There was little of the original asteroid. At the present time, most of the original rock had been discarded to make room for the ever-growing personnel and material that were needed to operate the relay station. What had been an asteroid with machinery was now a huge pile of machinery with people. The insides, formerly of spongy rock, were now neatly cubed off into offices, rooms, hallways, and so on, divided by sheets of steel. The outer surface, once rugged and forbidding, was now almost all shiny steel. The small asteroid, a tiny thing, was far smaller than the present relay station, the station having overflowed the asteroid soon after men found that uninterrupted communication was possible between the worlds. Now, the man-made asteroid carried twenty-seven hundred people. There were stores, offices, places of recreation, churches, marriages, deaths, and everything but taxes. Judging by its population, it was a small town. Venus Equilateral rotated about its axis. On the inner surface of the shell were the homes of the people--not cottages, but apartmental cubicles, one, two, three, six rooms. The rotation made a little more than one Earth G of artificial gravity. Above this outer shell of apartments, the offices began. Offices, recreation centers, and so on. Up in the central portion where the gravity was nil or near-nil, the automatic machinery was placed. The gyroscopes and the beam finders, the storerooms, the air plants, the hydroponic farms, and all other things that needed little or no gravity for well-being. This was the Venus Equilateral Relay Station, sixty degrees ahead of the planet Venus, on Venus' orbit. Often closer to Terra than Venus, the relay station offered a perfect place to relay messages through whenever Mars or Terra were on the other side of the Sun. It was seldom idle, for it was seldom that both Mars and Terra were in such position that direct communication between the three planets was possible. This was the center of Interplanetary Communications. This was the main office. It was the heart of the system's communication line, and as such, it was well manned. Orders for everything emanated from Venus Equilateral. It was a delicate proposition, Venus Equilateral was, and hence the present-on-all-occasions official capacities and office staff. This was the organization that Don Channing hoped to direct. A closed corporation with one purpose in mind, interplanetary communication! Channing wondered if the summons for Walt Franks was an official one. Returning to the electronics office, Don punched the communicator and asked: "Is Walt in there?" Arden's voice came back: "No, but Burbank is in Franks' office. Wanna listen?" "Eavesdropper! Using the communicator?" "Sure." "Better shut it off," warned Don. "Burbank isn't foolish, you know, and there are pilot lights and warning flags on those things to tell if someone has the key open. I wouldn't want to see you fired for listening-in."