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.”
“Huh?”
“The only thing you can sell around this place is improved land. I’m beating them at their own game, that’s what. I’ll get that land in shape to unload it on some other sucker and then me and mine are heading straight back for that ever-lovin’ Earth. And that’s just what you’ll be doing if you aren’t an utter fool. You’ll never make a farm here. It can’t be done.”
I was getting very tired of him but I’m short on the sort of point-blank guts it takes to be flatly rude. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Look at Mr. Schultz—he’s got a good farm.”
Saunders snorted again. “You mean ‘Johnny Apple-seed?”
“I mean Mr. Johann Schultz.”
“Sure, sure—Johnny Appleseed. That’s what everybody calls him in town. He’s nuts. You know what he did? He gave me a handful of apple seeds and acted like he had handed me the riches of Solomon.”
I stopped raking. “Well, hadn’t he?”
Saunders spat on the ground between us. “He’s a clown.”
I lifted up the head of the rake. I said, “Mr. Saunders, you are standing on my land, my property. I’ll give you just two shakes to get off it and never set foot on it again!”
He backed away and said, “Hey! You stop that! Watch what you are doing with that rake!”
I said, “Git!”
He got.
The house was a problem. Ganymede has little quakes all the time. It has to do with “isostasy” which doesn’t mean a thing but “equal-pressure” when you get right down to it, but it’s the science of how the mountains balance the seas and the gravitation of a planet all comes out even.
It has to do with tidal strains, too, which is odd, since Ganymede doesn’t have any tides; the Sun is too far away to matter and Ganymede always keeps the same face toward Jupiter. Oh, you can detect a little tide on Laguna Serenidad when Europa is closest to Ganymede and even a trifle from Callisto and lo, but what I mean is it doesn’t have tides—not like the Pacific Ocean.
What it does have is a frozen tidal strain. The way Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, explains it is that Ganymede was closer to Jupiter when it cooled off and lost its rotation, so that there is a tidal bulge in the planet itself—sort of a fossil tidal bulge. The Moon has one, you know.
Then we came along and melted off the ice cap and gave Ganymede an atmosphere. That rearranged the pressures everywhere and the isostatic balance is readjusting. Result: little quakes all the time.
I’m a California boy; I wanted a quakeproof house. Schultzes had a quakeproof house and it seemed like a good idea, even though there had never been a quake heavy enough to knock a man down, much less knock a house down. On the other hand most of the colonists didn’t bother; it is hard to make a rock house really quakeproof.
Worse than that, it’s expensive. The basic list of equipment that a ‘steader is promised in his emigration contract reads all right, a hoe, a spade, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a hand cultivator, a bucket, and so forth down the list—but when you start to farming you find that is only the beginning and you’ve got to go to the Exchange and buy a lot of other stuff. I was already in debt a proved acre and a half, nearly, before the house ever went up.
As usual we compromised. One room had to be quake proof because it had to be air tight—Peggy’s room. She was getting better all the time, but she still couldn’t take low pressure for any length of time. If the family was going to move out to the farm, her bedroom had to be sealed, it had to have an air lock on it, and we had to have an impeller. All that runs into money.
Before I was through I had to pledge two more acres. Dad tried to sign for it but they told him bluntly that while a ‘steader’s credit was good, his wasn’t. That settled the matter. We planned on one reinforced room and hoped to build on to it later. In the mean time the house would be a living room, ten by twelve, where I would sleep, a separate bedroom too small to swing a cat for George and Molly, and Peggy’s room. All but Peggy’s room would be dry wall rock with a patent roof.