Venus Equilateral By George O. Smith _Illustrations by_ SOL LEVIN _Introduction by_ JOHN W. CAMPBELL, JR. THE PRIME PRESS Philadelphia 1949 [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Copyright 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945 by Street and Smith for Astounding Science Fiction Copyright 1947 by THE PRIME PRESS First printing, 1947 Reprinted, 1949 THE PRIME PRESS Box 2019--Philadelphia 3, Pa. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES _Dedication_: _To James Clerk Maxwell, whose Electromagnetic Equations founded the art of electronics and thus made Venus Equilateral possible...._ _And to my son, George O. Smith (Jg), who may some day work there._ CONTENTS INTRODUCTION _by John W. Campbell, Jr._ QRM--INTERPLANETARY CALLING THE EMPRESS RECOIL OFF THE BEAM THE LONG WAY BEAM PIRATE FIRING LINE SPECIAL DELIVERY PANDORA'S MILLIONS MAD HOLIDAY INTRODUCTION Sometimes it's a little hard to get people to realize that not only has the world changed in the past, but that it is changing now, and will change in the future. In fact, it takes something on the order of an atomic bomb to blast them out of their congenital complacency. And it took the literally shocking violence of the atomic bomb to make the general public understand the fact that science-fiction is _not_ "pseudo-science" (that's what you find in Sunday Supplements--fiction, pretending to be science) but an entirely different breed of thing--fiction stories based on science, and attempting to extrapolate the curves of past development into future years. On August 6, 1945, people suddenly discovered that that fool fantasy stuff about atomic bombs hadn't been quite so fantastic as they had--well, to be brutally frank, _hoped_. Their immediate reactions were that a good guess or two, a chance, coincidental correspondence between fiction-fantasy and fact, didn't mean much. Still, relatively few people have learned to understand how science-fiction originates--why it does successfully predict.