"Now, hon, we can't," Henry whispered back. "We've bought the land and nobody's going to buy it back." "We bought it when they told us there would be roses," said the woman, loud and bitter. "Great big roses, so big that most of the plant grew below ground, only the flower showing. So big, no stem could support them." "Well, hon--" "Don't hon me. There _are_ roses, ten feet across, all over our land, just like they said." Her voice rose higher. "Mud roses, that's what they are. Stinking mud roses that collapse into a slimy hole in the ground." She sniffled again. "Did you notice the pictures they showed us? People standing by the roses with their heads turned away. And you know why the pictures were like that? Because they didn't dare show us the expressions on those people's faces, that's why." "It's not so bad," said the man soothingly. "Maybe we can do something about it." "What can we do? The roses poison cattle and dogs run away from the smell. And we're humans. We're stronger, we're supposed to take it." "I've been thinking," said Henry quietly. "I could take a long pipe and run it at an angle to the roots. I could force concrete through the pipe and seal it off below ground. When it collapsed, the rose wouldn't grow back." The woman asked doubtfully, "Could you?" "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.