"Piper, H Beam - Fuzzy 1 - little Fuzzy1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

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.

This one dodged the thrown flint, scuttled off a few feet and turned,
waving its antennae in what looked like derision. Jack reached for
his hip again, then checked the motion. Pistol cartridges cost like