Hours later he leaned back from his drawing table and his voice rumbled out into the quiet reaches of the empty room. "Men will fly to the stars like a bullet," he prophesized. "Because I know why the rocket crashed." It was dark but the light in Bronsen's office was still on. Mars pulled himself erect and turned toward Bronsen's room, then faltered. "I could just forget it," he mused. "Then the idea would be filed away. But someday...." He could not do it. The excitement was beginning to mount inside of him, pushing him forward. He took a deep breath and with a decisive shrug drew back his shoulders, standing straighter and taller than he had in fifteen long years. He strode from the room and headed down the hall. Bronsen heard the door behind him open and close softly. He glanced up and saw who it was and returned, scowling, to his work. When Mars did not leave, he looked up again, curiosity stirring within him at the expression in the older man's face. "Well?" It wasn't really a question, nor an inflection denoting that he wanted to hear what Mars had to say. It was more of a compromise between physically throwing him out and grudgingly listening to what he had to say. "I've got it, I know what happened to the ship," Mars announced quietly. "I knew it when I saw it come out of the launcher but I couldn't explain it." Bronsen returned to his papers with a snort and Mars pleaded, "I'm sorry about all those things I said. For God's sake. Listen to me!" The tortured pleading in the man's voice made Bronsen put down the papers in surprise. "The models worked," Mars plunged ahead. "Sure they did. But because they were small ... so much smaller than the real ship ... there was no trouble and they worked perfectly. The trouble reveals itself only as the projectile gets larger. The nose, Bronsen. A nose band. Don't you see what I'm trying to say?" The younger man stared in silence at the pleading ex-space pilot, before the words began to penetrate his whirling thoughts. He forgot the crash of the ship; he forgot the feel of hard teeth splitting the skin across his knuckles; he forgot the animosity that existed between them. His mind could focus on nothing but what Mars was trying to say.