"Piper, H Beam - Fuzzy 2 - Other Human Race2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

company to buy sunstones, or for anybody to sell one except to a
company gem buyer, but that had been company law, and the
Pendarvis deci­sions had wiped out the company's lawmaking
powers. Sunstone de­posits were always too scattered for
profitable large-scale mining. They were found by free-lance
prospectors, who sold them to the company at the company's
prices. Jack Holloway, who had started the whole trouble, had
been one of the most successful of prospectors.

Now sunstones were in the open competitive market on
Zarathus­tra, and something would have to be done about
establishing a new gem-buying policy. Before he could do that, he
wanted to know just how many of them the company had in
reserve.

So he had to go down and open the vault, before Conrad Evins,
the chief gem buyer, could get in to find out. He knew the
combina­tion. So-in case anything happened to him-did Leshe
Coombes, the head of the legal division, and, against the
possibility that both he and Coombes were killed or incapacitated,
there was a copy of it neatly typed on a slip of paper in a special-
security box at the Bank of Mallorysport, which could only be gotten
out by the Colonial Mar­shal with a court order. It was a bother, but
too many people couldn't be trusted with that combination.

The gem rooms were on the fifteenth level down; they were
sur­rounded by the company police headquarters, and there was
only one way in, through a door barred by a heavy steel portcullis.
The guard who controlled this sat in a small cubicle fronted by two
inches of armor glass; several other guards, with submachine
guns, sat or stood behind a low counter in front of it. Harry Steefer,
the chief of com­pany police, was there, and so was Conrad Evins,
the gem buyer, a small man with graying hair and a bulging brow
and narrow chin. With them were two gray-smocked assistants.

"Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting," he greeted them. "Ready,
Mr. Evins?"

Evins was. Steefer nodded to the men inside the armor-glass
cubi­cle; the portcullis rose silently. They entered a bare hallway,
covered by viewscreen pickups at either end and with sleep-gas
release noz­7Ies on the ceiling. The door at the other end opened,
and in the small anteroom beyond they all showed their identity
cards to a guard: Evins and his two assistants, the sergeant and
the two guards accompanying them, Grego, even Chief Steefer.
The guard spoke into a phone; somebody completely out of sight
and reach pressed a but­ton or flipped a switch and the door
beyond opened. Grego went through alone, and down a short flight
of steps to another door, brightly iridescent with a plating of
collapsium, like a spaceship's hull or a nuclear reactor.