He heard me, and turned and charged me, knocking me down with a hard shove. I scrambled up swiftly, and saw his head sticking above the crowd, but as I hurried after him my pace slowed: what was the use? If he didn’t want to talk I couldn’t force anything from him.

So I stopped chasing him, and stood there in smoggy dawn sunlight completely disoriented, as if this new year had brought with it a new world. Around me strangers stared, pointed me out to others. I realized that I was filthy, disheveled — not that that made me stand out particularly in that crowd, but I was suddenly conscious of myself as I had not been for several minutes, at least. I shook my head. “Happy New Year’s!” I called out to my circle of observers — to my stranger with his strange news — and tried to retrace my steps, to find what remained of the weather crew.

That man had known something about Icehenge, I was certain of it. And that certainty changed my life.

My food had run out, and my memory was exhausted, so I decided to get away from the keyboard and my memoirs for a day or two, and hang around in the commons. Maybe I would run into Jones, or I could seek him out. Some people aboard, I had heard, were affronted because Jones had been invited along (by me). Theophilus Jones was an outcast, he was one of those strange scientists who defied the basic tenets of his field and others’. But I found the huge red-haired man to be one of the most intelligent people on the Snowflake, and by far the most entertaining. And he was more inclined than the rest to talk about something other than Icehenge. Before I left for the commons I went to my library console to print up one of Jones’s books. Should I read from The Case for Prehistoric Technology (Volume Five)? Sure. I typed out the code for it.

In the kitchen I got a large bowl of ice cream, and went to a table to eat and read. The commons was empty — perhaps this was the sleep shift? I wasn’t sure.

I opened my crisp new book, pages still stiff around the ring binding, and began to read:

…We must suspect alien presence in the unsolved problem of human origins, for science has significantly failed to discover the beginnings of human evolution, the point at which human beings and a terrestrial species might meet; and the recent finds in the Urals and in southern India, in which fossilized human skeletons one hundred million years old have been found, show that the scientific description of human evolution held up to this time was wrong. Alien interference, in the form of genetic engineering, crossbreeding, or most likely, colonization, is almost a certainty.

So it is not impossible that a human civilization of high technology existed in prehistoric times — an earlier wave of history, now lost to us. That such a civilization would be lost to us is inevitable. Continents and seas have come and gone since it existed, and humanity itself must have come close to extinction more than once. If there had been a great and ageless city on the wide triangle of India, when it was a splinter of Gondwanaland inching north, what would we know of it now, crushed as it must have been in the collision between Asia and India, thrust deep beneath the Himalayas by the earth itself? Perhaps this is why Tibet is a place where humans have always possessed an ancient and intricate wisdom, and what we now know to be the oldest of written languages, Sanskrit. Perhaps some few of that ancient race survived the millennial thrust skyward; or perhaps there are caves the Tibetans have found, with deep fissures winding down through the mountain’s basalt to chambers in that crushed city…

My ice cream bowl was empty, so I got up and went to the kitchen to refill it, shaking my head over the passage in Jones’s book. When I returned, Jones himself was in the room, deep in conversation with Arthur Grosjean. They were at the long blackboard, and Grosjean was picking up a writing stick. He had been the chief planetologist on the Persephone in 2547, and had co-authored the only detailed description of the megalith. He was an old man, nearly five hundred, short and frail. Now he was tying a piece of string around the stick, listening to Jones’s excited voice. I sat down and watched them as I ate.

“First you draw a regular semicircle,” said Grosjean. “That’s the south half. Then the north half — the half closest to the pole, that is — is flattened.” He drew a horizontal diameter, and a semicircle below it. “We figured out the construction that will flatten the north half correctly. Divide the diameter into three parts. Use the two dividing points B and C for centers of the two smaller arcs, radius BD and CE” He drew and lettered busily. “At their meeting point, F, draw a perpendicular line through centerpoint A to south point G. Draw GBH — and GCI — then the arc HI, from center G. And voila!”

“The construction,” Jones said. He took the writing stick and began making little rectangles around the circle.

“All the sixty-six liths are within three meters of this construction,” Grosjean said.

“And this is a prehistoric Celtic pattern, you say?” asked Jones.

“Yes, we discovered later that it was used in Britain in the second millennium B.C. But I don’t see how that supports your theory, Mr. Jones. It would be just as easy for later builders of Icehenge to copy the Celts as it would be for the Celts to copy earlier builders of Icehenge — easier, if you ask me.”

“Well, but you never can be sure,” Jones said. “It looks awfully suspicious to me.”

Then Brinston and Dr. Nimit walked in. Jones looked over and saw them. “So what does Dr. Brinston think of this?” he said to Grosjean. Brinston heard the question and looked over at them.

“Well,” Grosjean said uncomfortably, “I’m afraid that he believes our measurements of the monument were inaccurate.”

“What?”

Brinston left Nimit and approached the blackboard. “Examination of the holograms made of Icehenge show that the on-site measurements — which were not made by Dr. Grosjean, by the way — were off badly.”

“They’d have to be pretty inaccurate,” Jones said, turning back to the board, “to make this construction bad speculation.”

“Well, they were,” Brinston said easily. “Especially on the north side.”

“To tell you the truth,” Grosjean informed Jones, “I still believe the construction was the one used by the builders.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good attitude,” Brinston said, his voice smooth with condescension. “I think the fewer preconceived notions we have before we actually see it, the better.”

“I have seen it,” Grosjean snapped.

“Yes,” said Brinston, voice still cheerful, “but the problem isn’t in your field.”

Jones slammed down the writing stick, “You’re a fool, Brinston!” There was a shocked silence. “Icehenge is not exclusively your problem because you are the archaeologist.” I stood up, jarred by the tableau: plump Brinston, still trying to look unconcerned; angry red-headed Jones towering over him; frail grim Grosjean completing the triangular composition; and Nimit and I across the room, watching.

Jones’s lip curled and Brinston stepped back, jaw suddenly tensed. “Come on, Arthur,” said Jones. “Let’s continue our conversation elsewhere.” He stalked out of the room, and Grosjean followed.

I remembered Nederland saying to me, It will become a circus. Brinston approached us, his face still tense. He noticed Nimit and me staring, and looked embarrassed. “A touchy pair,” he said.

“They’re not touchy,” I said. “You were harassing them, being a disruption.”