Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
Without saying anything about it, I had started counting paces when we left the walls of lava that marked the place where the new road led to our place and out to the new farms beyond. As near as I could make it we had come about five miles when Molly stopped. “What’s the matter?” yelled Dad.
“Dear,” she said, “I can’t find the road. I think I’ve lost it.”
I kicked the snow away underfoot. It was made ground, all right—soft. Dad took the torch and looked at his watch. “We must have come about six miles,” he announced.
“Five,” I corrected him. “Or five and a half at the outside,” I told him I had been counting.
He considered it. “We’ve come just about to that stretch where the road is flush with the field,” he said. “It can’t be more than a half mile or a mile to the cut through Kneiper’s Ridge. After that we can’t lose it. Bill, take the light and cast off to the right for a hundred paces, then back to the left. If that doesn’t do it, we’ll go further. And for heaven’s sakes retrace your steps—it’s the only way you’ll find us in this storm.”
I took the light and set out. To the right was no good, though I went a hundred and fifty paces instead of a hundred, I got back to them, and reported, and started out again. Dad just grunted; he was busy with something about the stretcher.
On the twenty-third step to the left I found the road—by stepping down about a foot, falling flat on my face, and nearly losing the light. I picked myself up and went back.
“Good!” said Dad. “Slip your neck through this.”
“This” was a sort of yoke he had devised by retying the blankets around the stretcher so as to get some free line. With my neck through it I could carry the weight on my shoulders and just steady my end with my hands. Not that it was heavy, but our hands were getting stiff with cold. “Good enough!” I said, “But, look, George—let Molly take your end.”
“Nonsense!”
“It isn’t nonsense. Molly can do it—can’t you, Molly? And you know this road better than we do; you’ve tramped it enough times in the dark.”
“Bill is right, dear,” Molly said at once. “Here—take Mabel.”
Dad gave in, took the light and the halter. Mabel didn’t want to go any further; she wanted to sit down, I guess. Dad kicked her in the rear and jerked on her neck. Her feelings were hurt; she wasn’t used to that sort of treatment—particularly not from Dad. But there was no time to humor her; it was getting colder.
We went on. I don’t know how Dad kept to the road but he did. We had been at it another hour, I suppose, and had left Kneiper’s slot well behind, when Molly stumbled, then her knees just seemed to cave in and she knelt down in the snow.
I stopped and sat down, too; I needed the rest. I just wanted to stay there and let it snow.
Dad came back and put his arms around her and comforted her and told her to lead Mabel now; she couldn’t get lost on this stretch. She insisted that she could still carry. Dad ignored her, just lifted the yoke business off her shoulders. Then he came back and peeled a bit of blanket off the bubble and shined the torch inside. He put it back into place. Molly said, “How is she?”
Dad said, “She’s still breathing. She opened her eyes when the light hit them. Let’s go.” He got the yoke on and Molly took the light and the halter.
Molly couldn’t have seen what I saw; the plastic of the bubble was frosted over on the inside. Dad hadn’t seen Peggy breathe; he hadn’t seen anything.
I thought about it for a long while and wondered how you would classify that sort of a lie. Dad wasn’t a liar, that was certain—and yet it seemed to me that such a lie, right then, was better than the truth. It was complicated.
Pretty soon I forgot it; I was too busy putting one foot in front of the other and counting the steps. I couldn’t feel my feet any longer.
Dad stopped and I bumped into the end of the stretcher. “Listen!” he said.
I listened and heard a dull rumble. “Quake?”
“No. Keep quiet.” Then he added, “It’s down the road. Off the road, everybody! Off to the right.”
The rumble got louder and presently I made out a light through the snow, back the way we had come. Dad saw it, too, and stepped out on the road and started waving our torch.
The rumble stopped almost on top of him; it was a rock crusher and it was loaded down with people, people clinging to it all over and even riding the spade. The driver yelled, “Climb on! And hurry!”
Then he saw the cow and added, “No livestock.”
“We’ve got a stretcher with my little girl in it,” Dad shouted back to him. “We need help.”
There was a short commotion, while the driver ordered a couple of men down to help us. In the mix up Dad disappeared. One moment Molly was holding Mabel’s halter, then Dad was gone and so was the cow.
We got the stretcher up onto the spade and some of the men braced it with their backs. I was wondering what to do about Dad and thinking maybe I ought to jump off and look for him, when he appeared out of the darkness and scrambled up beside me. “Where’s Molly?” he asked.
“Up on top. But where is Mabel? What did you do with her?”
“Mabel is all right.” He folded his knife and put it in his pocket. I didn’t ask any more questions.
17. Disaster
We passed several more people after that, but the driver wouldn’t stop. We were fairly close into town and he insisted that they could make it on their own. His emergency power pack was running low, he said; he had come all the way from the bend in the lake, ten miles beyond our place.
Besides, I don’t know where he would have put them. We were about three deep and Dad had to keep warning people not to lean on the bubble of the stretcher.
Then the power pack did quit and the driver shouted, “Everybody off! Get on in on your own.” But by now we were actually in town, the outskirts, and it would have been no trouble if it hadn’t been blowing a blizzard. The driver insisted on helping Dad with the stretcher. He was a good Joe and turned out to be—when I saw him in the light—the same man who had crushed our acreage.
At long, long last we were inside the hospital and Peggy was turned over to the hospital people and put in a pressurized room. More than that, she was alive. In bad shape, but alive.
Molly stayed with her. I would like to have stayed, too—it was fairly warm in the hospital; it had its own emergency power pack. But they wouldn’t let me.
Dad told Molly that he was reporting to the chief engineer for duty. I was told to go to the Immigration Receiving Station. I did so and it was just like the day we landed, only worse—and colder. I found myself right back in the very room which was the first I had ever been in on Ganymede.
The place was packed and getting more packed every minute as more refugees kept pouring in from the surrounding country. It was cold, though not so bitterly cold as outside. The lights were off, of course; light and heat all came from the power plant for everything. Hand lights had been set up here and there and you could sort of grope your way around. There were the usual complaints, too, though maybe not as bad as you hear from immigrants. I paid no attention to any of them; I was happy in a dead beat sort of way just to be inside and fairly warm and feel the blood start to go back into my feet.
We stayed there for thirty-seven hours. It was twenty-four hours before we got anything to eat.
Here was the way it went: the metal buildings, such as the Receiving Station, stood up. Very few of the stone buildings had, which we knew by then from the reports of all of us. The Power Station was out, and with it, the heat trap. They wouldn’t tell us anything about it except to say that it was being fixed.
In the meantime we were packed in tight as they could put us, keeping the place warm mainly by the heat from our bodies, sheep style. There were, they say, several power packs being used to heat the place, too, one being turned on every time the temperature in the room dropped below freezing. If so, I never got close to one and I don’t think it ev
I would sit down and grab my knees and fall into a dopey sleep. Then a nightmare would wake me up and I’d get up and pound myself and walk around. After a while I’d sit down on the floor and freeze my fanny again.
I seem to remember encountering Noisy Edwards in the crowd and waving my finger under his nose and telling him I had an appointment to knock his block off. I seem to remember him staring back at me as if he couldn’t place me. But I don’t know; I may have dreamed it. I thought I ran across Hank, too, and had a long talk with him, but Hank told me afterwards that he never laid eyes on me the whole time.
After a long time—it seemed a week but the records show it was eight o’clock Sunday morning—they passed us out some lukewarm soup. It was wonderful. After that I wanted to leave the building to go to the hospital. I wanted to find Molly and see how Peggy was doing.
They wouldn’t let me. It was seventy below outside and still dropping.
About twenty-two o’clock the lights came on and the worst was over.
We had a decent meal soon after that, sandwiches and soup, and when the Sun came up at midnight they announced that anybody could go outside who cared to risk it. I waited until noon Monday. By then it was up to twenty below and I made a dash for it to the hospital.
Peggy was doing as well as could be expected. Molly had stayed with her and had spent the time in bed with her, huddling up to her to keep her warm. While the hospital had emergency heat, it didn’t have the capacity to cope with any such disaster as had struck us; it was darn near as cold as the Receiving Station. But Peggy had come through it, sleeping most of the time. She even perked up enough to smile and say hello.
Molly’s left arm was in a sling and splinted. I asked how that happened—and then I felt foolish. It had happened in the quake itself but I hadn’t known it and George still didn’t know about it; none of the engineers were back.
It didn’t seem possible that she could have done what she did, until I recalled that she carried the stretcher only after Dad had rigged the rope yokes. Molly is all right.
They chased me out and I high-tailed it back to the Receiving Station and ran into Sergei almost at once. He hailed me and I went over to him. He had a pencil and a list and a number of the older fellows were gathered around him. “What’s up?” I said.
“Just the guy I’m looking for,” he said. “I had you down for dead. Disaster party—are you in?”
I was in, all right. The parties were made up of older Scouts, sixteen and up, and the younger men. We were sent out on the town’s tractors, one to each road, and we worked in teams of two. I spotted Hank Jones as we were loading and they let us make up a team.
It was grim work. For equipment we had shovels and lists—lists of who lived on which farm. Sometimes a name would have a notation “known to be alive,” but more often not. A team would be dropped off with the lists for three or four farms and the tractor would go on, to pick them up on the return trip.
Our job was to settle the doubt about those other names and—theoretically—to rescue anyone still alive.
We didn’t find anyone alive.
The lucky ones had been killed in the quake; the unlucky ones had waited too long and didn’t make it into town. Some we found on the road; they had tried to make it but had started too late. The worst of all were those whose houses hadn’t fallen and had tried to stick it out. Hank and I found one couple just sitting, arms around each other. They were hard as rock.
When we found one, we would try to identify it on the list, then cover it up with snow, several feet deep, so it would keep for a while after it started to thaw. When we settled with the people at a farm, we rummaged around and found all the livestock we could and carried or dragged their carcasses down to the road, to be toted into town on the tractor and slapped into deep freeze. It seemed a dirty job to do, robbing the dead, but, as Hank pointed out, we would all be getting a little hungry by and by.
Hank bothered me a little; he was merry about the whole thing. I guess it was better to laugh about it, in the long run, and after a while he had me doing it. It was just too big to soak up all at once and you didn’t dare let it get you.
But I should have caught on when we came to his own place. “We can skip it,” he said, and checked off the list.
“Hadn’t we better check for livestock?” I said.
“Nope. We’re running short of time. Let’s move on to the Millers’ place.”
“Did they get out?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see any of them in town.”
The Millers hadn’t gotten out; we barely had time to take care of them before the tractor picked us up. It was a week later that I found out that both of Hank’s parents had been killed in the quake. He had taken time to drag them out and put them into their ice cellar before he had headed for town.
Like myself, Hank had been outside when it hit, still looking at the line up. The fact that the big shock had occurred right after the line up had kept a lot of people from being killed in their beds—but they say that the line up caused the quake, triggered it, that is, with tidal strains, so I guess it sort of evens up. Of course, the line up didn’t actually make the quake; it had been building up to it ever since the beginning of the atmosphere project. Gravity’s books have got to balance.
The colony had had thirty-seven thousand people when the quake hit. The census when we finished it showed less than thirteen thousand. Besides that we had lost every crop, all or almost all the livestock. As Hank said, we’d all be a little hungry by and by.
They dumped us back at the Receiving Station and a second group of parties got ready to leave. I looked for a quiet spot to try to get some sleep.
I was just dozing off, it seemed to me, when somebody shook me. It was Dad. “Are you all right, Bill?”
I rubbed my eyes. “I’m okay. Have you seen Molly and Peggy?”
“Just left them. I’m off duty for a few hours. Bill, have you seen anything of the Schultzes?”
I sat up, wide awake. “No. Have you?”
“No.”
I told him what I had been doing and he nodded. “Go back to sleep, Bill. I’ll see if there has been a report on them.”
I didn’t go to sleep. He was back after a bit to say that he hadn’t been able to find out anything one way or another. “I’m worried, Bill.”
“So am I.”
“I’m going out and check up.”
“Let’s go.”
Dad shook his head. “No need for us both. You get some sleep.” I went along, just the same.
We were lucky. A disaster party was just heading down our road and we hitched a ride. Our own farm and the Schultzes’ place were among those to be covered on this trip; Dad told the driver that we would check both places and report when we got back to town. That was all right with him.
They dropped us at the turn off and we trudged up toward the Schultzes’ house. I began to get the horrors as we went. It’s one thing to pile snow over comparative strangers; it’s another thing entirely to expect to find Mama Schultz or Gretchen with their faces blue and stiff.
I didn’t visualize Papa as dead; people like Papa Schultz don’t die—they just go on forever. Or it feels like that.
But I still wasn’t prepared for what we did find.
We had just come around a little hummock that conceals their house from the road. George stopped and said, “Well, the house is still standing. His quake-proofing held.”
I looked at it, then I stared—and then I yelled. “Hey, George! The Tree is gone!”
The house was there, but the apple tree—“the most beautiful tree on Ganymede”—was missing. Just gone. I began to run.
We were almost to the house when the door opened. There stood Papa Schultz.
They were all safe, every one of them. What remained of the tree was ashes in the fireplace. Papa had cut it down as soon as the power went off and the temperature started to drop—and then had fed i
Papa, telling us about it, gestured at the blackened firebox. “Johann’s folly, they called it. I guess they will not think old Appleseed Johnny quite so foolish now, eh?” He roared and slapped Dad on the shoulders.
“But your tree,” I said stupidly.
“I will plant another, many others.” He stopped and was suddenly serious. “But your trees, William, your brave little baby trees—they are dead, not?”
I said I hadn’t seen them yet. He nodded solemnly. “They are dead of the cold. Hugo!”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Fetch me an apple.” Hugo did so and Papa presented it to me. “You will plant again.” I nodded and stuck it in my pocket.
They were glad to hear that we were all right, though Mama clucked over Molly’s broken arm. Yo had fought his way over to our place during the first part of the storm, found that we were gone and returned, two frost bitten ears for his efforts. He was in town now to look for us.
But they were all right, every one of them. Even their livestock they had saved—cows, pigs, chickens, people, all huddled together throughout the cold and kept from freezing by the fire from their tree.
The animals were back in the barn, now that power was on again, but the place still showed that they had been there—and smelled of it, too. I think Mama was more upset by the shambles of her immaculate living room than she was by the magnitude of the disaster. I don’t think she realized that most of her neighbors were dead. It hadn’t hit her yet.
Dad turned down Papa Schultz’s offer to come with us to look over our farm. Then Papa said he would see us on the tractor truck, as he intended to go into town and find out what he could do. We had mugs of Mama’s strong tea and some corn bread and left.
I was thinking about the Schultzes and how good it was to find them alive, as we trudged over to our place. I told Dad that it was a miracle.
He shook his head. “Not a miracle. They are survivor types.”
“What type is a survivor type?” I asked.
He took a long time to answer that one. Finally he said, “Survivors survive. I guess that is the only way to tell the survivor type for certain.”