_It could have been lives at stake that drove the job out of the "project" class and into the "necessity" stage. The fact that it was ebb and flow of a mundane thing like money may lower the quality of glamor._ _But there it was--a problem that cried out for a solution; a man who was willing to pay for the attempt; and a group of technicians more than happy to tackle the job._ CALLING THE EMPRESS The chart in the terminal building at Canalopsis Spaceport, Mars, was a huge thing that was the focus of all eyes. It occupied a thirty-by-thirty space in the center of one wall, and it had a far-flung iron railing about it to keep the people from crowding it too close, thus shutting off the view. It was a popular display, for it helped to drive home the fact that space travel was different from anything else. People were aware that their lives had been built upon going from one fixed place to another place, equally immobile. But on interplanet travel, one left a moving planet for another planet, moving at a different velocity. You found that the shortest distance was not a straight line but a space curve involving higher mathematics. The courses being traveled at the time were marked, and those that would be traversed in the very near future were drawn upon the chart, too; all appropriately labeled. At a glance, one could see that in fifty minutes and seventeen seconds the _Empress of Kolain_ would take off from Mars, which was the red disk on the right, and she would travel along the curve so marked to Venus, which was almost one hundred and sixty degrees clockwise around the Sun. People were glad of the chance to go on this trip because the Venus Equilateral Relay Station would come within a telescope's sight on the way. _The Empress of Kolain_ would slide into Venus on the day side; and a few hours later she would lift again to head for Terra, a few degrees ahead of Venus and about thirty million miles away. Precisely on the zero-zero, the _Empress of Kolain_ lifted upward on four tenuous pillars of dull-red glow and drove a hole in the sky. The glow was almost lost in the bright sunshine, and soon it died. The _Empress of Kolain_ became a little world in itself, and would so remain until it dropped onto the ground at Venus, almost two hundred million miles away. Driving upward, the _Empress of Kolain_ could not have been out of the thin Martian atmosphere when a warning bell rang in the telephone and telespace office at the terminal. The bell caught official ears, and all work was stopped as the personnel of the communications office ran to the machine to see what was so important that the "immediate attention" signal was rung.