Again, an author, in this case Poul Anderson, must convey a lot of information very quickly in order to inform his readers of where the characters are and of what they are doing there.
The text opens:
"Suddenly the plain exploded. A pillar of steam shot skyward, bone-white against darkness and the stars, tinged red with incandescent drops of metal." (p. 168)
See the image in the above-linked post. That image informs us immediately that these guys are on the Moon. On p. 169, the viewpoint character, Don Sevigny, looks at Earth above the horizon.
They are a mixed crew, their names including:
Sevigny
Aarons
Bergsma
Branch
Decker
Gourmont
Leong
Nakajima
Youkhannan
R'ku, who speaks with a vocalizer (an instrument that is becoming familiar) and turns out to be a Martian
The presence of R'ku tells us something. Men from Earth have not just recently reached the Moon. They have also travelled further into the Solar System where they have encountered at least one other intelligent species - or maybe the Martians have travelled to the Earth-Moon system? Either way, the existence of other Solarians was becoming a dated idea in 1964.
Sevigny is a Cytherean - a colonist of Venus? - and refers to other human characters as "'...Earthlings!'" (p. 170) These Cythereans have clan bonds like the "Venusians" in Anderson's Psychotechnic History. These various narratives are not set in a single timeline but they all originate in Poul Anderson's imagination.
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