"Well, for crying out loud-why didn't you say so, instead of giving all this build-up?"
They had made much the same underwater trip as on entering the city, to be followed by a longish swim and a short trip overland. The city mother herself honored them with her company.
The Gary was everything Burke had claimed for her, modern, atomic- powered, expensively outfitted and beautiful, with sharp wings as graceful as a swallow's.
She was also a hopeless wreck.
Her hull was intact except the ruined door, which appeared to have been subjected to great heat, or an incredible corrosive, or both. Matt wondered how it had been done and noted it as still another indication that the Venerians were not the frog-seal-beaver creatures his Earth-side prejudices had led him to think.,
The inside of the ship had looked fairly well, too, until they started checking over the controls. In searching the ship the amphibians, to whom even a common door latch was a puzzle, had simply burned their way through impediments-including the access hatch to the ship's autopilot and gyro compartment. The circuits of the ship's nervous system were a mass of fused and melted junk.
Nevertheless they spent three hours convincing themselves that it would take the resources of a dockyard to make the ship fly again.. They gave up reluctantly at last and started back, their spirits drooping.
Oscar had at once taken up with the city mother the project of recovering the jeep. He had not mentioned it before as the Gary seemed the better bet. Language difficulties would have hampered him considerably-their hostesses had no word for "vehicle," much less a word for "rocket ship"-but the Gary gave him something to point to wherewith to explain.
When she understood what he was driving at she gave orders which caused the party to swim to the point where the cadets had first been picked up. The cadets made sure of the spot by locating the abandoned litter and from there Oscar had led them back to the sinkhole that was the grave of the jeep. There he acted out what had happened, showing her the scar in the bank where the jeep had balanced and pacing off on the bank the dimensions of the ship.
The mother-of-many discussed the problem with her immediate staff while the cadets waited, ignored rather than excluded. Then she abruptly gave the order to leave; it was getting on in the late afternoon and even the Venerians do not voluntarily remain out in the jungle overnight.
That had ended the matter for several days. Oscar's attempts to find out what, if anything, was being done about the jeep were brushed off as one might snub a persistent brat. It left them with nothing to do. Tex played his harmonica until threatened with a ducking in the room's center pool. Oscar sat around, nursing his arm and brooding. Matt spent much of his time watching over Thurlow and became well acquainted with the nurses who never left him, especially one bright-eyed cheerful little thing who called herself Th'wing."
Th'wing changed his viewpoint about Venerians. At first he regarded her much as he might a good and faithful, and unusually intelligent dog. By degrees he began to think of her as a friend, an interesting companion-and as "people." He had tried to tell her about himself and his own kind and his own world. She had listened with alert interest, but without ever taking her eyes off Thurlow.
Matt was forced willy-nilly into the concepts of astronomy-and came up against a complete block. To Th'wing there was the world of water and swamp and occasional dry land; above that was the endless cloud. She knew the Sun, for her eyes, perceptive to infrared, could see it, even though Matt could not, but she thought of it as a disc , of light and warmth, not as a star.
As for other stars, none of her people had ever seen them and the idea did not exist. The notion of another planet was not ridiculous; it was simply incomprehensible- Matt got nowhere.
He told Oscar about it. "Well, what did you expect?" Oscar had wanted to know. "All the natives are like that. They're polite but they think you are talking about your religion."
"The natives around the colonies, too?"
"Same deal."
"But they've seen rocket ships, some of 'em, anyhow. Where do they think we come from? They must know we haven't been here always."
"Sure they know that-but the ones at South Pole think we came originally from North Pole and the ones around:
P.R.S. ASTARTE
North Pole are sure we came from South Pole-and it's no use trying to tell them anything different."
The difficulty was not one-sided. Th'wing was continually using words and concepts which Matt could not understand and which could not be straightened out even with Oscar's help. He began to get hazily the idea that Th'wing was the sophisticated one and that he, Matt, was the ignorant outlander. "Sometimes I think," he told Tex, "that Th'wing thinks that I am an idiot studying hard to become a moron-but flunking the course."
"Well, don't let it throw you, kid. You'll be a moron, yet, if you just keep trying."
On the morning fifteen Venus days after their arrival the mother of the city sent for them and had them taken to the site of the jeep. They stood on the same bank where they had climbed ashore from the sinking ship, but the scene had changed. A great hole stretched out at their feet; in it the jeep lay, three-quarters exposed. A swarm of Venerians crawled over it and around it like workmen in a dockyard.
The amphibians had begun by adding something to the thin yellow mud of the sinkhole. Oscar had tried to get the formula for the additive, but even his command of the language was useless-the words were strange. Whatever it was, the effect was to turn the almost-liquid mud into a thick gel which became more and more stiff the longer it was exposed to air. The little folk had carved it away from the top as fast as it consolidated;, the jeep was now surrounded by the sheer walls of a caisson-like pit. A ramp led up on the shoreward side and a stream of the apparently tireless little creatures trotted up it, bearing more jelled blocks of mud.
The cadets had climbed down into the pit to watch, talking in high spirits about the prospects of putting the jeep back into commission and jetting out
again, until the Venerian in charge of the work had urged them emphatically to go up out of the pit and stay out of the way. They joined the city mother and waited.
"Ask her how she expects to get it up out of there, Oz," Tex suggested. Oscar did so.
"Tell thy impatient daughter to chase her fish and I will chase mine."
"No need for her to be rude about it," Tex complained. "What did she say?" inquired the mother-of-many.
" 'She' thanks thee for the lesson," Oscar prevaricated. The Little People worked rapidly. It was evident that the ship would be entirely free before the day was far advanced-and clean as well; the outside shone now and a steady procession of them had been pouring in and out of the door of the ship, bearing cakes of jellied mud. In the last hour the routine had changed; the little workers came out bearing distended bladders. The clean-up squad was J at work. f
Oscar watched them approvingly. "I told you they would 3 lick it clean." :'
Matt looked thoughtful. "I'm worried, Oz, about the possibility that they will mess with something on the control board and get into trouble."
"Why? The leads are all sealed away. They can't hurt anything. You locked the board when you left it, didn't you?"
"Yes, of course."'
"Anyhow, they can't fire the jet when she's in that attitude even if you hadn't."
"That's true. Still, I'm worried."
"Well, let's take a look, then. I want to talk to the fore- '. man in any case. I've got an idea."
"What idea?" asked Tex.
"Maybe they can get her upright in the pit. It seems to me we could take off from there and never have to drag j her out. Might save several days." They went down the| ramp and located the Venerian in charge, then Matt and 1 Tex went inside the ship while Oscar stayed to talk over his idea.
It was hard to believe that the pilot room had lately; been choked with filthy, yellow mud. A few amphibians'