JК
Isle Of The Dead :: Zelazny Roger
Страница: 29 из 110It had been a long time since I'd heard some of those expressions. He grew red in the face and he paced. Greedy, money-grubbing, unethical me sat there thinking about pipes while he ranted.
A guy with a memory like mine has many odd facts in his head. Back in my youth, on Earth, the best pipes were made either of meerschaum or briar. Clay pipes draw awfully hot and wooden ones crack or burn out quickly. Corncobs are dangerous. In the latter part of the twentieth century, possibly because of a generation growing up in the shadow of a Surgeon General's Report on respiratory diseases, pipe smoking had undergone something of a renaissance. By the turn of the century, the world's supply of briar and meerschaum was largely exhausted. Meerschaum, or hydrous magnesium silicate, is a sedimentary rock which occurred in strata composed in part of seashells that had fused together over the ages, and when it was all gone, that was it. Briar pipes were made from the root of the White Heath, or _Erica Arborea_, which grew only in a few areas about the Mediterranean and had to be around a hundred years old before it was of any use. The White Heath had been subjected to wanton harvesting, with anything like a reforestation plan far from mind. Consequently, substances like pyrolitic carbon now do for the bulk of pipe smokers, but meerschaum and briar linger in memories and collections. Small deposits of meershaum have been discovered upon various worlds and turned into fortunes overnight. Nowhere but on Earth, however, has _Erica Arborea_ or a suitable substitute ever turned up. And pipe smoking is the mainliner's way of smoking these days, DuBois and me being mavericks. The pipe Bayner had shown me was a pretty, fiame-grained briar. Therefore ...
"... Fifteen percent," he was saying, "which barely allows me a small profit--"
"Nuts! Those briars are worth ten times their weight in platinum!"
"You cut my heart out if you ask for more than eighteen percent!"
"Thirty."
"Be reasonable, Frank."
"Then let's talk business, not nonsense."
"Twenty percent is all I can let you in for, and it will cost you five millions--"
I laughed.
So for the next hour I haggled, out of pure cussedness, resenting the estimation he'd placed on me and refused to disbelieve. I lived up to it, too. Like twentyfive and a half percent for four million, which required a phone call to Malisti to swing the financing. I really hated to wake him.
And that's how I nailed down a piece of the briar business on Driscoll.
A guy with a memory like mine has many odd facts in his head. Back in my youth, on Earth, the best pipes were made either of meerschaum or briar. Clay pipes draw awfully hot and wooden ones crack or burn out quickly. Corncobs are dangerous. In the latter part of the twentieth century, possibly because of a generation growing up in the shadow of a Surgeon General's Report on respiratory diseases, pipe smoking had undergone something of a renaissance. By the turn of the century, the world's supply of briar and meerschaum was largely exhausted. Meerschaum, or hydrous magnesium silicate, is a sedimentary rock which occurred in strata composed in part of seashells that had fused together over the ages, and when it was all gone, that was it. Briar pipes were made from the root of the White Heath, or _Erica Arborea_, which grew only in a few areas about the Mediterranean and had to be around a hundred years old before it was of any use. The White Heath had been subjected to wanton harvesting, with anything like a reforestation plan far from mind. Consequently, substances like pyrolitic carbon now do for the bulk of pipe smokers, but meerschaum and briar linger in memories and collections. Small deposits of meershaum have been discovered upon various worlds and turned into fortunes overnight. Nowhere but on Earth, however, has _Erica Arborea_ or a suitable substitute ever turned up. And pipe smoking is the mainliner's way of smoking these days, DuBois and me being mavericks. The pipe Bayner had shown me was a pretty, fiame-grained briar. Therefore ...
"... Fifteen percent," he was saying, "which barely allows me a small profit--"
"Nuts! Those briars are worth ten times their weight in platinum!"
"You cut my heart out if you ask for more than eighteen percent!"
"Thirty."
"Be reasonable, Frank."
"Then let's talk business, not nonsense."
"Twenty percent is all I can let you in for, and it will cost you five millions--"
I laughed.
So for the next hour I haggled, out of pure cussedness, resenting the estimation he'd placed on me and refused to disbelieve. I lived up to it, too. Like twentyfive and a half percent for four million, which required a phone call to Malisti to swing the financing. I really hated to wake him.
And that's how I nailed down a piece of the briar business on Driscoll.