"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."
Bren nodded and Chat said, "You're the handiest man with menslators and
the like, Scyth. You're also the guy that can think fast on his feet.
We elect you to go to the Earth and contact this Dusty Britton and
explain to him so that he can tell his people what is going on."
Bren nodded. "Take the ship and go, Scyth. But use the driver as little
as possible. We'd still like to keep this rift secret, you know. We're
working for Transgalactic, not the whole damned shipping business."
Not long after, on its secondary drivers which did not radiate enough
to make direction-finding much better than haphazard, the spacecraft
rose from Mercury and headed toward Earth.