"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.