entombed jellyfish little beans of dense stone. Some of them, by some
ancient biochemical quirk, were intensely thermofluorescent; worn as gems,
they glowed from the wearer's body heat.

On Terra or Baldur or Freya or Ishtar, a single cut of polished sunstone
was worth a small fortune. Even here, they brought respectable prices from
the Zarathustra Company's gem buyers. Keeping his point of expectation
safely low, he got a smaller vibrohammer from the toolbox and began
chipping cautiously around the foreign object, until the flint split open
and revealed a smooth yellow ellipsoid, half an inch long.

"Worth a thousand sols--if it's worth anything," he commented. A deft tap
here, another there, and the yellow bean came loose from the flint.
Picking it up, he rubbed it between gloved palms. "I don't think it is."
He rubbed harder, then held it against the hot bowl of his pipe. It still
didn't respond. He dropped it. "Another jellyfish that didn't live right."

Behind him, something moved in the brush with a dry rustling. He dropped
the loose glove from his right hand and turned, reaching toward his hip.
Then he saw what had made the noise--a hard-shelled thing a foot in
length, with twelve legs, long antennae and two pairs of clawed mandibles.
He stopped and picked up a shard of flint, throwing it with an oath.
Another damned infernal land-prawn.

He detested land-prawns. They were horrible things, which, of course,
wasn't their fault. More to the point, they were destructive. They got
into things at camp; they would try to eat anything. They crawled into
machinery, possibly finding the lubrication tasty, and caused jams. They
cut into electric insulation. And they got into his bedding, and bit, or
rather pinched, painfully. Nobody loved a land-prawn, not even another