“But you’re only guessing at her reaction! The scorn of intellectuals may have just made her laugh.”

“Who laughs at scorn?” said Elaine.

“Someone who has done as much as she has,” April said. “To someone who has had such a major hand in the development of the outer satellites, that museum and that artist colony must seem like the most minor of efforts, small failures in a giant success story. Why should she care what people say about them? She can look all over space beyond Mars and see her colonies, places she had built — and those are her cultural efforts.”

“That’s probably true,” I admitted. “Although some people like that get proud, and then any little failure gets to be extremely irritating. But I have to admit that in all the research I’ve done on Holmes, I’ve never found a single solid, central motive for building Icehenge. If she did it — and I’m almost certain she did — then the reason remains a mystery. But the more I’ve thought about it, the less surprised I am by that. It seems to me that the reasons one might perpetrate such a hoax are not the sorts of things that can be discovered by examining the public records years and years later. Chances are much higher that they would be something very personal, very private.” I sighed. “Meanwhile, we have these indications that you’ve found. And certainly something seems to have affected her, because in 2550 she put a large satellite into a polar orbit around Saturn, and has lived in seclusion there ever since. No more projects of any kind. It appears she has become a hermit.”

“For the time being,” April said.

“It would help if she had written an autobiography,” said Andrew. “But there’s not a thing by her in the files.”

“That in itself struck me as odd,” I said. “In this age of autobiography, who does not write one?”

“A hoaxer?” Sean suggested.

“Maybe she did write one,” April said. “Maybe she just didn’t publish it. Lots of people don’t publish their autobiographies — Nederland never has, has he? And what about you?”

“All right,” I said. “You’re right. All the motivational stuff is weak. But when you add it to the concrete points, the qualities that the builder absolutely had to have, then she becomes almost the only person to fill the bill. She had an organization large enough to conceal the disappearance of a ship or two for a few years — something that no single ship owner could have done. And in fact two of her ships were mysteriously drydocked for five years. Her Foundation supported the research that helped to establish the Davydov theory, or to shore it up. And lastly, I got on the vidphone last week and called up her father, Johannes Toquener. He still lives on Mars, but the Institute here paid for the call. I asked him if he had ever written anything about his daughter, and if so whether I could read it. He said he hadn’t written anything. Then I said I was doing an article on her and asked if he would give me some information about her youth. He said he’d rather not, and then, when I pressed him to at least tell me how old she was, he said she had been born in 2248, He was surprised to hear there was no birth certificate — he said it must have been destroyed in the civil war.”

Sean whistled. “Same as the number on the Inscription Lith!”

“That’s right. Icehenge has her birth year carved on it. And it could have been coincidence, but now there were too many of them. Now I was sure.”

Later that evening, after we had taken a break for drinks, April said, “You sure do guess a lot.”

I laughed. “Do you think so? I suppose I prefer to call it inductive reasoning. It’s the method everyone uses, no matter what they claim. My methods are no different from Nederland’s, or for that matter Theophilus Jones’s!” They laughed. “These days Jones is claiming that the monument was an alien message device sailing through space, that speared Pluto by coincidence and stuck there. Seriously! And he has ‘facts’ to back up the premise. Everyone does. The difference comes in how careful you are with your premise, and then how rigorously you test it. And it helps not to have a big emotional investment in the premise. Nederland, for instance, really wanted very much for Icehenge to be built by the Davydov expedition, because it helped him in his political jockeying on Mars. And that meant he only saw the facts he wanted to see.”

“You need to go out there,” Andrew said. “All this searching through records can only accomplish so much. You need to go out there and tear up Icehenge and find some solid evidence of who put it there. A rigorous investigation, with trained archaeologists—”

“Which I’m not,” I said.

“I know. You’re a historian.”

“A file freak,” said April.

“You need to have people run as many different tests as they can think of,” Andrew continued.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s precisely what we need.”

But how to get such an expedition underway? The expense would be enormous. And no one would be in any hurry about it. In this world of long-lived people nobody hurried about anything. It all would happen, eventually; why rush? Especially into something so costly.

So I decided to spur the action, and publish an article that would finger Holmes without actually naming her. I sent a short letter to Shards, and they published it in their very next issue:

…With the evidence now available we can provisionally list several attributes of the agent who constructed Icehenge:

1) Access to at least one spaceship equal or superior in capabilities to the Ferrando-X, and possibly to one or two more of the same class.

2) The ability to remove this ship (or these ships) from the Outer Satellites Council flight control and monitoring system, and from all other space flight recording systems extant during the period of the megalith’s construction. This removal would not have been simple by any means and the fact that it was accomplished implies the use of some large resource base, such as a fleet of spaceships, a large shipyard, an entire space flight corporation, or the like.

3) The ability to obtain the cooperation and subsequent silence of at least the twelve people necessary to operate a spaceship of the Ferrando-X class, and possibly many more.

4) Access to Cabinet 14A23546 in Room 319 of the Physical Records Annex in Alexandria, Mars, between the years 2536 and 2548.

5) Access to a Ford field car of the mid-Twenty-third century, and the means and ability to half bury it outside New Houston crater during the stormy two weeks beginning October 2547.

6) The ability to remove fairly large ice boulders from the rings of Saturn without being noticed; this would be easiest for an agent who is a constant presence around Saturn.

7) The tools and equipment with which to cut these ice boulders into the liths of the monument, and place them into position without leaving signs of construction, would have to be available to the builder — as they were not to the Davydov expedition, even granting the latter’s existence.

8) The wealth needed to accomplish all of the above.

Other attributes of the agent are implied by the appearance of the megalith:

1) A knowledge of the megalithic cultures of prehistoric Britain.

2) Some significant connection with the number 2248.

Two weeks after the publication of this short article I received a letter.

Mr. Edmond Doya

Box 510

Waystation

Dear Mr. Doya:

Please visit me for a talk about matters of mutual interest. I will provide your transportation from Waystation to Saturn and back. If it is convenient to you, Captain Pada of the Io can leave Waystation immediately; and if you can stay for a week or ten days (which I urge you to do) she can return you to Waystation by the New Year. Sincerely,