“‘You slimy stinker, I’ve told you a dozen times it’s no dice—you stink!’ she says, loud, clear, and plain. ‘This ship ain’t big enough to let me get far enough away from you to hold my breakfast down,’ she says, and this burns the ape plenty. “‘Lookit here, babe,’ he says, coming to a boil, ‘Bend an ear while I tell _you_ something. No klevous Vegian chippie is going to play high and mighty with me, see? I’m fed up to the gozzle. So come down off your high horse right now, or I’ll. . . .’ “‘You’ll what?’ she snarls, and puts a hand behind her back. She’s seeing red now, and fit to be tied. ‘Make just one pass at me, you kedonolating slime-lizard,’ she says, ‘and I’ll bust your pfztikated skull wide open!’ “He goes for her then, but, being a Vegian, her footwork’s a lot better than his. She ducks, sidesteps, pulls her sap, and lets him have it, but good, right behind the ear. It takes the ship’s croaker an hour to bring him to, and the skipper’s so scared he blasts right back to Vegia and the croaker calls the hospital and tells ’em to have a meat-wagon standing by when we sit down.” “A very interesting and touching tale, Vesta,” Cloud said then, in English, “but pretty rough language for a perfect lady, don’t you think?” “How the hell else. . . .” Vesta started to reply in spaceal, then switched effortlessly to English: “How else can a lady, however ladylike she may be, talk in a language which, except for its highly technical aspects, is basically and completely profane, obscene, vulgar, lewd, coarse, and foul? Not that that bothers me, of course. . . .” Nor did it, as Cloud well knew. When a Master of Languages studied a language he took it as a whole, no matter what that whole might be. Every nuance, every idiom, every possibility was mastered; and he used the language _as it was ordinarily used_, without prejudice or favor or motional bias. “. . . but it’s so pitifully _inadequate_—there’s so much that’s completely missing! Thlaskin objected before, remember, that there wasn’t any word in spaceal he could use—_would_ use, I mean—to describe Maluleme as his wife. And my brother—Zambkptkn—I’ve mentioned him?” “Once or twice,” Cloud said, dryly. This was the understatement of the trip. “He’s a police officer. Not exactly like one of your Commissioners of Police, or Detective Inspector, but something like both. And in spaceal I can call him only one of four things, the English equivalents of which are ‘cop,’ ‘lawman,’ ‘flatfoot,’ and ‘bull.’ _What_ a language! But I started to tell his story in spaceal and I’m going to finish it in spaceal. It’ll be fun, in a way, to see how close I can come to saying what I want to say.” Then, switching back to the lingua franca of deep space;