Bandersnatch George
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Part 1 appears in this issue. |
| conclusion |
“Kid, when you wandered into my camp two days ago, I figured you were just lost. Part of some of those research remote assignments. Eighteen months of cotton mouth to get here, two years on the planet looking at bugs and tubers and then another eighteen months of cotton mouth back to Earth. But a scientist you ain’t. You don’t know targor scat about what’s going on out here. You’re lucky we’re heading back toward a settlement. You’d never live long out here.”
George continued, his voice rising in anger, “Shipping rabbits and mice here wasn’t a just a good idea; it was the perfect idea. See, there’s so much vegetation that the population of those animals just exploded. Now they’re eating everything in sight.
“If every targor on this planet ate nothing but mice and rabbit for the next ten years, that wouldn’t even slow down the population of mice and rabbits. Within two years there won’t be a green sprig left on this planet. Before anyone at the United Nations even knows there’s an environmental catastrophe here, there won’t be an environment. Then English Petroleum corporation can come up here and do what they want to do. Since there’s no environment, there’s no restrictions.”
“That’s a pretty cruel way of looking at English Petroleum,” the kid said. “That’s implying that they know what they’re doing, that this isn’t an accident.”
“Your problem, son, is that you’re young. What are you? Maybe twenty-four? You haven’t been around in the real world. Me, I’m pushing fifty. I’ve been on seven planets and seen it happen time and again. It starts when a company called English Petroleum shows up. They set up a communication network and control all the news that goes out.
“Next thing you know, there’s a dozen cargo skyriders loaded with mice and rabbit. A year later, we’re up to our armpits in plant-eaters and the environment is gone. There’s an uproar on Earth about environmental degradation and when the United Nations sends up a fact-finding team, they don’t find anything but a dead planet.
“They declare the planet dead; the oil companies don’t have to worry about protecting anything. They can drill where they want, build roads, run pipelines. Hey, with oil going for what it is, there’s one hell of an incentive to destroy environments on planets where you don’t live.”
“That’s a pretty dangerous charge to make.”
“That’s not a charge, it’s the truth.” George laid back his head and laughed a deep, hearty laugh. “That’s why English Petroleum is trying to wipe out the Basin Riders. Hell, they don’t care about a wildcatter like me. If I find oil, even if it’s for a competitor, they don’t care. I’m one of the good guys, looking for oil. But those Basin Riders, those guys are looking for minerals.”
Since the kid didn’t respond, George knew he had crashed for the night. That wasn’t unusual for newcomers to Cerebrus. George was used to the short nights on Cerebrus, each about four hours long. Out here on the flats, you had to learn to sleep in two shifts. Every Earth day — 24 hours in a stretch — had two nights and two days. There was no way to sleep for eight hours in a row; that kind of sleep had to be broken into two sets of four hours each.
The kid probably felt he had just closed his eyes when George was kicking him awake.
“Sun’s up. Time to move. I’ll have you to a settlement before the sun goes down again. Robin’s Egg is only about four hours from here. Has some colonists and a landing strip. You can make it back to the main settlement with the next bush plane.”
George watched surreptitiously as the kid stood up, groggy from a night on the hard packed sulfur. Thick yellow dust clouded as he beat off his jeans. The kid looked slyly in George’s direction, then casually let his hand run to the bottom of his satchel as he stuffed his solar blanket inside.
George pretended not to notice.
“Usually we’d ride but the targor’d get nervous with someone he didn’t know on his back. So we’ll walk. Here, hand me that. No sense in carrying a bag while the targor is carrying a load.”
Before the kid could protest, George snatched the satchel out of the Kid’s hand and roped it onto the top pile of bags on the targor’s back. The animal gave a satisfied grunt as it stood up and nuzzled its head against George’s side.
“Never see a horse do that, would you? Naw. These targors are the best riding machines ever made. They can go where a man can go, straight up a cliff if they want to. I’ll take a targor to a jeep or Treadmaster any day.”
With that George headed out across the sulfur flats. The sun was already beating down on the men, baking them dry even as they started to sweat.
Just as the jet black of night came quickly, so did the heat of day. One moment it was a cool and the next it was a solar oven. George pulled his rabbit hide hat forward and down over his eyes. The kid pulled a pair of solar-tinted glasses out of his pocket and propped them up on the bridge of his nose.
Two hours later, George smiled as the kid got his first shock of the day. Just as the two of them were cresting a rise, two men mounted on targors came out of the tangled scrub brush behind them.
The kid immediately spotted them for what they were: Basin Riders. They both carried lasers laid casually across their saddles and had small satellite dishes strapped to the top of their saddle bags. They were dressed in the same long duster that George wore but theirs were camouflaged with uneven streaks of black, brown and grey, one of the reasons the kid hadn’t seen them until they had come out of the brush.
Without looking behind, George said “Say hello, kid. These are two of the Basin Riders you guys at English Petroleum want to kill.”
A kid’s voice cracked. “I don’t work for English Petroleum.”
“Sure you do, kid. You’re still wearing an English Petroleum shirt — you just ripped the badge tags off. Not real smart. But don’t, they’re not going to kill you. In fact, they sent for you.”
“Huh?”
George turned around but kept walking backwards as he spoke. The Basin Riders kept a sharp eye on the kid from behind sun-and-sand goggles.
“See, we had a problem. We needed a credible witness, preferably someone from English Petroleum to see what’s going to happen today. It had to be a human too, not a Reptisoid. So we set me up. We planted the seed that I was a Basin Rider. Then your people were kind enough to swallow the bait. We didn’t know who they were going to send; we just knew they were going to send someone. You arrived right on schedule.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
With that George turned his back on the kid again and kept walking. Within five minutes the four men crested a rise and there, in the distance, were a half-dozen geodesic bubbles.
It was a small settlement, a supply base actually, one of the far-flung spots of civilization where food and water was stored for the oil exploration engineers. There was a main building with robin’s egg blue panels — clearly the reason the settlement was called Robin’s Egg — and two smaller geodesic domes on the far side of a narrow landing strip.
As they drew closer, George and the Kid saw something else as well: two dozen men and women who could only be described as Basin Riders. From the looks of it, every Basin Rider on Cerebrus was here. Four others had come out of the scrub brush behind George and the kid by the time they made the yellow, pot hole-strewn landing strip in front of the collection of geodesic domes.
As George held the kid on the far side of the landing strip, the Basin Riders cleaned the support staff out the supply base with military precision. They entered each dome quickly and removed all the occupants, no more than ten men and half that many women, at laser point. The prisoners were lined up shoulder to shoulder well back from the landing strip where they held them under guard.
“Well, kid, here’s what we went to all the trouble to have you see. You just stand right here beside the landing strip and report back to English Petroleum exactly what you see here today.”
“What am I going to see?”
“That I should spoil your surprise?” George put his hands to his chest in mock surprise. “No. No. No. I want you to savor every moment of this. It will be something you can tell your grandchildren.”
As George was speaking, a soft throb could be heard in the distance. Everyone turned to the source of the sound and suddenly, from behind an outcropping, an English Petroleum cargo skyrider could be seen skimming along just above the surface of the sulfur flats. The kid looked at George and then at the Basin Riders, showing surprise that no one was particularly concerned. Cargo skyriders were sometimes troop carriers. But this possibility did not seem to concern the Basin Riders. They just stood silently in their long coats streaked in black, brown and grey.
As the kid looked from the skyrider to the landing strip, George could read the kid’s mind. The landing strip was obviously too small to handle a skyrider of that size. The aircraft itself was one of the larger, newer cargo models, 400 feet long and 40 feet wide. Built for speed and carrying capacity, it would be able to land only if the pilots were very good. But it could never take off again. For whoever was onboard, this was assuredly a one-way trip.
The skyrider pilots were very good. They hit the sulfur plain just before the beginning of the airstrip, taking out ten feet of scrub before the skyrider hit the actual strip. Those pilots were going to use every foot of airstrip they had — and then some. As the skyrider roared by George and the kid, tons of sulfur rose and swirled in billows of yellow dust coating the men.
George had his face covered with the red bandana he kept around his neck. The kid didn’t have a bandana so he choked on the biting sulfur dust. Not having a bandana was a sure sign of a tenderfoot on Cerebrus.
As the skyrider passed George and the kid, the engines suddenly reversed, the blast piercing their ears. Clearly whoever was flying that crate certainly knew how to land. The craft slowed quickly and even as it ploughed off the landing strip into the shrub, it was apparent that it would not be damaged. The minute the plane stopped moving, the engines cut off. Instantly the plain was silent.
“OK, kid, let’s go.”
George, the kid and three Basin Riders walked through the settling dust clouds to the back of the cargo craft. When they arrived, the huge belly door was just settling and low enough for the five men to step inside.
“We’re calling this Noah’s Ark.” George waved his arm around the interior. “What you see here are our secret weapons: coyotes, rattlesnakes, dingoes, hawks, and weasels. Animals that eat animals. This is how we’re going to fight English Petroleum. We’re going to beat you at your own game.”
“I don’t get it,” the kid was scratching his head as the five of them walked the three hundred feet to the end of the cargo hold. “You’re bringing more animals here to die?”
“No. We’re bringing animals here that will check the populations of mice, rabbits and voles. There is so much food here for these predators, thanks to English Petroleum, that their population is going to skyrocket.”
“So?”
“So, eighteen months from now, when the United Nations environmental observers finally get to Cerebrus, they are going to see an environment. It won’t be the original environment that was here but they are going to see an environmental balance nevertheless, one that has to be protected.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to. The only reason you’re here is to see what we’re doing. Then you report back to your headquarters.”
As George was speaking, the Basin Riders stood in queues and began unloading the cargo. Larger animals that could run or fly great distances were simply released from their cages. The Basin Riders maneuvered the pallets with the cages toward the open tailgate and pulled up the trap door.
The coyotes and wolves exploded out of the cages, took a single jump off the tail gate and disappeared into the brush. Eagles and hawks erupted out of their open cages and disappeared over the horizon in every direction as fast as they could fly. The kid counted well over two hundred carnivores before he decided to stop keeping tabs on the different types of animals.
“What are in the bags?” the Kid asked George as Basin Riders began collecting burlap sacks and tying them to the targors.
“Those are the smaller carnivores: rattlesnakes, badgers, weasels and the like. They can’t cover the country the way the larger animals can. Every Basin Rider is taking a collection of them as far from here as possible, dropping them off where they know the mice and rabbits are thickest. These predators are still drugged from the trip but in a day or two, they’ll be fine. Sure, we’ll lose along the way, that can’t be helped. But those that survive are going to eat and eat and eat. Then they are going to reproduce and reproduce and reproduce. Like I said, by the time the United Nations environmental observers get here, there’ll be a balanced environment to protect.”
George led the kid out of the cargo skyrider bay and back to the loaded targor. Only then did George toss the kid his satchel.
“Here’s where we part company,” George said as he mounted the targor. “You just report what you saw. You’ll get a promotion. They can’t fire you.”
“Why are you doing this, George? You’re a wildcatter! One of us!”
“Got a conscience, Kid. I like the world in a balance, with fuzzy and scaly animals all around me. This is my seventh planet and I’ve seen what your people will do for money. I just want them to know that it’s not going to happen any more. You did notice that the cargo skyrider was an English Petroleum plane?”
“Yeah. That I did notice.”
“Well, the company’s is starting to rot from the inside. There’s a new world out there. Not that science fiction stuff you’ve been reading. This is the real frontier, and we’re saving it, one planet at a time. It may be slow but it’s effective. Even using your company’s property to do it.”
“Where are you going, George? You can’t get away.”
“Already have. As soon as you report back, English Petroleum will abandon Cerebrus. I’ll bet on that. Six months from now, this will be a habitation colony again, good people looking to start new lives here. Naw, I’ll be OK. I’ll be able to retire here, maybe even open up a targor dude ranch. The targors will love it.”
George turned his back on the kid and slowly started riding up the hill. All around the kid were Basin Riders, their targors loaded with bulky burlap sacks, heading off in different directions. The cargo skyrider was empty now, sitting abandoned on a runway too short for a takeoff. There’d be an spotter plane along soon; no one could take off with a English Petroleum cargo skyrider and expect to disappear into the badlands. Someone was bound to come looking for it.
George turned around one last time and looked at the kid unconsciously reaching toward the bottom of his satchel.
“By the way. I emptied that tranquilizer pistol you’ve got in there. Those guys at English Petroleum loaded it with an adrenaline booster, not a poison. There was enough in that capsule to give me the strength of two targors for about a minute. Just enough time for me to tear you to pieces before I died. They’re not expecting you back.
“After you report in, you should take retirement. Get out of the company. You might even think about coming back here, being a Basin Rider. You could be real valuable having been on the inside. Think about it. You found me once. You can find me again.”
With that George turned his back on the kid and disappeared. One instant he was there and in the next, all that was left was a cloud of yellow dust where he and the targor had been before they were swallowed by a curtain of scrub.
Copyright © 2006 by Steven C. Levi
