SCIFI-BABE.COM - Ghu'Ka has technology others want, but won't pay for.

When Ghu'Ka developed the technology to rebuild its eco-system,
others wanted it, too. But they didn't want to pay for it.

Kamil Towra's life had been fairly uneventful - apart, that is, for the birth of his two daughters. When he originally took the government employment examination and came out in the top three percent of applicants, his rise to the top should have been assured; but beaurocracies have a way of holding back the careers of the talented in favor of the 'connected'. Still, two years ago he had put that disappointment behind him, and for a good reason: his employers, The Ghu'Ka Department of Sanitation, Water and Clean Air, of which he was the thirteenth administrative deputy assistant, had pulled off a masterstroke. They had managed to figure out how to deal with pollution at a molecular level. That's not new, of course. All methods currently employed use some kind of extraction or separation technique - usually chemical, or physical filtration, or simple accumulation in plant roots - to remove pollutants from the environment. None of them, however, used the Ghu'Ka D.S.W.C.A. method: Anti-pollutants. It was a revelation! By carefully analyzing the individual pollutants involved, the D.S.W.C.A. came up with a cleansing process, which was a quantum jump ahead of even the advanced extraction systems in use on Casawaia Prime, where vast lakes were being given a new lease of life by the deployment of massive ultra-sound and chemical 'digester' platforms. The D.S.W.C.A.'s anti-pollution solution was exactly that: pollutants that are the exact opposite of those already in the environment, and which, therefore, cancel them out.

When the first, one-tenth scale, working model was commissioned more than twenty years ago, it initially made matters considerably worse. In fact, more than seven hundred people in a nearby fishing village died in less than a week. Engineers were attacked by grieving survivors. Three were actually killed! It took them a further three months to figure out what was wrong. The quantities of anti-pollutants being produced by the equipment were in excess of the pollutants they were trying to remove from the muddy estuary of the River Cong'Na. They were, in fact, replacing one kind of pollution with another, much more deadly one. Adjustments were made, feedback circuits were redesigned and recalibrated, and the 'Detoxa', as it came to be called, was turned on once more. This time, there were no mistakes. It worked like a dream, cleaning up twenty miles of contaminated estuary and river in a few days. A second, one-tenth scale, Detoxa was commissioned, and a third, and a fourth. At the end of the five year trial, forty-seven were in place and functioning at full capacity. The decision to go to the full-sized Detoxa was taken at a full meeting of the D.S.W.C.A. board of governors, twelve years ago. Funding was already in place and construction at the abandoned Hag'Ma mining complex was begun without delay. The Detoxa they were building was huge! When completed, each of its eighty-six exhaust stacks - through which the anti-pollutants would be dispersed into the atmosphere - would be five hundred feet high, and emit six million drusa-cola (metric tons) of anti-pollutants a year. It became operational two and a half years ago. Within six months, the air quality close to the plant improved dramatically. Water purity in nearby streams and rivers increased significantly. The D.S.W.C.A. declared the Hag'Ma installation a resounding success, and plans were drawn up to commence construction of a second plant at Cooch'Ta. Then, a dreadful thing happened: uninvited guests arrived from the neighboring world of Patagor, intent on acquiring this technology for themselves. Advanced, they were. Pleasant, they were not. Indeed, they swaggered into the D.S.W.C.A. headquarters building and demanded to be taken to the Governor in Chief, himself. Well, no one gets to see the 'Chief' without an appointment, and the clerk at the desk in the foyer told them so. His courteously delivered explanation was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a small hole, which went clean through his head, from front to back. The individual who fired the weapon probably didn't realize it at the time, but he had just established the manner in which relations would be conducted between the two worlds for the foreseeable future. Armed guards removed the Patagorian delegation from Ghu'Ka's green and pleasant land a few seconds after the clerk died, and war was declared by Patagor's Mnu'Chu'Hagh (President Elect) within hours. The first attack on Ghu'Ka came one day later. It targeted the Hag'Ma complex. An area of more than ten thousand square miles was rendered uninhabitable in a microsecond. The atmosphere immediately above the complex was overwhelmed by anti-pollutants, and rendered poisonous. The jet stream dispersed the anti-pollutants across the planet in a matter of a few hours. Air quality was soon worse than it was before the Detoxas were first tested. Last minute pleas for a cease fire fell on deaf Patagorian ears. A second salvo took out the D.S.W.C.A. headquarters building. The research files were destroyed, along with one hundred of Ghu'Ka's finest engineers. That was just a year ago.

Present day Ghu'Ka is a ghost planet: devoid of people, of animal, and of plant life. The six trial Detoxas still functioning pour out a vile mixture of choking, noxious hydrocarbons, while the sea sort of slurps, stiffly, covered as it is by colonies of algae more than a mile thick.

Patagor is little better off. Its own seas are polluted beyond even the considerable capacity of Ghu'Ka's incredible invention to repair. Unable to visit Ghu'Ka to recover one of the working model Detoxas for examination and possible duplication, its stupid, warlike leadership have condemned their people to spend the rest of their uncertain future looking extinction right in the eye. More importantly, they have denied the rest of us the incalculable benefits of Ghu'Ka's extraordinary technology. All that now remains of this unique project was found in Kamil Towra's wallet, when his dead body was washed up on the beach at Win'Chari, in Sici'Chip Province: a creased photgraphic image of one of the first, development Detoxas, carefully screened from prying eyes by fresh plantings of trees and shrubs.