“PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING in the solar system rotates in the same direction.”
I looked at him. “Would you like to take a chance that Venus agrees with that statement? You’ve got a fifty percent chance that you’ll be right. Guess wrong and we have a metric ton of hardware trying to occupy the same space as another metric ton of matter.”
“But—”
“And furthermore,” I went on, “we’re just lucky that Polaris happens to be a pole star right now. The poles of Mars point to nothing that bright. Even then, we can hardly expect the Venusian to have divided the circumpolar sky into the same zoo full of mythical animals as our forebears—and if we use the commonplace expression, maybe the Venusian never paused to take a long-handled dipper of water from a well. Call them stewpots and the term is still
