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

rainbow when the sun was shining. Or maybe that was just his nat-ural way of seeing colors.

Then, when he saw what he had to work with, he began making arrangements with them, laying them out
in odd circular and spiral patterns. Each time he finished a pattern, he would yeek happily to call attention
to it, sit and look at it for a while, and then take it apart and start a new one. Little Fuzzy was capable of
artistic gratification too. He made useless things, just for the pleasure of making and looking at them.

Finally, he put the stones back into the tin, put the lid on and rolled it into the bedroom, righting it beside
his bed along with his other treasures. Thd new weapon he laid on the blanket beside him when he went
to bed.

The next morning, Jack broke up a whole cake of Extee Three and put it down, filled the bowl with
water, and, after making sure he had left nothing lying around that Little Fuzzy could damage or on which
he might hurt himself, took the manipulator up to the diggings. He worked all morning, cracking nearly a
ton and a half of flint, and found nothing. Then he set off a string of shots, brought down an av-alanche of
sandstone and exposed more flint, and sat down under a pool-ball tree to eat his lunch.

Half an hour after he went back to work, he found the fossil of some jellyfish that hadn't eaten the right
things in the right combina-tions, but a little later, he found four nodules, one after another, and two of
them were sunstones; four or five chunks later, he found a third. Why, this must be the Dying Place of the
Jellyfish! By late af-ternoon, when he had cleaned up all his loose flint, he had nine, in-cluding one deep
red monster an inch in diameter. There must have been some convection current in the ancient ocean that
had swirled them all into this one place. He considered setting off some more shots, decided that it was
too late and returned to camp.

"Little Fuzzy!" he called, opening the living-room door. "Where are you, Little Fuzzy? Pappy Jack's rich;
we're going to celebrate!"

Silence. He called again; still no reply or scamper of feet. Probably cleaned up all the prawns around the
camp and went hunting farther out into the woods, thought Jack. Unbuckling his gun and dropping it onto
the table, he went out to the kitchen. Most of the Extee Three was gone. In the bedroom, he found that
Little Fuzzy had dumped the stones out of the biscuit tin and made an arrangement, and laid the wood
chisel in a neat diagonal across the blanket.

After getting dinner assembled and in the oven, he went out and called for a while, then mixed a highball
and took it into the living room, sitting down with it to go over his day's findings. Rather in-credulously, he
realized that he had cracked out at least seventy-five thousand sols' worth of stones today. He put them
into the bag and sat sipping the highball and thinking pleasant thoughts until the bell on the stove warned
him that dinner was ready.

He ate alone - after all the years he had been doing that content-edly, it had suddenly become intolerable
- and in the evening he dialed through his microfilm library, finding only books he had read and re-read a
dozen times, or books he kept for reference. Several times he thought he heard the little door open, but
each time he was mistaken. Finally he went to bed.

As soon as he woke, he looked across at the folded blanket, but the wood chisel was still lying athwart
it. He put down more Extee Three and changed the water in the bowl before leaving for the dig-gings.
That day he found three more sunstones, and put them in the bag mechanically and without pleasure. He
quit work early and spent over an hour spiraling around the camp, but saw nothing. The Extee Three in
the kitchen was untouched.