Pretty small, eh? Well, what’s wrong with that? Abe Lincoln started with less.
I started in cutting the stone as soon as the seed was in. A vibro-saw is like a vibro-drill, except that it cuts a hair line instead of drilling a hole. When the power is on you have to be durned careful not to get your fingers or anything into the field, but it makes easy work of stone cutting. By the contract you got the use of one for forty-eight hours free and another forty-eight hours, if you wanted it, at a reduced rate. I got my work lined up and managed to squeeze it into the two free days. I didn’t want to run up any more debt, because there was another thing I was hankering for, come not later than the second spring away—flicker flood lights. Papa Schultz had them for his fields and they just about doubled his crops. Earth plants aren’t used to three and half days of darkness, but, if you can tickle them during the dark phase with flicker lights, the old photosynthesis really gets in and humps itself.
But that would have to wait.
The patrol got the house up—the patrol I was in, I mean, the Auslanders. It was a surprise to me and yet it wasn’t, because everybody has a house raising; you can’t do it alone. I had already taken part in six myself—not just big-heartedness, don’t get me wrong. I had to learn how it was done.
But the patrol showed up before I had even passed the word around that I was ready to hold a house raising. They came swinging down our road; Sergei marched them up to where the house was to be, halted them, and said to me, “Bill, are your Scout dues paid up?” He sounded fierce. I said, “You know they are.”
“Then you can help. But don’t get in our way.” Suddenly he grinned and I knew I had been framed. He turned to the patrol and shouted, “House raising drill! Fall out and fall to.”
Suddenly it looked like one of those TV comedies where everything has been speeded up. I never saw anybody work the way they did. Let me tell you it doesn’t take Scout uniforms to make Scouts. None of us ever had uniforms; we couldn’t afford special clothes just for Scouting.
Besides the Auslanders there was Vic Schultz and Hank Jones, both from the Hard Rock patrol and Doug Okajima, who wasn’t even of our troop but still with the Baden-Powell. It did my heart good. I hadn’t seen much of the fellows lately; during light phase I always worked too late to get in to meetings; during dark phase a cold nine miles into town after supper is something to think twice about.
I felt sheepish to realize that while I might have forgotten them, they hadn’t forgotten me, and I resolved to get to meetings, no matter how tired I was. And take the tests for those two merit badges, too—the very first chance I got.
That reminded me of another item of unfinished business, too—Noisy Edwards. But you can’t take a day off just to hunt somebody up and poke him in the snoot, not when you are making a farm. Besides it wouldn’t hurt anything for me to put on another ten pounds; I didn’t want it to be a repetition of the last time.
Dad snowed up almost immediately with two men from his office and he took charge of bracing and sealing Peggy’s room. The fact that he showed up at all let me know that he was in on it—which he admitted. It had been Sergei’s idea and that was why Dad had put me off when I said it was about time to invite the neighbors in.
I got Dad aside. “Look, George,” I said, “how in nation are we going to feed ’em?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“But I do worry about it!” Everybody knows it’s the obligation of the ‘steader whose house is being raised to provide the victuals and I had been taken by surprise.
“I said not to,” he repeated. And presently I knew why; Molly showed up with Mama Schultz, Gretchen, Sergei’s sister Marushka, and two girls who were friends of Peggy—and what they were carrying they couldn’t have carried on Earth. It was a number one picnic and Sergei had trouble getting them back to work after lunch.