"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 16 - Snakes Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

her roving senses detect anything like a threat in the immediate mental vicinity. Pip decided she could
safely leave Flinx for a while.

The other objects of her concern, the offspring of her recent union on Alaspin with a solidly muscled
minidrag named Balthazaar, were presently elsewhere, busily engaged in the hunts that were part of a mini-
drag's early education. She would have felt better about leaving Flinx had her progeny been around to
watch over him in her absence, but the call swept over her again, insistent, mournful.

Slowly she slid free of her branch. Below, Flinx snuffled in his sleep, dreaming of matters as
incomprehensible to her as they were important to him. Flinx's own mental abilities often weighed heavily
on him.

Children playing nearby saw the brilliant pleated wings of pink and blue unfurl. They stared open-
mouthed at the leathery, supple beauty of the flying snake, ignorant of the lethal danger those wings
represented. They watched with guileless fascination as the exquisitely jeweled creature climbed into the
cloying dampness of Moth's air, spiraled above the chiming treetops, and soared southward out of the city.




Knigta Yakus would have traded a twenty-carat hal-lowseye for a glass of water. As events had
developed, the sunken-chested old graybeard was one of the few men in the Commonwealth who could
readily have made such an offer.

After eight despairing months in the High Desert of Moth's Dead-Place-on-Map he'd discovered a
pocket of the rare orange gems extensive enough to support a dozen people in baroque splendor for the
rest of their lives. Now he survived partly on the thought of the expressions his discovery would produce
on the faces of the boasting rheumy wrecks who inhabited the sandy dives of Edgedune Town.

They had assured him he'd find nothing but sand and a dessicated death in the vast wastelands of Dead-
Place-on-Map. And they'd laughed at him.

One hand reached into the left pocket of his torn overalls and fondled what would be an eloquent
rebuttal to every taunt and cheap joke. It was the single crystal he was bringing out with him: an electric-
orange translucent lump of basic alumina-silicate weighing some two hundred and twelve carats. Properly
cut, it would display a remarkable simulacrum of a human eye in its center, an eye that would stare back at
whoever looked at it. A well-cut hallowseye also produced an emotional response in whoever saw it, a
response generated not by beauty but by peculiar piezoelectric fields within the stone itself.

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 Foster, Alan Dean - Commonwealth 16 - Flinx - Snakes Eyes (SS) (v1.0)



This particular gem would finance his return to the High Desert, a decently equipped return with proper
equipment. After that, he'd mine-out the lode and then he would never have to work another day of his
life. But if he didn't find water very soon, he might not have another day of his life left not to work in.

For the hundredth time he reminded himself that this desperate situation was his own damned fault.
With ten months' supplies he'd confidently marched into Dead-Place-on-Map, knowing full well that in the