At the time the stories take place, the asteroid has been completely reworked, resulting in a burnished steel cylinder with a large docking port at one end and a bank of communications dishes at the other.

Other regular characters include heads of development Charles and Freddie Thomas, Master Mechanic Michael Warren, Martian archeologists Barney Carroll and James Baler, Baler's sister Christine, Terran Electric Company lawyer Mark Kingman, Terran Electric physicist Wesley Farrell, and neurosurgeon-turned-evil-genius Allison "Hellion" Murdoch.

This is a specialized vacuum tube which (through mechanisms not explained) very efficiently converts the matter of its anode to massive amounts of thrust upon excitation by a low-power source.

All 13 stories were included in the 1976 Ballantine collection The Complete Venus Equilateral[1] and the 1980 reprint published by its SF imprint Del Rey Books.

[4] The staff of Venus Equilateral must cope with an incompetent manager named Francis Burbank who is appointed Director of the station by the Interplanetary Communications Commission.

Disaster looms when Burbank disposes of the air plant, thinking that the Martian sawgrass is simply a collection of weeds that sprouted up in an empty compartment.

When the engineering staff of Terran Electric use a Martian power transmitter to create a faster-than-light communicator, Kingman uses it to manipulate Venus Equilateral's stock price in an effort to gain a controlling interest in the company.

When Venus Equilateral independently reproduces the FTL communicator, Channing discovers Kingman's plot, and manipulates him back.

Channing successfully argues that the device is not a transmitter by using it as a matter duplicator, to create multiple copies of the judge's antique watch.

The people of the Solar System must fall back on barter, and those too poor to buy matter duplicators are left to their own devices.

Cal Blair hates space travel, and he's not very keen on surgery either, which is why his relationship with Tinker Elliot, a spacefaring surgeon, has never blossomed into marriage.

When the long-lost electronic key to Hellion Murdoch's hidden treasure finds its way into Blair's hands, though, he winds up deeply involved in both.

Cal, a cryptographer, uses his skills to decipher the key, build a device that will allow him to use it to find Murdoch's treasure, and travels to Venus to locate it.

Elliot suffers a serious spinal injury when Benj's aircraft crashes in the Venusian swamps, and Cal must defeat his twin in a duel using three-foot soldering irons before he can help her.

Overcoming his deep aversion to surgery, Cal uses Murdoch's treasure to repair Elliot's spinal injury and save her life.