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

There was a keyboard, like the keyboard of a linotype machine. He
went to it, punching out the letters of a short sentence, then waited
ten seconds. The huge door receded slowly, then slid aside.

"All right, gentlemen," he called out. "The vault's open."

Then he walked through, into a circular room beyond. In the
mid­dle of it was a round table, its top covered with black velvet,
with a wide circular light-shade above it. The wall was lined by a
steel cabi­net with many shallow drawers. The Chief, a sergeant
with a sub­machine gun, Evins, and his two assistants followed him
in. He lit a cigarette, watching the smoke draw up around the light-
shade and vanish out the ventilator above. Evins' two assistants
began getting out paraphernalia and putting things on the table; the
gem buyer felt the black velvet and nodded. Grego put his hand on
it, too. It was warm, almost hot.

One of the assistants brought a drawer from the cabinet and
emptied it on the table-several hundred smooth, translucent
pebbles. For a moment they looked like so much gravel. Then,
slowly, they began to glow, until they were blazing like burning
coals.

Some fifty million years ago, when Zarathustra had been almost
completely covered by seas, there had been a marine life-form,
not unlike a big jellyfish, and for a million or so years the seas had
abounded with them, and as they died they had sunk into the ooze
and been covered by sand. Ages of pressure had reduced them to
hard little beans of stone, and the ooze to gray flint. Most of them
were just pebbles, but by some ancient biochemical quirk, a few
were intensely thermofluorescent. Worn as gems, they would glow
from the body heat of the wearer, as they were glowing now on the
electrically heated table top. They were found nowhere in the
galaxy but on Zarathustra, and even a modest one was worth a
small fortune.

"Just for a quick estimate, in round figures, how much money have
we in this room?" he asked Evins.

Evins looked pained. He had the sort of mind which detested
ex­pressions like "quick estimate," and "round figures."

"Well, of course, the Terra market quotation, as of six months ago,
was eleven hundred and twenty-five sols a carat, but that's just the
average price. There are premium-value stones..."

He saw one of those, and picked it up; an almost perfect sphere,
an inch in diameter, deep blood-red. It lay burning in his palm; it
was beautiful. He wished he owned it himself, but none of this