The colony's tractor trucks delivered the pay dirt I was entitled to in order to seed my farm; I left the Schultz place early that morning to meet them. There is difference of opinion as to the best way to plant pay dirt; some 'steaders spread it all over and take a chance on it dying; some build up little pockets six or eight feet apart, checker board style... safe but slow. I was studying the matter, my mind not made up, when I saw something moving down the road.

It was a line of men, pushing wheelbarrows, six of them. They got closer and I could see that it was all the male Schultzes. I went out to meet them.

Every one of those wheelbarrows was loaded with garbage and all for me!

Papa Schultz had been saving it as a surprise for me. I didn't know what to say. Finally I blurted out, "Gee, Papa Schultz, I don't know when I'll be able to pay you back!"

He looked fierce and said, "Who is speaking of paying back when we have compost running out of our ears yet?" Then he had the boys dump their loads down on top of my pay dirt, took a fork and began mixing it as gently as Mama Schultz folding in beaten egg white.

He took charge and I didn't have to worry about the best way to use it. In his opinion—and you can't bet that I didn't buck itl—what we had was good for about an acre and his method was to spread it through the soil. But he did not select one compact acre; he laid out strips, seven of them, a couple of hundred yards long each and stretching across my chewed soil thirty-five or forty feet apart. Each of us took a wheelbarrow—their six and my one—and distributed the mix along each line.

When that was done and cairns had been set to show where the strips ran, we raked the stuff into the rock dust five or six feet on each side of each line. Around noon Mama and Gretchen showed up, loaded down, and we stopped and had a picnic.

After lunch Yo had to go back to town but he had almost finished his strip. Papa had finished his and proceeded to help Hugo and Peter who were too small to swing a good rake. I dug in and finished mine soon enough to be able to finish what Yo had left. Dad showed up at the end of the day, expecting to help me all evening—it was light phase and you could work as late as you could stand up under it— but there was nothing left to do. And he didn't know how to thank them either.

I like to think that we would have gotten the farm made anyhow, without the Schultzes, and maybe we would have—but I'm sure not sure. Pioneers need good neighbors.

The following week I spent working artificial nitrates from the colony's power pile into the spaces between the strips—not as good as pay dirt from Earth, but not as expensive, either.

Then I tackled sowing the grass, by hand, just like in the Bible, and then raking it gently in. That old pest Saunders showed up. He still did so every now and then, but never when Dad was around. I guess he was lonely. His family was still in town and he was camping out in a ten-foot rock shed he had built. He wasn't really making a farm, not properly; I couldn't figure out what he was up to. It didn't make sense.

I said, "Howdy," and went on with my work.

He watched me, looking sour, and finally said, "You still bent on breaking your heart on this stuff, aren't you, youngster?"

I told him I hadn't noticed any wear and tear on my pump, and anyhow, wasn't he making a farm, too?

He snorted. "Not likely!"

"Then what are you doing?"

"Buying my ticket, that's what."

"Huh?"

"The only thing you can sell around this place is improved land. I'm beating them at their own game, that's what. I'll get that land in shape to unload it on some other sucker and then me and mine are heading straight back for that ever-lovin' Earth. And that's just what you'll be doing if you aren't an utter fool. You'll never make a farm here. It can't be done."

I was getting very tired of him but I'm short on the sort of point-blank guts it takes to be flatly rude. "Oh, I don't know," I said. "Look at Mr. Schultz—he's got a good farm."

Saunders snorted again. "You mean 'Johnny Apple-seed?"

"I mean Mr. Johann Schultz."

"Sure, sure—Johnny Appleseed. That's what everybody calls him in town. He's nuts. You know what he did? He gave me a handful of apple seeds and acted like he had handed me the riches of Solomon."

I stopped raking. "Well, hadn't he?"

Saunders spat on the ground between us. "He's a clown."

I lifted up the head of the rake. I said, "Mr. Saunders, you are standing on my land, my property. I'll give you just two shakes to get off it and never set foot on it again!"

He backed away and said, "Hey! You stop that! Watch what you are doing with that rake!"

I said, "Git!"

He got.

The house was a problem. Ganymede has little quakes all the time. It has to do with "isostasy" which doesn't mean a thing but "equal-pressure" when you get right down to it, but it's the science of how the mountains balance the seas and the gravitation of a planet all comes out even.

It has to do with tidal strains, too, which is odd, since Ganymede doesn't have any tides; the Sun is too far away to matter and Ganymede always keeps the same face toward Jupiter. Oh, you can detect a little tide on Laguna Serenidad when Europa is closest to Ganymede and even a trifle from Callisto and lo, but what I mean is it doesn't have tides—notlike the Pacific Ocean.

What it does have is a frozen tidal strain. The way Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, explains it is that Ganymede was closer to Jupiter when it cooled off and lost its rotation, so that there is a tidal bulge in the planet itself—sort of a fossil tidal bulge. The Moon has one, you know.

Then we came along and melted off the ice cap and gave Ganymede an atmosphere. That rearranged the pressures everywhere and the isostatic balance is readjusting. Result: little quakes all the time.

I'm a California boy; I wanted a quakeproof house. Schultzes had aquakeproof house and it seemed like a good idea, even though there had never been a quake heavy enough to knock a man down, much less knock a house down. On the other hand most of the colonists didn't bother; it is hard to make a rock house really quakeproof.

Worse than that, it's expensive. The basic list of equipment that a 'steader is promised in his emigration contract reads all right, a hoe, a spade, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a hand cultivator, a bucket, and so forth down the list—but when you start to farming you find that is only the beginning and you've got to go to the Exchange and buy a lot of other stuff. I was already in debt a proved acre and a half, nearly, before the house ever went up.

As usual we compromised. One room had to be quake proof because it had to be air tight—Peggy's room. She was getting better all the time, but she still couldn't take low pressure for any length of time. If the family was going to move out to the farm, her bedroom had to be sealed, it had to have an air lock on it, and we had to have an impeller. All that runs into money.

Before I was through I had to pledge two more acres. Dad tried to sign for it but they told him bluntly that while a 'steader's credit was good, his wasn't. That settled the matter. We planned on one reinforced room and hoped to build on to it later. In the mean time the house would be a living room, ten by twelve, where I would sleep, a separate bedroom too small to swing a cat for George and Molly, and Peggy's room. All but Peggy's room would be dry wall rock with a patent roof.

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.