I was alone at Icehenge.

I sat down and let the feeling saturate me. All my life I had wanted to be here, and now I was. A pebble held between gloved fingers resisted all the pressure I could put on it. Yes, I was really here. No hologram this. I could hardly believe it.

The ring was roughly contiguous with a very old, subdued crater, so that some of the liths stood on low knobs or prominences of the almost-buried rim. It made for a very beautiful effect: each lith appeared to be “placed” with the utmost of care, in the spot perfectly appropriate for it. This impression co-existed with the obvious irregularity of the ring, in that liths were bunched together in groups of four or five or six, placed markedly out of line, placed so that their broad smooth faces pointed at every direction of the compass… And the combination, I thought, was wonderful.

I stood and walked over to the Inscription Lith. The words and the 2-2-4-8 slashes were deeply incised in the surface, and as the sunlight slanted across the ice the words were easy to read. I imagined the megalith’s discoverer Seth Cereson, staring up at that alien-looking script. To move, to push farther out; to cause to set out towards. It was a good motto. My father’s remark came back to me: It’s a wonder they didn’t all sign their names. So true, I thought. If the Davydov expedition had built the monument, why hadn’t they said so? It only made sense if they identified themselves, it seemed to me. Wasn’t this message an obvious attempt to be enigmatic, so that its goal was a clear ambiguity?

Continuing around the circumference of the ring, I touched my glove lightly to the sharp edge of one of the triangular liths, then walked into the field of broken ice boulders that was the Fallen Lith. Here every crack and splinter of ice looked absolutely fresh, in places as sharp as chipped obsidian. Ice at seventy degrees Kelvin is terrifically hard and brittle, and whatever hit it — meteor, construction tool, we would no doubt find out in the next few weeks — had shattered it into scores of cracked pieces, which had fallen to the inside of the ring. Looking through a clearish pane of ice (sort of like Holmes’s wall of wavy glass), I thought that the cracking looked very recent. It was true that ice sublimed very slowly at this low temperature, but it did sublime; yet I could see nothing but those fine obsidian edges. I wondered what the scientists would make of it.

Then I continued my circumference hike, skipping in places, and using the arc of liths as a slalom course in others, just as I would have done if I had truly been at the megalith back on my eleventh birthday. From every vantage point I saw a different Icehenge, as the play of sunlight and deep shadow shifted; when I noticed this each step brought me a new megalith, and jubilantly I circled the ring again and again, until I was too exhausted to skip, and had to sit on a waist-nigh block of the Fallen Lith. I was here.

Over the next week or two the various teams established their pattern of investigation. Those working on the ice spent a good deal of their time in the landing vehicles’ laboratories. Dr. Hood and his team worked to determine what kind of cutting tool had shaped the liths. Bachan Nimit and his people from Ganymede were following a new line of inquiry that I thought held promise; they were looking at pieces of the Fallen Lith in hopes of finding out if as many micrometcors had hit the hidden underside of the fragments as had hit the exposed surfaces.

But the most visible, and it seemed the most energetic, team was Brinston’s excavation group. Brinston was showing himself to be extremely competent and well organized, to no one’s surprise. The day after we arrived he had his people out laying down the gridwork, and quickly they were making the preliminary line digs. He spent long hours at the site, moving from trench to trench, inspecting what was revealed, consulting and giving instructions. In conversations he was confident. “The substructure of the megalith will explain it,” he said. At the same time he warned us against expecting any immediate information: “Digging is slow work — even with as simple a situation as this, one has to be very careful not to tear up the evidence one is looking for, which in this case is something as delicate as the marks of a previous excavation and fill, in regolith no less…” He would talk on endlessly about the various aspects of his task, and I would leave him nearly as convinced as he that he would solve the mystery.

The teams established a common working period that they called “day,” and during this time the site swarmed with busy figures. Outside these times the landscape emptied.

I had no specific work to do, I was uncomfortably aware of that. The investigation I had stimulated was being made, by professionals competent to the task. There was nothing left for me but to witness what they found. So I quickly took to visiting the monument in the off hours. Those few who stayed, or returned to visit, soon became still, contemplative figures, and we didn’t bother each other.

At those times, wandering among the massive blocks in a vast silence, the abandoned equipment and all the trenches and mounds gave it the look of a work in progress, a work of giants left unfinished for unknown reasons… leaving the skeleton or framework of something larger. I sat at the center point of the ring for hours, and learned the various aspects it presented at different times of the Plutonian day. It was spring in the northern hemisphere — coldest, longest spring under the sun — and the sun stayed just over the horizon all the time. It took nearly a week for Pluto to spin around, for the sun to circle our horizon; and even at that slow speed I could see the movement of light and shadow, if I watched long enough, creating a different Icehenge at every moment, just as when I had run around it that first day; only this time I was still, and it was the planet that moved.

Near the center of the ring was the memorial plaque left by Nederland’s expedition. A block of brecciated rock had been hauled into the old crater, and its top had been cut flat and covered by a platinum plaque.

Staring at this oddity I tried to sort it all out in my mind. Apparently those three asteroid miners had disappeared in the years before the Martian revolution; it was a fact documented in a variety of times and places. So the three ships had disappeared, yes. But almost anything might have happened to them. And since the documents — some of them — concerning their disappearance had been released in the early 2500s, Holmes could have found out about them, and decided then to explain her monument as an artifact left by those miners… thus creating an attractive tale of successful resistance against the Martian oligarchy and its police state, and recovering a victory from the unmitigated defeat of the failed revolt. This gave the hoaxer a motive beyond that of mere mystification… and it was the kind of story people liked to believe.

And so the file on Davydov in Alexandria, and the buried field car, miraculously unburied at New Houston. The file, simply enough, had not been in the cabinet in Alexandria just a few years before Nederland searched there. He could claim for as long as he liked that records were always being shifted around the archives, but the truth was that such shifts were also documented, and that this cabinet had not been tampered with, officially. The file, in short, was a plant. Part of the hoax.