"You've been reading too much science fiction," snapped Bandersnatch George as he jammed a hunk of rabbit onto the end of his pike and drove the other end of the metal rod into the brownish-yellow hardpan of the sulfur plain. "I'll bet you grew up reading about little green men an' space ships and all them weird stories they published back in the 90s."
"Well, . . ." The kid scratched a week of peach fuzz on his chin and then ran his fingers through his dust-filled hair.
"Listen, Kid. You want to know what's real? Look out there. From those snow-capped Sulfur Mountains to the Gelatin Sea, that's all real. That targor over there is real too. This planet is real. You've got to stop thinking that this is some kind of a science fiction place. It isn't. This is Cerebrus, a hot, dusty planet. We've got winter and summer just like on Earth. We've got days and nights just like on earth -- they're just a bit shorter."
The kid was obviously not happy with the reality of Cerebrus.
"This place might as well be earth. I expected something different when I signed on to come here. Like alien life-forms."
George laughed pleasantly. "This planet's got alien life-forms." He slowly rotated the spike, the flames from the camp fire blistering the meat from raw to well-done. "What do you think that targor is?"
"No. I meant like people. Alien life-forms you could talk to. A targor is kind of a hairy horse with claws, a bear you can ride."
"A targor can talk. It just doesn't speak in a language you and I understand. I wouldn't go calling a targor a hairy horse either. They're a hell of a lot smarter than horses. Almost as smart as us humans. They communicate among themselves and build shelters with those claws, two or three high even, with running water no less -- drinking water in, black water out. We've got fourth world people with less civilization than that."
The kid shrugged his shoulders and George gave a shrill whistle. The targor sleeping at the edge of the fire's glow snapped alert, its eyes hidden behind a thick mop of fur homing in on the sizzling meat.
"Come on," George waved and the targor sprang to its four feet and padded forward. As the animal moved, it walked like a bear, bending its front paws forward, rather than back as would a horse. And it certainly ate more like a bear than a horse.
There was only one thing the targor feared, George knew, and that was fire. While scientists didn't know exactly why, it was assumed the fear had to do with the fact that the targor's body hair was so flammable. This seemed strange considering that Cerebrus had more than its fair share of volcanos. More than likely it was because the targor couldn't control man's oldest invention. A human could start and stop a fire at will; the targor couldn't.
Had it been 150 years earlier, George would have been called a cowboy or, more appropriately, a drifter. He looked like a cowboy. It was almost as if he had stepped out of a snapshot in one of the enhanced history book where the photographs were holographed and combined with others to give a truer image and depth of field. It wasn't a true picture in the sense that the scene shown had ever occurred. Rather, it was a collection of historical images that existed on film and had been combined to give a single, in-focus, striking, historical image.
More appropriately, George would have been the perfect long rider. He wore a dark duster that fell to the top of his boots to keep the yellow-brown sulfur dust off his clothes and equipment and he wore a red bandana around his neck which he used to cover his face when he was astride the targor. A rabbit-leather hat covered his thinning hair and he had a pair of sun-and-sand goggles which hung loosely from a rawhide cord around his neck.
The only difference in appearance between George and a cowboy was that George didn't pack iron. There was no reason to carrying a weapon on Cerebrus. The only carnivores here were the targors and they liked humans.
But there was a great deal of difference between what George did and the cowboy of two centuries before. He was a wild-catter, a free-lancer petroleum engineer looking for oil. When he found oil, he made a claim and then sold it to the highest bidder. He'd been on seven planets and each one just as English Petroleum was moving in. He sold his claims for a modest profit and then moved on.
In spite of the fact that he sold petroleum claims to English Petroleum, many at English Petroleum thought he was secretly a Basin Rider, an on-site mineral geologist. These men lived solitary lives in the planet's interior, far from the colonies, searching for minerals. They were suspicious of everyone with whom they came in contact and for good reason. Most of the people with whom they came in contact worked for English Petroleum.
Basin Riders, to English Petroleum, were the bane of the universe. This was because of the marked difference between the oil and mineral companies. Oil companies wanted to find oil and extract it out of the ground as rapidly as possible and then move on to another find. What happened to the soil and environment was of no concern to them. After the oil was gone, the oil companies left.
On the other hand, the mineral companies needed a stable environment. They could not just plunge a drill bit into a copper deposit and suck out all the copper. Even with the most sophisticated ore removal systems, it would take decades to deplete the find. Ruining the environment made the mineral extraction process nearly impossible. The miners needed the grass and shrubs to hold the soil together so the wind wouldn't turn the mine into a dust bowl.
When oil companies and Basin Riders met, it was bad news for the oil companies. The Basin Riders would use their own communications network to report to their companies what English Petroleum was doing. The best situation for English Petroleum was a planet with no environment. For the Basin Riders, exactly the opposite was true.
Though never stated as official policy, once it was proven that someone was a Basin Rider, an open season on that individual was declared. A bounty was unofficially announced and no-questions-asked payments made. Unfortunately for English Petroleum, Basin Riders were not the kind of men who could be bushwhacked and many more bounty hunters disappeared than Basin Riders.
George knew that quite a few people at English Petroleum believed he was a Basin Rider and he didn't discourage such thoughts. He kept saying he was a traveling wild-catter, but the Reptisoids in the main office in London were sure he was a Basin Rider. George liked it that way. It gave him a perverse thrill to know that someone somewhere was thinking about him, even if the thoughts weren't the kindest.
Nightfall on Cerebrus was abrupt. With a rotation twice that of earth, there were no lingering, lengthy sunsets. When the sun set --or what everyone on Cerebrus called the sun-- the dark side of the spinning planet went jet black immediately. Near the saw-toothed Sulfur Mountains, night came even sooner because the spine of the range cut the daylight by a good forty-minutes. Once the sun dropped behind the 30,000 foot crest of mountain peaks, inky black shadows, quite literally, sprinted across the canyon floor, filling the valley with darkness.
"Toss some more of that wood on the fire. I'm not going to sit in the dark just because the targor doesn't like fire."
The kid shuffled about in the dark. "Aren't you afraid someone will see the fire?"
"Hell, no. I'm not a Basin Rider. Why should I care if anyone sees the fire?"
"Aren't there a lot of Basin Riders out here? Have you ever seen any?"
"See 'em all the time. They're skittish. Stay away from the main trails -- and big fires like this one. They ride targors out in bush."
"Why don't they use trucks? They could move faster."
George snorted as he felt through his saddlebags for some salt. In the darkness, he could hear the targor gently gnawing on the hunk of meat.
"No vehicle's any good out here." George leaned back against a sulfur boulder, careful not to put too much weight on it. "No gas stations to keep those trucks going. Once the pipelines go in there will be, someday, but not today. Until then, the only thing you can ride across the sulfur plains is a targor."
The sulfur flats weren't really pure sulfur, though they looked that way. Actually, there was quite a bit of what could be called "soil" mixed with the sulfur, enough to support grasses where water was close to the surface. Scrub grew everywhere else, its root networks digging deep for the elusive elixir of life. There were some sulfur dunes but, for the most part, the sulfur plain appeared more like the Nevada desert with the only difference being the color of the soil on Cerebrus was a brown-yellow -- and the dust tasted like sulfur.
"I saw some tread scars back about two hours ago," the kid said breaking the silence. "That means . . . "
". . . nothing," George finished the sentence. "Using a vehicle of any kind out here, even those new-fangled solar-powered jobs, is out of the question. One bit of trouble and you die unless you know how to live off the land and where to find water. It would be a long walk back through this heat. No, a vehicle is only as good as long as it has fuel and oil and water."
"How about a plane?"
"Some of those old bush planes might make it, but why use a plane? What's out here? Just a couple dozen wild-catters, a few Basin Riders and every once in a while, some of those Reptisoid, English Petroleum environmental people. You know, snake people."
"You don't seem to like English Petroleum very much; and you're a wild-catter. You're in the oil business."
George took a deep breath and looked across the fire. For the hundredth time since he found the kid wandering around, apparently lost, he looked at the holes in the kid's shirt where the English Petroleum identification badge usually was. The kid's damn lucky I found him before a Basin Rider did, George thought. Then he answered. "I don't like English Petroleum at all. They did a terrible job on earth, polluting the environment to find oil."
"They were only doing what everyone else was doing."
"No. They were doing it better. As long as they weren't in England, they didn't care what happened. Remember that oil spill in Prudhoe Bay in 1998? There was petroleum goo four feet deep spread over 200 square miles. All English Petroleum said was that they were 'sorry.'"
"Well, they were."
"The only thing they were sorry about was that anyone made a stink about it. Now look what they're doing to Cerebrus."
"What's wrong with what's going on here?"
"What's wrong with it?! When were you born? You don't know what's wrong with going to a planet and deliberately killing every living thing there?"
"English Petroleum is only killing those animals it can't find and transport out."
"Wake up." George waved a chunk of flaming rabbit on the spike before dropping it on the kid's plate. "Where do you think this rabbit came from? Do you think it jumped all the way from Australia? You think this little critter stowed away on a cargo skyrider? Then there are the shrews, hares, lemming, mice, voles and all those other plant-eaters. Those were brought here to eliminate the habitat."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Look. What does the rabbit eat? What do the mice and rabbits and voles eat? They eat anything green, right? Heat and cold don't brother them, right? The only natural predators here are the targor and there aren't that many of them at all."
"Well, there's plenty of food for everything."
"Are you kidding?! Two years ago you could walk from the Celsius Divide to Sulfur Mountains and not see anything but grasslands and green brush. Look at it today. Those Earth animals are eating this land to dirt."
"Well, if that's true then the animals would be eating themselves out of house and home. It would be real stupid for a company to spend a lot of money to cargo in Earth animals that would eat themselves to starvation."
The kid couldn't see it but Bandersnatch George was shaking his head in disgust in the darkness.
"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. 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 24? 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 wild-catter 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 – i.e., 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."
