In the year 2200 A.D., Solar News Company became the biggest corporation in the nine planets. In the year 2220, Solar built the Heptagon, so called not because it was seven-sided but because it covered seven solid blocks, housed seven hundred thousand employees, and on its seventieth floor had a spacefield big enough to handle a fair-sized interplanetary patrol boat. In the early part of the Twenty-Third Century, war had been eliminated for so long that international affairs no longer had the de