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Guide Entry: Planet Earth
by Tony Beswick
Guide Entry for Earth:
When the Galaxy was young, yobplanets menaced society.
The worst was a scrap of driftrock tagged ‘Dearth inVader’. The kid was trouble with a capital ‘T’. There wasn’t any law. You hired whatever drifted in.
Marshall was the meanest spacerock you ever saw: small, red with a deep gash right across his cheek A ‘cooler’; he waited while the rocks wrecked the joint. Then he pounced. He rolled some of the sickest psychoplanets into the nearest star. It wasn’t pretty but it worked. The spacetrails got sponged.
The galaxy was growing up when he rolled into Dearth’s patch.
Mona was Dearth’s gal. A flashy dresser, she hung close in a skintight orbit around him. Things were ugly on the spiral arm’s edge. As his posse swerved sunwards, Dearth rolled the local Godfather who, one trick left, sent a shower of comets in after the raiders. One caught Dearth’s eye. Mona went ballistic. Swinging the floozy inboard, but already too close, her collision was a gritgrinder.
Dearth’s ‘D’ layer bumper was ‘totaled’. Mona was skyash.
Their daughter was nothing like either of her parents: Cool, quiet, elegant and airless. Marsh took ‘incoming’. His ‘H’ layer shocked off, his lawman’s days were over. The kid had reminded him of himself.
His last report to the board was terse: He was retiring here.
The Moon kept her Dad straight. Losing her Mom had creased him.
Green stubble and oceans of tears shed for his lost love made him the bluest planet in space. The new Mars wired his boss: Earth was ‘Mostly Harmless’.
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