Scyth said, "So instead of being an uninhabited planet, we have a rather high culture, complete with space travel. This Dusty Britton must be quite a hero. But how in the name of the Great Space can they have space travel without machinus fields or some knowledge of phanoband radiation?"
"Maybe their space travel is—er—"
"Now look, you're not suggesting that people with a Space Patrol are riding ships with tailburners? Rockets? What a horrible thought."
Bren shook his head. "Our forefathers lived through it."
"Not many of them," grunted Scyth.
Chat objected. "Read that history you dislike so much. You'll find that our ancestors went through hundreds of years wallowing across space to the planets in reaction-type spacecraft. Chemico-atomic rockets, if you please."
"Let's stop the argument and get along with the main problem," said Bren. "What are we going to do about them?"
"Well, we can't set up a beacon with them here. So we'll just have to take the proper measures."
"That'll be quite a project. Whole colonies and—"
"That they haven't got yet. They're at the outpost stage; the scientific expedition stage. Their moon has less than a hundred people on it, their Mars has been visited only three times, and their Venus only once previously. This project that Dusty Britton is going on is the second Venus rocket, the first one being sent as an orbital, round-trip manned-job for observational purposes. So we can set up our barytrine field without causing a lot of distress, and then we can go on preparing our space beacon."