"Huh?"

"There is only one senior patrol leader around here–and you're looking right at him. Don't make any mistake about it. But come on around to meeting anyhow," he added. "You'll be welcome. We're always glad to sign up a new tenderfoot."

I went back to the Receiving Station and looked up Hank Jones and told him all about it. He looked at me admiringly. "William, old son," he said, "I've got to hand it to you. It takes real talent to louse things up that thoroughly. It's not easy."

"You think I've messed things up?"

"I hope not. Well, let's look up Doc Archibald and see what can be done."

Our troop master was holding clinic; we waited until the patients were out of the way, then went in. He said, "Are you two sick, or just looking for a ticket to gold brick?"

"Doc," I said, "we were wrong. There are so Scouts on Ganymede."

"So I know," he answered.

I said, "Huh?"

"Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Bruhn and I have been negotiating with the senior Scout officials here to determine just how our troops will be taken into the parent organization. It's a bit complicated as there are actually more Mayflower Scouts than there are in the local troop. But they have jurisdiction, of course."

I said, "Oh."

"Well have a joint meeting in a few days, after we get the rules ironed out."

I thought it over and decided I had better tell him what had happened, so I did.

He listened, not saying anything. Finally I said, "Hank seems to think I've messed things up. What do you think, Doc?"

"Mmmm—" he said. "Well, I hope he's wrong. But I think I may say you haven't helped the situation any."

I didn't know what to say. "Don't look so tragic about it," he urged. "You'll get well. Now run along and forget it. It may not make any difference."

But it did make a difference. Doc and the others had been pitching for our troops to be recognized as properly constituted troops, with all ratings acknowledged. But after Sergei spread the word around, the regular Ganymede Scouts all squawked that we were nothing but a bunch of tenderfeet, no matter what we had been back on Earth. The place for us to start was the bottom; if we were any good, we could prove it— by tests.

It was compromised; George says things like that are always compromised. Ratings were confirmed on probation, with one G-year to make up any tests that were different. Our troops were kept intact But there was one major change:

All patrol leaders had to be from the original Ganymede Scouts; they were transferred from the Leda troop. I had to admit the justice of it. How could I be a patrol leader on Ganymede when I was still so green that I didn't know northwest from next week? But it didn't set well with the other fellows who had been patrol leaders when the word got around that I was responsible for the flies in the soup.

Hank talked it over with me. "Billy my boy," he told me, "I suppose you realize that you are about as popular as ants at a picnic?"

"Who cares?" I objected.

"You care. Now is the time for all good men to perform an auto da fé"

"What in great blazing moons is an auto da fé?"

"In this case it means for you to transfer to the Leda Troop."

"Have you gone crazy? You know what those guys think of us, especially me. I'd be lucky to get away with my life."

"Which just goes to show how little you know about human nature. Sure, it would be a little rough for a while, but it's the quickest way to gain back some respect."

"Hank, you really are nuts. In that troop I really would be a tenderfoot—and how!"

"That's just the point," Hank went on quietly, "We're all tenderfeet—only here in our own troop it doesn't show. If we stay here, we'll keep on being tenderfeet for a long time. But if we transfer, we'll be with a bunch who really know their way around—and some of it will rub off on us."

"Did you say 'we'?"

"I said 'we'."

"I catch on. You want to transfer, so you worked tip this gag about how I ought to do so, so you would have company. A fine chum you are!"

He just grinned, completely unembarrassed. "Good old Bill! Hit him in the head eight or nine times and he can latch on to any idea. It won't be so bad, Bill. In precisely four months and nine days we won't be tenderfeet; we'll be old timers."

"Why the exact date?"

"Because that is the due date of the Mayflower on her next trip—as soon as they arrive they'll be the Johnny-Come-Latelies."

"Oh!"

Anyhow, we did it—and it was rough at first, especially on me... like the night they insisted that I tell them how to be a hero. Some twerp had gotten hold of the meteorite story. But the hazing wasn't too bad and Sergei put a stop to it whenever he caught them at it. After a while they got tired of it.

Sergei was so confounded noble about the whole thing that I wanted to kick him.

The only two merit badges to amount to anything that stood in the way of my getting off probation and back up to my old rating of Eagle Scout were agronomy and planetary ecology, Ganymede style. They were both tough subjects but well worth studying. On Ganymede you had to know them to stay alive, so I dug in.

Ecology is the most involved subject I ever tackled. I told George so and he said possibly politics was worse—and on second thought maybe politics was just one aspect of ecology. The dictionary says ecology is "the science of the interrelations of living organisms and their environment." That doesn't get you much, does it? It's like defining a hurricane as a movement of air.

The trouble with ecology is that you never know where to start because everything affects everything else. An unseasonal freeze in Texas can affect the price of breakfast in Alaska and that can affect the salmon catch and that can affect something else. Or take the old history book case: the English colonies took England's young bachelors and that meant old maids at home and old maids keep cats and the cats catch field mice and the field mice destroy the bumble bee nests and bumble bees are necessary to clover and cattle eat clover and cattle furnish the roast beef of old England to feed the soldiers to protect the colonies that the bachelors emigrated to, which caused the old maids.

Not very scientific, is it? I mean you have too many variables and you can't put figures to them. George says that if you can't take a measurement and write it down in figures you don't know enough about a thing to call what you are doing with it "science" and, as for him, hell stick to straight engineering, thank you.

But there were some clear cut things about applied ecology on Ganymede which you could get your teeth into. Insects, for instance—on Ganymede, under no circumstances do you step on an insect. There were no insects on Ganymede when men first landed there. Any insects there now are there because the bionomics board planned it that way and the chief ecologist okayed the invasion. He wants that insect to stay right where it is, doing whatever it is that insects do; he wants it to wax and grow fat and raise lots of little insects.

Of course a Scout doesn't go out of his way to step on anything but black widow spiders and the like, anyhow—but it really brings it up to the top of your mind to know that stepping on an insect carries with it a stiff fine if you are caught, as well as a very pointed lecture telling you that the colony can get along very nicely without you but the insects are necessary.

Or take earthworms. I know they are worth their weight in uranium because I was buying them before I was through. A farmer can't get along without earthworms.

Introducing insects to a planet isn't as easy as it sounds. Noah had less trouble with his animals, two by two, because when the waters went away he still had a planet that was suited to his load. Ganymede isn't Earth. Take bees—we brought bees in the Mayflower but we didn't turn them loose; they were all in the shed called "Oahu" and likely to stay there for a smart spell. Bees need clover, or a reasonable facsimile. Clover would grow on Ganymede but our real use for clover was to fix nitrogen in the soil and thereby refresh a worn out field. We weren't planting clover yet because there wasn't any nitrogen in the air to fix—or not much.