The ice of Icehenge, it has been determined, is about two billion years old. But when that ice was cut into beams and placed on Pluto has proven more difficult to determine. Two changes in the ice beams offer possible dating methods. First, a certain amount of the ice has sublimed spontaneously, but at seventy degrees Kelvin this process is extremely slow, and its effects at Icehenge are too small to measure. (This argues against any very great age for the megalith — those ages proposed by all of the “prehistoric” theories — but is no help in determining the date of construction more precisely.)
An attempt has been made to measure the second change occurring in the ice, which is the pitting that results from the fall of micrometeorites. Professor Mund Stallworth, with the help of Professor Hjalmar Nederland and the Holmes Foundation, has developed a micro-meteorite count method by which he claims to have dated the monument. This method is the equivalent of the terrestrial dating method of patination, and like patination it relies on an intimate knowledge of local conditions if it is to achieve any accuracy. Stallworth has assumed, and assumed only, that micrometeor fall is a constant both temporally and spatially. After making this assumption he has been fairly rigorous, and has taken counts on artificial surfaces on Luna and in the asteroids to establish a reliable short-term time chart. According to his calculations, micrometeors have fallen on Icehenge for a thousand years plus or minus five hundred. This makes Icehenge at least a hundred and fifty years older than the 2248 dating, but is considered close enough by Nederland, who has used Stallworth’s results to support his theory.
But the main problem with this dating (aside from the fact that the method is based on an assumption) is that the micrometeor fall on Icehenge could be part of the manufactured evidence. Micrometeorites are, for the most part, carbon dust. A handful of carbon dust sprinkled from a few hundred meters over the monument would create exactly the same effect as a thousand years of natural micrometeor fall. There would be no way of telling the difference.
Also, this is a precaution that would occur very quickly to the builders of Icehenge if they were attempting to make the monument appear older than it really is, for micrometeorites would be the only force acting on the structure over the short term. Though a method for measuring this action did not exist at the time of the monument’s construction (and still does not, in my opinion), the existence of micrometeor fall was known, and so the dating method could be both foreseen and dealt with, by an artificial fall. Given the elaborate nature of this hoax it is a possibility more likely than not—”
At the next seminar meeting, in the same pub, after we had had a few drinks, Andrew waved a finger at me. “So give, Edmond,” he said. “We want to know who put it there.”
I put down my glass. I had never written this down; never said it to anybody. All their eyes were on me.
“Caroline Holmes,” I said.
“What?”
“No!”
“What?”
“No, nooooo…”
They quieted down. Sean said, “Why?”
“Start from the beginning,” Elaine said.
I nodded. “It started with shipping records. You remember the list of criteria I gave you last time? Well, it seemed to me that access to a spaceship would be the best point on the list for narrowing down the group of potential suspects. The Outer Satellites Council licenses all spaceships, and keeps flight logs for all flights made. The same is true for Mars and Terra. So the flight to Pluto would have to be made, um, off the books, you know. So I started checking the records of all the spaceships capable of making the round trip to Pluto—”
“My God!” Sean said. “What a chore.”
“Yes. But there are a finite number of those ships, and I had a lot of time. I wasn’t in any hurry. And eventually I found that Caroline Holmes’s shipyards had tucked away a couple of Ferrando-X spaceships for five years in the 2530s, for unspecified repairs. So I started investigating Holmes herself. She fulfills all the criteria: she’s rich enough, she has the equipment, the spaceships, the employees that depend on her for everything and wouldn’t be likely to talk. Her foundation financed the development of Stallworth’s micrometeorite dating method, by giving him a grant. And there was something about her — she wasn’t obviously secretive, I mean we all know something about her — but it was curious how little I could find out about her once I tried. Especially about her earlier years.”
“I know a fair bit about her company,” Sean said. “It domed Hyperion Crater on Ganymede, where I was born. Nearly half of the first Jovian colonies were her projects, as I understand it. But I don’t know anything about her before that.”
“Well,” I said, “I never found any record of her birth. And no one knows how old she is. Her parents were Johannes Toquener and Jane Leaf. Leaf was the chairperson of Arco until she was killed in a docking accident on Phobos, in 2289. The next year Holmes named herself and moved to Ceres. With her inheritance she started a shipping, mining and exploration firm, and she got the patents on several recycling devices that were widely used in the Jovian colonies. Between 2290 and 2460, when the Outer Satellites Council was formed on Titan, she had become one of the major developers in the outer satellites. I know most of the general outline of her story — my question is, can any of you explain it?”
“Good business sense,” Andrew said.
“She’s completely ruthless,” said April.
“She had good business sense,” insisted Andrew. “She was a smart miner. She could find metal ores that were in short supply on Terra faster than her competitors. I worked in mining, I know. She was a legend. Like once they thought all the manganese ore was gone. They were dragging nodules off of Terra’s ocean floors, and since heavy metals are less frequent the farther away from the sun you get, there wasn’t much hope held for finding any more outside of Mars. But Holmes’s Jupiter Metals supplied thousands of tons of the ore in the 2370s. It was like she was pulling the stuff out of her hat. That in itself made her a billionaire, and that was just part of it.”
“And after that,” I said, “she could just leave it up to gravity.”
“What?”
“Acute students of finance will have observed that money, abstract concept though it is, behaves as if it had mass. Economic laws imitate physical laws. Everyone’s collection of money is a planetary body, in other words, exerting influence on everyone else’s. Thus the more money you have the stronger its gravity is, and the easier it is to attract more. Now most of us own mere asteroids of money. But some people own stars of money, and some of those stars, like Holmes’s, reach their Chadresekhar Limit and turn into black holes. Now any money that comes close enough to Holmes is sucked in. There is an event horizon, of course, where this captured money appears to slow down, like Apollo in Zeno’s Paradox, ever closer by smaller degrees to Holmes’s Jupiter Metals — but in actuality those ‘subsidiary corporations’ have flashed invisibly to the no-point of infinite mass which is Holmes’s wealth.”
Andrew and Elaine laughed; the rest stared at me. “Edmond, you’re crazy tonight,” Elaine said. “But we’ve run out of time again, and I have to get to work.” She was a bartender.
“No, finish the story!”
“Next time,” I said. “Okay — assignment, here. Next time come with some information about Caroline Holmes. We’ll see what you find.”
Elaine and April then left, and Andrew and Sean and I settled down for some serious drinking, some serious argument.
In those weeks when the seminar was running I had a bit more money than usual, even after I had paid Fist what I owed him. One night when I was walking the streets for entertainment, hanging out with the locals I knew, I decided to do some mental traveling instead. It was a pastime I had indulged fairly often when I first arrived on Waystation, and had a little nest egg of savings. I went to the nearest Recreation Center, and paid for three hours in one of the sensory deprivation tanks.