Challenge #01498-D037: Pay Dirt
There's money in Muck. Points for referencing Harry King, he of the Golden River. -- Anon Guest
Recycling is de rigeur in space. Throwing something out into the void means having less of the thing that made it up in the first place. There's many a spacer who, setting foot on a planet for the first time, is astonished by rain, and water running down the gutters. Or, in the case of Earth, the trash mountains of the United States.
Spacers often make their money from scrounging the things that past peoples have thrown away or abandoned. Air, metal, minerals, even the electrical wiring can prove to be useful. Even the internal atmosphere, regardless of its contents, can be used for something.
Sooner or later, someone will use it or buy it. And some will even eat it.
But the most valuable and rare thing for spacers to encounter, the most precious resource of them all... is viable soil. They generate some out of their own waste or leavings. There's the Compost-O-Matic that churns organic waste into rich food for plant life, but dirt... genuine dirt... is worth more than gold or gemstones.
Everyone knows you can find both of those practically anywhere. The rare stuff is healthy dirt. Dirt that will let plants, vital to restoring atmospheres, grow and flourish. Having plants that are also food is something of a bonus, even if it is frowned upon by the Galactic Nutrition Administration.
The phrase, "struck paydirt" has new meaning in Galactic Society. So when Gor'qax Tirrrq returned from a long haul with the third hold with significant amounts of dirt, other scavengers followed him. They wanted to cash in, too.
They followed hir to a small, rocky planet with vestigial life and very definitely fertile soil. All the way to what was, in essence, a dirt farm. Gor'qax would scrape off topsoil and sterilise the plants into mulch, and leave the stuff underneath to re-fertilise itself on his round trip through the local asteroid belt. Scavengers are not the most ethical of peoples at the best of times, so the vast majority of Gor'qax's stalkers picked an area suitably far away and started following hir lead.
Fortunately the Primitive Planet Protection Patrol is always on alert for Scavengers bringing in too much of a valuable commodity. It took them an astonishingly short two weeks to put it together and come to the rescue of a potentially viable world.
Since so many Scavengers were interested in protecting their investment, it became one among many Dirt Wars that have been fought in Society Territory. And it would definitely not be the last. It was, however, on record as one of the biggest.
Those who profited from their illegally-harvested dirt did not profit well. With each hundred Standard Weight Units they brought in, the price of dirt plummeted. Gor'qax had been careful. His followers had not. They still tell tales of the Great Dirt Crash of '77, even centuries after the crisis passed.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Ig0rZh]
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