“Jones,” I scolded him. “You’re at it again. How many of these solutions have you put up?”

“No more than half,” he said, and seeing my expression of dismay he cackled. He made me laugh too, but we straightened up and put on serious frowns before we entered the dining commons.

Inside, Bachan Nimit and his micrometeorite people were seated at a table together, eating with Dr. Brinston. I cringed when I saw him, and went to the kitchen.

Jones and I sat at a table on the other side of the room and began to eat. Jones, system- famous heretic scholar of evolution and prehistory, had nothing but a pile of apples on his plate. He adhered to the dietary laws of his home, the asteroid Icarus, which decreed that nothing eaten should be the result of the death of any living system. Jones’s particular affinity was for apples, and he finished them off rapidly.

I was nearly done with my omelet when Brinston approached our table. “Mr. Doya, it’s good to see you out of your cabin!” he said loudly. “You shouldn’t be such a hermit!”

Now I left my cabin pretty regularly to party, but when I did I was careful to avoid Brinston. Here I was reminded why. “I’m working,” I said.

“Oh, I see.” He smiled. “I hope that won’t keep you from joining our little lecture series.”

“Your what?”

“We’re organizing a series of talks, and hope everyone will give one.” The micrometeor crew had turned to watch us.

“Everyone?”

“Well — everyone who represents a different aspect of the problem.”

“What’s the point?”

“What?”

“What’s the point?” I repeated. “Everyone on board this ship already knows what everyone else has written and said about Icehenge.”

“But in a colloquium we could discuss these opinions.”

The academic mind. “In a colloquium there would be nothing but a lot of arguing and bitching and rehashing the same old points. We’ve wrangled for years without anyone changing his mind, and now we’re going to Pluto to look at Icehenge and find out who really put it there. Why stage a reiteration of what we’ve already said?”

Brinston was flushing red. “We hoped there would be new things to be said.”

I shrugged. “Maybe so. Look, just go ahead and have your talks without me.”

Brinston paused. “That wouldn’t be so bad,” he said reflectively, “if Nederland were here. But now the two principal theorists will be missing.”

I felt my distaste for him turn to dislike. He knew of the relationship between Nederland and me, and this was a jab. “Yes, well, Nederland’s been there before.” He had, too, and it was too bad he hadn’t made better use of the visit. They had done nothing but dedicate a plaque commemorating the expedition of asteroid miners that he had discovered; at the time, his explanation was so widely believed that the megalith hadn’t even been excavated.

“Even so, you’d think he’d want to be along on the expedition that will either confirm or contradict his theory.” His voice grew louder as he sensed my discomfort. “Tell me, Mr. Doya, what did Professor Nederland say was his reason for not joining us?”

I stared at him for a long time. “He was afraid there would be too many colloquia,” I said, and stood up. “Now excuse me while I return to my work.” I went to the kitchen and got some supplies, and walked back to my room, feeling that I had made an enemy, but not caring much.

Yes, Hjalmar Nederland, the famous historian of Icehenge, was my great-grandfather. It was a fact I remember always knowing, though my father never encouraged my pleasure in knowing it. (Father wasn’t his grandchild; my mother was.)

I had read all of Nederland’s books — the works on Icehenge, the five-volume Martian history, the earlier books on terran archaeology — by the time I was ten. At that time Father and I lived on Ganymede. Father had gotten lucky and was crewing on a sunsailer entered in the InandOut, a race that takes the sailers into the top layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Usually he wasn’t that lucky. Sunsailing was for the rich, and they didn’t need crews often. So most of the time Father was a laborer: street sweeper, carrier at construction sites, whatever was on the list at the laborer’s guild. As I understood later, he was poor, and shiftless, and played the edges to get by. Maybe I’ve modelled my life on his.

He was a small man, my father, short and spare-framed; he dressed in worker’s clothes, and had a droopy moustache, and grinned a lot. People were always surprised to see him with a kid — he didn’t look important enough. But when he lived on Mars, and then Phobos, he had been part of a foursome. The other man was a well-known sculptor, with a lot of pull in artistic circles. And my mom, being Nederland’s granddaughter, had connections with the University of Mars. Between them they managed to get that rare thing (especially on Mars), the permission to have a child. Then when the foursome broke up, Father was the only one interested in taking care of me; he had grown up with me, in a sense, in that my presence as an infant was what brought him out of a funk. So he told me. Into his custody I went (I was six, and had never set foot on Mars), and we took off for Jupiter.

After that Father never discussed my mother, or the other members of the foursome, or my famous great-grandfather (when he could keep me from bringing up the topic), or even Mars. He was, among other things, a sensitive man — a poet who wrote poems for himself, and never paid a fee to put them in the general file. He loved landscapes and skyscapes, and after we moved to Ganymede we spent a lot of time hiking in suits over Ganymede’s stark hills, to watch Jupiter or one of the other moons rise, or to watch a sunrise, still the brightest dawn of them all. We were a comfortable pair. Ours was a quiet pastime, and the source of most of Father’s poetry. The poems of his that exerted the most pull on me, however, were those about Mars. Like this one:

Even though Father disliked Nederland (they had met, I gathered, only once) he still indulged my fascination with Icehenge. For some reason I loved that megalith; it was the greatest story I knew. On my eleventh birthday Father took me down to the local post office (at this time we were on bright Europa, and took long hikes together across its snowy plains). After a whispered conference with one of the attendants, we went into a holo room. He wouldn’t tell me what we were going to see, and I was frightened, thinking it might be my mother.

The room holo came on, and we were in darkness. Stars overhead. Suddenly a very bright one flared, defining a horizon, and pale light flooded over what now appeared as a dark, rocky plain.

Then I saw it off in the distance: the megalith. The sun (I recognized it now, the bright star that had risen) had only struck the top of the liths, and they gleamed white. Below the sunlight they were square black cutouts, blocking stars. The line quickly dropped (the holo was speeded up) and it stood revealed, tall and white. Because of the model of it that I owned at the time, it seemed immense.