"Hmm." Alan was ill at ease. It seemed to him for a moment that there was something to Brave's instinct, and that he should have been snatched from those lights. Then he said, "I think it's merely that someone had a shot at me the other day, and you've fretted over that till you're seeing assassins behind every chair." "Maybe. Maybe." Brave rocketed the little car along the dark highway, across the miles to home, and all the while the tomtoms beat in his blood and he knew that he should be afraid, that he should be coldly and sanely afraid of some black hazard soon to come. * * * * * Don Mariner walked into their laboratory the following afternoon. He was one of the top engineers on Project Star, a youngish-middle-aged man running to flab and ever-thinning hair. Ordinarily good-humored, today he had a long face and a crease between his eyes. Without a word he spread a sheaf of blueprints and photostats out on a lab table. Alan and Brave bent over them. Don's stubby finger traced the outline of a flying disk, then stabbed at the fuel storage tanks and several other sections of the interior. "Look at this, you two. I've had it under my nose for three months and it never struck me till today. Just look at it. See anything wrong?" After a moment Alan said, "The fuel tanks are too big." "My God! You ought to be the engineer instead of me. I ought to hire out for a potato peeler. Three months it took me to see it." "What's the point of it?" asked Brave. "If the disks are going to use hornethylene, they won't need a tenth--not a hundredth that much storage space, even if they want to circle the earth a dozen times without landing." "Here's another thing," said Don Mariner. "This closet for space suits. Why? The stratosphere is the highest they're supposed to go, and there's no need for space suits there. You want a space suit to crawl around the outside of Albertus, but not to wear in a disk. If there's trouble outside the shell you will simply land. Now look at these instruments." He showed them another chart. "Are these instruments for earth travel?" "I don't know. Are they?" "They are not. And also they're not the instruments Carey designed for the disks last year. They're a new set entirely, and some of 'em I don't understand myself, but I'll tell you this: they're not for earth travel. They're what you'd want in a space rocket." He looked up, his gray eyes bleak. "I faced Carey with 'em, and he swears they're his old design; and Carey doesn't lie in the ordinary course of events. But they're not, and I know it." "What's the point?" asked Alan. The question was almost rhetorical; he knew the answer.