Farmer in the Sky

7. Scouting in Space

Making a trip in a space ship is about the dullest way to spend time in the world, once the excitement wears off. There's no scenery, nothing to do, and no room to do it in. There were nearly six thousand of us crowded into the Mayflower and that doesn't leave room to swing a cat.

Take "B" deck—there were two thousand passengers sleeping in it. It was 150 feet across—fore and aft, mat is—and not quite 500 feet around, cylinder fashion. That gives about forty square feet per passenger, on the average, but a lot was soaked up in stairs, passageways, walls, and such. It worked out that each one had about room enough for his bunk and about that much left over to stand on when he wasn't sleeping.

You can't give a rodeo in that kind of space; you can't even get up a game of ring-around-the-rosy.

"A" deck was larger and "C" deck was smaller, being nearer the axis, but they averaged out the same. The council set up a staggered system to get the best use out of the galley and the mess rooms and to keep us from falling over each other in the 'freshers. "A" deck was on Greenwich time; "B" deck was left on zone plus-eight time, or Pacific West Coast time; and "C" deck drew zone minus-eight time, Philippine time.

That would have put us on different days, of course, but the day was always figured officially on Greenwich time; the dodge was just to ease the pressure on eating facilities.

That was really all we had to worry about. You would wake up early, not tired but bored, and wait for breakfast Once breakfast was over, the idea was to kill time until lunch. All afternoon you could look forward to the terrific excitement of having dinner.

I have to admit that making us go to school was a good plan; it meant that two and a half hours every morning and every afternoon was taken care of. Some of the grown ups complained that the mess rooms and all the spare space was always crowded with classes, but what did they expect us to do? Go hang on sky hooks? We used up less space in class than if we had been under foot.

Still, it was a mighty odd sort of school. There were some study machines in the cargo but we couldn't get at them and there wouldn't have been enough to go around. Each class consisted of about two dozen kids and some adult who knew something about something. (You'd be surprised how many adults don't know anything about anything!) The grown up would talk about what he knew best and the kids would listen, then we would ask questions and he would ask questions. No real examinations, no experiments, no demonstrations, no stereos.

Dad says this is the best kind of a school, that a university consists of a log with a teacher on one end and a pupil on the other. But Dad is a sort of romantic.

Things got so dull that it was hardly worth while to keep up my diary, even if I had been able to get microfilm, which I wasn't.

Dad and I played an occasional game of cribbage in the evening—somehow Dad had managed to squeeze the board and a pack of cards into his weight allowance. Then he got too busy with technical planning he was doing for the council and didn't have time. Molly suggested that I teach her to play, so I did.

After that I taught Peggy to play and she pegged a pretty sharp game, for a girl. It worried me a little that I wasn't being loyal to Anne in getting chummy with Peg and her mother, but I decided that Anne would want me to do just what I did. Anne was always friendly with everybody.

It still left me with time on my hands. What with only one-third gravity and no exercise I couldn't sleep more than six hours a night. The lights were out eight hours but they didn't make us go to bed, not after the trouble they had with it the first week. I used to fool around the corridors after lights out, usually with Hank Jones, until we both would get sleepy. We talked a lot. Hank turned out not to be such a bad guy as long as you kept him trimmed down to size.

I still had my Scout suit with me and kept it folded up in my bunk. Hank came in one morning while I was making up my bunk and noticed it. "See here, William," he said, "why do you hang on to that? Let the dead past bury its dead."

"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe there will be Scouting on Ganymede."

"Not that I ever heard of."

"Why not? There is Scouting on the Moon."

"Proves nothing," he answered.

But it got us to talking about it and Hank got a brilliant idea. Why not start up Scouting right now, in the Mayflower?

We called a meeting. Peggy spread the word around for us, through the junior council, and we set it for fifteen-thirty that same afternoon, right after school. Fifteen-thirty Greenwich, or "A" deck time, that is. That made it seven-thirty in the morning for the "B" deck boys and a half hour before midnight for the fellows on "C" deck. It was the best we could do. "B" deck could hurry through breakfast and get to the meeting if they wanted to and we figured that those who were really interested from "C" would stay up for the meeting.

I played my accordion while they were drifting in because Hank's father said that you needed music to warm up a meeting before it got down to work. The call had read "all Scouts and former Scouts;" by fifteen-forty we had them packed in and spilling into the corridors, even though we had the use of the biggest mess room. Hank called them to order and I put away my accordion and acted as Scribe pro tem, having borrowed a wire recorder from the Communications Officer for the purpose.

Hank made a little speech. I figure him for politics when he grows up. He said that all of us had enjoyed the benefits, the comradeship, and the honorable traditions of Scouting on Earth and it seemed a shame to lose them. He said that the Scouting tradition was the tradition of the explorer and pioneer and there could be no more fitting place and time for it than in the settlement of a new planet In fact the spirit of Daniel Boone demanded that we continue as Scouts.

I didn't know he had it in him. It sounded good.

He stopped and slipped me the wink. I got up and said that I wanted to propose a resolution. Then I read it—it had been a lot longer but we cut it down. It read: "Be it resolved—we the undersigned, Scouts and former Scouts of many jurisdictions and now passengers in the good ship Mayflower, having as our purpose to continue the Scouting tradition and to extend the Scouting trail out to the stars, do organize ourselves as the Boy Scouts of Ganymede in accordance with the principles and purpose of Scouting and in so doing do reaffirm the Scout Law."

Maybe it was flowery but it sounded impressive; nobody laughed. Hank said, "You have heard the resolution; what is your pleasure? Do I hear a second?"

He surely did; there were seconds all over the place. Then he asked for debate.

Somebody objected that we couldn't call ourselves the Boy Scouts of Ganymede because we weren't on Ganymede yet. He got a chilly reception and shut up. Then somebody else pointed out that Ganymede wasn't a star, which made that part about "Carrying the Scouting trail out to the stars" nonsense.

Hank told him that was poetic license and anyhow going out to Ganymede was a step in the right direction and that there would be more steps; what about the Star Rover III? That shut him up.

The worst objection was from "Millimetre" Muntz, a weary little squirt too big for his britches. He said, "Mr. Chairman, this is an outlaw meeting. You haven't any authority to set up a new Scouting jurisdiction. As a member in good standing of Troop -Ninety-Six, New Jersey, I object to the whole proceeding."

Hank asked him just what authority he thought Troop Ninety-Six, New Jersey, had out around the orbit of Mars? Somebody yelled, "Throw him out!"

Hank banged on the mess table. "It isn't necessary to throw him out—but, since Brother Millimetre thinks this is not a proper meeting, then it isn't proper for him to take part in it. He is excused and the chair will recognize him no further. Are you ready to vote?"

It was passed unanimously and then Hank was elected organizational chairman. He appointed a flock of committees, for organization and for plans and programs and for credentials and tests and for liaison, and such. That last was to dig out the men in the ship who had been troop masters and commissioners and things and get a Court of Honor set up. There were maybe a dozen of the men passengers at the meeting, listening. One of them, a Dr. Archibald who was an aide on "A" deck, spoke up.

"Mr. Chairman, I was a Scoutmaster in Nebraska. I'd like to volunteer my services to this new organization."

Hank looked him straight in the eye. "Thank you, sir. Your application will be considered."

Dr. Archibald looked startled, but Hank went smoothly on, "We want and need and will appreciate the help of all you older Scouts. The liaison committee is instructed to get the names of any who are willing to serve."

It was decided that we would have to have three troops, one for each deck, since it wasn't convenient to try to meet all at the same time. Hank asked all the Explorer Scouts to stand up. There were too many of them, so he asked those who were Eagles to remain standing. There were about a dozen of us.

Hank separated us Eagles by decks and told us to get busy and organize our troops and to start by picking an acting senior patrol leader. "A" deck had only three Eagles, me, Hank, and a kid from another bunk room whom I hadn't met before, Douglas MacArthur Okajima. Doug and Hank combined on me and I found myself tagged with the job.

Hank and I had planned to finish the meeting with setting up exercises, but there just wasn't room, so I got out my accordion again and we sang The Scouting Trail and followed it with The Green Hills of Earth. Then we took the oath together again:

"Upon my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my planet, and to keep myself physically fit, mentally alert, and morally straight."

After that the meeting busted up.

For a while we held meetings every day. Between troop meetings and committee meetings and Explorer meetings and patrol leader meetings we didn't have time to get bored. At first the troops were just "A" troop, "B" troop, and "C" troop, after the decks, but we wanted names to give them some personality. Anyhow I wanted a name for my troop; we were about to start a membership drive and I wanted something with more oomph to it than "'A'" deck troop."

Somebody suggested "The Space Rats" but that was voted down, and somebody else suggested "The Mayflowers"; they didn't bother to vote on that; they simply sat on him.

After that we turned down "The Pilgrims," "Deep Space Troop," "Star Rovers," and "Sky High." A kid named John Edward Forbes-Smith got up. "Look," he said, "we're divided into three troops on the basis of the time zones we use, aren't we? "B" deck has California time; "C" deck has Philippine time; and we have Greenwich or English time. Why don't we pick names that will show that fact? We could call ourselves the Saint George Troop."

Bud Kelly said it was a good idea as far as it went but make it Saint Patrick instead of Saint George; after all, Dublin was on Greenwich time, too, and Saint Patrick was a more important saint.

Forbes-Smith said, "Since when?"

Bud said, "Since always, you limey—" So we sat on both of them, too, and it was decided not to use saints. But Johnny Edwards had a good idea, just the same; we settled on the Baden-Powell Troop, Boy Scouts of Ganymede, which tied in with the English time zone and didn't offend anybody.

The idea took hold; "C" deck picked Aguinaldo as a name and "B" deck called themselves the Junipero Serra Troop. When I heard that last I was kind of sorry our deck didn't have California time so that we could have used it. But I got over it; after all "Baden-Powell" is a mighty proud name, too.

For that matter they were all good names—scouts and explorers and brave men, all three of them. Two of them never had a chance to be Scouts in the narrow, organized meaning, but they were all Scouts in the wider sense—like Daniel Boone.

Dad says there is a lot in a name.

As soon as they heard about what we were doing the girls set up Girl Scouting, too, and Peggy was a member of the Florence Nightingale Troop. I suppose there was no harm in it, but why do girls copy what the boys do? We were too busy to worry about them, though; we had to revamp Scouting activities to fit new conditions.

We decided to confirm whatever ranks and badges a boy had held in his former organization—permanent rankings, I mean, not offices. Having been a patrol leader or a scribe didn't mean anything, but if you were an Eagle on Earth, you stayed one in the B.S.G.; if you were a Cub, then you were still a Cub. If a boy didn't have records—and about half of them didn't— we took his Scout oath statement as official.

That was simple; working over the tests and the badges was complicated. After all you can't expect a boy to pass beekeeping when you haven't any bees.

(It turned out that there were several swarms of bees sleep-frozen in the cargo, but we didn't have the use of them.)

But we could set up a merit badge in hydroponics and give tests right there in the ship. And Mr. Ortega set up a test for us in spaceship engineering and Captain Harkness did the same for ballistics and astrogation. By the end of the trip we had enough new tests to let a boy go up for Eagle Scout, once we had a Court of Honor.

That came last. For some reason I couldn't figure Hank had kept putting off the final report of the liaison committee, the committee which had as its job getting Scout Masters and Commissioners and such. I asked him about it, but he just looked mysterious and said that I would see.

I did see, eventually. At last we had a joint meeting of all three troops to install Scout Masters and dedicate the Court of Honor and such. And from then on the adults ran things and we went back to being patrol leaders at the most. Oh well—it was fun while it lasted.