"Early In His Career"

Satan's World.

The spaceship outercom causes slight alterations in hyper-velocity as it modulates drive vibrations to carry dots and dashes for communication purposes:

"That system was still new and crude (Falkayn could remember when, early in his career, he had been forced to turn his engines on and off to transmit a message)..." (XIV, p. 465)

This implies three historical stages:

Falkayn improvising early in his career;
the new crude system later in his career;
the polished system of Flandry's period.

If we are reading Satan's World as Volume III of the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy, then we have already read about that incident early in Falkayn's career in Volume II, The Trouble Twisters. That volume also refers back to Adzel's student days on Earth. However, in the original reading order, we will not read about those days until we encounter "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" in The Earth Book Of Stormgate, the second of the two Avalonian volumes that come after the Tetralogy. We are reading a fictional history but a history nevertheless.