"The Commission is right, of course," he went on. "If we have people, we'll get machinery—we'll make it ourselves. By the time you have a family of your own, Bill, immigrants will arrive here bare-handed, no cargo at all, and we'll be able to outfit a man with everything from plastic dishes for his cupboard to power cultivators for his fields."

I said, "If they wait until I have a family, they'll have a long wait. I figure a bachelor travels faster and further."

Dad just grinned, as if he knew something I didn't know and wouldn't tell. I had walked into town to have dinner with him and Molly and the kid. I hadn't seen much of them since I went to work for Papa Schultz. Molly was teaching school, Peggy couldn't come out to the farm, of course, and Dad was very busy and very excited over a strike of aluminum oxides twenty miles east of town. He was in the project up to his ears and talking about having sheet aluminum on sale in another G-year.

As a matter or fact, cultivating a farm by stoop labor wasn't too bad, not on Ganymede. Low gravity was a big help; you didn't wear yourself out just dragging your own carcass around. I grossed a hundred and forty-two mass pounds, what with the way Mama Schultz stuffed me; that meant I weighed less than fifty pounds, field boots and all A wheelbarrow was similarly light when loaded.

But the real advantage that made the work easy was something you might not guess.

No weeds.

No weeds at all; we had very carefully not imported any. Once the land was built, making a crop was darn near a case of poking a seed into the ground and then stepping back quick before the stalk shot up and hit you in the eye.

Not that we didn't work. There is plenty of work around a farm even with no weeds to worry about. And a light wheelbarrow load simply meant that we piled three times as much on. But we had fun, too; I never met a family that laughed so much.

I brought my squeeze box out from town and used to play it after supper. We would all sing, with Papa Schultz booming away on his own and leaving it up to the rest of us to find the key he was singing in. We had fun.

It turned out that Gretchen was an awful tease when she got over being shy. But I could always get her goat by pretending that her head was on fire and either warming my hands over her hair or threatening to pour water on her before she burned the place down.

The day finally came when it was my turn to have the colony's crushers work on my land and I was almost sorry to see it arrive; I had had such a nice time at the Schultz's. But by then I could caponize a rooster or plant a row of corn; I still had a lot to learn, but there wasn't any good reason why I shouldn't start making my own farm.

Dad and I had had to prepare our farm for the crusher by dynamiting the biggest boulders. A crusher will choke on anything much bigger than a barrel but it will handle up to that size very nicely. Dynamite is cheap, thank goodness, and we used plenty of it. The raw material is nitroglycerine which we didn't have to import from Earth, the glycerine being refined from animal fats and the nitric acid being a synthetic byproduct of the atmosphere project.

Dad spent two weekends with me, making medium-sized ones out of big ones, then decided it was safe to trust me to set powder by myself and I finished the job. There was a little stream of melted snow water coming down from the hills at the far side of our property; we blew out a new bed for it to lead it close to the place where the house would go. We left it dry for the time being, with a natural rock dam to blow up later. One fair-sized hill we moved entirely and blew it into a gully on the lake side of the land. Big charges that took and I almost got fitted for a halo through underestimating how far some of the stuff would throw.

It was easy work and lots of fun. I had a vibro-drill, borrowed from the engineer's office; you could sink a charge hole with it twenty feet into rock as easily as you could sink a hot knife into butter. Then drop in the powder, fill the rest of the hole with rock dust, light the fuse, and run like the dickens!

But the most fun was blowing up that rock that looked like a grinning skull. I fixed it properly, it and its leer!

We had a visitor while we were dynamiting the land. Dad and I had just knocked off for lunch one day when Saunders, "The One-Man Lobby"—that's George's name for him—showed up. We invited him to share what we had; he had brought nothing but his appetite.

He complained about this and that. Dad tried to change the subject by asking him how he was getting along with his blasting. Saunders said it was slow work. Dad said, "You have the crusher the day after us, don't you?"

Saunders admitted it and said he wanted to borrow some powder; he was running short of time. Dad let him have it, though it meant another trip out from town, after work, for him the next day. Saunders went on, "I've been looking this situation over, Mr. Lermer. We're tackling it all wrong."

George said, "So?"

Saunders said, "Yes, indeedy! Now in the first place this blasting ought not to be done by the homesteader; it should be done by trained crews, sent out by the government. It's really part of the contract anyway; we're supposed to receive processed land."

Dad said mildly that, while that might be a nice idea, he didn't know where they would find enough trained crews to do the work for fifteen hundred new farms.

"Let the government hire them!" Mr. Saunders answered. "Bring them in from Earth for that purpose. Now, see here, Mr. Lermer, you are in the chief engineer's office. You ought to put in a word for the rest of us."

George picked up the vibro and got ready to set a charge. Presently he answered, "I'm afraid you've come to the wrong party. I'm in an entirely different department."

I guess Mr. Saunders saw he was off on the wrong tack for he went on, "In the second place, I have been looking into the matter of the soil, or what they call 'soil'—again they are off on the wrong foot." He kicked a rock. "This stuff isn't good for anything. You can't grow anything in stuff like that."

"Naturally not," agreed Dad. "You have to make soil first."

"That's just what I'm getting at," Saunders went on. "You have to have soil—good, black, rich soil. So they tell us to breed it, a square foot at a time. Plough garbage into it, raise earthworms—I don't know how many tomfool stunts."

"Do you know of a better way?"

"You bet you I do! That's just what I'm getting at. Here we are, piddling along, doing things the way a bunch of bureaucrats who never made a crop tell us to, all for a few inches of second-rate soil—when there are millions of cubic feet of the richest sort of black soil going begging."

Dad looked up sharply. "Where?"

"In the Mississippi Delta, that's where! Black soil goes down there for hundreds of feet."

We both looked at him, but he was quite serious about it. "Now here's what you've got to have—Level the ground off, yes. But after that spread real Earth soil over the rock to a depth of at least two feet; then it will be worth while to farm. As it is, we are just wasting our time."

Dad waited a bit before answering, "Have you figured out what this would cost?"

Mr. Saunders brushed that aside. "That's not the point; the point is, that's what we've got to have. The government wants us to settle here, doesn't it? Well, then, if we all stick together and insist on it, we'll get it." He jerked his chin triumphantly.

George started to say something, then stopped. He patted rock dust in on top of his charge, then straightened up and wiped the sweat off his beard. "Listen, citizen," he said, "can't you see that we are busy? I'm about to light this fuse; I suggest that you back away out of danger."

"Huh?" said Saunders. "How big a charge is it? How far?"