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.