"Alligator raincoats," Boynton said. "Things weren't very well organized. Too many things were happening too fast. There was a lot of confusion and although the countries wanted to do what was best, no one knew exactly what that was. So they improvised as best they could on the basis of their little knowledge."
"Was it a dangerous thing?"
"The little knowledge? No, not dangerous. Just inefficient. Then there was Jupiter. We didn't bother about Mercury, although for a time there was some uninformed talk about sending an Equatorial African to do what he could."
"Who went to Jupiter?" Allister asked.
"The United States clamored for Jupiter and got it. The argument was that the other planets would be a cinch to colonize because of their similarity to Earth but that Jupiter needed a real expert because it had only its surface of liquid gas and the Red Spot."
"What's that?"
"I'm sorry. I'd forgotten you were just a youngster when all this was going on. The Red Spot is the Jovians' space platform. They built it a long time ago and then they retrogressed, the way people do, and forgot how they'd done it. Earth sent an engineer to see if it could be done again. The Spot was pretty overpopulated and no real job of colonization could be done until we built one more."
"And did you?"
"Well, we started to. Before we could really go to work anywhere, though, we had to solve the language problem. An Australian went to work on that. He'd had a background of Melanesian pidgin, and if anyone was suited to the job of cross-breeding four languages into one, he was."
"Four languages?"