"Seetee?"
Linus Brein nodded. "In which case from both sides we must watch our steps. Get involved with a seetee race the wrong way and you have two cultures with absolutely nothing in common but a life-factor, busy tossing chunks of their own kind of matter at one another in a fight to exterminate. So before either of you start making half-baked plans, you'd better get your heads together and plan something that sounds reasonable to the Big Boss. Right?"
VI
Commodore Wilson eyed the spacecraft full of hastily assembled instruments with a grimace. The ship was swarming with techs who were peering into oscilloscopes, watching meters, and tinkering with signal generators. A huge concave hemispherical dome above was a splatter of little flickering green pinpoints and dark patches.
"This idea is hopelessly haywire," Wilson said unhappily.
"It sure is," said Space-Tech Maury Allison. "But everything is, at first."
"You hope to make something out of it?"
"We hope," replied Allison. "We can't be sure."
"But surely this pile of junk has been tested before?"