"Shall we be going?" asked Bliss, grabbing her clothes.
A few minutes later, at a distance of a thousand yards, Pole and Bliss, loaded with all their portable possessions, watched their cabin burst into flames as a roaring, forty-foot lizard, with fifty-foot flames gouting from his mouth, ambled through their clearing.
"There, he's gone," said Pole as the dragon passed on. "I'd better put out the fire."
Dipping water from a nearby pond with a bucket, Pole had, after fifty-three fast buckets, a blackened ruin of what had formerly been their rude jungle cabin.
Pole moved a new, nearly finished split-pole settee he had been working on back in the jungle to their front porch. As they seated themselves, he complacently surveyed the slits burned between the charred boards of the walls and roof. "The roof will leak a mite when it rains, but it will let in lots of light," he observed optimistically.
"There's nothing like lots of light," Bliss agreed.
"Charcoal is healthful, too."
"It absorbs poison like nobody's business!"
"However, since it rains every day on Venus we will have to have a new cabin." He sighed resignedly. "And you know what that means: Lower production, fewer of the magical, antibiotic pretzins. I'd better radio the Division Chief."