Damon Knight - Orbit 21

“Now we’re spinning like a top,” said Jones. “Feel it?” I laughed easily, yet as we sat there, silent, I could suddenly visualize Pluto as a tiny ball twirling, 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 time Jones took a small penlight from his suit, pointed it at the ring, turned it on. On Lith Number Three, the tallest of them all, a white spot appeared, brighter than any star. Jones moved the spot in a small circle on the lith.

“That one,” he said, breaking an hour’s silence. “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.”

As we approached, 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, just outside 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—feet 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 Brinston and his folks found. That’s interesting. For a long time I thought it was the triangular liths that our attention was being drawn to. Now I’m pretty sure it’s this one —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 it 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 positions it had been in when I had the thought —tried all the other remembering tricks I knew. I looked up to the top of the lith and stepped back; and as I did so a bright star appeared, defining the top of the lith. Was it Castor? I found Pollux, checked the lineup—it was. The Pole Star.

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

Jones faced me. “Do you really think so?”

“I’m certain of it!”

“How?”

“Holmes told me. Or rather, Holmes gave it away.” I told him of the model with the laser sight-lines, in the spherical planetarium: “And there was one beam of blue-white light pointing straight out of one of the tallest liths, very likely this one ... 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.

“Hmmm,” I said.

“I hope you don’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 officer on duty 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 round the bend. . . .

“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.

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. I could feel my heartbeat squashing my stomach.

“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 lv. “You’d better get out here,” he told Brinston and Hood. “Jones and Doya found a hollow lith.”

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 arc 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, and the painfully bright arc lamps looked 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, topping the shaft. It’s flush with the surface, I don’t know how we’ll get it out.” He ordered another ladder set 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 had to sink a heated rod into the block and set up a pulley above it. When those on the ground pulled, the trap door—a square block about six meters by six—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. With a powerful light we could just distinguish an end or turning in the shaft, far below.

“Bring up some more rope,” ordered Lhotse. “Something we can use for belay slings, and some of those expanding trench rods. If we used crampons we’d kick the lith down before we cut a step in this stuff.” The ropes were 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.