Icehenge

  Bitterly I kicked the plaque. It was set solidly. I picked up a double handful of regolith, dumped it on the marker. Several handfuls made a good pile; it looked like a cairn of pebbles, set on a big flat boulder. “Stupid romantic story,” I muttered. “Preying on what we want to believe.…” Why had she done it?

  * * *

  My only regular companion during these off hours’ meditations was Jones. It was natural that he should prefer these times, for only then did the monument fully regain its solitary power, its shadowed majesty. But I thought, also, that he felt self-conscious doing his work before the others.

  For work he was doing, laboriously and painstakingly, with a surveying distance gun. He was measuring the megalith. When I switched to the common band on the intercom, I heard him muttering numbers to himself, and humming snatches of music. He had arranged to have music piped in to him from the landing vehicles while he worked; usually when I switched to that band one of Brahms’s symphonies was playing.

  Occasionally he enlisted my aid. He would stand at a lith and aim his gun at me while I held a small mirror before a lith; then I walked to the next lith, and repeated the operation. I laughed at the tiny figure across the central crater.

  “Sixty-six times sixty-six, that’s a lot of measurements,” I said. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Numbers,” he replied. “Whoever built this was very very careful about numbers. I want to see if I can find the lith by looking very carefully at the numbers that are made by the monument.”

  “The lith?”

  “The patterns are singling out a particular lith, I feel.”

  “Ah.”

  “Therefore I must try to find the unit of measurement they used when building. Note that it was not metrical or foot and inch. Long ago a man named Alexander Thom discovered that all of the stone megaliths in northern Europe used the same unit, which he called the megalithic yard. It was about seventy-four centimeters.” He stopped what he was doing, and I saw the tiny red dot of his gun wander over the liths to my left. “Now, no one but me has ever noticed that this megalithic yard from northern Europe is almost exactly the same length as the ancient Tibetan unit—”

  “And the Egyptian unit used at the Pyramids, undoubtedly, but isn’t that because they’re the standard elbow to finger units of early civilizations?”

  “Maybe, maybe. But since the flattened ring construction here is one of the common patterns for British henges, I thought I’d check to see.”

  “How is it coming along?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I laughed. “You could find out in seconds on the Snowflake’s computer.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad you’re here with us, Jones, I really am.”

  He chuckled. “You like having someone here crazier than you. But just wait. The numerology of Icehenge was always a rich field, even before these new measurements I’m taking. Did you know that if you begin at the Fallen Lith and count counterclockwise by prime numbers, the width of each lith increases by one point two three four times? Or that the heights of each foursome of consecutive liths add up to either ninety-five point four, or one hundred and one meters? Or that each length divided by width ends with a prime number—”

  “Who says all this?”

  “I do. You must not have read my book, Mathematics and Metaphysics at Icehenge.”

  “I missed that one, I guess.”

  “One of my best. See how much you don’t know?”

  * * *

  In this manner several weeks quickly passed. Brinston’s face took on a slightly anxious expression, though he was finding out some interesting things. It appeared that for every lith a large cylindrical posthole had been dug—the ice beam had been positioned on the floor of the hole, which was invariably bedrock, and the hole was then filled. The only other fact they had discovered was that there were no individual postholes for the Six Great Liths. Perhaps because they were so near each other, a single big hole, still cylindrical, had been dug for all of them. Brinston’s team had marked out the circumference of this cylinder, and it encompassed nine liths. “But I don’t know what it means,” he confessed irritably.

  * * *

  The day Brinston presented this information, Jones and I walked out to the site. Jones was excited, but he wouldn’t tell me why.

  It was after the working hours, and we were the only ones out there. We walked through the circle of towers and on to the pole, to watch the henge from there. Dr. Grosjean had had a short metal pole placed at the axis of rotation to help his first survey of the site, and it stood there still, a little less than shoulder high. We sat on either side of it. The sun was on the other side of the megalith, and the liths were more obscure than ever—faint reverse shadows, dim areas of lightness against the pervading black. The gravel underneath me felt cold.

  “Now we’re spinning like a top,” said Jones. “Feel it?” I laughed easily, yet as we sat there I could suddenly visualize Pluto as a tiny twirling ball, a handful of ice toothpicks stuck in its top, two antlike creatures seated on the axis of rotation.

  I moved and the sun disappeared behind a lith. I felt the ancient fear—eclipse, sun death.

  After a long silence Jones took his distance gun from his suit’s thigh pocket and turned it on. He pointed it at the henge. On lith number three, the tallest one, a red spot appeared; brighter than the sun. Jones moved the spot in a small circle on the lith.

  “That one,” he said. “There’s something special about lith three.”

  “Aside from it being the tallest?”

  “Yes.” He jumped up and took off rapidly toward it. “Come on!”

  I hurried after him. As we approached it, he said, “I told you I would find something in those measurements. Though it wasn’t exactly what I had expected.”

  We stopped before it, standing just outside the arc of the Six Great Liths. Number three was massive, endlessly tall, big as a Martian skyscraper. On this side it was in total darkness, or rather, was illuminated only by starlight, which was barely adequate for our vision; the circle of shadows reared up into eerie obscurity. We stared up into it.

  “If you take the centerpoint of the lith,” Jones said, “at ground level, and measure from there. Then every center of every lith in the henge is an exact multiple of the megalithic yard away.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, seriously. It doesn’t work for any other lith, either.”

  I looked up at his faceplate, but it was too dark—from a meter or two away I could barely see him. “You used the computers.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jones, you amaze me.”

  “What’s more, number three is right near the center of that big excavation that Brinston and his folks found. That’s interesting. For the longest time I’ve thought that it was the triangular liths that our attention was being drawn to. Now I’m pretty sure it’s this one—that it’s the center of the henge.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know!”

  “No! Perhaps to satisfy an alien geometry, perhaps to provide a key to a code—it could be anything. My brilliant investigation has gone only so far.”

  “Ho, ho.” We circled the lith slowly, looking for some remarkable sign, some new attribute. There were none evident. A rectangular slab of ice—

  A thought, slipping at the edges of consciousness. I stopped and tried to retrace my thinking. Stars, nothing … I shifted my head through the position it had been in when I had the thought, tried all the other remembering tricks I knew. I looked up at the top of the lith, and stepped back, and as I did so a bright star appeared, defining the top of the lith. Was that Kachab, brightest star in Ursa Minor? I found the other stars of the constellation—it was. Pluto’s Pole Star.

  I remembered. “Inside it,” I said, and heard Jones’s surprised breath. “That’s it! There’s something inside it.”

  Jones face
d me. “Do you really think so?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “How?”

  “Holmes told me. Or rather, Holmes gave it away.” I reminded him of the model with the laser sight lines, in the spherical planetarium: “And there was one beam of blue light pointing straight out of the tallest lith. It must have been this one. And it was the only laser beam coming directly out of a lith.”

  “That could be what it means, I suppose. But how do we find out?”

  “Listen,” I said. I pressed my faceplate against the surface of the lith and rapped hard on the ice. A certain vibration … I hurried to the adjacent lith and did the same. Vibrations again, but I couldn’t tell if they were different.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “I hope you wouldn’t melt holes in it—”

  “No, no.” The certainty of my guess, which had felt so much like an act of memory, didn’t fade. I switched my intercom to a landing vehicle band. “Could you get me Dr. Lhotse, please?” The crew member called him up.

  “Dr. Lhotse? This is Doya. Listen, could you run an easy test to find out if one of the liths had any hollow spaces in it?”

  “Or spaces occupied by something other than ice?” Jones was on the band as well.

  Lhotse considered it for a moment—it sounded as if he had been asleep—and then supposed that some mass tests, or sonar and x-ray and such, could determine it.

  “That’s excellent,” I said. “Could you bring out the necessary gear and people?… Yes, now; Jones and I have found the key lith and we suspect there is a hollow in it.” Jones laughed aloud. I could imagine Lhotse’s thoughts—the two strange ones had finally gone over the rim.…

  “Is this serious?” Lhotse asked. Jones laughed.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite serious.”

  Lhotse agreed to do it and hung up. Jones said. “You’d better be right, or we may have to walk home.”

  “There’ll be something,” I said, feeling an apprehension that verged, curiously enough, on exhilaration.

  “I hope so. It’s a long walk.”

  * * *

  There was a hollow column in the center of the lith, running from top to bottom.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Lhotse. Jones and the sonar people were whooping. Searchlights flashed off the ice as from the surface of a mirror. Circles and ellipses of white bobbed around the ground and caught dancing figures, flashed in my eyes. The surrounding scene was blacker, more obscure. My heart pounded the inside of my chest like a living child.

  “There must be an entrance at the top!”

  There was an extension ladder that could be roped to the liths, on the other side of the site. Lhotse ordered the people he had brought with him to set it up, and he called back to the LVs. “You’d better get out here,” he told Brinston and Hood and the rest. “Jones and Doya found a hollow lith.”

  Jones and I grinned at each other. While they were moving the ladder across the dark old crater bed, Jones told Lhotse the story of our search. I could see Lhotse shaking his head. Then the ladder was moored against the lith and secured. Huge lamps, their beams invisible in the vacuum, made Lith number three a blazing white tower, and it cast a faint illumination over the rest of the henge, bringing the beams into ghostly presence. Lhotse climbed the ladder and set the next section in place. It just reached the top. I followed him up, and Jones clambered at my heels.

  Lhotse kneeled on the top, roped himself to the ladder securely. I looked down; the painfully bright lamps seemed far below. Lhotse’s quiet voice in my ear: “There are cracks.” He looked up at me as my head rose over the edge, and I could see that his face was flushed red, and dripping with sweat. I myself felt chills, as if we were in a wind.

  “There’s a block of ice here plugging the shaft. It’s flush with the surface, I don’t know how we’ll get it out.” He ordered another ladder sent up. There were a lot of people talking on the common bands, though I couldn’t see many of them. I tied myself to the ladder and climbed onto the top of the lith. Jones followed me up. It was a big flat rectangle, but I worried that it might be slippery.

  Eventually we secured a pulley above the lith, on two ladder extensions, and then sank heated curved rods into the plug. The line was rigged and when those on the ground pulled, the trap door—a square block about three meters by three by two, cut like a wedge so it would fit into the top snugly—rose up easily. The blocks of ice were too cold to stick to each other. Jones and Lhotse and I, standing on the ladders, stuck our heads over the black hole and looked down. The shaft was cylindrical, and a little smaller than the plug cut. With a powerful light we could distinguish an end or turning in the shaft, far below.

  “Bring up some more rope,” ordered Lhotse. “Something we can use for belay swings, and some of those expanding trench rods. If we used crampons we’d kick the lith down before we cut even a scratch in this stuff.” The block was lowered, the ropes brought up, and we were tied into torso slings, and given lamps. Lhotse climbed in and said, “Let me down slowly.” I followed him in, breathing rapidly. Jones hung above me like a spider.

  The walls of the shaft were slick-looking under our bright lights. We inspected the ice as we pushed off and descended, pushed off and descended.

  Lhotse looked up. “You probably should wait till I get to the bottom.” The people at the top of the ladder heard him and Jones and I slowed. Lhotse dropped away swiftly.

  The descent lasted a long time. Our lamps made the ice around us gleam, but above and below us it was black. The ice changed to dark, smoothly cut rock. We were underground.

  Finally we hit a gravelly floor. Lhotse was waiting, crouched in the end of a tunnel that—I struggled to keep oriented—extended away from the ring, therefore northward. It descended at a slight slope. Ahead lay pitch blackness.

  “Send another person down to this point for a radio relay,” said Lhotse, and then, holding his lamp ahead of him, he hurried down the tunnel.

  Jones and I stayed close behind him. We walked for a long time, down the bottom of a cylindrical tunnel. Except for the fact that the walls were rock—solid basalt, the tunnel had been bored through it—it might have been a sewer pipe. I was shivering uncontrollably, colder than ever. Jones kept stumbling over me, ducking his head at imaginary low points.

  Lhotse stopped. Looking past him I could see a blue glow. I rounded him and ran.

  Suddenly the tunnel opened up, and I was in a chamber, a blue chamber. A cobalt blue chamber! It was an ovoid, like the inside of a chicken’s egg, about ten meters high and seven across. As Lhotse’s lamp swung unnoticed in his hand, streaks and points of red light gleamed from within the surface of the blue walls. It was like a blue glass, or a ceramic glaze. I reached out and ran a gloved hand over it; it was a glassy but lumpy surface. The points and lines of dark red came from chips under the surface.… Lhotse raised his lamp to head level and rotated slowly, looking up at the curved ceiling of the chamber. His voice barely stimulated the intercom. “What is this.…”

  I shook my head, sat down and leaned back against the blue wall, overwhelmed.

  “Who put this here?” Lhotse asked.

  “Not Davydov,” I said. “There’s no way they could have put this under here.”

  “Nor Holmes neither,” suggested Jones.

  Lhotse waved his lamp, and red points sparked. “Let’s discuss it later.”

  So we stood, and sat, in silence, and watched the blue walls corruscate with red. The constantly shifting patterns created the illusion of extended space, the room seemed to grow larger even as we watched.… I felt fear, fear of Holmes, fear that I had been in her power. Who was she, to have created this? Could she have?

  Questions, doubts, thought receded, and the three of us remained mesmerized by light.

  After a time white flashes from the tunnel, and voices on the intercom, snapped us awake. Our air was low. Several others were coming down the tunnel, crowding into the chamber, and we moved out so they could see and ma
rvel freely.

  Jones, through his faceplate, looked stunned. His mouth was open. As we trudged slowly back up the sloping tunnel, he was shaking his head, and I could hear his deep voice, muttering, “… Strange blue glass under lith … star chamber, red light … a space … underground.”

  Then they hauled us up the long narrow shaft of the hollow lith. I stood on the rim at the top, and looked up, up to the great blanket of stars.

  * * *

  It gave the scientists a lot more to work on.

  They soon reported that the chamber was directly under the pole—that is, the pole passed directly through the chamber. The walls were covered by a ceramic glaze, fired onto the bedrock.

  Dr. Hood and his team soon discovered traces of the drill bits used to bore out the tunnel in the bedrock—tiny smears of metal, of an alloy exactly like that used for the bits of a boring machine designed to cut tunnels through asteroids. The machine had been first produced in 2514 … by Caroline Holmes’s Jupiter Metals.

  And Brinston was ecstatic. “Ceramic!” he cried. “Ceramic! When they fired that glass up to melting temperature, they started up a clock. They put a date on it as clear as those marks on the Inscription Lith—with no chance of lying, either.”

  It turned out that thermoluminescence measurement was a method that had been used to date terrestrial pottery for centuries. Samples of the ceramic are heated to firing temperatures, and the amount of light released by them is a measure of the total dose of radiation to which the ceramic has been exposed since the last previous heating. The technique can determine age—even over short periods of time—with an accuracy of plus or minus ten percent.