e
to start all over again with another one."

Kielland stared at the Venusian, and then at Simpson. "So," he said
finally, "I see."

"No, you don't," Simpson said with conviction. "You don't even begin to
see yet. You have to fight it for a few months before you really see."
He waved the Venusian out the door and turned to Kielland with burden of
ten months' frustration in his voice. "They're _stupid_," he said
slowly. "They are so incredibly stupid I could go screaming into the
swamp every time I see one of them coming. Their stupidity is positively
abysmal."

"Then why use them?" Kielland spluttered.

"Because if we ever hope to mine anything in this miserable mudhole,
we've got to use them to do it. There just isn't any other way."

With Simpson leading, they donned waist-high waders with wide, flat
silicone-coated pans strapped to the feet and started out to inspect the
installation.

A crowd of a dozen or more Venusian natives swarmed happily around them
like a pack of hounds. They were in and out of the steaming mud,
circling and splashing, squeaking: and shaking. They seemed to be having
a real field day.

"Of course," Simpson was saying, "since Number Four dredge sank last
week there isn't a whale of a lot of Installation left for you to
inspect. But you can see what there is, if you want."

"You mean Number Four dredge is the only one you've got to use?"
Kielland asked peevishly. "According to my records you have five
Axis-Traction dredges, plus a dozen or more of the old kind."

"Ah!" said Simpson. "Well, Number One had its vacuum chamber corroded
out a week after we started using dredging. Ran into a vein of stuff
with 15 per cent acid content, and it got chewed up something fierce.
Number Two sank without a trace--over there in the swamp someplace." He
pointed across the black mud flats to a patch of sickly vegetation. "The
Mud-pups know where it is, they think, and I suppose they could go drag
it up for us if we dared take the time, but it would lose us a month,
and you know the production schedule we've been trying to meet."

"So what about Numbers Three and Five?"

"Oh, we still have them. They won't work without a major overhaul,
though."

"Overhaul! They're brand new."

"They _were_. The Mud-pups didn't understand how to sluice them down
properly after operations. When this guck gets out into the air it
hardens like cement. You ever see a cement mixer that hasn't been
cleaned out after