OFF THE BEAM Thirty hours out of Mars for Terra, the _Ariadne_ sped along her silent, invisible course. No longer was she completely severed from all connection with the planets of the inner system; the trick cams that controlled the beams at Venus Equilateral kept the ship centered by sheer mathematics in spite of her thirty hours at two G, which brought her velocity to eleven hundred miles per second. What made this trip ironic was the fact that Don Channing was aboard. The beams had been bombarding the _Ariadne_ continually ever since she left Mars with messages for the Director of Communications. In one sense, it seemed funny that Channing was for once on the end of a communications line where people could talk to him but from which he could not talk back. On the other hand, it was a blessing in disguise, for the Director of Communications was beginning to paper-talk himself into some means of contacting Venus Equilateral from a spaceship. A steward found Channing in the salon and handed him a 'gram. Channing smiled, and the steward returned the smile and added: "You'll fix these ships to talk back one day. Wait till you read that one--you'll burn from here to Terra!" "Reading my mail?" asked Channing cheerfully. The average spacegram was about as secret as a postcard, so Channing didn't mind. He turned the page over and read: HOPE YOU'RE WELL FILLED WITH GRAVANOL AND ADHESIVE TAPE FOR YOUR JUMP FROM TERRA TO STATION. SHALL TAKE GREAT DELIGHT IN RIPPING ADHESIVE TAPE OFF YOUR MEASLY BODY. LOVE. ARDEN "She will, too," grinned Don. "Well, I'd like to toss her one back, but she's got me there. I'll just fortify myself at the bar and think up a few choice ones for when we hit Mojave." "Some day you'll be able to answer those," promised the steward. "Mind telling me why it's so tough?" "Not at all," smiled Channing. "The problem is about the same as encountered by the old-time cowboy. It's a lot easier to hit a man on a moving horse from a nice, solid rock than it is to hit a man on a nice, solid rock from a moving horse. Venus Equilateral is quite solid as things go. But a spaceship's course is fierce. We're wobbling a few milliseconds here and a few there, and by the time you use that arc to swing a line of a hundred million miles, you're squirting quite a bit of sky. We're tinkering with it right now, but so far we have come up with nothing. Ah, well, the human race got along without electric lights for a few million years, we can afford to tinker with an idea for a few months. Nobody is losing lives or sleep because we can't talk with the boys back home." "We've been hopping from planet to planet for quite a number of years, too," said the steward. "Quite a lot of them went by before it was even possible to contact a ship in space."