Lanya was properly awed. She wouldn't start at the Institute until next year. No matter how hard she studied or how fast she learned, Virgil was always two years of knowledge ahead of her. She had just struggled through higher mathematics and physics, thinking she was getting ahead at last, only to find that Virgil, from the vantage point of his engineering studies, considered the laws of mathematics and physics merely basic. In the old days, Grandma had said, one didn't matriculate at the Institute until one was as old as fifteen. "How they learn today!" she was always saying when Lanya accidentally exhibited her knowledge. "All so fast you would think they haven't as much time to live as before." She would throw up her hands in mock despair. "This new generation! I don't know what Mars is coming to." But she usually laughed so Lanya knew that Grandma didn't really despair for Mars' future. Lanya was vague about her father Jonathan Greggor's origin. He seemed to be a physicist and they said he had been sent to Mars from Earth to assist in the development of uranium and plutonium deposits. But her mother, Klee, a beautiful Martian, had induced Jonathan to stay. Lanya knew little more than that. "Do you think we can do it?" Lanya asked with just the right shade of admiration in her voice. Virgil was much pleasanter company when she took pains to appreciate his masculine superiority. "Sure," he boasted. "Even better than this one. This old tub is simple ... we can make ours smaller and faster." They had a last long, lingering look at the "Ghost", then swaggered out past the grinning attendant. He wouldn't be grinning if he knew what they knew, Lanya thought. * * * * * In the Greggor workshop, out away from the house, Virgil and Lanya worked diligently on the ship. A launching rig jutted up out of a pronounced dip in the red Martian sand a quarter of a mile away. Fascinating blueprints, over which Virgil pored learnedly whenever Lanya happened to look at him, littered the shop. Their father's shop equipment was switched on every afternoon to assist in the work. After five months the ship, with rocket engines already installed, was nearing completion. Lanya's confidence in the venture had been on the wane lately. Before it had been only an exhilarating idea, safely remote in the future. But now, as the ship actually grew before her eyes, it was losing its secure vagueness. It was becoming terrifyingly real. "Do you think we ought to do it?" she asked sheepishly and hopefully. She trembled at the derision in her brother's voice. "Girls!" he said. "Always afraid of everything." "I am not afraid!" Lanya protested indignantly. "I just wondered if we ought. Maybe father _will_ buy us an aircraft _this_ year."