When you
arrived on the _Polaris_, didn't you have a view of the station on your
teleceiver?"

"Yes, sir," answered Tom, "of course."

"Well, these monitors picked up your image on the _Polaris_ teleceiver.
So the traffic-control chief here could see exactly what you were
seeing."

In the center of the circular room Tom noticed a round desk that was
raised about eight feet from the floor. This desk dominated all activity
in the busy room. Inside it stood a Solar Guard officer, watching the
monitoring teleceivers. He wore a throat microphone for sending out
messages, and for receiving calls had a thin silver wire running to the
vibrating bone in his ear. He moved constantly, turning in a circle,
watching the various landing ports on the many screens.
Three-thousand-ton rocket liners, Solar Guard cruisers, scout ships, and
destroyers all moved about the satellite lazily, waiting for permission
to enter or depart. This man was the master traffic-control officer who
had first contacted Tom on his approach to the station. He did that for
all approaching ships--contacted them, got the recognition signal,
found out the ship's destination, its weight, and its cargo or passenger
load.

Then the connection was relayed to one of the secondary control officers
at the monitoring boards.

"That's Captain Stefens," said Scott in a whisper. "Toughest officer on
the station. He has to be. From five hundred to a thousand ships arrive
and depart daily. It's his job to see that every arriving ship is
properly taken into the landing ports. Besides that, everything you've
seen, except the meteor and weather observation rooms, are under his
command. If he thinks a ship is overloaded, he won't allow it to enter
and disrupt the balance of the station. Instead, he'll order its skipper
to dump part of his cargo out in space to be picked up later. He makes
hundreds of decisions a day--some of them really hair-raising. Once,
when a rocket scout crew was threatened with exploding reactant mass, he
calmly told them to blast off into a desolate spot in space and blow up.
The crew could have abandoned ship, but they chose to remain with it and
were blown to atoms. It could have happened to the station. That night
he got a three-day pass from the station and went to Venusport."

Scott shook his head. "I've heard Venusport will never be the same after
that three-day pass of Captain Stefens."

The young officer looked at Corbett quizzically. "Tha