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.
"The point is, these disks we're building are supposed to be purely and simply a faster means of traveling around Terra than any we have now. But the man in the street, that faceless brainless little cipher, believes they're for conquering the stars. And by Judas, he's right! We're building interplanetary disks—and we're not supposed to know it!"
The three men stared at one another.
"Who's keeping it from us?"