In 1946, the United States Army Signal Corps succeeded in sending forth and receiving in return a radar signal from the moon. This was an academic triumph; at that time such a feat had no practical value. Its value came later when the skies were opened up for travel; when men crossed the void of space to colonize the nearer planets Mars and Venus. They found then that communication back and forth depended upon the initial experiment in 1946. But there were barriers, even in deep space. The penetration of the Heaviside Layer was no great problem. That had been done. They found that Sol, our sun, was often directly in the path of the communications beam because the planets all make their way around Sol at different rates of speed. All too frequently Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from Terra, or Sol might lie between Venus and Mars. Astronomically, this situation where two planets lie on opposite sides of the sun is called Major Opposition, which is an appropriate name even though those who named it were not thinking in terms of communications. To circumvent this natural barrier to communications, mankind made use of one of the classic solutions of the problem of the Three Moving Bodies, in which it is stated that three celestial objects at the corners of an equilateral triangle will so remain, rotating about their common center of gravity. The equilateral position between the sun and any planet is called the "Trojan" position because it has been known for some time that a group of asteroids precede and follow Jupiter around in his orbit. The "Trojan" comes from the fact that these asteroids bear the well known names of the heroes of the famous Trojan War. To communicate around the sun, then, it is only necessary to establish a relay station in the Trojan position of the desired planet. This will be either ahead or behind the planet in its orbit; and the planet, the sun, and the station will form an equilateral triangle. So was born the Venus Equilateral Relay Station. There was little of the original asteroid. At the present time, 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 all shiny steel. The small asteroid, a tiny thing, was gone, 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.