_Why do men work? Men often work because they must work in order to live. Then why do many men work hard, at long hours when there are easier ways of getting along? Because they have the desire to provide the best they can for their families. It is necessary to them to feel proud of the fact that they can do as well as they do. But remove the sheer necessity of toiling for food, clothing and shelter, and you make all men equally capable of supporting a family. Then come the ambitious ones who would appear a little better, a little more desirable, a little cleverer than their fellow man. This is not odious; it is the essence of ambition even though it sounds egotistic when mentioned in cold print._ _And so when people all are well-clad, well-housed, and well-fed, there arises an almost universal ambition to become clever; to produce things that have not been duplicated by the machine._ _For in a culture in which fifty thousand copies of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper hang, in theatres, churches, schools, and living rooms, he who possesses a hand-made chromo painted by his own hand owns a true Unique to which he can point with pride._ _So once the flurry was over and the tumult gone, men took a deep breath--_ _And went back to work._ _On Venus Equilateral, they worked, too. Given more time for leisure, they took more time for study and experiment._ _Of course, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with something that would put Venus Equilateral on the obsolete list. Venus Equilateral had been instrumental in putting a number of other things on the retired list--and the Relay Station itself was long overdue._ _And, too, there was still one man who would give his black soul to see Venus Equilateral lose out...._ MAD HOLIDAY "Yeah," drawled Wes Farrell, "but what makes it vibrate?" Don Channing looked down at the crystal. "Where did you get it?" he asked. Walt Franks chuckled. "I bet you've been making synthetic elements again with the heterodyned duplicator." Farrell nodded. "I've found a new series sort of like the iron-nickel-cobalt group." Channing shook his head. There was a huge permanent magnet that poured a couple of million gauss across its gap, and in this magnetic field Farrell had the crystal supported. A bank of storage batteries drove several hundred amperes--by the meter--through the crystal from face to face on another axis, and down from above there poured an intense monochromatic light. "Trouble is," complained Wes, "that there isn't a trace of a ripple in any of the three factors that work on the thing. Permanent magnet, battery current, and continuous gas-arc discharge. Yet--" "It vibrates," nodded Channing. "Faintly, but definitely it is vibrating."