We were close, very close. Activity began on the Snowflake — like water thawing after a long winter, people began to move in the halls, to meander past each other, scuffing at moss and greeting shyly… Jones and I escaped the expedition group and went down to the crew’s lounge, where they were drinking and sniffing drugs. At the appearance of Jones and me they declared a party, and we all went at it with a will, turning the music up loud and bouncing up and down against the newly returned deceleration gee. There was a viewscreen in the lounge displaying the space we were headed toward — a black square sparkling with stars.
“So where is it?” said Jones to one of the crew. She pointed out Pluto, just ahead of Aries. It was about second magnitude, and there beside it was Charon, barely visible. Jones lifted his drink bulb to it, and cried, “You’re right! There’s Icehenge, I see it right there on top!”
Later, after we had danced to exhaustion (and a number of bruises, because deceleration gee wasn’t all that strong), Jones and I hunkered over to one of the corner tables. I was pretty drunk, and ideas swirled dizzily in my head. “I’ve been writing a lot of this down, Jones. A sort of journal.” He nodded and snapped a capsule under his nose. “Sometimes — sometimes it seems to me that what I’m writing is the sequel to Emma Weil’s journal — which I’m certain was written by Caroline Holmes.”
“Umph,” Jones said.
“I’m certain of it,” I said, interpreting his grunt of doubt accurately. “If you had seen Holmes like I saw her during my visit, you’d know what I meant. When I told her I had found the Icehenge model…”
“Umph.” But that one meant understanding. I had described my stay at Holmes’s to Jones in great detail, and now with some big sniffs he nodded.
“And my story — my story tells of a voyage to Pluto, which is exactly what Emma said was going to happen. And this voyage is being paid for by Holmes! Sometimes, I tell you, that old woman looks very much in control of things out here… sometimes I wonder how much of it she may have planned, and what she has in store for us out there—”
“Who knows?” said Jones. “There are so many influences on our lives that we don’t control — you might as well not worry about another one that you may be making up. Right? Whatever happens on Pluto, I’m looking forward to it. I’m anxious to get there. We are close, you know.” Dramatically he pointed at the screen. “I can see those ice towers! I can!”
And then we were there. We were there, circling the ninth planet. When the orbit was established Dr. Lhotse gave the orders and we rushed into the LVs, burst out of the bays of the Snowflake and fell in long arcs onto the cratered polar plain, settling with a gentle last bump like little crystals of the mother flake. I felt solid and substantial, heavier than I had in years and years. The dust thrown up by our landing cleared and off beyond the glare-white area under the spotlights I saw a horizon almost flat. The flattest horizon I had ever seen. “This is the biggest thing I ever stood on,” I said aloud, though in the scramble for suits no one heard me. “I’m on a planet. First planet I ever stood on, and it’s Pluto.” Something in the thought was odd and distressing, and by the time I shook it off all the suits had been claimed. “Hey!” I shouted. “Someone give me one of those — I’m the one who got you out here!” But they all ignored me or pretended not to hear me or counted on someone else to oblige me, and in three great noisy charges they crushed into the lock and were spewed onto the surface. I was left to fume and leap around the main room cursing and fizzing with a few others, until Arthur Grosjean (who had seen the megalith before, and, I think, was doing me a favor) returned early and gave me his suit. “Thanks, Arthur,” I babbled, “I really appreciate it,” and the static shocks jumped between us as he helped the suit onto me — and then I was into the lock, and through, and stumbling onto the surface. I started to run and immediately fell full-length into the gravel. It made me laugh, because I knew then that the rocks were real, that I was really there.
The dust we had thrown up in our landing served to hold a little of the light from our searchlights, and so there was a faint glow in the sky to show me where the megalith was, as well as a wide road of footprints. Some of them were no doubt footprints from the Persephone’s people, perfectly sharp-edged after more than sixty years. I broke into a trot, keeping my eyes on the smooth horizon to the north, and damned if I didn’t trip and fall again.
I got up and ran, kicked my own heel and fell. Sitting there on Pluto’s gravelly, dusty surface, I looked north and saw the very tops of the liths, rising just behind a low hill. The sun was off to my right, a dazzling morning star just a few degrees over the horizon. On their eastern sides the liths were patches of gleaming white; to the west they were barely visible black shadows.
I was shivering, as if I could feel through my suit a touch of Pluto’s cold, only seventy degrees above the absolute zero of total stillness. I got up and walked with a long slow stride, as if I were in a parade. Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge, Icehenge. Every step brought more of it over the horizon to me, until I topped the low mound and it was all there, the whole ring, silent and expansive on the plain before me.
The little human figures were standing in groups inside the giant circle, or bounding about from lith to lith, and to my surprise I appreciated their presence very much. I turned on my intercom and heard them all talking at once so that not one of them could have understood anything, and it made me laugh. They were so small — one of them stood by the Fallen Lith, and even he appeared insignificantly short. Exhilarated, I continued my march down the slope to it, humming bum, bom, bum, bom, bum, bom. I passed between two liths. Looking down the curving row of columns I saw that they were much more irregularly placed than they had ever seemed in holograms. Just the act of transmitting and imaging them had somehow given their ensemble more order. Here, in reality, their placement seemed jumbled, the work of an alien intelligence. The ring was huge, monstrous; the area encircled by the white beams was a giant field! It took a while to walk to the center of it. There, in a circle trodden smooth by prints, was the plaque left there by Nederland’s Martian expedition. I ignored the plaque and looked around. The ring was a rough circle — I couldn’t perceive the flattened side to the “north,” for the different dimensions of each lith, and the varying angles of placement, created an irregular display of white and black parallelograms that were hard to get in perspective. Most of the western liths gleamed in the sun, though some were darkened by the endless shadows cast by the liths to the east. The eastern liths themselves were black cutouts against the starry sky, except for a few that caught the reflected light from some more westerly lith, and gleamed dully. To the north the Six Great Liths stood like a huge curving line of towers; yet the jagged arc of small liths near the fallen one seemed not much shorter, though the shortest ones were all there.
Groups of people approached me, and I shook hands with everyone before they headed back. We all chattered happily, saying nothing yet conveying just what we wanted to. Then they were all off over the low rise to the south, to the landing vehicles. The last figure approached; by his height and gait I already had identified him as Jones. “Hey, Theophilus,” I said. “Here we are.” He extended his arm and we shook hands. Through his faceplate I saw his bright eyes, and a wide grin. He drew me toward him and hugged me, and then, without a word, he turned and left.