and gets going, they’ll even find life on the surface of Jupiter.”
“On Jupiter?” Mr. Villa exploded. “Please, Jock! Methane and ammonia and cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss. Don’t joke with us. Why, there’s not even light down under on the surface of Jupiter; it’s pitch dark.”
“I said it and I’ll say it again,” Montague answered. “Life is persistent. Wherever there is mass and energy with conditions that permit the formation of large and stable molecules, there you will find life. Look at Mars. Look at Venus. Look at Earth—the most dangerous planet of the lot. Look at the Ruined Planet.”
I said, “What do you think about it, Paul?”
The boss smiled gently. “I don’t I haven’t enough data.”
“There!” said Mr. Villa. “There speaks a wise man. Tell me, Jock, how did you get to be an authority on this subject?”
“I have the advantage,” Jock answered grandly, “of not knowing too much about the subject. Facts are always a handicap in philosophical debate.”
That ended that phase of it, for Mr. Seymour, the boss agronomist, said, “I’m not so much worried about where life came from as where it is going—here.”
“How?” I wanted to know. “In what way?”
“What are we going to make of this planet? We can make it anything we want. Mars and Venus—they had native cultures. We dare not change them much and we’ll never populate them very heavily. These Jovian moons are another matter; it’s up to us. They say man is endlessly adaptable. I say on the contrary that man doesn’t adapt himself as much as he adapts his environment. Certainly we are doing so here. But how?”
“I thought that was pretty well worked out,” I said. “We set up these new centers, more people come in and we spread out, same as at Leda.”
“Ah, but where does it stop? We have three ships making regular trips now. Shortly there will be a ship in every three weeks, then it will be every week, then every day. Unless we are almighty careful there will be food rationing here, same as on Earth. Bill, do you know how fast the population is increasing, back Earthside?”
I admitted that I didn’t.
“More than one hundred thousand more persons each day than there were the day before. Figure that up.”
I did. “That would be, uh, maybe fifteen, twenty shiploads a day. Still, I imagine they could build ships to carry them.”
“Yes, but where would we put them? Each day, more than twice as many people landing as there are now on this whole globe. And not just on Monday, but on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday—and the week and the month and the year after that, just to keep Earth’s population stable. I tell you, it won’t work. The day will come when we will have to stop immigration entirely.” He looked around aggressively, like a man who expects to be contradicted.
He wasn’t disappointed. Somebody said, “Oh, Seymour, come off it! Do you think you own this place just because you got here first? You snuck in while the rules were lax.”
“You can’t argue with mathematics,” Seymour insisted. “Ganymede has got to be made self-sufficient as soon as possible—and then we’ve got to slam the door!”
Paul was shaking his head. “It won’t be necessary.”
“Huh?” said Seymour. “Why not? Answer me that. You represent the Commission: what fancy answer has the Commission got?”
“None,” Paul told him. “And your figures are right but your conclusions are wrong. Oh, Ganymede has to be made self-sufficient, true enough, but your bogeyman about a dozen or more shiploads of immigrants a day you can forget.”
“Why, if I may be so bold?”
Paul looked around the tent and grinned apologetically. “Can you stand a short dissertation on population dynamics? I’m afraid I don’t have Jock’s advantage; this is a subject I am supposed to know something about.”
Somebody said, “Stand back. Give him air.”
“Okay,” Paul went on, “you brought it on yourselves. A lot of people have had the idea that colonization is carried on with the end purpose of relieving the pressure of people and hunger back on Earth. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
I said, “Huh?”
“Bear with me. Not only is it physically impossible for a little planet to absorb the increase of a big planet, as Seymour pointed out, but there is another reason why we’ll never get any such flood of people as a hundred thousand people a day—a psychological reason. There are never as many people willing to emigrate (even if you didn’t pick them over) as there are new people born. Most people simply will not leave home. Most of them won’t even leave their native villages, much less go to a far planet.”
Mr. Villa nodded. “I go along with you on that. The willing emigrant is an odd breed of cat. He’s scarce.”
“Right,” Paul agreed. “But let’s suppose for a moment that a hundred thousand people were willing to emigrate every day and Ganymede and the other colonies could take them. Would that relieve the situation back home—I mean ‘back Earthside’? The answer is, ‘No, it wouldn’t.’”
He appeared to have finished. I finally said, “Excuse my blank look, Paul, but why wouldn’t it?”
“Studied any bionomics, Bill?”
“Some.”
“Mathematical population bionomics?”
“Well—no.”
“But you do know that in the greatest wars the Earth ever had there were always more people after the war than before, no matter how many were killed. Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to extent of the food su
pply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation. In other words, if we bled off a hundred thousand people a day, the Earth’s population would then grow until the increase was around two hundred thousand a day, or the bionomical maximum for Earth’s new ecological dynamic.”
Nobody said anything for a moment; there wasn’t anything to say. Presently Sergei spoke up with, “You paint a grim picture, boss. What’s the answer?”
Paul said, “There isn’t any!”
Sergei said, “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, what is the outcome?”
When Paul did answer it was just one word, one monosyllable, spoken so softly that it would not have been heard if there had not been dead silence. What he said was:
“War.”
There was a shuffle and a stir; it was an unthinkable idea. Seymour said, “Come now, Mr. du Maurier—I may be a pessimist, but I’m not that much of one. Wars are no longer possible.”
Paul said, “So?”
Seymour answered almost belligerently, “Are you trying to suggest that the Space Patrol would let us down? Because that is the only way a war could happen.”
Paul shook his head. “The Patrol won’t let us down. But they won’t be able to stop it. A police force is all right for stopping individual disturbances; it’s fine for nipping things in the bud. But when the disturbances are planet wide, no police force is big enough, or strong enough, or wise enough. They’ll try—they’ll try bravely. They won’t succeed.”
“You really believe that?”
“It’s my considered opinion. And not only my opinion, but the opinion of the Commission. Oh, I don’t mean the political board; I mean the career scientists.”
“Then what in tarnation is the Commission up to?”
“Building colonies. We think that is worthwhile in itself. The colonies need not be affected by the War. In fact, I don’t think they will be, not much. It will be like America was up to the end of the nineteenth century; European troubles passed her by. I rather expect that the War, when it comes, will be of such size and duration that interplanetary travel will cease to be for a considerable period. That is why I said this planet has got to be self-sufficient. It takes a high technical culture to maintain interplanetary travel and Earth may not have it—after a bit.”
I think Paul’s ideas were a surprise to everyone present; I know they were to me. Seymour jabbed a finger at him, “If you believe this, then why are you going back to Earth? Tell me that.”
Again Paul spoke softly. “I’m not. I’m going to stay here and become a ’steader.”
Suddenly I knew why he was letting his beard grow.
Seymour answered, “Then you expect it soon.” It was not a question; it was a statement.
“Having gone this far,” Paul said hesitantly, “I’ll give you a direct answer. War is not less than forty Earth years away, not more than seventy.”
You could feel a sigh of relief all around the place. Seymour continued to speak for us, “Forty to seventy, you say. But that’s no reason to homestead; you probably wouldn’t live to see it. Not but what you’d make a good neighbor.”
“I see this War,” Paul insisted. “I know it’s coming. Should I leave it up to my hypothetical children and grandchildren to outguess it? No. Here I rest. If I marry, I’ll marry here. I’m not raising any kids to be radioactive dust.”
It must have been about here that Hank stuck his head in the tent, for I don’t remember anyone answering Paul. Hank had been outside on business of his own; now he opened the flap and called out, “Hey gents! Europa is up!”
We all trooped out to see. We went partly through embarrassment, I think; Paul had been too nakedly honest. But we probably would have gone anyhow. Sure, we saw Europa every day of our lives at home, but not the way we were seeing it now.
Since Europa goes around Jupiter inside Ganymede’s orbit, it never gets very far away from Jupiter, if you call 39 degrees “not very far.” Since we were 113 west longitude, Jupiter was 23 degrees below our eastern horizon—which meant that Europa, when it was furthest west of Jupiter, would be a maximum of 16 degrees above the true horizon.
Excuse the arithmetic. Since we had a row of high hills practically sitting on us to the east, what all this means is that, once a week, Europa would rise above the hills, just peeking over, hang there for about a day—then turn around and set in the east, right where it had risen. Up and down like an elevator.
If you’ve never been off Earth, don’t tell me it’s impossible. That’s how it is—Jupiter and its moons do some funny things.
It was the first time it had happened this trip, so we watched it—a little silver boat, riding the hills like waves, with its horns turned up. There was argument about whether or not it was still rising, or starting to set again, and much comparing of watches. Some claimed to be able to detect motion but they weren’t agreed on which way. After a while I got cold and went back in.
But I was glad of the interruption. I had a feeling that Paul had said considerably more than he had intended to and more than he would be happy to recall, come light phase. I blamed it on the sleeping pills. Sleeping pills are all right when necessary, but they tend to make you babble and tell your right name—treacherous things.
19. The Other People
By the end of the second light phase it was clear—to Paul, anyhow—that this second valley would do. It wasn’t the perfect valley and maybe there was a better one just over the ridge—but life is too short. Paul assigned it a score of 92% by some complicated system thought up by the Commission, which was seven points higher than passing. The perfect valley could wait for the colonials to find it…which they would, some day.
We named the valley Happy Valley, just for luck, and named the mountains south of it the Pauline Peaks, over Paul’s protests. He said it wasn’t official anyway; we said we would see to it that it was made so—and the boss topographer, Abie Finkelstein, marked it so on the map and we all initialed it.
We spent the third light phase rounding up the details. We could have gone back then, if there had been any way to get back. There wasn’t, so we had to dope through another dark phase. Some of them preferred to go back on a more normal schedule instead; there was a round-the-clock poker game, which I stayed out of, having nothing I could afford to lose and no talent for filling straights. There were more dark phase bull sessions but they never got as grave as the first one and nobody ever again asked Paul what he thought about the future prospects of things.
By the end of the third dark phase I was getting more than a little tired of seeing nothing but the inside of our portable range. I asked Paul for some time off.
Hank had been helping me since the start of the third dark phase. He had been working as a topographical assistant; flash contour pictures were on the program at the start of that dark phase. He was supposed to get an open-lens shot across the valley from an elevation on the south just as a sunburst flash was let off from an elevation to the west.
Hank had a camera of his own, just acquired, and he was shutter happy, always pointing it at things. This time he had tried to get a picture of his own as well as the official picture. He had goofed off, missed the official picture entirely, and to top it off had failed to protect his eyes when the sunburst went off. Which put him on the sick list and I got him as kitchen police.
He was all right shortly, but Finkelstein didn’t want him back. So I asked for relief for both of us, so we could take a hike together and do a little exploring. Paul let us go.
There had been high excitement at the end of the second light phase when lichen had been discovered near the west end of the valley. For a while it looked as if native life had been found on Ganymede. It was a false alarm—careful examination showed that it was not only an Earth type, but a type authorized by the bionomics board.
But it did show one thing—life was spreading, taking hold, at a point thirty-one hundred miles from the original invasion. There was much ar
gument as to whether the spores had been air borne, or had been brought in on the clothing of the crew who had set up the power plant. It didn’t matter, really.
But Hank and I decided to explore off that way and see if we could find more of it. Besides it was away from the way we had come from camp number one. We didn’t tell Paul we were going after lichen because we were afraid he would veto it; the stuff had been found quite some distance from camp. He had warned us not to go too far and to be back by six o’clock Thursday morning, in time to break camp and head back to our landing point, where the Jitterbug was to meet us.
I agreed as I didn’t mean to go far in any case. I didn’t much care whether we found lichen or not; I wasn’t feeling well. But I kept that fact to myself; I wasn’t going to be done out of my one and only chance to see some of the country.
We didn’t find any more lichen. We did find the crystals.
We were trudging along, me as happy as a kid let out of school despite an ache in my side and Hank taking useless photographs of odd rocks and lava flows. Hank had been saying that he thought he would sell out his place and homestead here in Happy Valley. He said, “You know, Bill, they are going to need a few real Ganymede farmers here to give the greenhorns the straight dope. And who knows more about Ganymede-style farming than I do?”
“Almost everybody,” I assured him.
He ignored it. “This place has really got it,” he went on, gazing around at a stretch of country that looked like Armageddon after a hard battle. “Much better than around Leda.”
I admitted that it had possibilities. “But I don’t think it’s for me,” I went on. “I don’t think I’d care to settle anywhere where you can’t see Jupiter.”
Farmer in the Sky Page 18