I learned not to sneer at a wheelbarrow after I priced one at the Exchange.
The total lack of power machinery wasn’t through lack of power; the antenna on the farm house roof could pick up as much power as necessary—but there wasn’t any machinery. The only power machinery in the colony belonged to the whole colony and was the sort of thing the colony absolutely couldn’t get along without, like rock chewers and the equipment for the heat trap and the power plant itself.
George explained it this way: every load that was sent up from Earth was a compromise between people and cargo. The colonists were always yapping for more machinery and fewer immigrants; the Colonial Commission always insisted on sending as many people as possible and holding the imports down to a minimum.
“The Commission is right, of course,” he went on. “If we have people, we’ll get machinery—we’ll make it ourselves. By the time you have a family of your own, Bill, immigrants will arrive here bare-handed, no cargo at all, and we’ll be able to outfit a man with everything from plastic dishes for his cupboard to power cultivators for his fields.”
I said, “If they wait until I have a family, they’ll have a long wait. I figure a bachelor travels faster and further.”
Dad just grinned, as if he knew something I didn’t know and wouldn’t tell. I had walked into town to have dinner with him and Molly and the kid. I hadn’t seen much of them since I went to work for Papa Schultz. Molly was teaching school, Peggy couldn’t come out to the farm, of course, and Dad was very busy and very excited over a strike of aluminum oxides twenty miles east of town. He was in the project up to his ears and talking about having sheet aluminum on sale in another G-year.
As a matter or 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 Schultz’s. 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.