Introduced Species [Revised]

          As soon as he had twisted his helmet off, Paul was complaining. “We’re spending a week in this?”
          His wife might have replied, but she was too busy coughing up sand.
          Their guide shrugged. “It happens, mate.”
          “Oh, I bet you’re really sorry,” snapped Paul, sand cascading out of his Foreign Environment suit as he unzipped it. “You’re getting paid for every day we spend out here.”
          Anna touched his shoulder, freeing a hand from trying to rub the sand out of her eyes. “Please, Paul, don’t talk like that.” She was about to say something else but instead erupted into a fit of coughing, releasing as many grains of sand into the air as germs.
          Paul slipped out of his boots, pulled off his gloves, and shoved the whole Foreign Environment suit into one of the cubby holes next to the pressure cleaning airlock. One of the outpost workers gave him a reproachful glance, but Paul glared right back. The FE suits were so old and holey he could have gotten better protection from a rain poncho.
          Paul surveyed the outpost while assisting his coughing wife out of her own suit. The place stunk of old air, a smell Paul had almost grown accustomed to on his and his wife’s trek across the galaxy. There were other smells too, ones he was too afraid to try and identify. Machinery chugged in the background, obscuring the sounds of talk from around the room.
          There was a bar at one end, serving beer and freeze-dried foods. Its patrons seemed to be stranded space travelers for the most part, along with a few unlucky ones who called the planet home. They were all alike, however, in that they were all coated in sand.
          The building shivered under a gust of wind. Paul winced and picked up their bags, leading the teary-eyed Anna towards the bar. Ridley, their guide, had gathered the rest of their luggage and was already headed in that direction.
          Ridley and Anna dumped their bags at a table, hardly garnering a glance from the bar’s patrons, while Paul ordered a water from the bar.
          He looked down at the discolored liquid he was served. “I asked for water,” he said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.
          “That’s what I gave you.” said the tender. “You want something else?”
          “No thanks,” muttered Paul.
          He slipped onto the bench, next to Anna, who had graduated from coughing to sneezing. “Here, drink this slowly. It might help.” Hopefully it wouldn’t make her any worse. He tried to dig some of the sand out of his ear. “I can’t wait for a shower.”
          Ridley grimaced. “Not much chance of that, mate. No showers here, water’s too scarce. Just pressure cleaners.”
          “I should have guessed.” He had known this trip was a mistake all along.
          The beginning had started off fairly well; their departure from Earth had gone without a hitch. As soon as they jumped off of Centauri Prime, however, things began to go wrong.
          Their original guide, an old friend of Paul’s, had taken ill and they were dumped with Ridley, The Plucky Australian. Things had gotten steadily worse: the usually healthy and spry Anna came down with something horrible after three days, while Paul’s stomach turned to mush for hours during and after every jump. Luggage had been lost, wrong turns had been taken, and impossibly expensive bills had been paid.
          And now this, stranded on a planet that didn’t even have a name--its official designation was 3656-R. It was a week before a transport could be spared to jump them to the New Zurich system, their final destination. 3656-R had looked mildly appealing from space, although Anna’s comment that the cloud and sand looked like marshmallow and peanut butter hadn’t helped Paul’s stomach.
          As soon as they landed, 3656-R’s appeal dropped into the negative. Two elements prevailed on 3656-R: sand and wind. The wind blew the sand into the planet’s pitiful landing zone, into their wheeled transport, and into their Foreign Environment suits. And, judging by the sand piled up under the table, into Outpost 3656-R2.
          Paul watched his wife. The trip was for her. It had been her dream, her hope, her dedication that had brought them this far. She was the risk-taker of the pair, the reason for their success. They owned and operated Floworks, Earth’s largest independently owned plumbing business. It had been listed as one of the most valued properties on Earth, for the simple reason that it had never been consumed by the Corporations.
          Anna detested the Corporations; even when the competition was extremely fierce and the offers had been immensely appealing, she had held firm. And their persistence had been rewarded. With the last few years’ anti-Corporation backlash, Floworks had become immensely popular, making the two of them immensely rich.
          For all her hatred of the Corporations, Anna was not opposed to gaining from their loss. After a relatively short, but bloody, conflict, the United States of America had dissolved the Pacific Corporation, leaving all its earthly and interstellar holdings literally up for grabs. Taking advantage of the post-war confusion, Anna packed their bags, left the company temporarily in the hands of a trusted friend and chartered them a transport to Centauri Prime. New Zurich 6 was a planet in the early stages of colonization, though slowed and confused by the loss of Corporation funding. The pragmatic Anna decided they would set up on the new planet to provide quality plumbing and water control for the colonists, something every colony desperately needed.
          It was a good plan, but Paul was worried. He was the number-cruncher of the pair, and knew the status of their bank account much better than Anna did. Their fortune had gotten them a mansion in New England, nice cars for the both of them, and had sent their daughters to college campuses while their friends took VR classes from home. But it was just barely enough to get them to New Zurich and back.
          Independent interstellar travel was still restricted to the most privileged of the elite, the chosen few individuals besides the Corporations who could spend the millions of dollars needed to pay for interstellar travel. The trip had taken far more than Paul had ever imagined; he’d be surprised if they had enough money to rent a room on New Zurich 6, let alone start up a business. But still he refused to give up, for Anna’s sake.
          He nudged her. “Come on, let’s go find our room.”
          As usual, Ridley offered to help carry the bags, but Paul just shook his head. Alone with Anna in a hotel room was the only place where Pail could reach something near a good mood. The guide’s perpetually cheery attitude only grated on him.
          They collected their key and Paul helped Anna up the stairs. Their room was small and sparse, with no windows and plenty of sand. Anna collapsed onto the bed, while Paul tried the pressure cleaner to get the sand out of his nooks and crannies. He quit in disgust, however, after simultaneously knocking both elbows against the cramped sides of the pressure cleaner and then discovering that more sand was coming out of the hose than was being blown off of him. He changed into a new, though not necessarily sand-free, pair of clothes and fell onto the bed next to Anna.

The sand felt surprisingly good between Paul’s toes. He yawned and stretched, checking his wristwatch, hoping no sand had gotten inside.
          He had slept nearly 3 hours and was still tired. Space travel was hard on his aging body--he silently swore that if he ever returned to Earth he would never leave solid ground again. He might not ever go to the beach again, for that matter.
          He gently shook Anna’s shoulder. She rolled over to face him, her eyes half-closed. “Come on, dear, let’s go find something to eat,” Paul said.
          Anna yawned and used Paul’s shoulder to pull herself upright. “How long have we slept?”
          “Three hours.”
          “Three hours? Feels like three days.”
          “We’re too old for this.”
          “I am not too old for this,” said Anna, her severe tone only slightly lessened by a stuffy nose, “And neither are you. You are too old to be grumbling and complaining.” She stood up and slipped back into her shoes. “I am going to go get something to eat.”
          Paul locked the door behind his wife and followed her, a bit grudgingly, down the stairs.
          The bar was livelier, which was to say there was slightly more background noise then there had been three hours earlier.
          Just as Paul sat down at the bar he saw Ridley at the other end of the room, waving to him. He was sitting at a booth with another man.
          “Let’s go sit with Ridley, dear,” said Anna, “You’d better not be rude.”
          “Get any sleep?” asked their guide as they sat down.
          “Oh yes, we slept wonderfully,” said Anna.
          Ridley motioned to his friend. “This is an old mate of mine. Maverick, meet Paul and Anna Wilson.”
          Paul shook the man’s outstretched hand. It was hard and knobby, rather like the man’s face, which was weather-worn and permanently tanned. His stringy black hair fell down to the shoulders of his leather jacket.
          “Do you live here?” asked Anna.
          He shook his head and took a sip of his drink. “Used to. I’m just in town for my job. I’m jumping off on the next flight.”
          “Really? What do you do?”
          He shrugged. “Not much of anything since Pacific cleared out.”
          “You used to work for the Pacific Corporation?”
          “Yeah.”
          “Ah.” One syllable had managed to convey all of Anna’s loathing for the Corporations.
          Maverick stared right back at her. “You’d be hard pressed to find someone this far from earth who doesn’t, or didn’t, work for the Corporations. Not everyone is as well off as you, Mrs. Wilson.”
          The table was quiet for a moment. Ridley was obviously uneasy. “I don’t know if I said, but Anna and Paul are headed out to New Zurich.”
          “Ah,” said Maverick. “Beautiful system. Very nice place.”
          “Maverick’s been all over the galaxy.” said Ridley, “He did all kinds of things for the Pacific Corporation.”
          Maverick looked up from his drink to meet Anna’s eyes. “Yeah, I’ve been around. Seen lots of stuff happen. Trust me, I hate the Pacific Corporation just as much as you do. Probably more. They never tried to do you in, did they? Nah, they wouldn’t have dared something like that on Earth. But out here...different rules.” He made a fist and stuck out his arm, pulling the sleeve back to reveal a long, nasty scar down the length of his forearm. “Got that one, and others, when they sent their thugs to kill me. I killed them instead.”
          “Why’d they try to kill you?” asked Paul.
          “Because I saw things I wasn’t supposed to see. I was there on Eden 3.”
          Paul laughed.
          “What, don’t believe me?”
          “Well, I always thought Eden 3 was government propaganda. You’re saying it’s real?”
          “It’s real, alright. Most of what you’ve heard...that’s real too. The wildest stories I’ve heard aren’t even that far from the truth. I was there from beginning to end. I saw it all.”
          After a brief silence, Paul spoke up. “Why don’t you tell us about it? We’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”
          Maverick shook his head. “I’ve tried to tell other people, but they just laughed it off. Said it would make a great dystopian novel. A great comedy of errors.”
          Paul knew Anna would have no problem believing whatever Maverick would say about the Corporations, no matter how far-fetched it might seem. As for himself, it wasn’t like he had any pressing engagements. “Tell us.”
          He looked down into his drink. “I’ll need another beer first.”

          Eden 3 wasn’t the planet’s original name. Originally it was one of those generic placeholder names Pacific used until someone bought the right to name the planet. Free Enterprise 3, or something like that. It doesn’t matter, because only official reports called it that. Everyone else called it Eden.
          It deserved its name, too. The slant of its axis and its distance from its sun made it into a planetary paradise. There was tropical weather even up to the poles, plenty of water, and the air was actually healthier for you than air back on Earth. The planet’s ecosystem was mostly herbivorous; there was nothing like the Centurian dreadnaughts or Betelgeusian hyrdras. It was perfect for human habitation.
          Its plant life was far more diverse than Earth’s, some of the most diverse I’ve ever seen. So naturally that meant that there were a whole lot more edible plant types than Earth. There were thousands of fruit species just begging to be exported. They had fruits that tasted like grapes, like apples, like pears, like oranges, like strange mixtures in-between. Ones so good or bizarre I couldn’t describe them to you.
          But a shipload of Pacific Corporation bigwigs arrived a few months after our first settlement. They pretty much ignored all the native species; instead they were there to find out what kind of Earthly flora could grow there. In the end, they decided that the climate was perfect for coconuts.

          “Coconuts? You must be joking.” said Paul
          Maverick was annoyed. “I guess I’ll stop there, then.”
          “No, no, keep going.” said Anna, speaking up.
          “Only if you promise not to interrupt me again.”
          “We promise,” said Anna, glaring at Paul.

          Anyways, they did some tests and decided that Eden 3 was going to be a coconut producing planet. They shipped in about a thousand coconut farmers from all over the world, along with enough coconut seeds to cover half the planet’s landmass with coconut trees.
          They started up about five coconut farms just to see the results. They seemed to go alright. Within a few months they had a sizable harvest of coconuts, which they tested for Quality Control. When the coconuts arrived, the testers discovered that each coconut had one or two small holes drilled into the shell. One particularly bright guy decided to stick his finger inside, and when he pulled it back out he was missing about half of it.
         As it turns out, there was a particular species of insect on Eden 3 that burrowed into shelled fruits and laid their eggs inside. The Quality Control center was crawling with them. They eventually burned all the coconuts and got rid of all the bugs, but they still had a problem.
          Normally Pacific wouldn’t have any qualms about shipping a load of coconuts stuffed with carnivorous bugs back to Earth, but this was at about the same time that the whole USDA/Martian Llama ordeal was going on, and I’m sure you all remember how that one turned out. On the other hand, this deal was very important to them. I think the Taiwanese Mafia was involved somehow, but we don’t want to get into that. Instead of abandoning the coconuts and harvesting the native flora instead, the bigwigs refused to take no for an answer, leaving their subordinates with the problem of how to deal with the bugs. And, in true Pacific fashion, they bungled it.
         Now, the planetary overseer at this point was a pretty nice guy; I got to talk with him on a few occasions. He was alright as Corporation execs go, but he was about average Corporation intelligence--meaning he was about as smart as a cow.
         Somehow this guy got it down that pesticides and viral agents were bad for the environment, and decided to explore a more “organic” route. They tried growing the coconuts in quarantined greenhouses, but the excess heat only accelerated the bugs’ gestation period and they ended up with some very unhappy and very hand-less coconut pickers. They tried a few other methods, but none of them had any effect. Eventually, though, one of the overseer’s subordinates hit upon a bright idea.
         The bugs were pretty much on the top of their food chain on Eden 3, so the Pacific overseer decided to introduce a species to take care of them. They brought in a whole shipload of some reptilian species from another planet that ate insects with body structures similar to the ones that were destroying the coconuts. I forget what their scientific name was; we just called them “monitors.” In theory, they were supposed to take care of the offending insects so the coconut production could resume.
          They dumped about fifty of the things into the wild around the coconut farms, and continued growing. But when they got the next shipment, they still were crawling with bugs.
          You see, the overseer and his fellow Executive Idiots in Charge failed to realize that the monitors were ground dwellers, while the insects were primarily arboreal. They never came into contact with each other. They did autopsies on some of the monitors, and the only instance they ever found in which a monitor had eaten one of the insects was when it had picked up a dead one from the ground.
          Of course, no one at Pacific was smart enough to figure it out. They hired a whole team of cosmobiologists to find out was going on. They had their answer within a day, as well as a team of very angry scientists. The four of them got locked in the brig so they couldn’t get word out about what Pacific was doing.
          So now Pacific had two problems on their hands: the insects, which were still destroying their coconut harvests; and the monitors, which were disrupting the ecosystem.
          The decision-makers decided that the most important thing was the coconuts. So they hired a new overseer. The new guy was meaner than the first, but just as dumb. Thanks to Pacific’s Darwinian executive training system, he was convinced that it was his predecessor’s stupidity, not his methodology, that had created the problem. So he decided to introduce another species onto Eden 3.
          Now that they knew that the bugs were arboreal, they decided to get another flying species to take care of them. They were a bit more careful this time. They did some tests, and they found a species from another planet that would eat the bugs. So they brought in a bunch of them. They were beautiful. Golden fur, big, multi-colored feathers. Deadly, too. They could decapitate a cat with one swoop. Born and bred killers.
          They trained the birds to eat the bugs, and set them loose. After a week or two, they started going out to see how their birds were doing. And they came back with corpses. Lots of corpses. Half of the ones they introduced were dead within the first two weeks.
          So they did some autopsies. Found out that another species was killing them off. It turned out to be the same species that was eating the coconuts. They were sneaking into the nests at night and eating the birds’ eyes out. And why didn’t Pacific anticipate this beforehand? Because they had only tested the birds on dead bugs.
          At this point, the overseer decided that the coconuts weren’t worth it. He canceled the seed shipments, sent the workers home, and shut down the coconut farms. They decided to start cultivating a native species, and for a bit, it seemed like there was actually someone semi-competent in charge.
          But it didn’t stop there. Oh no. They couldn’t just forget all their problems and start over. They still had to deal with the species they had introduced. The birds were no problem, they were dead and forgotten within a month. The monitors, however, were very much alive.
         Like I said before, the planet’s ecosystem was mostly herbivorous. The monitors had no competitors in the area. They were faster, smarter and tougher than all the other carnivores. They tore through the food chain like tornadoes, eating like pigs and reproducing like rabbits.
          Introducing species was a fairly common practice on Earth back when they didn’t understand the full ecological repercussions. Sometimes the introduced species would fit right in with the ecosystem, other times it would be a nuisance, and other times it would completely destroy the ecosystem. Even when it did, it would decades before the ecosystem was adversely affected on a large scale.
          All this on Eden 3 happened within about a year and a half. Usually, all animals on a planet are based off the same basic structure and design. But when you start introducing species between planets, you start mixing completely alien organisms. And then you never know what’s going to happen. In this case, the monitors were so alien that the native fauna couldn’t stand up to them at all.
          But of course, nobody really noticed this, or cared, until the monitors started getting bold enough to attack humans. When a few of their farming crews came back from the fields with fewer appendages than they had started out with, the overseer and his cronies decided something needed to be done.
          They started up “Kill A Monitor” days, when anyone who brought in a monitor corpse got a hundred dollars. It seemed like a good idea; we didn’t have to worry about over-hunting because total extinction was the objective. It was moderately enjoyable, too, a whole lot better than the falquark hunting I was raised on back home on Ursa Minor Epsilon. Pretty soon, though, they became “Kill A Monitor” weeks, and then “Kill A Monitor” months. There were just too many of the things.
          They shut down all the Netfeeds, closed all the bars and started issuing guns to everyone. Monitor killing became the only thing anyone could do for fun. Most of the men took to it rather well, and pretty soon there was a steady stream of monitor corpses piling up around the colony.
          But it wasn’t enough. For every corpse they brought in, there were two more to kill. The things just wouldn’t die.
          So, in a brilliant move, they decided to stop the monitors from eating all the native creatures by killing off all the native creatures that the monitors ate. And so-

          Paul tried to keep his beer inside his mouth from exploding all over the table, and succeeded, at least for the most part. “You cannot be serious.”
          Maverick raised his right hand. “On my honor.”
          “That’s what I thought the first time I heard it,” said Ridley.
          Paul shook his head. “Okay, I’m sorry, keep going.” He shook his head again. Anna was quiet, her arms crossed, waiting for Maverick to begin again.

          And so that’s what they did. They switched their campaign from killing monitors to killing everything else. People went wild. Started taking explosives and blowing whole acres off the face of the planet. Fighting each other for hunting grounds. Soon people started getting killed because they trespassed on other people’s claims.
          The whole colony would have gone up in smoke if the Pacific bigwigs hadn’t figured out that Eden 3 wasn’t producing any more coconuts. Heads rolled; the overseer was terminated. They reopened all the farms, brought back all the growers, and started shipping in coconut seeds again. The new overseer they installed was meaner than the second one had been, and dumber than either of the first two. His first order of business was to put an end to the killing campaigns, much to the chagrin of the colonists. After a while, though, most people pretty much forgot about the monitors altogether.
         The new man in charge had an epiphany. Like the second overseer, he knew it wasn’t that the concept of introducing species was bad; it was because his predecessors had been incompetent. Of course he wouldn’t make the same mistakes they had made.
         So instead of introducing a species from another planet, he would bring in a species native to Eden 3. And they’d bring in a species from the same landmass, too, so that the impact would be as lessened as possible.
          They did all the tests, and finally brought in another species of bird that consisted mainly on bugs like the coconut eaters. They gathered up all the birds they could and brought them north to the coconut farms.
          When their next shipment of coconuts came in, it was bug-free. And their next shipment--no bugs. And their next--no bugs. Their problem, it seemed, was solved.
But their shipments were growing smaller. The second bug-free shipment only had half the coconuts that the first did. The third had half of that.
          Now, this guy knew very well what had happened to the first two overseers, and had no intention of having the same happen to him. He temporarily halted production and turned all his attention towards the new coconut problem.
         As it turns out, another species was eating their coconuts. They put some cameras up around their farms and soon discovered the culprit. The closest parallel to an Earth animal would have to be a sloth, although this one was omnivorous and not slothful at all. It could eat five, six coconuts in one sitting, and there were hundreds of them, coming night after night to eat the coconuts.
          They got the four cosmobiologists they had locked up to find out what the problem was in return for being set free. In less than three days, they had their answer. The sloths were from the same area as the birds. They had relied on the birds as a primary food source, and when the birds had been moved north, the sloths had followed. When they reached the coconut farms, however, they discovered that the coconuts were better and completely forgot about the birds.
          The Pacific overseer was so mad that he locked the cosmobiologists right back up again. He was at his wit’s end at this point, having reached the limit of his brain’s creative and cognitive abilities. He threw a few tantrums, terminated a few employees, and probably would have killed us all if it hadn’t so happened that—

         A glass shattered on the ground nearby. Anna let out a little yelp.
         A scuffle had started a few booths down between some apparently drunk space travelers, but Maverick and Ridley had ignored it. Now, though, things were getting a little heated.
         Maverick sighed. “Free-loaders. Excuse me a moment.”
         He slid out of the booth and strode over to where the two men were grappling at each other’s throats. He stepped between them and pushed them apart. “Cut it out.”
         One of the drunk men took a swipe at his head and missed. Maverick ignored him and turned to the more sober second one. “Sit back down.”
         The man squinted at him and raised a pair of shaky fists. “Mind yer own bis’ness.”
         “When you started throwing mugs around, it became my business. Sit down.”
         The first man took another swing and went careening into a pair of chairs. The talk around the room had quieted and most everyone was watching Maverick.
         The second man punched. Maverick dodged the blow and sunk his own into the man’s stomach. The man skittered backwards, bent over double and wheezing.
         “I said, sit down.”
         The man grunted and pulled something from his back pocket. Anna gasped.
         A wave of muted surprise passed over the room. It was a gun, supposedly outlawed in this sector of the galaxy. Paul watched nervously, Ridley looked only the least bit perturbed.
          Other men, with Maverick’s no-nonsense looks about them, began to stand. “N’body move or I’ll shoot ‘im!” cried the drunk man.
          They ignored the man, as did Maverick. With an almost causal swipe, he knocked the gun out of the man’s hand, twisted his arm around his back, and shoved the man face first into the table.
          The man groaned. “You’ll sit down now,” said Maverick loudly, “Or else I’ll get the Sheriff. I assure you he’s not as gentle as I am.” He let the man roll over onto one of the booth’s couches. He picked up the gun, tucked in his jacket pocket, and cast a glance over at the second drunk man. He was sound asleep on the floor, his face resting in a patch of sand.
         When it became clear that no other disturbance was forthcoming, the other men sat down and Maverick returned to the booth, dusting off his arms. “Sorry about that.”
         “What did you mean by ‘free-loader’?” asked Anna.
          Maverick shrugged. “They’re cast-offs and stowaways some, criminals mostly. A lot of them are what’s left of the Pacific bureaucracy. They still think they have the run of the sector. Few of them have ever done a hard day’s work in their life.” He waved his arm around the room. “Us, we’re the grunts, the laborers. We’re the ones that made this all possible. We put up with the Corporation when we had too, but now that they’re gone we’re putting up with any mischief from them. We built this sector; now it’s ours.”
          “I see,” said Anna. Her view of Maverick seemed to be improving.
          “Anyways,” he said, “Should I go on? Or have you had enough?”
          “No, no, it’s fascinating,” said Paul, shaking his head. “Disturbingly fascinating, that is.”
          Maverick shrugged. “Alright then.”

         As I was saying, the guy would have gone on a rampage if the animals hadn’t gone on one first.
         Remember the monitors? Nobody on Eden 3 did. So when they started turning up dead, people were a bit confused. Then they started finding the dead sloths, and somebody made the connection.
         You see, both the monitors and the sloths were dominant predators. The monitors had had the run of the roost for quite awhile, and the arrival of the sloths disturbed them, to say the least. There were so many of the monitors and so many of the sloths that it became impossible for the ecosystem to support them both. So they decided to try and balance the equation.
         It became impossible to leave the living compounds. Just stepping outside was frightening enough. The whole forest would be ringing with monitor bellows and sloth squeals. Pretty soon, though, the smell overwhelmed the sounds. The forest floor was literally covered with sloth and monitor corpses, and the stench was unbearable.
         If the carnage had been allowed to continue, the sloths might have wiped the monitors out. As much as they had multiplied, the reptiles were hopelessly outnumbered. Another month or so and they would have been gone for good.
         But two things happened. The Pacific bigwigs started wondering why coconut production had dropped, and the overseer’s air filters broke down and he had a fit about the stench. He decided to end the conflict.
         First he poisoned the entire coconut crop, which killed about half of the sloths right off. Then, like the second overseer, he started handing out weapons. Instead of offering prizes for the corpses, though, he made us work for food. He hoarded all the foodstuffs in his compound and rationed it out in return for sloth corpses.
         This campaign was understandably much less popular than the first one had been. Quite a few of us almost died of starvation. Others were killed by monitors or sloths. Even more got sick or died from diseases acquired from the corpses.
         After a month or so of this, the surrounding forest was emptied of sloths. The overseer was estatic…until he remembered about the bugs.
         He tried unlocking the four cosmobiologists, but they’d gone nearly insane watching everything that was going on. So he shipped in a team of Pacific’s own scientists. Now, Pacific’s standards of education for scientists are only a little bit higher than the ones for their janitorial corps. These guys didn’t even have a grasp of elementary Earth biology, let alone complex interstellar biology.
          Most of the chemical and bacterial agents they tested didn’t have any effect, but the overseer was pushing them hard. Eventually they came up with a viral agent that worked; the overseer rushed it into production.
          It worked. The bugs died, coconut production resumed. The overseer thought he was in the clear. Of course, we know better.
          You see, whether from being rushed or by pure ineptitude, the Pacific scientists had designed the virus to attack a protein that was essential to all life on the planet. The bugs died, the sloths died, the plants died. Even the monitors started getting sick.
         That was about the time I called it quits--

          “All of us who weren’t directly employed by Pacific canceled our contracts and shipped out. The coconuts weren’t profitable, we weren’t getting paid, so there was no reason to stay.”
          “So what did the overseer do next?”
         “Nothing. He had a heart attack when everything started dying. Pacific leadership took direct control of the planet, and things only got worse from there.
          “Worse? How could it get any worse?” demanded Anna. “They’ve practically destroyed the entire planet.”
         Maverick smiled humorlessly. “On the contrary, there was still a sizable chunk of planet left unharmed. Pacific wanted to cut their losses. At this point, though, all they had left were nuclear weapons.”
          “No,” Anna gasped.
          “They wanted to contain the virus so it couldn’t escape and infect other parts of the planet. They nuked the entire continent; dumped a few million megatons on it. Glassed everything.”
          Paul had a feeling what came next. “Except the virus.”
          “Except the virus.”
          No one spoke for a moment.
          Maverick stretched and stood. “I’ve got to go. Need to pack, I’m heading to the next station. They need some maintenance work done, and I need some cash.” He shook Paul’s and Ridley’s hands. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Wilson, Mrs. Wilson. I’ll see you around, Ridley.”
          “See ya, mate,” said the guide.
          “Wait, Maverick,” said Paul. Maverick looked back. “So is the planet even still around?” asked Paul, “Or did they nuke the whole thing?”
          “No, it’s still around. Not much left on it, though.”
          “What’s left?”
          He shrugged. “Look outside, see for yourself.”
          The table was quiet in his wake.
          “Did he really mean....?” asked Anna.
          Paul looked at the floor, at the sand piled up around the column of the table.
          “Well? What do you think?”
          Paul thought for a moment. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat another coconut again.”