“Yes, but look at all he says about how old Icehenge is.”

“No no no, none of those are serious dating methods. Calculating the chances of a lith getting hit by a meteorite? Why, it doesn’t matter what the chances are. The fact is it could have been hit by a meteorite the day after they completed the thing, and damn the probabilities. It doesn’t prove anything. That megalith was put there by Martians about three hundred years ago, by the Davydov expedition. They are the only ones who had the means to get out to Pluto so long ago. Read Nederland, he’s got the whole case worked up beautifully. He even found mention of the plans for the thing, in the Weil journal. With that kind of evidence you don’t need this far-fetched stuff. It’s nonsense, John.”

And John would argue right back that it wasn’t, and Angela and George and the others would usually support him. “How can you be so sure, Edmond? How can you be sure?”

“By looking at the evidence we’ve got. It stands to reason.”

Not that I was always so positive in my feelings toward my great-grandfather. Once I was walking home after a hard day of loading pipe. I had had some beers after work with the rest of the loading gang, and I was feeling low. Passing a holo sales shop I noticed a panel discussion in the window holo and stopped to watch, recognizing one of the doll- like figures to be Nederland. Curiously I contemplated him. He was discussing something or other — on the street it was hard to hear the store’s speaker — with a group of well- dressed professor types, who looked much like him; he was authoritative, impeccably groomed, and on his tiny face was an expert’s frown — he was getting ready to correct the speaker,

I remembered that once I had badgered my father: “Why don’t you like you like Great- grandpa, Dad? Why? He’s famous!” It took a lot of that to get Father even to admit he disliked Nederland, much less explain it. Finally he had said, “Well, I only met him once, but he was rude to your mother. She said it was because we had bothered him, but I still thought he could have been polite. She was his own granddaughter, and he acted like she was some beggar dunning for change. I didn’t like that.”

I left the holo shop window and continued home thinking about it, and when I came to my shabby old boarding house, and looked at its stained walls and etched windows, and remembered the sight of Nederland on that expensive Martian stage in his fine clothes, I felt a little bitter.

But most of the time I was pleased to have such a historian for an ancestor; I was fascinated by his work, and made myself an expert in it. One wall of my book-lined room was covered with shelves of books by Nederland, or about Nederland, or about Oleg Davydov and Emma Weil, and the Mars Starship Association, and the Martian Civil War, and the rest of early Martian history. I became a scholar of that whole era, and my first publications were letters of comment in Chronicle of Martian History and Shards, correcting errors in articles on the period. The publication of these letters in such prestigious journals convinced me that I was a gypsy scholar, a laborer intellectual, the equal of any university man. And I studied harder than ever, quite pleased with myself — a dabbler in a field where I had not had a single moment’s contact with the primary sources of data: one of Nederland’s many followers in the widespread revision of Martian history.

So years passed, and Icehenge, and Nederland’s explanation for it, the astonishing story of the Davydov mutiny, remained a central part of my life. The turning point in my history — the end of my innocence, so to speak — came on New Year’s Eve, when the year 2589 became 2590. By that time I was working for the Titan Weather Company. Early in the evening I was on the job, helping to create a lightning storm that crackled and boomed over the raucous new town of Simonides. Just after the big blast at midnight — two huge balls of St. Elmo’s fire, colliding just above the dome — we were let off, and we hit town ready for a good time. The whole crew, all sixteen of us, went first to our regular bar, Jacque’s. Jacque was dressed up as the Old Year, and his pet chimpanzee was in diapers and ribbons, representing the New. I drank several beers and allowed a variety of capsules to be popped under my nose, and soon like most of the people there I was very drunk. My boss, Mark Starr, was rolling on the floor, wrestling the chimp. It looked like he was losing. An impromptu chorus was bellowing out an old standard, “I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant,” and inspired by the mentioning of my native satellite, I started singing a complicated harmony part. Apparently I was the only one who perceived its beauties. There were shouts of protest, and the woman seated next to me objected by pushing me off the bench. As I recovered my footing she stood up, and I shoved her into the table behind us. People there were upset by her arrival and began pounding on her. Feeling magnanimous, I grabbed her arm and pulled her away. The moment she was clear of them she punched me hard in the shoulder, and swung again angrily. I parried the blow with a forearm and jabbed her on the sternum, but she had a longer reach and was much angrier, and I had to retreat quickly, warding off her blows. Despite a couple of good jabs I saw that I was outmatched, and I slipped through the throng at the bar and escaped out the door and into the street.

I sat down at the curb and relaxed. I felt good. There were lots of people on the street, many of them quite drunk. One of them failed to notice me, and tripped over my legs. “Hey!” he shouted, kneeling before me and grabbing my collar. “What d’you mean tripping me like that?” He was a big barrel-chested man, with thin arms that nevertheless were very strong; he shook me a little and it seemed to me his biceps looked like wire under the skin. He had long tangled hair, a small head, and he reeked of whiskey.

“Sorry,” I said, and tried to knock his hands away from my collar. I failed. “I was just sitting here when you ran over me.”

“Sure!” he shouted, and shook me again. Then he let go of me, and his eyes rolled a little; he crumpled back onto his butt, took stock of his situation dizzily, and slid himself over so that he was seated in the trash in the gutter, out of people’s way. I shifted away from him a foot or two, and he waved at me to stop. He took a vial from his shirt pocket, opened it with awkward care, waved it under his nose.

“You shouldn’t use that stuff,” I advised him.

“And why not?”

“It’ll give you high blood pressure.”

He peered up at me with bloodshot eyes. “High blood pressure is better than no blood pressure at all.”

“There is that.”

“So you’d better try some of this, hadn’t you.”

I didn’t know if he was serious or not, but I decided not to test it. “I guess I’d better.”

Slowly he levered himself up onto the curb next to me. Seated he looked like a spider. “You got to have blood pressure, that’s my motto,” he said.

“I see.”

He waved the vial under my nose, and immediately I felt the rush of the flyer. He left it there until I almost fainted with euphoria and lack of oxygen. “Man,” he said, “on New Year’s Eve everybody just goes crazy.”

“Gosh I w-wonder why,” I managed to say.

Then Mark and Ivinny and several more of the weather crew crashed out of Jacque’s. “Come on, Edmond, the chimp has got hold of a fire extinguisher and any minute it’ll be blasting us.”

I stood up, much too quickly, and when the colored lights went away I motioned to my new companion. He started to stand, we helped him the rest of the way. He stood a score of centimeters taller than the rest of us. We trailed my group of friends, talking continuously and barely listening to each other, we were so high. Then a forty-person free-for-all swirled out of a side street and caught us up in it; Simonides was filled with Caroline Holmes’s shipworkers, and it was nearing dawn, and from the roar bouncing down on us from the dome it appeared that there were brawls going on all over town. My new companion’s arms were only thin in relation to his giant torso, and with their length and power he was able to clear an area around him. I stayed close on his heels, and was hit on the side of the head by his elbow. When I regained consciousness a few seconds later he was dragging me by the heels after Mark and the rest. “What are you doing attacking me from behind, eh?” he shouted. “Don’t you know that’s dangerous?”