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

off six months from now in Johannesburg on Terra, they could look
in the cargo holds of the ship that had brought it across five
hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold and platinum and
gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes that
defied synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy.
Spices. And the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury
goods, the only really dependable commodities in interstellar
trade.

And he had spoken of other things. Veldbeest meat, up seven
percent from last month, twenty per cent from last year, still in
demandon a dozen planets unable to produce Terran-type
foodstuffs. Grain, leather, lumber. And he had added a dozen
more items to the lengthening list of what Zarathustra could now
produce in adequate quantities and no longer needed to import.
Not fishhooks and boot buckles, either-blasting explosives and
propellants, contragravity-field gen erator parts, power tools,
pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles. The Company didn't need to
carry Zarathustra any more; Zarathustra could carry the Company,
and itself.

Fifteen years ago, when the Zarathustra Company had sent him
here, there had been a cluster of log and prefab huts beside an
improvised landing field, almost exactly where this skyscraper now
stood. Today, Mallorysport was a city of seventy thousand; in all,
the planet had a population of nearly a million, and it was still
growing. There were steel mills and chemical plants and reaction
plants and machine works. They produced all their own
fissionables, and had recently begun to export a little refined
plutonium; they had even started producing collapsium shielding.

The recorded voice stopped. He ran back the spool, set for sixty-
speed, and transmitted it to the radio office. In twenty minutes, a
copy would be aboard the ship that would hyper out for Terra that
night. While he was finishing, his communication screen buzzed.

"Dr. Kellogg's screening you, Mr. Grego," the girl in the outside
office told him.

He nodded. Her hands moved, and she vanished in a
polychromatic explosion; when it cleared, the chief of the Division
of Scientific Study and Research was looking out of the screen
instead. Looking slightly upward at the showback over his own
screen, Victor was getting his warm, sympathetic, sincere and
slightly too toothy smile on straight.

"Hello, Leonard. Everything going all right?"

It either was and Leonard Kellogg wanted more credit than he
deserved or it wasn't and he was trying to get somebody else