"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?" "Yes. English was the official language of Earth. Then there was Martian, Venusian _chat-chat_, and Spotian. It was a queer amalgam, but it could be understood by everyone, more or less." "So that's where it came from. _Chikker-im-up-im chat-chat too-much_, eh? Interplanetary _bêche de mer_." "Exactly. Only of course it was called _bêche d'espace_. _Me two-fellah vimb' kitch-im pjoug by'm by._ But even after the language difficulty was solved, we had our troubles. They already had camels on Mars, for instance, and the Martians were amazed when we brought in more. Particularly because theirs were wild and semi-intelligent and the first thing the Martian camels did was come over and liberate their brothers from Earth. They never did come back. "Same sort of thing with the raincoats on Venus. It doesn't rain _down_ there, as we know now. It sort of mists _up_. From the ground. Soaks up under a raincoat in no time. These were just petty annoyances, of course, but they were symptomatic of the way our half-baked planning operated." "You didn't know about the people of Ganymede then?"