Earth, then. He was on Earth.

Del Azarchel must have turned the punt around. That would have been no easy task. Decelerating just to come to a rest relative to Earth … then to expend the fuel to accelerate toward Earth again, doing a screw-turn halfway, decelerating again … How far had the Hermetic traveled in that amount of time? Past Pluto? If she was past the heliopause, no craft of Earth could ever rendezvous with her …

A sense of crushing defeat was in him, like water in the lungs of a drowning man. All nine men aboard the punt would have missed the expedition, thanks to him. He had missed the stars. The future had been ripped from his hand like some old but cherished comic, and torn to bits.

Menelaus threw open the bed curtains, and recoiled, blinking. The sunlight poured in from French doors leading to a balcony. Outside was dizzying scenery: majestic mountains, crowned and ermined with snow and, gathered between crevasses, like emeralds sown into the silvery-white garments of emperors, were narrow valleys of pine and spruce. Above, a sky so pale and clear it was as glass, and there on motionless wing, an eagle, highest flown of all the fowls of Earth.

He stepped closer to the window. He looked out through the French doors to a balcony of marble. Beyond was air, and a sheer drop. Fog, or perhaps it was cloud, was underfoot, and he blinked in the dazzle, half-blinded.

This room he was in seemed to be burrowed into near-vertical cliff wall. To either side of his room he could see the cliff was punctured with other balconies and windows, as well as larger portals, which may have been landing perches for aircraft. The balconies were an odd mixture: tropic flowers and drooping vines hung over the sides, but driving snow blenched the rock walls to either side, and icicles gleamed.

Menelaus saw a shelf below him that was cut deeply into the rock wall, large as an amphitheater. Atop this shelf gardeners had carefully constructed a flower maze, green tennis lawns, and fountains with silver basins. Two airy stairways, graceful as waterfalls, reached down toward it. The pure beauty of the architecture, the refinement of the decoration, impressed him, and he was not a man normally who took note of such things.

The cliff wall curved left and right in bays and protuberances. His astonished eye followed the cliff farther and farther. In the distance the mighty curves met, and light twinkled from the shadows of the far cliff wall opposite. He was in a palace: the place must have miles of halls and corridors.

It looked like someone had taken a museum, or one of those old French palaces, and stuck it in the middle of a gigantic crater in the middle of the mountains. But did they heat the whole estate, merely to grow a rose garden and grape arbor in the midst of snow? Menelaus wondered at the energy expended.

Palace? Or fortress? He saw, folded almost invisibly into the rock, immense shutters of metal; clamshell armor thicker than bank vault doors. Several acres of steel were poised to fall over these windows and gardens and airy walkways, and he also saw pillboxes, hatches, and turrets which implied a healthy antiaircraft battery was also buried in the rock, only its many snouts poking above the surface.

There was nothing like this on Earth, and no blueprints for anything like it. Which meant he had been asleep for longer than merely the trip in the punt back to Earth. How far had the Hermetic traveled in this time? Was it twenty-five years later? Fifty? Had the first starship of Man reached her destination? Perhaps even now Blackie Del Azarchel was walking on the surface of the Monument in a pressure suit, bending down to study the alien glyphs. Menelaus gritted his teeth and ignored a boiling knot in his stomach.

Abruptly, he flung wide the French doors, and strode onto the balcony. A rushing blanket of warm air hovered near him. He did not hear any fan roaring, or see any vents whence the air came, but Menelaus stood without a coat on in sub-freezing mountain winterscape, unscathed. He could smell the snow, and if he put out his hand, he could feel cold air on his fingers. His hand felt queer, as if he had disturbed the surface of an invisible, vertical pond.

Menelaus only then noticed what he was wearing: silk pajamas. They rustled in the warm winds. There was a monogram on the pocket, a combination of the letters D and X and A.

At least there were Latin letters still in use here in the future.

He wondered where he was. Not a hospital, that was sure. Maybe the palace was owned by the Alliance of Deneb X? (That sounded promising.) Xylophone Anti-music Department? The Algophilists of the Xipetotec Desolation? (Given a vote, he’d prefer disgruntled percussion musicians to votaries of a old Injun blood-god.)

Beneath his hand was a little sphinx with the cherub-head of a child, smiling. “What’re you grinnin’ at, kid?” he grunted. Then he jerked his hand in surprise. The carven haircurls of stone embracing the wee face were warm under his touch: the marble balustrade was heated.

Now he looked out. Underfoot, through the openings in the fog, was a vast crater. Each time Menelaus estimated its size, he saw some other feature, such as a pine tree which he had mistaken for a weed, and had to revise his estimate upward. The crater was many miles across.

The clouds all hung at the same level, so looking down was like peering through the surface of a lake at a hidden lakebed. A particularly wide gap in the cloud was open at his feet, and opening slowly as if the winds were unseen hands parting a stage curtain. Menelaus leaned forward, eager for a glimpse of the future world.

The bottom of the crater was a broken field of glassy splatters, looking almost like volcanic rock. In the center of the crater, a lake had gathered. From the color of the water, he guessed it was newly made, a decade old or less, and nothing much lived in it. In the very middle of the water rose a cone-shaped island of rock.

Island? An uplift peak. He knew what he would have seen if he had been standing on it: chevron-shaped striations in the rock called shatter cones, all radiating out from the impact point, or laminated and welded blocks of sand.

He was not worried about radiation. This was not a nuke: It was a meteor strike. A big one.

There were ruins crumbling at the edge of the crater walls above: broken walls in burial shrouds of ice, blind with unglassed windows and doorless thresholds, or stumps of chimneys helmeted in snow. Now Menelaus saw a regularity in the cracks and discolorations in the crater floor: squares and rectangles. Old streets, old foundations, something had been here once.

This had been a large installation. Not a city: Some of the ruins were shaped like pillboxes or hemi-cylinders. A military installation. A fortress built high in the mountains? There was a break in the treeline, and all the trees in a row, for over a mile, were younger than those surrounding. He guessed that this was where the launchrail once rested, and broken lumps regularly spaced along the path may have been the energy system. That square break in the treeline was where the vehicle building might have stood: That broken eggshell in the distance, if it were not a mosque, was the remnant of a reactor dome. Of the acceleration rings there was no sign.

So—not just any fortress. A fortified spaceport. There had been no such installations anywhere on Earth in his day.

And now a second fortress had been built atop the first, no doubt replacing the old one when it was pasted. That implied even more years had passed. Seventy-five? A hundred? How long had it been? More importantly, had any radio messages been received from the Hermetic? The original expedition provisions would have allowed the vessel to stay at the Diamond Star for seven years, before powering up to begin the astronomical voyage back, with another possible two years if crewmen died, or very strict rationing were practiced. The results would arrive before the ship. If all went as planned, if there were results to send. If the Monument had been translated …