The Return of the Black Widowers by Isaac Asimov Page B

crack in the paint, is just a copy, worth no more than any daub, and if there were a thousand copies, the real one would still remain priceless because it alone would be the unique original and would reflect uniqueness on its possessor. But that, you see, has nothing to do with beauty."
    Reed said, "It is easy to rail against humanity. Rareness does enhance value in the eyes of the vain, and I suppose that something that is sufficiently rare and, at the same time, notable would fetch a huge price even if there were no beauty about it—"
    "A rare autograph," muttered Halsted.
    "Yet," said Reed firmly, "beauty is always an enhancing factor, and I sell only beauty. Some of my wares are rare as well, but nothing I sell, or would care to sell, is rare without being beautiful."
    Drake said, "What else do you sell besides beauty and rarity?"
    "Utility, sir," said Reed at once. "Jewels are a way of storing wealth compactly and permanently in a way independent of the fluctuations of the market place."
    "But they can be stolen," said Gonzalo accusingly.
    "Certainly," said Reed. "Their very values—beauty, compactness, permanence—make them more useful to a thief than anything else can be. The equivalent in gold would be much heavier; the equivalent in anything else far more bulky."
    Avalon said, with a clear sense of reflected glory in his guest's profession, "Latimer deals in eternal value."
    "Not always," said Rubin rather wrathfully. "Some of the jeweler's wares are of only temporary value, for rarity may vanish. There was a time when gold goblets might be used on moderately important occasions but, for the real top of vanity, the Venetian cut glass was trotted out—until glass-manufacturing processes were improved to the point where such things were brought down to the five-and-ten level.
    "In the 1880s, the Washington Monument was capped with nothing less good than aluminum and, in a few years, the Hall process made aluminum cheap and the monument cap completely ordinary. Then, too, value can change with changing legend. As long as the alicorn—the horn of a unicorn—was thought to have aphrodisiac properties, the horns of narwhals and rhinoceroses were valuable. A handkerchief of a stiffish weave which could be cleaned by being thrown into the fire would be priceless for its magical refusal to burn—till the properties of asbestos became well known.
    "Anything that becomes rare through accident—the first edition of a completely worthless book, rare because it was worthless—becomes priceless to collectors. And synthetic jewelry of all sorts may yet make your wares valueless, Mr. Reed."
    Reed said, "Perhaps individual items of beauty might lose some of their value, but jewelry is only the raw material of what I sell. There is still the beauty of combination, of setting, the individual and creative work of the craftsman. As for those things which are valuable for rarity alone, I do not deal with them; I will not deal with them; I have no sympathy with them, no interest in them. I myself own some things that are both rare and beautiful—own them, I mean, with no intention of ever selling them—and nothing, I hope, that is ugly and is valued by me only because it is rare. Or almost nothing, anyway."
    He seemed to notice for the first time that the gems he had earlier distributed were lying before him. "Ah, you're all through with them, gentlemen?" He scooped them toward himself with his left hand. "All here," he said, "each one. No omissions. No substitutions. All accounted for." He looked at each individually. "I have showed you these, gentlemen, because there is an interesting point to be made about each of them—"
    Halsted said, "Wait. What did you mean by saying 'almost nothing'?"
    "Almost nothing?" said Reed, puzzled.
    "You said you owned nothing ugly just because it was rare. Then you said 'almost nothing.' "
    Reed's face cleared. "Ah, my lucky piece. I have it here somewhere." He rummaged in his pocket, "Here it