“Jitterbug, here we come,” answered Hank. I sat up and looked, too.
We were coming down the slope, not five miles from it, when flame burst from its tail and it climbed for the sky.
Hank groaned. I lay back down and closed my eyes.
I woke up again when the contraption stopped. Paul was there, hands on his hips, staring at us. “About time you birds got home,” he announced. “But where did you find that?”
“Paul,” Hank said urgently, “Bill is very sick.”
“Oh, oh!” Paul swung up and into the walker and made no more questions then. A moment later he had my belly bared and was shoving a thumb into that spot between the belly button and the hip bone. “Does that hurt?” he asked.
I was too weak to slug him. He gave me a pill.
I took no further part in events for a while, but what had happened was this: Captain Hattie had waited, at Paul’s urgent insistence, for a couple of hours, and then had announced that she had to blast. She had a schedule to keep with the Covered Wagon and she had no intention, she said, of keeping eight thousand people waiting for the benefit of two. Hank and I could play Indian if we liked; we couldn’t play hob with her schedule.
There was nothing Paul could do, so he sent the rest back and waited for us.
But I didn’t hear this at the time. I was vaguely aware that we were in the walker wagon, travelling, and I woke up twice when I was repacked with ice, but the whole episode is foggy. They travelled east, with Hank driving and Paul navigating—by the seat of his pants. Some long dreamy time later they reached a pioneer camp surveying a site over a hundred miles away—and from there Paul radioed for help.
Whereupon the Jitterbug came and got us. I remember the landing back at Leda—that is, I remember somebody saying, “Hurry, there! We’ve got a boy with a burst appendix.”
20. Home
There was considerable excitement over what we had found—and there still is—but I didn’t see any of it. I was busy playing games with the Pearly Gates. I guess I have Dr. Archibald to thank for still being here. And Hank. And Sergei. And Paul. And Captain Hattie. And some nameless party, who lived somewhere, a long time ago, whose shape and race I still don’t know, but who designed the perfect machine for traveling overland through rough country.
I thanked everybody but him. They all came to see me in the hospital, even Captain Hattie, who growled at me, then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek as she left. I was so surprised I almost bit her.
The Schultzes came, of course, and Mama cried over me and Papa gave me an apple and Gretchen could hardly talk, which isn’t like her. And Molly brought the twins down to see me and vice versa.
The Leda daily Planet interviewed me. They wanted to know whether or not we thought the things we found were made by men?
Now that is a hard question to answer and smarter people than myself have worked on it since.
What is a man?
The things Hank and I—and the Project Jove scientists who went later—found in that cave couldn’t have been made by men—not men like us. The walker wagon was the simplest thing they found. Most of the things they still haven’t found out the use for. Nor have they figured out what the creatures looked like—no pictures.
That seems surprising, but the scientists concluded they didn’t have eyes—not eyes like ours, anyhow. So they didn’t use pictures.
The very notion of a “picture” seems pretty esoteric when you think it over. The Venetians don’t use pictures, nor the Martians. Maybe we are the only race in the universe that thought up that way of recording things.
So they weren’t “men”—not like us.
But they were men in the real sense of the word, even though I don’t doubt that I would run screaming away if I met one in a dark alley. The important thing, as Mr. Seymour would say, they had—they controlled their environment. They weren’t animals, pushed around and forced to accept what nature handed them; they took nature and bent it to their will.
I guess they were men.
The crystals were one of the oddest things about it and I didn’t have any opinions on that. Somehow, those crystals were connected with that cave—or space ship hangar, or whatever it was. Yet they couldn’t or wouldn’t go inside the cave.
Here was another point that the follow-up party from Project Jove recorded: that big unwieldy walker wagon came all the way down that narrow canyon—yet it did not step on a single crystal. Hank must be a pretty good driver. He says he’s not that good.
Don’t ask me. I don’t understand everything that goes on in the universe. It’s a big place.
I had lots of time to think before they let me out of the hospital—and lots to think about. I thought about my coming trip to Earth, to go back to school. I had missed the Covered Wagon, of course, but that didn’t mean anything; I could take the Mayflower three weeks later. But did I want to go? It was a close thing to decide.
One thing I was sure of: I was going to take those merit badge tests as soon as I was out of bed. I had put it off too long. A close brush with the hereafter reminds you that you don’t have forever to get things done.
But going back to school? That was another matter. For one thing, as Dad told me, the council had lost its suit with the Commission; Dad couldn’t use his Earthside assets.
And there was the matter that Paul had talked about the night he had to let his hair down—the coming war.
Did Paul know what he was talking about? If so, was I letting it scare me out? I honestly didn’t think so; Paul had said that it was not less than forty years away. I wouldn’t be Earthside more than four or five years—and, besides, how could you get scared of anything that far in the future?
I had been through the Quake and the reconstruction; I didn’t really think I’d ever be scared of anything again.
I had a private suspicion that, supposing there was a war, I’d go join up; I wouldn’t be running away from it. Silly, maybe.
No, I wasn’t afraid of the War, but it was on my mind. Why? I finally doped it out. When Paul called I asked him about it. “See here, Paul—this war you were talking about: when Ganymede reaches the state that Earth has gotten into, does that mean war here, too? Not now—a few centuries from now.”
He smiled rather sadly. “By then we may know enough to keep from getting into that shape. At least we can hope.”
He got a far-away look and added, “A new colony is always a new hope.”
I liked that way of putting it. “A new hope—” Once I heard somebody call a new baby that.
I still didn’t have the answer about going back when Dad called on me one Sunday night. I put it up to him about the cost of the fare. “I know the land is technically mine, George—but it’s too much of a drain on you two.”
“Contrariwise,” said George, “we’ll get by and that’s what savings are for. Molly is for it. We will be sending the twins back for school, you know.”
“Even so, I don’t feel right about it. And what real use is there in it, George? I don’t need a fancy education. I’ve been thinking about Callisto: there’s a brand new planet not touched yet with great opportunities for a man in on the ground floor. I could get a job with the atmosphere expedition—Paul would put in a word for me—and grow up with the project. I might be chief engineer of the whole planet some day.”
“Not unless you learn more about thermodynamics than you do now, you won’t be!”
“Huh?”
“Engineers don’t just ‘grow up’; they study. They go to school.”
“Don’t I study? Ain’t I attending two of your classes right now? I can get to be an engineer here; I don’t have to drag back half a billion mites for it.”
“Fiddlesticks! It takes discipline to study. You haven’t even taken your merit badge tests. You’ve let your Eagle Scoutship lapse.”
I wanted to explain that taking tests and studying for tests were two different things—that I had studied. But I couldn’t seem to phrase it right.
George stood up. “See here, Son, I’m going to put it to you straight. Never mind about being chief engineer of a planet; these days even a farmer needs the best education he can get. Without it he’s just a country bumpkin, a stumbling peasant, poking seeds into the ground and hoping a miracle will make them grow. I want you to go back to Earth and get the best that Earth has to offer. I want you to have a degree with prestige behind it—M.I.T., Harvard, the Sorbonne. Some place noted for scholarship. Take the time to do that and then do anything you want to do. Believe me, it will pay.”
I thought about it and answered, “I guess you are right, George.”
Dad stood up. “Well, make up your mind. I’ll have to hurry now for the bus, or I’ll be hoofing it back to the farm. See you tomorrow.”
“Good night, George.”
I lay awake and thought about it. After a while, Mrs. Dinsmore, the wing nurse, came in, turned out my light, and said goodnight. But I didn’t go to sleep.
Dad was right, I knew. I didn’t want to be an ignoramus. Furthermore, I had seen the advantage held by men with fancy degrees—first crack at the jobs, fast promotion. Okay, I’d get me one of those sheepskins, then come back and—well, go to Callisto, maybe, or perhaps prove a new parcel of land. I’d go and I’d come back.
Nevertheless I couldn’t get to sleep. After a while I glanced at my new watch and saw that it was nearly midnight—dawn in a few minutes. I decided that I wanted to see it. It might be the last time I’d be up and around at midnight Sunday for a long, long time.
I scouted the corridor; Old Lady Dinsmore wasn’t in sight. I ducked outside.
The Sun was just barely below the horizon; north of me I could see its first rays touching the topmost antenna of the power station, miles away on Pride Peak. It was very still and very beautiful. Overhead old Jupiter was in half phase, bulging and orange and grand. To the west of it Io was just coming out of shadow; it passed from black to cherry red to orange as I watched.
I wondered how I would feel to be back on Earth? How would it feel to weigh three times as much as I did now? I didn’t feel heavy; I felt just right.
How would it feel to swim in that thick dirty soup they use for air?
How would it feel to have nobody but ground hogs to talk to? How could I talk to a girl who wasn’t a colonial, who had never been off Earth higher than a copter hop? Sissies. Take Gretchen, now—there was a girl who could kill a chicken and have it in the pot while an Earthside girl would still be squealing.
The top of the Sun broke above the horizon and caught the snow on the peaks of the Big Rock Candy Mountains, tinting it rosy against a pale green sky. I began to be able to see the country around me. It was a new, hard, clean place—not like California with its fifty, sixty million people falling over each other. It was my kind of a place—it was my place.
The deuce with Caltech and Cambridge and those fancy schools! I’d show Dad it didn’t take ivied halls to get an education. Yes, and I’d pass those tests and be an Eagle again, first thing.
Hadn’t Andrew Johnson, that American President, learned to read while he was working? Even after he was married? Give us time; we’d have as good scientists and scholars here as anywhere.
The long slow dawn went on and the light caught Kneiper’s Cut west of me, outlining it. I was reminded of the night we had struggled through it in the storm. As Hank put it, there was one good thing about colonial life—it sorted out the men from the boys.
“I have lived and worked with men.” The phrase rang through my head. Rhysling? Kipling, maybe. I had lived and worked with men!
The Sun was beginning to reach the roof tops. It spread across Laguna Serenidad, turning it from black to purple to blue. This was my planet, this was my home and I knew that I would never leave it.
Mrs. Dinsmore came bustling out to the door and spotted me. “Why, the very idea!” she scolded. “You get back where you belong!”
I smiled at her. “I am where I belong. And I’m going to stay!”
Farmer in the Sky Page 20