"--during working hours!" finished Channing. He grinned at Franks and ordered another beer. "And how is the Office of Beam Control going to make out under the new regime?" "I'll answer that after I see how the new regime treats the Office of Beam Control," answered Franks. "I doubt that he can do much to bugger things up in my office. There aren't many cheaper ways to direct a beam, you know." "Yeah. You're safe." "But what I can't understand is why they didn't continue you in that job. You've been handling the business ever since last December when Walters got sick. You've been doing all right." "Doing all right just means that I've been carrying over Walters' methods and ideas. What the Commission wants, apparently, is something new. Ergo the new broom." "Personally, I like that one about the old shoes being more comfortable," said Franks. "If you say the word, Don, I'll slip him a dose of high voltage. That should fix him." "I think that the better way would be to work for the bird. Then when he goes, I'll have his recommendation." "Phooey," snorted Franks. "They'll just appoint another political pal. They've tried it before and they'll try it again. I wonder what precinct he carries." * * * * * The telephone rang in the bar, and the bartender, after answering, motioned to Walt Franks. "You're wanted in your office," said the bartender. "And besides," he told Channing, "if I'm going to get lunch for three thousand people, you'd better trot along, too. It's nearly eleven o'clock, you know, and the first batch of five hundred will be coming in." He wasn't quite accurate as to the figures. The complement of Venus Equilateral was just shy of twenty-seven hundred. They worked in three eight-hour shifts, about nine hundred to a shift. They had their lunch and dinner hours staggered so that at no time was there more than about two hundred people in the big lunchroom. The bar, it may be mentioned, was in a smaller room at one end of the much larger cafeteria. Venus Equilateral Relay Station was a modern miracle of engineering if you liked to believe the books. Actually, Venus Equilateral was an asteroid that had been shoved into its orbit about the Sun, forming a practical demonstration of the equilateral triangle solution of the Three Moving Bodies. It was a long cylinder, about three miles in length by about a mile in diameter.