She belonged back on Earth.
I suppose we weren’t bad off, but there is a whale of a difference between being a rich farmer, like Papa Schultz, with heaps of cow manure in your barn yard and hams hanging in your cold cellar and every modern convenience you could want, even running water in your house, and being poor farmers, like us, scratching for a toe hold in new soil and in debt to the Commission. It told on us and that winter we had time to brood about it.
We were all gathered in Peggy’s room after lunch one Thursday. Dark phase had just started and Dad was due to go back into town; we always gave him a send off. Molly was darning and Peg and George were playing cribbage. I got out my squeeze box and started knocking out some tunes. I guess we all felt cheerful enough for a while. I don’t know how I happened to drift into it, but after a bit I found I was playing The Green Hills of Earth. I hadn’t played it in a long time.
I brayed through that fortissimo part about “Out ride the sons of Terra; Far drives the thundering jet—” and was thinking to myself that jets didn’t thunder any more. I was still thinking about it when I went on into the last chorus, the one you play very softly: “We pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth—”
I looked up and there were tears running down Molly’s cheeks.
I could have kicked myself. I put my accordion down with a squawk, not even finishing, and got up. Dad said, “What’s the matter, Bill?”
,I muttered something about having to go take a look at Mabel.
I went out into the living room and put on my heavy clothes and actually did go outside, though I didn’t go near the barn. It had been snowing and it was already almost pitch dark, though the Sun hadn’t been down more than a couple of hours. The snow had stopped but there were clouds overhead and you couldn’t see Jupiter.
The clouds had broken due west and let the sunset glow come through a bit. After my eyes adjusted, by that tiny amount of light I could see around me—the mountains, snow to their bases, disappearing in the clouds, the lake, just a sheet of snow-covered ice, and the boulders beyond our fields, making weird shapes in the snow. It was a scene to match the way I felt; it looked like the place where you might be sent for having lived a long and sinful life.
I tried to figure out what I was doing in such a place.
The clouds in the west shifted a little and I saw a single bright green star, low down toward the horizon, just above where the Sun had set.
It was Earth.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Presently somebody put a hand on my shoulder and I jumped. It was Dad, all bundled up for a nine-mile tramp through the dark and the snow.
“What’s the matter, Son?” he said.
I started to speak, but I was all choked up and couldn’t. Finally I managed to say, “Dad, why did we come here?”
“Mmmm… you wanted to come. Remember?”
“I know,” I admitted.
“Still, the real reason, the basic reason, for coming here was to keep your grandchildren from starving. Earth is overcrowded, Bill.”
I looked back at Earth again. Finally I said, “Dad, I’ve made a discovery. There’s more to life than three square meals a day. Sure, we can make crops here— this land would grow hair on a billiard ball. But I don’t think you had better plan on any grandchildren here; it would be no favor to them. I know when I’ve made a mistake.”
“You’re wrong, Bill, Your kids will like this place, just the way Eskimos like where they live.”
“I doubt it like the mischief.”
“Remember, the ancestors of Eskimos weren’t Eskimos; they were immigrants, too. If you send your kids back to Earth, for school, say, they’ll be homesick for Ganymede. They’ll hate Earth. They’ll weigh too much, they won’t like the air, they won’t like the climate, they won’t like the people.”