Mr. Harris was overwhelmed. He'd learn plenty--and that would help him when he applied for training as a space officer; unless he decided to take a position with Venus Equilateral when he grew up. The signal faded from the little cruiser and silence prevailed. Don spoke into the microphone and said: "Run her up a millisecond," to the beam controller. The beam wiped the space above the previous course for several minutes and Franks was sending furiously: "You have answered our message. We'll be seeing you!" Channing told the man in the cruiser to return. He kicked the main switch and the generators whined down the scale and coasted to a stop. Tube filaments darkened and meters returned to zero. "O.K., Warren. Let the spinach lay. Get the next crew to clean up the mess and polish the set-up into something presentable. I'll bet a cooky that we'll be chasing spaceships all the way to Pluto after this. We'll work it into a fine thing and perfect our technique. Right now I owe the gang a dinner." _Interlude:_ _When necessity dictates a course of action and the course of action proves valuable, it is but a short step to the inclusion of the answer into the many facets of modern technical civilization. Thus it was that not many months after Venus Equilateral successfully established planet-to-ship communications with the "Empress of Kolain" that all course constants were delivered to the relay station and thereafter messages were transmitted as a part of the regular business of Interplanetary Communications._ _This, of course, offered another problem. Ships in space were in the position of being able to catch messages but were not able to answer back. It would take, perhaps, another emergency to set up conditions which demanded the reverse of the problem of contacting a ship in space._ _But there was a more immediate problem. Spacecraft were protected from meteors by means of radar that was coupled to the steering panels of the ships; when a meteor threatened, the ship merely turned aside by that fraction of a degree that gave it safety._ _It took, however, but a few meteors, and the resulting few fractions of a degree to shunt the swiftly moving ship out of the coverage-area of the ship-seeking beams from Venus Equilateral. Then the power and ingenuity of Venus Equilateral was wasted on vacant space and the messages intended for the ships went undelivered._ _Since the ship must avoid meteors, and the meteors could not be diverted from their courses, there was but one answer: Swerve the ship and let the messages go hang, for a message is of no use to a riddled spacecraft!_ _But, thought several people, if the meteor cannot be steered, perhaps it might be removed...._ RECOIL