"Huh?"
"Could you hate a dog? Or a cat-"
"Sure could," said Tex. "There was an old tomcat we had once-"
"Pipe down and let me finish. Conceding your, point, you can hate, a cat only by placing it on your own social level. She doesn't regard Burke as ... well, as people at all, because he doesn't follow the customs. We're 'people* to her, because we do, even though we look like him. But Burke in her mind is just a dangerous animal, like a wolf or a shark, to be penned up or destroyed-but not hated or punished.
"Anyhow," he went on, "I told her it wouldn't do, because we had an esoteric and unexplainable but unbreakable religious tabu that interfered-that blocked her off from pressing the point. But I told her we'd like to use Burke's ship to get the lieutenant back. She gave it to me. We go out tomorrow to look at it."
"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.,