"H. Beam Piper - Fuzzy Papers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

He always did. He could remember at least a thousand blast-shots he had fired back along the years
and on more planets than he could name at the moment, including a few thermonuclears, but they were all
different and they were always something to watch, even a little one like this. Flipping the switch, his
thumb found the discharger button and sent out a radio impulse; the red rag vanished in an upsurge of
smoke and dust that mounted out of the gorge and turned to copper when the sunlight touched it. The big
manipulator, weightless on contragravity, rocked gently; falling debris pelted the trees and splashed in the
little stream.

He waited till the machine stabilized, then glided it down to where he had ripped a gash in the cliff
with the charge of cataclysmite. Good shot: brought down a lot of sandstone, cracked the vein of flint and
hadn't thrown it around too much. A lot of big slabs were loose. Extending the forward claw-arms, he
pulled and tugged, and then used the underside grapples to pick up a chunk and drop it on the flat ground
between the cliff and the stream. He dropped another chunk on it, breaking both of them, and then
another and another, until he had all he could work over for the rest of the day. Then he set down, got
the toolbox and the long-handled contragravity lifter, and climbed to the ground where he opened the
box, put on gloves and an eyescreen and got out a microray scanner and a vibrohammer.

The first chunk he cracked off had nothing in it; the scanner gave the uninterrupted pattern of
homogenous structure. Picking it up with the lifter, he swung it and threw it into the stream. On the
fifteenth chunk, he got an interruption pattern that told him that a sunstone--or something, probably
something--was inside.

Some fifty million years ago, when the planet that had been called Zarathustra (for the last
twenty-five) was young, there had existed a marine life form, something like a jellyfish. As these died,
they had sunk into the sea-bottom ooze; sand had covered the ooze and pressed it tighter and tighter,
until it had become glassy flint, and the entombed jellyfish little beans of dense stone. Some of them, by
some ancient biochemical quirk, were intensely thermofluorescent; worn as gems, they glowed from the
wearer's body heat.

On Terra or Baldur or Freya or Islitar, a single cut of polished sunstone was worth a small fortune.
Even here, they brought respectable prices from the Zarathustra Company's gem buyers. Keeping his
point of expectation safely low, he got a smaller vibrohammer from the toolbox and began chipping
cautiously around the foreign object, until the flint split open and revealed a smooth yellow ellipsoid, half
an inch long.

"Worth a thousand sols-if it's worth anything," he commented. A deft tap here, another there, and
the yellow bean came loose from the flint. Picking it up, he rubbed it between gloved palms. 'I don't think
it is." He rubbed harder, then held it against the hot bowl of his pipe. It still didn't respond. He dropped it.
"Another jellyfish that didn't live right."

Behind him, something moved in the brush with a dry rustling. He dropped the loose glove from his
light hand and turned, reaching toward his hip. Then he saw what had made the noise--a hard-shelled
thing a foot in length, with twelve legs, long antennae and two pairs of clawed mandibles. He stooped and
picked up a shard of flint, throwing it with an oath. Another damned infernal land-prawn.

He detested land-prawns. They were horrible things, which, of course, wasn't their fault. More to
the point, they were destructive. They got into things at camp; they would try to eat anything. They
crawled into machinery, possibly finding the lubrication tasty, and caused jams. They cut into electric
insulation. And they got into his bedding, and bit, or rather pinched, painfully. Nobody loved a land-
prawn, not even another land-prawn.