“How did you start?”
“With a premise. Induction, same as Nederland. I started with the theory that Icehenge was not built until humans were capable of getting to Pluto, which struck me as very reasonable. And there were no spaceships that could have taken us there and back until 2443. So Icehenge was a relatively modern construct, made anonymous in the deliberate attempt to obscure its origins.”
“A hoax,” April said.
“Well, yes, in a way, although it’s not the structure that’s a hoax, I mean it is definitely there no matter who set it up—”
“The Davydov expedition, then.”
“Right. Suddenly I had to wonder whether Davydov and Emma — whether any of them had existed at all.”
“So you checked Nederland’s early work.” This from Sean, a very big, bearded man.
“I did. I found that both Davydov and Emma had actually existed — Emma held some Martian middle-distance running records for several years, and some records of their careers were extant. And they both disappeared with a lot of other people in the Martian Civil War. But the only things connecting them with Icehenge were a file in the Alexandrian archives that apparently was planted, and Emma Weil’s journal, which was excavated outside New Houston. Now I got a chemist named Jordan interested in the case, and he has been investigating the aging of the field car that the journal was found in. You know metal oxidizes to an extent when buried in Martian soil, and the rate is measureable — and Jordan’s analysis of the field car seems to indicate that it was never buried in smectite clay, but apparently was exposed to the atmosphere. That is very suspicious, of course. And an engineer named Satarwal has figured out a list of the equipment necessary to construct Icehenge, and by Weil’s own account the asteroid miners didn’t have all of that equipment. So the Davydov explanation has been falling apart from more than one angle in the past few years, and in fact this seminar is one sign of that collapse.”
“So what did you do, then?” Sean asked.
“I made a list of qualities and attributes that the builder of Icehenge had to have had, thinking that I could then draw up a list of suspects. They had to have had a lot of money. They had to have help — my stranger for one, I guessed. They had to have a fairly big spaceship, and one that could be taken out of the usual flight control logbooks, which is a difficult task. And they had to have some specialized equipment, some of which was a little unusual. After I made this list I started making assumptions, about motivation and so forth, that were less certain, though they helped me a lot—”
“But you could make assumptions forever,” April said. “What did you do?”
“Uh. I did research. I sat in front of a screen and punched out codes, read the results, found new indexes, punched out more codes. I looked through shipping records, equipment manufacturing records, sales records — I investigated various rich people. That sort of thing. It was boring work in some ways, but I enjoyed doing it. At first I thought of myself as working my way through a maze. Then that seemed the wrong image. In front of a library screen I could go anywhere. Because of the access-to-information laws I could look in every file and record that existed, except for the illegal secret ones — there are a lot of those — but if they had code call-ups, you know, were hidden somewhere in larger data banks — then I could probably get into those too. I bumped into file freaks and learned new codes, and learning them took me into data banks that taught me even more. Trying to visualize it, I could see myself as a tiny component in a single communications network, a multibank computer complex that spanned the solar system — a dish-shaped, invisible, seemingly telepathic web, a wave pattern that added one more complication to the quark dance swirling in the sun’s gravity well. So I was not in a maze, I was above it, and I could see all of it at once — and its walls formed a pattern, had a meaning, if I could learn how to read it…”
I stopped and looked around. Blank faces, neutral, tolerant nods. “You know what I mean?” I asked.
No answers. “Sort of,” said Elaine. “But our time’s up.”
“Okay,” I said. “More next time.”
One night after a party in the restaurant’s kitchen I wandered the streets, my mind in a ferment. The Sunlight was off and the other side of the cylinder was a web of streetlights and colored neon points. It was the day after payday, so I stopped at the News and Information Center and waited until I could get a booth. When I got one I sat down and aimlessly called up indexes. Something was bothering me, but I didn’t know exactly what it was; and now I only wanted to be distracted. Eventually I selected Recreation News, which played continuously.
The room darkened and then revealed a platform in space. The scene moved to one side and I could see we were on the extension of a small satellite, in a low orbit around an asteroid.
The lilting voice of one of the sports commentators spoke. “The ancient game of golf has undergone yet another transformation out here on Hebe,” he said. We moved farther out onto the platform, and two golfers appeared at the edge of it, in thin hoursuits. “Yes, Philip John and Arafura Aloesi have added a new dimension to their golfing on and around Hebe. Let’s hear them describe it for themselves. Arafura?”
“Well, Connie, we tee off from up here, that’s about it in a nutshell. The pin is back down there near the horizon, see the light? It’s two meters wide, we figured we deserved that much from up here. Mostly we play hole-in-one.”
“What do you have to think about when you’re hitting a shot from up here, Phil?”
“Well, Connie, we’re in a Clarke orbit, so we don’t have to worry about orbital velocity. It’s a lot like every other drive, actually, except you’re higher up than usual—”
“You have to watch out for hitting it too hard; gravity’s not much around a small rock like this, if you drive with a one wood you’re liable to put the ball in orbit, or out in space even—”
“Yeah, Connie, I generally use a three iron and shoot down at it, that works best. Sometimes we play where we have to put the ball through one orbit before it can hit the ground, but it’s hard enough as it is, and—”
“All right, let’s see you guys put one down there.”
They swung and the balls disappeared.
“Now how do you see where it’s hit, guys?”
“Well, Connie, we got this radar screen following them down to the horizon — see, mine’s right on track — then the green has a hundred-meter diameter, and if we land on that it shows on this screen here. Here, they’re about to hit—”
Nothing appeared on the green screen beside them. Phil and Arafura looked crestfallen.
“Well, guys, any future plans for this new twist?”
Phil brightened. “Well, I was thinking if we were to set up just off Io, we could use the Red Spot as the hole and shoot for that. No problem with gravity there—”
“Yes, that’d be one hell of a fairway. And that’s all from Hebe for now, this is Connie McDowell—”
My time ran out and the room was dark, then bright with roomlight. Eventually the attendant came in and roused me. Again my mouth was hanging open: the astonishment of inspiration. I jumped up laughing. “That’s it!” I said, “golf balls!” Still laughing wildly: “I got the old fool this time!” The attendant stared at me and shook his head.
Only a month later (I had written it in a week) a long letter of mine appeared in the Commentary section of Shards. Part of it said,
There is no good evidence concerning the age of Icehenge. This is because most dating methods that have been developed by archaeologists are applicable to substances or processes found only on Terra. Some of these have been adapted for use on Mars, but on planetary bodies without atmospheres, most of the processes that are measured simply do not occur.