"Fine," said Warren. "I'll have the whole business installed in the Beam Control Room in nine hours. Complete and ready to work." "That nine hours is a minimum?" "Absolutely. After we cut and polish that screwball cam, we'll have to check it, and then you'll have to check it. Then the silly thing will have to be installed and its concentricity must be checked to the last wave length of cadmium light. That'll take us a couple of hours, I bet. The rest of the works will be ready, checked, and waiting for the ding-busted cam." "Yeah," agreed Franks. "Then we'll have to get up there with our works and put the electricals on the mechanicals. My guess, Don, is a good, healthy twelve hours before we can begin to squirt our signal." * * * * * Twelve hours is not much in the life of a man; it is less in the life of a planet. The Terran Standard of Gravity is so small that it is expressed in feet per second. But when the two are coupled together as a measure of travel, and the standard Terran G is applied for twelve hours steady, it builds up to almost three hundred miles per second, and by the end of that twelve hours, six million miles have fled into the past. Now take a look at Mars. It is a small, red mote in the sky, its diameter some four thousand miles. Sol is eight hundred thousand miles in diameter. Six million miles from Mars, then, can be crudely expressed by visualizing a point eight times the diameter of the Sun away from Mars, and you have the distance that the _Empress of Kolain_ had come from Mars. But the ship was heading in at an angle, and the six million miles did not subtend the above arc. From Venus Equilateral, the position of the _Empress of Kolain_ was more like two diameters of the Sun away from Mars, slightly to the north, and on the side away from Sol. It may sound like a problem for the distant future, this pointing a radio beam at a planet, but it is no different from Galileo's attempts to see Jupiter through his Optik Glass. Of course, it has had refinements that have enabled man to make several hundred hours of exposure of a star on a photographic plate. So if men can maintain a telescope on a star, night after night, to build up a faint image, they can also maintain a beamed transmission wave on a planet. All you need is a place to stand; a firm, immobile platform. The three-mile-long, one-mile-diameter mass of Venus Equilateral offered such a platform. It rotated smoothly, and upon its "business" end a hardened and highly polished set of rails maintained projectors that were pointed at the planets. These were parabolic reflectors that focussed ultra-high-frequency waves into tight beams which were hurled at Mars, Terra, and Venus for communication.