The ship seemed comically primitive to little Lanya. Its huge bulk was almost entirely made up of rocket-drive engine and fuel compartments. She studied the elongated shape that stretched to the vaulted roof like a spear head and rested solidly on the rear jet clusters. High up in the nose she could see the tiny cabin just big enough for three astronauts.
Compared with the sleek, beautifully-designed atomic craft in the rest of the museum, it was grotesque.
"Gosh," breathed Lanya, "it's big, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Virgil, with the full confidence of two years at the Technological Institute. "Very crude design, but necessary because there is so much engine to it. Simple to construct, though, and with a few refinements ... oh boy!"
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.