"I think so. Of course I'd have to experiment to get the right kind of
concrete."
"But what would we do with the hole it left?" There was a faint tremor
of hope.
"We could haul away the slime," he said. "It would stop smelling after a
while. We might even be able to use it for fertilizer."
"But there's still the hole."
"It would fill with water after the next rain. We could raise ducks in
it."
"White ducks?"
"If you like."
The woman was silent. "If you think we can do it, then we'll try," she
said. "We'll go back to our farm and forget about Earth."
Henry was silent, too. "They're kind of pretty, even if they do smell
bad," he said after a long interval. "Maybe I could pump a different
kind of cement, real thin, directly into the stem. It might travel up
into the flower instead of down."
"And make them into stone roses," enthused the woman. "Mud roses into
stone. I'd like that--a few of them--to remind us of what our farm was
like when we came to it." She wasn't sniffling.
They had their own problems, decided Jadiver, and their own solution,
which, in their ignorance, might actually work. He'd been like that when
he first came to Venus, expecting great things. With him it had been
different. He was an engineer, not a farmer, and he didn't want to be a
farmer. There was nothing on Venus for him.
He couldn't stay much longer on Venus in any capacity. Earth was out of
the question. Mars? If he could escape capture in the months that
followed and then manage to get passage on a ship. It wasn't hopeless,
but his chances weren't high.
The puzzling thing was why the police wanted him so badly. He was an
accessory to a crime--several of them, in fact. But even if they
regarded him as a criminal, they couldn't consider him an important one.
And yet they were staging a manhunt. He hated to think of the number of
policemen looking for him. There must be a reason for it.
He had a few days left, possibly less. In that time, he would have to
get off the planet or shed the circuit. Without drastic extensive
surgery, there was not much hope he could peel off the circuit.